Writing takes a Back Seat to Family

My blog has been erratic this month. For that, I am truly sorry. Please hang in there. My life should get back to better order soon. This month was, is, and is going to continue to be crazy. Sarah and I have been busy touring memory care facilities because her mother has reached the point where home care isn't enough.

What she wants is to stay in her home. That is simply no longer possible. She often doesn't recognize it as her home, and sometimes forgets she is in Florida. I frequently have to tell her that I can't take her home because she is home, that she no longer lives in Kentucky, and that Sarah and I do not live in Kentucky anymore. 

Then there are the expenses. The amount of home care she needs, and the costs of maintaining a house that is over 100 years old, is more than she can afford. The care alone is more than ten thousand a month. Sarah's brother arrives next week and together we will make the choice that we think is best for Sarah's mom. We will wade through the paperwork and get her the best possible place we can find.

In times like these, writing takes a back seat to family. Sarah and I are going to be stretched pretty thin until we find a place that can provide her mom the care she needs, get the work done to move her in, and make sure she settles into her new home. It is not going to be easy. She will hate giving up her home, probably hate us for forcing the issue, and hate any memory care home we choose. 

Dementia has taken away our other options. Nothing about caring for a loved one with dementia is easy. I am sure any caregiver will confirm that. For us, the hardest part is reversing the mother-child relationship. We must do what is best for her no matter how much she resists.

Becoming a Micro-Publisher

Tomorrow, Sarah and I are going to be talking to the Derby Rotten Scoundrels Chapter of Sisters in Crime about our publishing journey. Preparing for this talk has made me do a lot of thinking about our micro-press and all the work that has gone into learning to create books. It required learning about formatting, new software, what fonts worked well together, what kind of covers were needed, how to get covers, and what budget they needed. Timetables had to be set up for what needed to be done to take a book from manuscript to published. We had to learn about everything from hypertext and metadata to ISBNs and Library of Congress numbers. 

The strangest part of this journey is that neither of us started out with a plan to go into publishing. Frankly, we were and are still writers first, which is why the press will never grow beyond being a micro-press. It is not possible to write and publish a large number of books at the same time. Each is a full-time job. Now that I have retired there is more time I can devote to other projects, but not that much more. I didn't gain those eight to ten hours a day that used to be taken up with my job. Instead, there were new responsibilities that ended up on my plate. 

Publishing is challenging. There are so many other books on the market that it is very difficult to get one book to stand out from the pack. The pack for us isn't the big publishers. It is the other small independent presses and the self-published authors that we vie for shelf space with. Standing out is about finding the right keywords on Amazon, the right blurb for the back cover, the right places to get reviews, and the right price points to get sales. It is all still a work in progress. 

I am grateful for the people who have helped us along the way and awed that I have reached a point where others consult me with their questions. It is quite a journey from writer to publisher, one that I could not have made without Sarah and her editing skills.