cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Make or Break Well, uh, Saturday was disheartening. The weather was perfect, everyone showed up. But no fucking st@rlings appeared during 5 hours of wandering around this huge WMA. Everybody seemed to have a good time anyway, but the point was to bag some meat to work with and in that sense it was a total fucking flop. Naturally, as we drove away we saw a flock of 3 to 5 thousand fly right over us. I'm sure that I can write up some clever and interesting blog entry about it for my real-name blog, but whatever. That does not put money in my pocket. I need book material and recipes and for that I need some fucking st@rling meat. Sunday was similarly a wash. I went fishing at my parents' ponds, but ended up taking both kids with me. Always a mistake if I need to come home with actual fish. I doubt that I cast my line more than 15 times the whole day on account of needing to look after Harry. I took them both for canoe rides and Harry especially liked that. He and I saw a raccoon, and various vultures and things. I think Ida somehow broke my fishing reel and fucked up the line. So now I no longer have a working rod and reel. It is slightly possible that I might be able to take parts from 2 different broken reels and come up with one working unit between them, but its not very likely to work on account of them being made by different companies. My fishing license is good for another 2 or 3 months. I can at least make a hand-line out of the bits of tackle that I still have. I might stop near a river on my way home to fish for half an hour or so and see if I can come up with dinner. Still no sign-ups for my March class, which is now obviously canceled and not happening. I leave for NYC in 5 days and have no cash for food or other expenses. I think we have about $30 in the bank following my trip to the pawn shop last week and I'm just about out of gas. We're out of heating oil. After work I can get a few gallons of gas to commute with for the rest of the week. Then we're fucked. My best hope, horrifyingly, is selling the book. I know that my agent is pitching it this week. A book advance is my only real hope of avoiding calamity this year. Above all else, I've got to do a fucking stunning job with this workshop in NYC this weekend. Publishers will be there and probably make a decision about whether to sign me and how much to offer based on what kind of presentation I put on. Its got to be good. I think I've just got to find some more shit to pawn tomorrow to come up with a few hundred bucks for my trip. I mustn't pawn my rifles since I use those to teach classes, but almost anything else is on the table. If the book doesn't sell next week and if I'm not getting much of a tax refund (I should know for sure about that in a few days) then I'm going to clear out and close my SEP IRA. That won't get me a ton of money, since I lost most of what I had there through past emergency withdrawals and the tanking of the market. But it will be enough to get us through to August or September. Once that is gone, if I don't sell some books, Everything will be gone except for some art and things like that. My equity in my house is gone, my IRA will be gone, and my 14% stake in the company that I work for is now essentially worthless. If I clear out that IRA then everything that I spent the last decade of my life working for will be wiped out. All we'll have is some household goods and a couple of used cars with blue book values of about $1,000 each. This book deal had better happen or we are fucked. There are no jobs out there. My industry is half-dead. I don't have any other options other than becoming a successful author and speaker. 9:55 a.m. - 2010-03-08 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||