Friendship, Foresight and Turning Forty

The word of the week is expectation.

July 15 - Pricey books?

As with all things, the devil's often in the details.

While looking at the pricing structure for Blurb.ca today, I noticed that there was a small window off to the side that one can use to calculate book costs based on the number of copies. Just last week, I was excited that I could get books from this site starting at just four dollars a copy. What caught my eye when visiting today was the fact that the page counter was set to 200...

Curious, I set the pages to 350 and 25 copies for a 5x8 paperback, then clicked "Calculate Price" to see these results:

Imagine my disappointment when a price WAY over $300 came up, meaning that the per-book price would work out to close to $11 PLUS tax and shipping. Which is not where I wanted to be, especially as it would mean that I'd be paying for something that I couldn't even see a proof of first.

So, a week from now I've made an appointment with a local printer to go in and get all the details nailed down. Their cost is around $12 a book after tax, with no shipping costs on top as they're local and I get to see a proof first before I plunk down my money for their remaining copies.

More on that next week!

July 16 - Turning Forty Today

What can I say about spending four decades on this planet?

I could go on about good times and bad, ruminate a bit about things nostalgic or postulate about things to come that I really have no idea about but could make myself sound somewhat sage in saying.

One funny thing about turning 40: it's definitely not like I thought it would be back when I was 20. Not a bit.

Back then, I didn't pretend to know if I'd be married or have kids or have a successful career or if I'd even be doing something I really loved for living. I sure didn't think that I'd have spent 20 years struggling to ensure my family didn't get buried underneath their financial burdens and so had to sublimate my own needs to ensure we survived. Which we did.

I did think that for the most part, about half of my friends would follow the usual route I mentioned above of marriage and kids and a house - all those things that I grew up with and that I considered normal. Given the lackluster and frankly disastrous romantic relationships I've had in my life, I was surprised to find myself over the years still believing that I'd find someone who is right for me - eventually. Perhaps it will take until I'm in my retirement years and a fateful lawn bowling tournament, but I've never entertained the thought of just giving up.

Not just on romance, but things in general. I've had to be extraordinarily practical, dutiful and far too realistic about the present over the last two decades. So much so that I've paid too little attention to the dreams that have been dimmed and but never extinguished in a happy corner of my mind.

Now that I'm 40 and preparing to finish the third draft of my first novel, I've sensed a glimmer of those dreams brightening in the last year. Though the financial see-saw hasn't gone away, I'm making every effort to expect things to become better by the end of this year and into 2014. I'm tired of being practical and realistic and despite the fact that I don't own a house or car or have a lifestyle that some would consider successful, I do have those dreams in my head that have never gone away.

I owe it to my younger selves to make those beautiful dreams come true.

July 17 - Famous Failures

Since were on the subject of success, let's talk about people who didn't find it right away.

I wasn't aware that there were quite a few famously successful people who struggled for quite some time before they made it. Marilyn Monroe, Oprah Winfrey and Charlie Chaplin are but a few of the people who suffered quite a few setbacks before their luck shifted.

One name in particular caught my eye: Dr. Seuss.

Apparently, his early work was rejected by dozens of publishers before someone took a chance on him. I know that my childhood was not to have been the same without his books and I'm profoundly grateful that someone in the publishing industry decided that his voice needed to be heard by the world.

 

In my case, I have a lot of stories to tell, some of which I haven't even dreamed of yet; there's quite a few that I need to develop more fully. For the moment, my novel takes priority in terms of getting it polished to the point where an agent simply can't say no once they read it. I'm hoping that my ship will come in early and that I'll be able to spend more time writing for its own sake to give voice to the stories that I want to tell.

I think I'd have a lot of fun discovering where those would lead me, and so would my readers.

July 18 - Want to own an island?

When I write, I like to do so with little in the way of distraction.

Writing in the pub or on a patio of a sidewalk café doesn't appeal to me. I also don't like to write in a closed room with a window or other distractions, but instead like to find a happy medium where I can simply create without having to shift my focus to other things or be interrupted by external events.

Ideally, I'd like to have a place without distractions, if I need to go there. Like an island.

Strangely enough, there's an island for sale near Victoria right now.

For a mere $75 million, James Island can be yours! It has a 5000 ft.² mansion, half a dozen guest cottages, a private airstrip and a protected harbor for the dock and all of it located on 748 acres of wooded sandy soil.

It sounds ideal, though I'm not sure I'd want to be unable to drive to and from my retreat. A plane is rather noisy and the boat is rather slow, not to mention that both methods of travel are subject to weather conditions that would not bother a wheeled motor transport…

Then again, I'll have to come up with a few tens of millions of dollars before I have to worry about such things. It's nice to think of though

July 19 - Taking chances?

Let's talk about relationships, briefly.

As many of you know, I'm no expert on the romantic bonds that can form between two people. Sure, I've read a lot about the many millions of ways that love and chemistry can come about, but for the most part it's academic to me. Some more first-hand experience would always be welcome.

What really fascinates me though, are the unfulfilled relationships in our lives: those half-formed bonds that for whatever reason are never given a chance by one person or the other.

It's interesting to see how each person handles these undercurrents to their relationships with another person who's close to them in their lives, like a friend or coworker. Sometimes the attention is flattering, sometimes it's a nuisance and sometimes it's just unwanted, to name a few of the variations that you can run into.

The singular type of relation that is most fascinating to me is the one where both people know or feel that something is there, but neither does anything about it. There are various reasons for this that can be floated, but what boggles my mind is that things remain where they are like an elephant in the room. When people don't know themselves well enough or have enough confidence in their judgment of relationships, it's much easier to let things be then to take a chance and possibly lose someone who's become important in their life. We' re all afraid to lose things that we value, but when you refuse to see the possibility of something greater, it's an even greater loss, I think.

If you can't or won't see that, then there's nothing someone else can do.

July 20 - Weight LOSS?

Every few months or so, I weigh myself, just to check on things.

Imagine my surprise when I stepped on the scale today and saw that I'd lost even more weight than the last time that I'd set foot on the enemy of dieters everywhere.

Trouble is, I'm not diet. In fact, I've been trying to eat more in the last month or so. Last week, I mentioned that I was eating better and back in March of this year, I mentioned that I'd lost weight, but not how much. In January 2013, I weighed around 165 pounds. By March, I was down to 158 pounds, thanks to an increase in riding to work daily on my bike and the solid workout I was getting working the night shift as a stocker.

When I weighed myself today, the scale read 149 pounds, which to me is worrying.

There's not a lot of me to go around and I NEVER wanted to find myself weighing less than 150 pounds, which is the low average for my height. Ironically, I used to play a game in high school called Car Wars where the standard weight for a driver in the game's imaginary vehicles was exactly 150 pounds.

I happen to be a real person and I know that I'm in decent health overall right now. I'm going to seriously look into a healthy weight gain regimen, where I'll be packing on muscle slowly to get up to an ideal weight of somewhere around 170 or 180 pounds. I definitely think that I need to stop any more weight loss here and now and begin to put more weight on again in a controlled and healthy manner.

July 21 - Niagara next week!!!!

In less than a week, I'll be back in Niagara.

Well, briefly at first, as I'm heading up to a cottage near Algonquin Park to spend the weekend with my friends. As I mentioned last week, these are my buddies that I grew up with from childhood and we've decided to get together to celebrate, as our 40th birthdays are all this year in 2013.

It says a lot about both myself and this small special group of friends -we've known each other for practically all our lives - in that none of us have really changed so much that we've stopped talking to each other. In all the essential things that made us become friends in the first place, were still the same.

I think it's for that reason that I pulled out all the stops to get myself back to Ontario for this very special weekend. It's not only that I haven't seen some of these pals for years, but the fact that it's a special anniversary for us and I wouldn't miss that kind of gathering if I had any way of getting myself there.

Which I didn't think I'd be able to manage, even as of a few weeks ago. But thanks to a fortuitous credit that my sister had with WestJet, coupled with savings that I'd set aside for emergency use during my trip to Arizona, I made it happen. I'll be giving up at least a week' s pay as well, as I'm not considered full-time at my workplace despite the decent hours I've been getting lately, so I don't have any vacation time I can use. But it doesn't matter.

Just like Arizona two months ago, I have to be there. And I will, which thrills me to no end!

The next week is going to be BUSY, BUSY, BUSY, so I'm going to bed early, early, early. I've got a book to print, a writing group to run, a giant robot movie to see and a trip to pack for, in addition to working during the day. All that and I have a cottage to be at next weekend - yay!