Got a Bob letter today. His health isn’t good at all. Other than that, he has 2 years and 11 months to go. He did a really cute rat drawing on the back of his letter.

I slept till 3:00 today with no interruptions. We decided to do laundry on Thanksgiving, figuring that it’d be dead then. Plus, we could escape any ruckus going on around here.

God, I never thought I’d be wanting to move so badly again! Not in the way I did in Phoenix, though still bad enough. I feel like a wild animal captured and forced to live in captivity. Well, I want to be turned loose to be free in the wild once again! Tom said renting a house in the sticks in May will be no problem, now that he’s getting established in Oregon and we’ll have the deposit money from this place to move in with. It’s getting a backup vehicle that’s the issue. So this is why we’re going to devote most of our spare money to getting another piece of shit so we can have two vehicles. I still think he ought to talk to Michael since we already do have another piece of shit up on Bly Mountain. I think that if he’s worked with us this far, he’ll let us leave the thing parked up there till May, even if we don’t get another piece of land from him.

Loverboy was visiting Bev again. No bass concerts, though.

Sure enough, the closer we get to Thanksgiving, the higher the temperature revisions get and the lower the chances of precipitation. Even if no one goes outside, though, the music and banging will make up for anyone chatting or perhaps screaming outside the bedroom windows.

I spoke with Paula for 10 minutes earlier but only 10 as I’ve got to save my minutes due to how broke we are. She sounds more relaxed and says I do, too. Yeah, getting out of hotels, no matter how nice the owners are, sure does help. I’ll be even more relaxed when I can get back in the wilderness, though! Like I said, I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that we’re never going to have money and that money will always be a problem for us, so let’s just get back in the sticks, then we can be broke and struggling there instead of here. The duplex is beautiful and quiet 99% of the time, but it’s not for me. I’d be happy just to take this duplex with us to the sticks, cutting off Beverly’s side, of course. Then we’d make a doorway in the living room wall that divided the two sides and add another small bedroom with a half bath off of it.

Lastly, I don’t know if it’ll do me any good, but I submitted a story query to that Artemis Press Electronic Publishing company. We read on to find that that’s what you’ve got to do first. If they like the query, then they’ll ask for the entire manuscript, which Tom thinks they’ll do simply because reading manuscripts is what they do. The more I think about it, the more I realize that it wouldn’t be much of a loss if they don’t end up publishing it because there’s simply no way I could make good money at it. I’d have to sell half a million books in order to make much money. Very few authors do that, and those that do usually have some of their books turned into movies and that’s the real payoff. If they publish my book and sell it for $5, all I get is $1.50 if anyone buys it, and again, how many people are going to want books with lesbian characters? I couldn’t even sell books on Amazon! Still, if they publish it, that’d be quite an amazing event for someone like me.

Anyway, the query involved telling them things like my name, the title of the book, what category it fits in, the description, the word count, etc. Hopefully, the low word count won’t put them off. The people running this thing are most certainly gay themselves as they sell a bunch of gay merchandise. It’s probably a small company, so I won’t expect to hear back from them soon if they do want to read the book.

Imagine what Mary would think if she could magically know that I’ll probably be submitting a manuscript! She’d no doubt be paranoid, even terrified, that she was in it.