For many years, mostly due to the type of sleep disorder I have, I have felt as if something up there feels I don’t deserve to make money. I mean in addition to whatever my husband makes. I always figured I wouldn’t have been cursed with this sleep thing if it wanted me making money out of the house, but I can’t even make it at home! :( Book sales are at their worst ever. The last thing I want to do is struggle at trying to make something be that isn’t meant to be. I once did it with the singing, then with the women, then with trying to conceive. While I may’ve ended up glad I didn’t succeed with any of those things, I don’t want to work really hard for just a few bucks here and a few bucks there. Too much work for a tiny prize. If I’m going to work hard on writing it may as well be just for fun. And so Renting Ginny, if I even bother to publish it, will be my final publication. In a sea of millions of books and authors, the odds of making much money from writing are like the odds of hitting the lottery. Right or wrong, fair or not, I simply wasn’t meant to make money anymore than I was meant to be tall and I just have to accept that.

I’m not a great writer. I’m just ok. Same with pretty much everything else I do except for acting, the one thing I haven’t had any desire to do since I was 10 years old or younger. But I know that had I continued to want to do that I wouldn’t have been allowed to do it, perfect or not. As I said, whatever dream I may have today, tomorrow, or 10 years from now, someone else will be destined to realize that dream but never me. Especially if it deals with profiting in any kind of way. I don’t know why I’m not “allowed” to make money but we’re all blessed and cursed in various areas of life for reasons we’ll probably never know or understand. All we can do is roll with the punches since fighting it won’t usually do us any good. I can’t make myself best-seller material. All I could do was my best. And I can’t make people buy my book either. But no one can say I didn’t try. That’s all we can do. But there’s a time to give up and cut our losses, so to speak, when it comes to some things. You try it for a while, you hope for the best, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out and wasn’t meant to be and you just gotta move on to something else.

I don’t know what is meant to be other than just to continue on as a homemaker and a hobbyist, both of which I do love even if it doesn’t generate any money. Keeping our heads afloat is still enough of a blessing in itself. Maybe I should think of more “non-profitable” ideas since that’s what’s meant to be for me. IDK, maybe I should get into photography or something like that but just because I wasn’t meant to make money doesn’t mean I want to spend it either. I want to save, save and save as much as possible for the next poor spell and mostly spend money on just what we need and not what we want.

I feel bad for Aly. Just like Andy’s been unlucky in love and I’ve been unlucky with neighbors, this poor girl’s cursed big-time health-wise. Just when she learns she’s in remission – at least that’s a good thing – she learns that she now may have skin cancer. Is God trying to slowly kill her? I mean if He keeps it up and keeps letting her have to battle one horrible disease after another soon or later it’s going to wear her down till she’s either a vegetable or dead. I wish He would just give the poor girl a break for once, but praying has done her absolutely no good at all. So she just keeps hoping that one day she’ll stop having one thing after another after another…

Something must really be up with the DQ. It hasn’t gotten back to my message yet. Is she trying to avoid answering my question? Or is she really that sick or busy?

Tom has a cold so he’s kind of a crab. I may whine like crazy when I’m sick, but I don’t get all snappy like he sometimes does. It sucks to know I’m next, too. I don’t seem to be able to ward off colds like I did for a decade or so, and when you live like bums in such a tiny place, where can the germs go? So tomorrow or the next day I may have to do some throat scalding and hope for the best. If it gets me in my sleep it will be harder to kill than if it starts while I’m awake like his did. Only his didn’t start with a sore throat. His started with what he thought was an allergy attack.

That’s another thing that still has me angry – we didn’t come here to live like a pair of bums. Yet why have we been so meant to live in little old dives for so damn long? And will we ever really break out? If we do, will it be for good? Or will circumstances beyond our control throw us right back into old dives? The only thing of the past I don’t want to return to is owning, but I’m sooo fucking sick of living like a little bum! Really, it gets so old. I tried to make myself like it and get all excited at the idea of fixer-uppers, but the money you spend trying to fix up old shit could be spent on something newer.

I just miss things like having sufficient space around a bed so it’s easier to make and not having to pile so much shit so tightly together because there’s no room to spread it out. I don’t have to have a dishwasher but I miss full-size washers and boy do I miss having a dryer. But to one day own a full-size washer/dryer is probably just a dream. There are always too many higher priorities and only so much money to get all these things with.

Mail.com is driving me nuts. That service and the program I’m using that runs it so I don’t have to log into them which takes forever is chock full of glitches. Receiving messages in twos, apostrophes replaced with boxes with ? in them – WTF? But I’m also trying to do more things offline cuz I know it’s not healthy to be a computer addict who spends so much of her free time online. No, it’s not that I’ve been neglecting the important things, but I have been neglecting my writing and just because others don’t take my writing seriously doesn’t mean I still don’t. Same with my languages. I really should study those more. It’s just that I’ve been having more and more trouble retaining what I learn and I don’t know if it’s age or because something’s wrong.

I also don’t know what’s up with the troll but she has been getting stranger by the minute. She was back today and she also left just one quick post saying she’s been busy reading and going to Kmart. Nothing about funny farms, group homes or anything of the like. But there’s no way she’d choose books and shopping over following/bashing people online. Is something up or am I just being as paranoid as she is? Just one quick post? Only a few minutes in my blog? That’s sooo unlike her. Is it really even her? Was the last visitor really her mother like I first thought? It sure seems to be her this time around, so then why not the usual dozens of page views and why not the usual half a dozen or more posts ranting about how miserable she is and how horrible her former friends are while she longs for the guy who “elbowed” her? If she has online access at home, wouldn’t she want to spend 10 hours on my blog catching up? She’s only accessed a few entries unless she’s coming in more often with cookies disabled. But this is someone who would always post like crazy and would spend most of the day on my blog, so something’s amiss.

I am so glad Andy isn’t interested in Facebook! He would drive me crazy there and probably embarrass me as well, LOL. He says I’m “hardly” on Formspring. But I’m there a few times a day or more, though even that’s more than I should be. I need to focus on being offline more often. I really do. I just get sick of chatting with the same people every single day even if they’re fun and interesting. Maybe I should check my email less often. He and I sure are graphic freaks, though.

Andy’s SIL printed my first book that was published for his mom to read. She doesn’t have a computer or a Kindle and I guess she doesn’t like the idea of sitting at his computer to read it, so that’s why it’s been printed out. If by some chance she likes it, she should read Renting Ginny next. I really think that’s my best book ever so far.