Wrestling with marketing is still one of my big issues as I have definitely decided not to put out the historical romances until I have a better idea of how to build a platform that gets them seen.
It's rather like when we sell lambs or steers. We cannot keep going with ranching until we find somewhere to sell the offspring. It's not the fun part of ranching but it is a necessity.
Last week 22 of our lambs went out to one buyer and it looks like a good fit for the buyer and us. They will be butchered as needed and sold to a specialty market. I hate selling lambs or steers because we give them this good life right up until that day comes. Now if we can kill on the place, which we manage more easily with the beef, I am happiest. They live good until the end. and the end is quick and merciful. At any rate, it's all part of ranch life.
The heavy rains have interfered with a lot of our plans. There is talk that this winter might be like this-- lots of gray, rainy days. It seems we are in a have and have not situation right now. It's dry and arid or it's tropical. This is kind of tropical as the air temp is pretty warm. Warm enough that at night we sleep with the french doors open.
I had a fascinating dream which I still have been trying to interpret but this is a time when my dreams seem not only intense but I retain parts of them when I wake. In this one I was like me but a slimmer and probably younger me. When someone came around I could either show them this me-- more like the one i used to be-- or a nude very muscular man who was also me. When I wondered in the dream why I was slimmer, the answer was dipping in the water. (While that might sound good, it's not as what kind of water could do that-- microbes? worms? acidic? No water that made you slim sounds safe to me. Is that too practical?)
What I think the dream likely represented-- the male/female part-- was the yin and yang of us, how we are both masculine and feminine. We have parts of us we choose to show to different people at different times. Very few see all of us.
But it might've been also because I write and as we write characters, we do go inside their heads. They then show various aspects of themselves to those they come across and the writer decides which part. When I am writing, I write both the beautiful woman and the handsome man. I am both of them in some ways and have to draw their characters out of myself. It might make me more aware of this in myself. Anyway it's one thought.
Somehow I threw out a muscle alongside my hip and the end result of that has been some pain, some trying to figure out how to restrengthen everything. Physically it makes me more aware of my age than I often am. It also reminds me I have not been as religious in exercising as I should be. Dare I mention also that physically I want to eat all the time, snack on this or that. It's as though it's a compensation for that weather outside, for my own frustration over not figuring out the marketing of books, over the hip not feeling right, and over the realities of ranch life. I need to get some healthier snacks around here as the ones I am choosing right now are anything but. Like I really needed more weight.... not.
Otherwise this is a bit of a waiting time for us as we have plans but weather is interfering. I certainly won't put up photos of outside my door right now as it's dreary out there but these are a few I drew out of my files.
