This is my <3

I woke up this morning and felt overwhelmingly grateful.

My husband and I don’t exactly live large.  He works as a special education teacher, which is not a career you go into for the financial reward.  I’m the one with the high earning potential–and I’m not talking about being an author.  (We’ve had this talk, right?)  I’m a techie who could have buckled down and gotten a nice 9 to 5 office job where I went slowly insane from too many lines of code.

If my husband was a different sort of person, I probably would have.  Not because he told me to–no, telling me what to do would have resulted in a stern wifely ass-whupping–but because I love my husband, and if he couldn’t have been happy without lots of money, I would have made myself unhappy trying to earn it.

I am lucky.  We live quiet little lives in a small house with tight budget and not a ton of unnecessary spending, and we do that so that I could work a flexible contract job that let me work on writing on the side.  Which I did, for two long years where I never slept and didn’t see a ton of return, because if there’s one thing publishing isn’t, it’s an instant jackpot.

But this year, our writing reached the point where juggling both was going to mean giving up the 4-5 hours of sleep I was getting.  So I took a scary, scary gamble and my husband showed insane faith and I quit my day job to be a full time writer. Eeeep!

Except…not eep.  Because somewhere out there are all of you wonderful people who buy our books.  Enough of you that I don’t wake up with a ball of stress in my stomach anymore.  I’m not getting rich quick or anything. I’m still making below minimum wage.  But you know what?  I’m not so far away from minimum wage anymore.

I could make more. I have made much more.  But minimum wage at a job I love this much is better than anything I could earn reenacting Office Space.  (And I would have. Have you seen my TPS reports?)

I woke up this morning and felt really damn good.  My to-do list may  be 75 items long,  but they’re all related to writing, and I am pretty okay with that.  So thank you, sincerely, to everyone who’s ever bought one of our books.  To everyone who’s ever posted about them, or told a friend, or e-mailed us.  To the people who’ve loved them and liked them and wanted to like them and pretended to my face that they liked them.  Even to the ones who hated them and told everyone.  Thank you all.

We now have twenty digital stories, novellas and novels available, along with and three in print, and I didn’t have to tell those stories in a void. On Tuesday we get to see #21!  So thanks, y’all.

This <3′s for you.