When Life Hands You Lemons…

So the old saying goes, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” but I’m not thirsty right now. What else should I do?

For those who haven’t been following the situation, my fiance James and I were dealt a pretty cruddy blow yesterday. James was let go from his job and may get called back in 2-3 months, but the operative word in question there is “MAY.” There are no guarantees. While I didn’t lose my job completely, I took a 3/4 pay cut and currently have about 15 more hours per week on my hands than usual.

I want to shake my fist at the world and scream, “WTF?” but I won’t because I’ve been through worse and I have custom-fitted big girl panties to prove it.

My mind automatically started churning though. How the hell can I make more money? Not only do I need to find a way now to make ends meet, but we have all that immigration stuff to pay for so James and I can get his Visa and get married before the end of the world in 2012. James has to get a physical, apply for police records, get a new copy of his birth certificate because the one he has is short form and they need a long form copy, pay the Visa stamping fee and we have to travel to Montreal to do half of this stuff.

We also have a 15-year-old who starts field hockey and school in about three weeks. She needs clothes, cleats, shin guards, a new stick, school supplies… gah!

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a pity party. I actually got creative about how I could get some extra cash. I’ve been selling those Dark Journeys stories on Amazon and Smashwords, and I was going to compile them into a 13 story collection to sell for $3.99. Well, now that I’m working even harder than ever I can’t find the time to finish and polish two more stories. But I do have the promised extra short, so that will bring the collection up to 11 stories. Instead of selling it for $3.99, I’m going to sell it for $2.99 and put up a direct paypal widget here on my site for PDF versions of the full collection, as well as selling on Amazon and Smashwords.

So, who wants a bunch of really awesome stories to read on their eReader or computer? I hear you shouting ME ME ME!

James also set up a Chipin widget on his site for anyone interested in helping us get through this and actually be able to get married. We’ve estimated that we need about $5000 to get through this next couple of months. It’s a lot of money, and would have been easily covered and then some had we not taken such a hard income blow. we’re both searching for other work opportunities, but sometimes when you’re trying to make lemonade, you can’t always find the sugar.

It’s a lot to ask, I know.