The no-writing life, three years later.

 

orlaimagen | Deposit Photos

I mentioned at the end of my post last week that it's been more than three years since I published my last novel. The final book in the Atherton Vampire trilogy, The Atherton Vampire: Midnight Creeps, was released in December 2021. 

I originally wrote that series for Kindle Vella, a new Amazon platform that was half book sales and half gaming, or so it seemed to me; you had to buy tokens to pay for the books you bought. I thought it would be a place to find new readers on a brand-new platform that wasn't as glutted as the regular Amazon marketplace had become. I figured maybe I could break out there and inspire those new readers to find the rest of my books. 

It didn't work out that way. As usual, the writers who did well on Vella already had a name elsewhere. Vella must not have made any money for Amazon, either; the Zon shut it down earlier this year.

Jerry Atherton was my last-ditch effort to goose my book sales. By the fall of 2021, I'd been self-publishing for about ten years. I did pretty well with the first five books of the Pipe Woman Chronicles, but the follow-on series didn't sell all that well. My top sales year was 2013. (I actually moved 15,000 copies of all my books that year. Damn! I wonder if that's enough to get me into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association? SWFA membership was one of my goals, once upon a time.)  

By the way, here's a shout-out to the person who bought all five of the Pipe Woman Chronicles books on Amazon this year. How the hell did you find them? They're all ranked at like #2,873,965...

I am off topic, a little, and now I'm going to go a little farther off-topic. Bear with me.

***

A few weeks back -- actually, it was the afternoon of the day that the legislative session ended -- I chatted with a Tarot card reader. Now, alert hearth/myth readers know that I know how to read Tarot and I do readings for myself on the regular. But it can be easy to miss things you don't want to think about. So it's not a bad practice to check in with someone else every now and then.

The main message from this reading was that I had an internal conflict. I'd left DC and moved to Santa Fe (in the midst of a pandemic!) for a reason, and since then, I had kind of lost the plot. And I needed to think about how I was going to get back on track and re-focus on my original goal.

That original goal didn't have anything to do with fiction writing, although I did have vague plans to republish all my books with new covers and maybe make audio books for them all. No, the goal was to quit working full time. And here I am, back at work full-time.

I mean, shit happens. I bought a condo in a building that needs a lot of work. To afford that, I had to go back to work. And now, to be completely honest, with Trump back in office and the DOGEbros loose at the Social Security Administration, I'm just as happy to have a paycheck in case our Social Security and Medicare safety nets disappear.

But when I went back full time, my goal was to do it for just five years, until I turned 70. After these idiots in DC started mucking about, I was bracing myself to work 'til I dropped dead.

But I'm tired, y'all. I need to go back to having unstructured days at some point. So I'm returning to the "retire at 70" mindset, and we'll see where we are in three years.

***

Circling back to the question that some of you may be asking: Am I going to write any more novels?

Honestly? I don't think so. I do so much reading at work nowadays that I can barely read for pleasure anymore; I tend to nod off after about 20 pages. (To be fair, I also nod off while watching stupid TV every evening. Maybe I just need more sleep...) The idea of sitting in front of a computer for even more hours a day sounds less like fun and more like, I dunno, I should get out and take a walk or something instead.

After I re-retire and get a few months of those sweet, sweet unstructured days under my belt, I may try writing again. Or if I get a kickass idea for a book in the meantime. But otherwise, I plan to stay retired from the writing life.

***

These moments of introspective blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, all of whose 40-ish titles are still available on Amazon. 

Working mothers deserve better.

80s Child | Deposit Photos

First, happy Mother's Day to anybody who has a mom, had a mom, is or was a mom, and/or had to be their own mom.

And a special shout-out to all the working moms, who have had a rough go of it over the past few years. The pandemic exacerbated long-standing problems in finding child care. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the child-care sector lost 80,000 workers between February 2020 and November 2022 -- about 6.7% of the sector's work force. It's never been a lucrative job -- the pay averages about $13 an hour, and 95% of child-care workers are female, most of them Black and Hispanic.

Even before the pandemic, finding somebody to watch the kids while you worked wasn't easy, unless you had accommodating family nearby. And if you worked weird hours, it was that much harder. 

My first day back at work after delivering my first child was a Sunday -- Mother's Day. Back then, I was working as an anchor-reporter for WTAR-AM in Norfolk, Virginia. I was scheduled to work about four hours that day, writing and delivering newscasts on the air. Kat's father was in the Navy and was out at sea that weekend, so I schlepped the baby, the portable playpen, and all the other assorted gear that an eight-week-old kid requires into the newsroom. I figured I'd keep an eye on her in the newsroom while I wrote my newscasts, then put her in the playpen and turn up the air monitor while I went into the booth to do a newscast. She would be able to hear me, even though she couldn't see me. Genius, right?

Not so much. She spent the first five-minute newscast screaming. I didn't think anybody could hear her over the air, but it messed with my concentration. So for the second newscast, I brought her into the booth with me, holding her on my lap. That worked great until she spotted the glowing red on-air bulb above the window and had to tell the world about it. For the remainder of the day, she spent my on-air time in the playpen in the boss's office. She still screamed, but at least the noise wasn't close enough to bother me...too much.

From then on, I left the kids with a sitter whenever I had to work. After the divorce, and as the girls got older, finding someone to watch them was often tough, particularly while I was still in broadcasting and worked an evening or overnight shift. Go ahead, try to find someone who's willing to stay at your house from 11:00 p.m. until 9:00 a.m. while your kids sleep. Let me know how that works out for you.

Anyway, it was a huge relief to switch careers and begin working for the big law firm, which let me work daytime hours and had an emergency daycare center on site. 

Parents -- not just me -- can be better workers when they know their kids are cared for. But when it comes to help with balancing work and family responsibilities, employees are at the mercy of the benevolence of their employers. And Congress hasn't exactly made fixing the situation a priority. So I was pleased to learn that last month, President Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to expand programs for child care and elder care, including improvements in at-home care for veterans, better pay for child care workers, incentives for government contractors to include child care and elder care benefits in their bids, and a reaffirmation of the right of child care and elder care workers to unionize. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a start.

***

Speaking of Mother's Day and working: Today is my last official day of retirement for a while. Tomorrow, I'm going back to work, probably for the next several years. I like being retired just fine, but my condo building needs some major repairs, and the only way I can afford them short of selling the place is to go back to work. 

I'll be a full-time proofreader for the state Legislative Council Service. Alert hearth/myth readers know that I've been working for the legislature for several months each year anyway, so it won't be that big a change. I believe I'll be working from home most of the time. I'll still be able to volunteer at El Rancho de las Golondrinas during summer weekends, and I intend to keep writing these weekly blog posts.

If any of that changes, you'll be the first to know.

***

These moments of bloggy work-life balance have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Now commencing: Retirement 2.0.

Yurumi | DepositPhotos.com

I'm sure you've heard the word by now: This past weekend was the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, also known as Ostara. We are now officially out of the dark half of the year that started in September at Mabon; the Oak King has vanquished the Holly King, if that's the Pagan mythos you follow, and will reign for the next six months.* 

Regardless of your spiritual bent, though, for everybody north of the equator, the hours of sunlight will keep increasing until the summer solstice -- and unlike in the days just after the winter solstice, the increased daylight is more obvious now. This is the season for planting seeds, both physical and spiritual/mystical, in the hope that they will bear fruit come harvest time in the fall.

So it seemed fitting to me that the temp job I've been working since the beginning of November ended at noon on Saturday, the day of balance. Having labored for the Man during the darkest part of the year, I am ready to take a significant amount of time off to rest. I'm calling it Retirement 2.0.

Oddly, I now find myself experiencing some of the doubts that keep people in their later working years from retiring at all. 

In the last few years leading up to my retirement from the law firm, I was driven so hard by my need to get out of the job and get out of DC that I was in "by any means necessary" mode. It didn't matter to me how much I had in my 401(k) or how I was going to fill the endless amounts of time I'd have without a job to show up for; I had a plan to execute to get to Santa Fe, the pool of money I had would work if I got a part-time job, and the rest would sort itself out.

So here I am, almost eight months post-retirement. The move has been executed; the part-time job I'd envisioned as being a few hours of work per week throughout the year got slammed into a few intense months; and now I'm out the other side, shell-shocked but standing, blinking, in the sunlight.

In retrospect, I think I may have jumped into the part-time job too soon. I got out here at the tail end of July and started training for the legislative proofreading gig on November 1. I had only three months to decompress before I started working again, and these past two months have been particularly intense: seven days a week, nine hours a day on weekdays and slightly shorter hours on weekends, and no breaks during the day. By the halfway mark, it had stopped being fun. In the final two weeks, I resorted to adding stickers left over from my retirement planner to the wall calendar to help me mark the days 'til the end of session.

Still, the money was good. And that's the lure, isn't it? You show up for the job and in return the company deposits money into your bank account every couple of weeks. What happens when you lose that security blanket?

Not to mention how much people invest of their self-image in the work they do. I thought I'd escaped that mental pitfall; I was always very clear that I wasn't a legal secretary -- rather, I worked as a legal secretary. For the past few months I've worked as a legal proofreader. But now I'm...not working. 

Oh, I'm still an author and editor, but I've done nothing with either of those since NaNoWriMo ended in November. I have the first draft of the NaNo novel to edit and publish (still aiming for Beltane!). That will be my CampNaNo goal for April.

By May, I hope, I'll be vaccinated, and all the things that have been closed since I got here (the performing arts theater a block away, the bookstore and coffee shop across the street) will have reopened. 

For now, though, I'm going to treat myself to a soak in a thermal pool and the luxury of not setting an alarm. After that, I guess I'll let things sort themselves out.

***

* In some Pagan traditions, the Oak King and the Holly King trade off at the summer and winter solstices. From the standpoint of the annual cycle of sunlight, that makes more sense -- but in terms of the growing season, it makes more sense to put the handoff at the equinoxes. And lots of Pagans don't incorporate the myth into their traditions at all. 

***

These moments of balanced blogginess (and only a day late!) have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Keep masking up and social distancing! We're gonna beat this thing together!

One of the perks of retirement: never filling out another business visa application.

Gam Khoon Lay | Noun Project | CC3.0

A couple of days ago, I had a Facebook status from 2010 pop up as a memory. It was a single sentence that said I was "getting kind of tired of being the Indian visa 'expert.' (sigh)" When I shared it, I said, "It didn't get any better over the next ten years, either."

I should probably explain. In 2009, one of the partners I worked for began doing a fair amount of work in India, and so it fell to me to fill out the paperwork for his business visa.  For most countries, procuring a business visa is a complex process. You can fill out the form online, which is harrowing enough when you're doing it for someone else ("Hey, what's your mother's maiden name and where were your parents born?"). But it also involves a lot of other moving parts: a passport photo or two; your passport, because the consulate puts the visa in it; a copy of your passport, and it had better be photo quality; a letter from your employer saying you are, in fact, an employee, and you will have sufficient funds to cover your stay; a letter from your client saying you are, in fact, coming there to do business for them; and usually one or two other things. Some countries require a copy of your birth certificate. Some want a photo ID with the same address as the one on your application. Occasionally you'll be asked to provide a copy of your travel itinerary (which means booking refundable airline tickets that you're probably going to have to cancel because the visa won't be ready in time). At one point, Russia required proof of a negative HIV test. One country -- I don't remember which one -- insisted on proof that the applicant had graduated from law school; I recall that involved juggling an associate's massive, framed diploma onto a copier.

Countries also change their requirements from time to time. India, for example, went from accepting regular business letters from employer and client to a bizarre short-answer form that had to be to printed on company letterhead and signed by the big boss, with the company seal affixed. The Indian government issues company seals to Indian companies. Since we weren't an Indian company, we didn't have a company seal -- but the Indian government required us to provide one anyway. So our accounting folks made up something that kind of looked like a seal and turned it into a graphic, and I had to put that on the letters. (Why our accounting folks? Because they also had to affix the thing to the firm's Indian tax forms.)

Also, the Indian government decides whether to issue the length of visa you request. Several times, we asked for a five-year visa and got back a two-year visa -- with, of course, no refund of the additional fee we'd paid for the longer visa.

So it's a major hassle and involves a lot of herding cats ("Did you get your passport photo taken yet? Did you remember to bring in your passport today?") and often some back-and-forth with the visa processing firm. A few years ago, India changed their preferred visa processing firm; I hated calling them -- it was even odds whether I'd get a customer service rep with an accent I could understand. (I admit that was a "me" problem, but still.)

It's bad enough doing one application; if your legal team is five or ten or twenty people and they all need help getting their applications together, it gets old fast. But because I'd done so many, whenever any attorney at the firm had to go to India for the first time, their secretary would end up calling me for help.

Finally -- finally -- we asked for a ten-year visa for the partner I worked for, and the Indian government gave it to him. I was ecstatic. I knew I would be retiring well before he needed the thing renewed. I was finally done with Indian visa applications!

And then he got a new matter that would be staffed by a whole new bunch of lawyers -- including the other partner I worked for. I almost had a panic attack. That is not a euphemism; I came very close to breaking down at my desk. 

Thankfully, that was the last time I had to fill out a visa application for anybody. And now I'm retired and I never have to do another one. Someone else will have to become the firm's Indian visa expert once business travel overseas resumes, and that is just fine with me.

***

These moments of relaxed, retired blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay home when you can and mask up when you go out!

About time, warped.

Here's a weird thing I've discovered about being retired, now that I've been at it for a couple of months: A whole lot of my routines and habits were structured around my working life.

To be clear, I'm not talking about setting a morning alarm, commuting to and from work, and all that stuff. Those are the most obvious trappings of a working life and and we're all used to shedding them when we're on vacation. 

Well, assuming we actually go on vacation when we go on vacation, instead of simply scheduling fewer meetings and phone calls than we would during a regular workweek. You laugh, but I just got done working for twenty years for attorneys who would do just that. One guy always spends a week with his family every summer at a resort in the Adirondacks where there's no wi-fi, and no cellphone signal unless you get in a canoe and hike up to the other side of a mountain or something. A few years ago, I learned he's begun driving into the closest little town during this nominally unplugged week to get some work done. 

Come to think of it, that's about when I started keeping an eye on my work email when I would go on vacation.

Anyway, back to my original point: It's easy, and obvious, to turn off the alarm on the weekend. More insidious are the hidden compromises on your time. For instance, I got into the habit of doing laundry very late on Sunday nights. For several years I lived in an apartment building with shared laundry facilities; if I started my laundry late enough, I wouldn't have to wait for a dryer. I considered a 1:30am bedtime on Sunday nights a small price to pay for that luxury. Besides, I could sleep in on Saturday and Sunday in preparation (assuming the cats would let me).

Another example: My go-to time for grocery shopping gradually became 8:00pm on a Monday night. The produce section would be kind of picked over, but almost nobody was in the store then and the checkout lines were non-existent -- and shopping in an empty store became much more important once the virus hit and the mere thought of leaving the house could fill one with existential dread.

I don't need to make those compromises anymore. Moreover, if I don't get something done one day, it isn't a big deal if I let it slide to the next day. Or the day after that. Of course I have certain deadlines -- the rent is still due on the first of the month -- but it doesn't matter if I don't get up in time to go to the farmers' market. There's always next week.

Which is partly why it took me two months to figure out how to use my ginormous new loom. 

Alert hearth/myth readers will recall that I took a two-day weaving workshop a couple of years ago. I had to buy a rigid-heddle loom for the class, and I've used that loom for a couple of projects since then. But the cloth my little loom turns out is only 15 inches wide, max. I figured out pretty fast that there were only so many 15-inch-wide projects I was going to be interested in making; if I wanted to weave something more practical, like cloth for a garment, I would need a wider loom.

So when my attorneys asked me what I would like for a retirement gift, I suggested they get me an 8-shaft table loom. After several rounds of negotiations, plus consultations with the retailer when it was clear I didn't know as much about table looms as I thought I did, we settled on the medium-sized loom. However, that one was on backorder; the largest-sized loom was not. And that's how I ended up with a ginormous loom.

There are a number of differences between a rigid heddle loom and a table loom, but one of the biggest is the way you warp it. This has nothing to do with Star Trek. If you look at a piece of woven fabric -- say, a dress shirt -- you can see the threads that make up the fabric go in two directions. Let's call them up-down and right-left. To make fabric, the up-down threads have to be tied onto the loom; the right-left threads are then woven through the up-down threads. The up-down threads are the warp and the right-left threads are the weft. Tying on the warp threads is called warping the loom. 

With me so far? Okay. There are a few methods for warping a loom, but they basically fall into two camps. One is the direct method, which is what I've always used to warp my rigid heddle loom. The other is the indirect method, which requires the use of a thingum called a warping board. I asked for a warping board along with the loom, and the guys bought it for me. 

The order came in several shipments, some from the retailer and several directly from the manufacturer in New Zealand. Once I got everything, I put it all together -- loom, stand, and warping board -- and there it all sat, silently rebuking me, for about a month and a half. I was intimidated by the thought of warping that ginormous loom. It was easy to put it off for another day, and another day, and...

Finally, a few weeks ago, I set myself a deadline: Either get the loom warped by the end of September or fold it up and admit you're never going to do it. So last week, I sucked it up. I dug out a pattern for a small project I'd made on the rigid heddle loom, spent a bunch of quality time with YouTube videos, and figured everything out. Of course I screwed up a couple of times, but I made it work. The loom was warped! 

And now that I've done it once, I feel confident I can weave a full-width project. Maybe I'll even try something more complex than a plain weave. I'll keep y'all posted.

***

Speaking of deadlines, the folks at NaNoWriMo have been sending me emails every few days, reminding me that I can announce my November project any time now. Yeah, thanks for nagging me, guys. 

Actually, I got an idea for the new novel today. I need to roll it around in my mind a little more, but I think it'll turn out to be a fun read -- and gods know we could all use a fun read right about now. Stay tuned...

***

These moments of bloggy warp and weft have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay vigilant -- the virus is still out there. Social distance and wear a mask!

Dinosaur breath, or: Moving on.

Copyright 2020 Lynne Cantwell

I write to you for the last time from this desk in this room. The next time I blog to you, I'll be in Santa Fe.

The moving glitches continue: I took a carload of stuff to Goodwill today, only to be turned away - not because of the virus this time, but because it's going to be hotter than 95 degrees today and they won't let their workers stand in a broiling parking lot and sort people's junk all day when it's this hot. "Try the Salvation Army," the guy turning away donations said. I already knew they wouldn't be open for anything on a Sunday -- and by the time they reopen tomorrow, I'll be halfway to Front Royal.

I'm moving on.

The Tarot card in the photo is the Eight of Cups. It's perhaps not the best photo, but I think you can see that it shows eight full cups in the foreground, and a person who has turned their back on them and is walking away. They're kitted out for a long journey -- cloak, boots, and staff.

That should give you a pretty good idea of the meaning of this card. It's about setting aside one's comfortable life in search of something more -- more meaning in life, perhaps, or a deeper spirituality.

Right now, I just want to get out of Dodge. I've had two careers so far (not counting the indie author thing), and in both of them, I felt dinosaur breath on the back of my neck by the time I got out. By 1998, radio news had already consolidated to just six major players (ABC, CBS, NBC/Mutual, NPR, and the Associated Press), and with the merger of the NBC/Mutual Radio and CBS Radio newsrooms, it went down to five. The job I had still exists, but fewer and fewer people do it.

Now, the position of legal secretary appears to be going away. Law firms want to pass on as many of their costs of doing business as possible to their clients, but the clients won't pay for admin costs. The solution, at least at our firm, has been to transition anything that can be even remotely described as "legal" to paralegals, who bill their hours exactly as attorneys do. Well, they charge less than attorneys do, but you get the idea.

So my job as a legal secretary had devolved from a 50-50 split of interesting work and mundane admin stuff to almost 100 percent mundane admin stuff. And when we shut down due to the virus, a lot of the admin tasks dropped away. I can't answer attorney phones from a virtual phone. There are no catered meetings to plan when everyone is working from home. There's no travel to book, as no one has been traveling -- which means there are no expense reports to create, either. Not that I missed doing any of that stuff, mind you, but the shutdown has made it obvious that the firm can get by with fewer secretaries. My job, specifically, was never in jeopardy. But I wasn't interested in having additional mundane work loaded onto my plate as other secretaries left the firm.

In short, it was time to move on. Friday was my last day. Tomorrow, I turn my back on DC and hit the road. It's going to be wonderful.

***
I won't have internet turned on at the new place by next Sunday, so I won't blog to you again until August 9th, the week after Lughnasa. I'll tell you all about the trip, and the new place, then. In the meantime, have a fabulous First Harvest!

***
These moments of bloggy momentum have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Wear a mask! Practice social distancing! Wash your hands!

#EscapeVelocity update.

pxfuel.com

This post is going to be good news/bad news/good news, more or less.

As alert hearth/myth readers know, I have been counting down the days until I could retire from my day job and leave the Washington, DC, area. After a period of waffling, which I deemed "location research" so it didn't sound quite so bad, I decided at last to relocate to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

And after a further, mostly concurrent period of waffling, I settled on a date for my last day at work: Monday, July 6, 2020. Which is tomorrow.

The update, in short, is this: I'm still moving to Santa Fe, but tomorrow will not be my last day at work. And it's all thanks to COVID-19.

Like a whole lot of other companies, the law firm I work for sent everybody home with laptops in mid-March, as a test of whether our IT system could support the strain -- and then told us to stay there. We've been working from home ever since. This is a radical departure from the firm's historical stance on secretarial work. Our former manager once told me flat-out that legal secretaries would never be allowed to work from home. Well, that was then and this is now: Everything we do, with the exception of running errands, is done electronically. And a lot of the hands-on stuff -- for example, making sure catering is delivered for meetings -- isn't happening right now because our buildings are closed.

So as I said, we all went home. And then I went on my two-month sabbatical, as scheduled, on April 17th. When I "came back to work" on June 17th, we were still working remotely, but a whole bunch of stuff had changed. A new law -- the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act -- allows eligible employers to take a tax credit for keeping employees on their payroll. Our firm decided to take advantage of that. So most secretaries were switched to four-day-per-week work schedules. The few who were already working four days per week were moved to a three-days-per-week schedule. All of us got to keep our full-time pay and health care. (The changes do impact accrual of paid time off, but my PTO accrual was already whacked this year due to the sabbatical.)

Anyway, two things happened when I got back to work: 1) I was put on a three-day-per-week schedule for my last three weeks; and 2) the attorney I've worked for the longest persuaded me to stay on until the end of 2020 (not coincidentally, that's when the CARES Act provisions are set to end). I said I would do it if I could keep working remotely, even from New Mexico, and he said he didn't have a problem with that. It's a sweet setup for me: I get a part-time job at full-time pay, including benefits, and I can let my 401(k) recover for several more months. (Another plus is not having to get a part-time job to pay for Obamacare, as the job market is lousy for nearly everyone right now.)

There have been some nail-biting moments this past week, with more likely to come. While our Human Resources and Finance people have been figuring out how to do tax withholding for the resident of a state where we don't have an office, the "leaving the firm" machinery was still grinding away in the background. I received an email on Thursday from Payroll with a question about my final paycheck on 7/6. I told them I wasn't leaving. Then I forwarded the email to HR. A couple of hours later, I had a new tentative retirement date of 7/31. That gives the firm enough time (I hope!) to work out the rest of the tax withholding bugs so I can stay on 'til the end of the year.

Regardless, the movers will be here for my stuff on 7/16, and on the morning of 7/27 I am hopping in Eli and hitting the road for Santa Fe.

I say all this with some trepidation and a whole lot of gratitude. Nearly three million Americans have tested positive for this virus so far; as of today, 132,000 have died from it, and far more who have "recovered" continue to be sick; and millions have lost their jobs due to the economic shutdown. I realize how lucky I am to be able to keep my job and to retire on my own terms.

So that's the update: the Big Move West is still happening but retirement is delayed. And heads up that I probably won't be posting on Sunday, August 2nd.

***
These moments of nail-biting blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

On peak retirement age.

My head is full of Elementals and my Facebook feed is full of the mass shootings over the past couple of days, neither of which I want to talk about right now. So for this week's post, I'm going back to an idea that I threatened to write about a few weeks ago.

Gerd Altmann | CC0 | Pixabay

What piqued my interest was an article in The Atlantic about how long people should plan to keep working. The article is not about finances. If you talk to any financial planner, they will tell you to keep working and saving 'til you have a million dollars in your retirement account. Right? And how realistic is that when the average amount people ages 55 to 64 have in savings is $107,000? (Even the article at the link is on this train; it says people in their 60s need to have saved eight times their annual salary. Yeah, right.) The longer you listen to these folks, the more depressing it gets. You may end up feeling like you'll never have enough money to retire.

That's not realistic, either. Most American workers retire at 62, which is not-so-coincidentally the age at which Americans are first eligible to collect Social Security. Often, people intend to work longer, but they underestimate how long they'll stay healthy enough to keep their jobs. The most realistic approach, then, would be to figure out what your retirement income will be, given where you are right now, and rearrange your lifestyle to make that work.

But that's not what the Atlantic article is about, either. In a sense, it's about people who work too long -- folks who try to keep up the pace they sustained when they were younger.

The author is Arthur C. Brooks, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute. He says in many fields, people do their best work in middle age.

Looking at major inventors and Nobel winners going back more than a century, [Benjamin Jones, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management,] has found that the most common age for producing a magnum opus is the late 30s. He has shown that the likelihood of a major discovery increases steadily through one’s 20s and 30s and then declines through one’s 40s, 50s, and 60s. Are there outliers? Of course. But the likelihood of producing a major innovation at age 70 is approximately what it was at age 20—almost nonexistent.

The outlook isn't much better for writers, according to Brooks: "When Martin Hill Ortiz, a poet and novelist, collected data on New York Times fiction best sellers from 1960 to 2015, he found that authors were likeliest to reach the No. 1 spot in their 40s and 50s. Despite the famous productivity of a few novelists well into old age, Ortiz shows a steep drop-off in the chance of writing a best seller after the age of 70." (So maybe don't leave writing your Great American Novel to after I retire.)

It's a long article and has a lot of interesting ideas in it. But Brooks does finally get down to a prescription for coping with this earlier-than-you-want-it-to-be decline: walk away from the hard-driving career world while you're still at your peak; take time to think about your spirituality and what you'd like for folks to say about you in a eulogy; and connect with others, and not just your friends and family. He suggests older folks should serve as mentors or teachers, and thereby pass their hard-earned wisdom along.

I'm not suggesting all of us old farts take up teaching. But if you feel yourself slowing down at work earlier than you thought you would, know that you're pretty typical -- and that there may be life after whatever job you have right now.

***
These moments of encouraging blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell (who's still contemplating whether to write a Great American Novel, and what it would be about if she did).

Adventure awaits.

Oh hey -- before I get any further, I should let you know that Treacherous Ground is now available in paperback.

And now, this week's post.

***

We're wrapping up an extra-long holiday weekend here at hearth/myth; the day job shut down (as much as a law firm ever shuts down) on both Thursday and Friday for the Independence Day holiday. I was off so long that I was losing track of which day of the week it was. Pretty sure today is Sunday, which means I owe y'all a blog post.

I have to tell you that it's been really, really nice, having this string of days off -- which is either a preview of how great it will be when I retire in about a year, or a rotten tease because it's Not. Here. Yet.

To beat back the "rotten tease" part, I'm creating a sort of hybrid calendar/journal. You can buy these as blank books -- they're called planners. And as it turns out, planners are where the paper crafters went after scrapbooking went digital. All the pretty papers, stickers, diecut shapes, and so on work as well in a planner as they do on a scrapbook page (although everything needs to be downsized from 12" x 12" to 1.5 inches square, give or take). A number of companies have created blank journals, with Staples' Arc brand being perhaps the least twee.

My problem with a lot of the preprinted planner stuff is the same problem I had with a bunch of the scrapbooking stuff: It's not me. Anything with a Bible verse on it is a non-starter for this Pagan -- but that's not my only issue. A lot of the offerings are either aimed at young women (pastel narwhals! cute sushi!) or busy mothers (little stickers featuring washing machines, school buses, vacuum cleaners, coffee cups, and for the really bad days, martini glasses and suitcases). Then there are the words in various fonts that are supposed to be encouraging, but are basically nagging you: "Gym," "Laundry," and so on. (I saw one sticker that said, "Do your damn laundry." Even though I'd be the one putting it on the page, if I ran across that in the wrong mood, I'd throw the planner across the room.)

It just seems like all this stuff is aimed at people who are trying to keep up, when here I am, trying to wind down. Oh, I've seen some retirement-related stuff, but most of it looks like it's for a scrapbook page for a retirement party. Or it's meant for what comes after -- the Winnebago, the Adirondack chair, and the joke about what you call the person who's happy on Monday.

So I'm falling back on different images: dream catchers; dragonflies, which symbolize transformation at a mature, permanent level; and this Death Tarot card, which for me encapsulates the true meaning of what's often seen as a scary card: killing off that which has outlived its usefulness in order for new, healthy growth to occur.

Although there's room for fun stuff in my planner, too. I've laid in a supply of llama stickers. And if you're looking for stickers for the days when you just want to throw your computer out the window, here you go.

***
These moments of affirmative blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.