THE NEW ERA…

… WILL HAVE TO WAIT?

In the last month, I’ve made huge changes in my personal and professional life. It’s been a transformative month. The fact that it lines up with the second anniversary of my novel’s publication is unlikely to be a coincidence. There’s a lot going on.

I’ve purchased a scooter. I’m now the proud owner of a 2011 Yamaha Zuma 125cc, which technically makes me a motorcycle dude in his forties. Such a cliché, no? I purchased the scooter to give my wife her car back, so she’s not trapped at home five days a week while I’m working. She and the kids can get out in the world again. Make friends, have play dates, get some Sun, etc.

Meet my new girl, Blaze.

But with that issue handled, I’d created another. I couldn’t ride my scooter all the way out to the weed farm. It was too far, and the speeds required on those roads were too much even for my admittedly beefy scooter. Additionally, I’d recently learned I had no real hope of progressing to higher levels and higher pay at the cannabis farm. They’d recently made some changes to management, and management had in turn made changes to the structure of the business, so by the time I became eligible for a coveted position, it simply didn’t exist anymore.

I had initially gone to work at the cannabis farm specifically to do something I loved and stop working in hospitality, which had me burned out and depressed. Once I was working at the farm, I felt happy during work hours and didn’t want to go back to a job I hated. However, outside of work, things took a turn for the worse in 2024, beginning with my finances as the job wasn’t making ends meet, and life was becoming more expensive by the day. This, of course, is a huge problem for me as the sole breadwinner in my home. The roof over our heads, the food in our bellies, the clothes on our backs, all come down to my ability to provide. And I couldn’t. And the deeper into the hole, the deeper my depression dug into me. The very job that was making me happy during work hours was deepening my depression outside of it.

This is a major reason why not much got done author-wise in 2024. I simply didn’t have it in me. The YouTube channel has been on hiatus, my newsletters have been late, I did very little writing compared to previous years, and very little work got done on the member site until very recently.

Longer story shorter: changes needed to be made. So I quit the cannabis farm and went back to work at the last hotel I left. Of all the hospitality work experience I’ve had, that location was the most chill, had the best clientele, and shouldered me with the least amount of stress. They took me back, offered me more pay than the weed farm had, and started me right away. My new old job includes some Night Audit shifts, which provide me with writing time. The regular morning and evening shifts provide me with time to work on the member site, which is not as full as I’d like before launch, but is filling up quickly now that I’m in front of a computer eight hours a day instead of a plant.

I miss my plants already. I miss my coworkers there. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. I’m telling myself this is temporary. I don’t want to get trapped in Hospitality for years again. It would feel like one step forward and two steps back if it weren’t for the bump in pay. But let’s be honest, an extra dollar an hour isn’t going to change my life. So, every day I’m on the hunt for a nice “work-from-home” situation with holy-shit pay. No luck yet, but it’s out there somewhere. I’ll find it. Once I’m home full-time, yet another era will commence. For now, we live in the era of finishing MYTHIC: THE FACE OF GAIA.

I’m looking forward to sharing some sneak peeks with you guys very soon. For starters, you can catch Jared Kauffman reading and critiquing Chapter One of MYTHIC: THE FACE OF GAIA, this Saturday on the WriteNow! YouTube Channel.

How’s this for the audiobook cover? Share your thoughts below!

Other than that, I’m focused on The World Book. Filling that out also provides me the luxury of doing a fresh edit on the novel, so I’m killing two birds with one stone. I’m editing further while doing the AudioBook, too, so that’s like four birds with two stones, or something like that. Anyway, I’m loving the ease of progress this provides.

Now, I originally intended to launch The Mythic Universe Member Site today, but the World Book is having technical difficulties, so I’m going to fix it, fill it up more, and probably launch when the World Book is complete. But a preview of the AudioBook is available in the form of the very first scene from the Prologue, right now on Spotify. Go check it out and leave feedback so I can improve the production of the audiobook as I go!