The Other Side

 Is it better there?

On the Other Side?

Does everything work that didn't before?

Or are you something completely different?

Is there pain? 

Is there sadness?

Do you wish you were still here?

Even with the pain and confusion that tormented you?

Because it's not better here without you.

Here on This Side.

Nothing works like it did before. 

And I'm completely different without you.

I am in pain.

And so very sad.

And I wish you were still here.

But not if you'd still be in pain and confused and tormented.

I can wait till it's my time 

To be with you again.

On the hard days and in the awful moments 

But also on the best days and in the joyful moments

And especially during routine days and in the mundane moments

I will keep my eyes focused on yours.

I will keep my heart connected to yours.

If I close my eyes, I can see you 

Tall and strong and calm

And smiling at me.

A year ago, 

When you died,

You were so far away, 

Just a speck on the horizon

And I was terrified that each day

Would take you farther away from me.

But now I know better.

Every day you get just a little larger

As I get closer to

The Other Side. 

"Almost Invisible- a Different Kind of Survival Story"

 I have an idea for another book, but it's going to be a while, ya'll. Hopefully not too long, but at least a few months, so in the meantime, I'm going to take the liberty to remind you that I have some already ready to go and suitable for holiday giving. 

First up, is this quick little read about an elderly homeless woman, reminding us that the end of the world is every single day for a whole mess of people.

I was inspired to write this book after a thread started in a forum I was on called Mrs. Survival. Part homesteady people and part survivalists, the only common thread was that it was a place for women to share and learn. 

One woman's husband had suddenly lost his job, which was their only source of income, since she was at home caring for several young children and homeschooling them. She had squirreled away and saved and scrimped and had finally accumulated the suggested year's amount of staples in her pantry, and she was distressed to the point of tears that she had had to dip into it after the job loss.

The replies were mostly encouraging, but they all sternly told her to make sure she replaced it all ASAP, and all I could think of was, "What the everloving fuck?"

I posted and told her how proud I was of her, because SHE DID IT. The whole point of stocking up is to carry a family through hard times, sometimes also known as "the end of the world", and that her husband losing his job WAS the end of the world for them right this minute. 

The end of the world happens to people all around us every single day. 

There's a death.

There's an accident.

There's a sudden financial disaster.

Shit can happen to anyone at anytime and exactly 0% of us are immune. 

Anyway, you can order this disturbing, fairy-tale-esque, feel-good tale of caution from my website below, and please don't forget to join my Patreon for the cost of a single cup of schmancy coffee a month. Support your local authors!

 Sheri's Site (mystrikingly.com) 

I am an Air BnB Host

 On our property are two little "tiny houses".

When we moved out here and built our cabin, our friend Joe (in his 70's) moved here, too, had a prefab yard shed with a porch hauled in and he had it finished out. Rustic. Camo curtains and bedspread. Plywood kitchen counters and wire racks for dishes and whatnot. No range and a small fridge. No door on the bathroom. Basically a "deer camp cabin" for anyone who knows what that means. He loved it since it also housed his gigantic recliner, a 48" tv, and his 6' tall gun safe. His life was complete.

A year later, Joe's mom (in her 90's) fell in her little senior apartment in Oklahoma City. She said it was time to go into the nursing home since she shouldn't live alone anymore. I asked her if that's what she wanted and she said, "Of course not." So, we gave her another option. She visited us here in Texas, we took a tour of the "little house building place" and she bought one. It's yellow outside and blue inside and just a perfect little grandma's house. It was the first time in her life she had been able to make all the decisions regarding where she lived. She had a big vegetable garden every year and rose bushes outside her house and lived there happily till she passed away just shy of her 95th birthday.

Joe moved into his mom's house because it was bigger and had a full kitchen and washer/dryer. He closed in its lovely porch (badly) to house the exercise bike he bought and never used and turned his old house into a reloading shed. 

After a while, he decided that there was too much stigma attached to "living in his mom's house" (sorry- did I say he was in his 70's? I guess he was really about 7) and he "fixed up" his reloading shed and moved back in. By fixing up, I mean he closed off the front porch to give himself 4 extra feet of living space (while making it look like shit from the outside) and using cement blocks for porch steps. He did allow his electrician friend to put in a proper kitchen and washer/dryer since he'd gotten used to those luxuries.

I told him I needed enough money to do a complete cleaning and painting of his mom's house, totally refurnish it, and remove the hideous front porch enclosure, because I was going to use it as an Air BnB. He laughed at me and said, "Sugar, ain't no one gonna rent a little house way out here in the middle of nowhere" and he said our neighbors were offering to "take it off of our hands" for about $10,000. I said, "NO. I'm turning into an Air BnB. If nothing else, it should book on Canton weekends" so he reluctantly handed me the money to clean up what had been a spotless little house before he moved into it. Old guys can be...messy.

Well. We opened it in May and were booked the first weekend. And the next. And then it got busier. June, July and August that first year, every single day we either had a guest here, one was checking in, or one was checking out. By the end of that first year, it had made more than the $10,000 the neighbor would have paid for it.

Then, my husband Ward's health deteriorated, and Joe took a fall and he decided that he would move to Ohio to live with other friends since, "Two old men is too much for you to handle." Truer words, man. Truer words.

I told him I wanted enough money to do the same thing with HIS house so I could try to compensate for the rent he'd been paying that we were now losing. Again- after totally cleaning inside and out, removing the horrible porch enclosure putting the original porch back, painting the outside (which had never been done) and fully re-furnishing it, I waited a little nervously. I had no idea if "the middle of nowhere" would support two places on the same property.

I needn't have worried. They both stay full almost all of the time- certainly every weekend. 

Is it fun? 99% of the time. 

Is it hard work? I do my own cleaning, so yeah, when they both have 2 sets of guests on a weekend, that's cleaning x 4 in two days, but I have it down to a routine. And I have to be available by text to answer questions or help 24/7/365. 

I know Air BnB gets a bad rap over people/businesses buying up all the prime real estate in tourist areas and being literally absentee landlords who do a shit job making their listings comfortable and appealing. I agree with that. When we looked for a listing in downtown Chicago that we could afford, I found one that was an apartment in a high-rise building with "gorgeous views of downtown and Lake Michigan!" and it did have that. The furnishings consisted of air mattresses in the bedrooms and a card table and 4 chairs in the living room. I shit you not. 

But. There are many more people like me, who live right on the property and take pride in what we do. We do it because we love meeting people, and we need the money.  We stayed in almost 100 different Air BnB's all over the US before opening ours, so we had a "feel" for what was expected...and then we did more.

We take one-night stays, where many require at least two nights, because most of the time we've stayed places we were on our way to somewhere else and just needed one night. Our one-night guests love that there is a washer and dryer in each guest house because sometimes you just need to do a load of laundry and don't want to sit in a laundromat for 2 hours when you can sit out on the porch and read a book instead. To cater to our here-to-there travelers, Monday-Thursday nights are cheaper than the weekends. 

We take late and last-minute check-ins, because we've been the travelers who just couldn't make it to where we thought we could and needed to stop...now. At 10pm. I always keep the guest houses clean for just such cases. Then, it's no problem to flashlight over and turn on the lights to welcome midnight guests. 

We are one of the few places within 50 miles that offer full kitchens and washer/dryers, so we are popular with traveling nurses, or guys who get a contract for a few months working the refinery or electrical linemen, or construction crews. We give a 25% discount for over 7 nights and a 40% discount for over 30 nights, and if they get called to another job without warning (the refinery is great about that) I refund them for unused nights. 

Even without the discounts, we are the most affordable option in our area for stand-alone lodging. I get told all the time that I need to charge double my rate, but I won't.

Once hotel tax (required) and my cleaning fee (good cleaning supplies and name-brand snacks ain't cheap) and *Air BnB fees get added in, they are still between $75-$100 a night for one night.

*About Air BnB fees. It isn't much. And it pays for the platform to advertise. We've hosted guests from Germany, South Korea, Mexico, Canada, and all over the US who NEVER would have found us on a personal website. Never. Their fees also pay for liability insurance for us AND the guests- us if a guest takes or breaks something (rare) and for guests if something is bad wrong or dangerous with the listing.

And here's the thing.

Everyone deserves something nice. 

We've been the local honeymoon weekend for young couples who can't just fly off to Hawaii. 

Girls' weekends for friends going to Canton and not wanting to stay at Motel 6.

People here in East Texas looking for homes or needing somewhere to stay after their home sold and their new home hasn't closed yet and not having a lot of money because of that awful in-between time.

We are close enough for people in DFW, Waco, Austin, Houston, San Antonio who have had a crap week at work and say, "I wish we could go somewhere reasonably close and pretty and just get away for the weekend and not spend too much money. Oh. Look!"

Guys going fishing on one of the big lakes around here like that there's plenty of room for their boat. And their buddy's boat. And *his* buddy's boat.

Two friends who work on a gambling boat in Shreveport finally got a weekend off together, and they were so excited to see the llamas, they stopped in Longview on their way here and each got a llama tattoo.

Oh, yeah. There are also llamas to feed cookies to and take selfies with.

So let me amend that.

Everyone deserves something nice. And llamas.

Starfish Farm (mystrikingly.com)

The Right Time To Write is Right Now

 OK, then. My ducks are almost in a row, at least for the short term, and I have enough disparate income sources that I *shouldn't* be left hungry or without utilities if one or more go tits-up, even temporarily.

I had become complacent for the first time in my life, depending on my employment income as being reliable and stable just because I'd been doing it for 30 years, so when it got yanked out from under me, even with a pretty generous exit package, it was a horrifying reminder that no one is irreplaceable in the workplace.

No one.

Anyhow.

I have a little room to breathe and think about what I really want to do going forward. 

And I keep coming back to one thing. 

My entire life, I've wanted to be a writer. I've had a few gigs that paid a little money over the years, but nothing more than pocket-change. 

After spinning my wheels for a few months frantically applying to any job that remotely sounded like it was something I could do and not hate, and not get in the way of running the Air BnB's, which are now my main source of income thanks to a subtle marketing shift, I lucked into my part-time job through a friend. I am very, very lucky. 

But, am I lucky enough to be able to earn a following for my writing? Gomez always said I was, and he was never wrong. 

I spent years being demoralized, oddly enough, by a friend's success in his writing career. I love words. Every word I type and install into a piece is there for a reason. Each one has its own heft, and taste, and value. If a story I write begs to be read out loud, I know I've done right by the words. 

Our friend happened to fall into a niche demographic: gun nut survivalist far-right Rambo wannabees.

His books get slapped up on Amazon in a format that would be considered pre-rough draft to anyone who writes even casually. The spelling and grammar are horrific. Formatting is non-existent. But none of that matters. He has thousands of devoted followers all over the world who can't get enough of his one-dimensional characters killing libtards and making judgment calls to wipe out entire cities just because they are different from what his hero thinks of as moral. 

He's made over a hundred thousand dollars, at least. 

I'm not bitter (really), and I'm happy for his success, and while he was living here with us, a lot of that money was useful for...paying medical bills, farm repairs, etc. etc. etc. and he never begrudged any of it. 

Except DAMN it was hard to see his royalty payments bringing in thousands of dollars a month, while royalty payments for my books on the same platform are usually under $5.00 per month. 

So, when life got busy, and work got busy and Ward's health declined, I just stopped writing, and told myself I didn't really miss it, and it was all for the best.

Now, though. 

My brain is poking me in the eye (from the inside) and saying, "Lissen, old lady. You wanted to do this. You always wanted to do this. Stop watching Facebook videos and knuckle down and do it. There's no 'maybe' about it anymore. You want this? Fucking do it."

All that to say...I'm going to fucking do it. And I'm not going to stop this time. 

I have the taste of the words in my mouth again, and they are delicious. 

If you have an inclination to help a struggling author, here's my Patreon:

Plan Q | When Life gives you lemons, you don't have to accept them | Patreon

And if you'd like to buy a book directly, here's my website:

Sheri's Site (mystrikingly.com)

And if you want a Kindle version, they're here:

Amazon.com: Sheri Dixon: books, biography, latest update

Thank you for reading. It means the world to me.