About three years ago, I was deep within the darkest days of my life. I was quite ill, feeling miserable with every click of the clock. It was more physical suffering than I thought a human could bear. My future ws defined in months, not years. It was at the beginning of the pandemic and I was put on “house arrest” by my doctors at the same time, Denise as a hospital administrator was working 16 hour days … only to come home and crash before her next grueling day. There was no better environment for sadness than that situation.

I spent those days, besides talking to my Saint Bernard, pleading with God, “Please help me, have mercy, or please end my life.” Day and night it was the same, usually in tears. I was praying a good 12 hours per day and it was subsistence prayer. Not as a pious exercise, but I was compelled to do so, out of desperation. But I knew that something had to give, or I would take matters in my own hands.

It was at that moment I decided that I had to dream again, even if those dreams could be cut short. I had to occupy my mind and soul with something or I would go insane. It was then, I decided to write another book. Such grueling work in the word-smitery mines, saved my life.

It was about the same time I decided, while my previous dreams of restoring an old stone cottage in Scotland or around the Mediterranean would never be realize in my new state of health, that I would attempt to build a stone cottage here.

Both of these endeavors had their challenges and in this situation, challenges were a good thing. A mind occupying gift of problem solving and imagining (in case of the book writing).

It is hard to imagine how each of those project, through their ups and downs, twists and turns, that they both culminated on this twenty-third day of January, 2023. For it is on this day, The Stones of Yemen officially went to the presses, and my foundation guy broke ground on the new cottage. So while I spent seven hours inside, doing the complicated work of setting up my book with Ingram (book distributor), Adam, my foundation guy has been digging up your yard into mountains of black dirt.

Now Denise is on house arrest, having been suffering from COVID since last Friday. It was only a matter of time as several of her students have had it. So, she is living upstairs and me down, not being in the same room at the same time since she tested positive. She is recovering from something like a bad cold. I am still at a very high risk of it or any infection.

It has been hard for her, confide in the upstairs while her yard is being dug up. She had concerns about me building the cottage, due to risk-taking at this juncture in our lives. She agreed to let me do it because of my insistence and what I thought it would mean to me. I have promised her that if I am not able to finish it, it will become her goat barn.

I am sorry, thinking about those dark days, as things are so much better now. I’m not in pain or suffering except for constant fatigue from the chemo, which is nothing compared to 2020. But I share these things as a moment of jubilation, not sorrowful reminiscing.

On a last note, I was hoping so much to have my paperback book priced low, say $10.99. However, as we set up a contract with Amazon today, they want 60% of the book’s profits and the presses demand about 37%. That leaves 2% fo the author. While I do not write to make money, I would have to pay Amazon for each book sold, unless I charged about 15 bucks a book. Anyway, the book is worth it. It is a good read … or at least that’s what others are telling me. It will appear on Amazon in a few days. I will do an official launch after I’ve ordered one myself and made sure the printing was of quality.

Mike