Send to Kindleby Staci Stallings
Sometimes life is designed to make you remember what is really important and how easily our “blessing counter” can get skewed.
So for about 3 months now, I have been “counting down” so to speak for November. November 1, “A Time to Love” would release and “Some Say Love” would go on preorder. In order for that to happen, I had to have “Some Say Love’ finished at least the first draft. To make a long story short, I ended up writing around 140K words in 21 days, which is INSANE. But I got it done.
I was so looking forward to November as all of my marketing and hard work was going to pay off—maybe even resulting in hitting a “list.” I was working almost literally around the clock to get this to happen, marketing, writing, publishing, and trying to keep up with my crazy-crazy life outside of writing.
Things looked to be going great, but then around November 4, I started having health issues—major ones. By the 7th and 8th, my body had slammed on the brakes, and by the 9th, I was in the Urgent Care. The 10th I made a trip to the Emergency Room with horrible symptoms that they did not at all understand. They gave me a mild painkiller (I wasn’t in pain, just felt like my body was about to shut down completely!), and they sent me home.
The 11th was one of the worst days I’ve ever lived through physically. I was mentally a wreck, and my body kept going into spasms I could not predict, control or fix. It would be four full days before I got any kind of answer as to what was going on. My natural health lady finally figured it out. I had gone into near total adrenal collapse. My estrogen went off the charts because my progesterone had virtually crashed into nothing.
I don’t know how well-versed you are in the importance and function of hormones, but let me just tell you, when they get as out-of-whack as mine were, coming back is NOT an easy road. It is slow going and a process of boosting the good things in your body, eliminating and detoxing the overloaded hormones, and artificially boosting certain hormones enough while the other two processes are going on so that you don’t lose your mind!
It has been quite a trip, let me tell you.
So November didn’t turn out exactly as I had planned. Mostly, I’ve been sitting in the chair and progressively going from near catatonic to mingling with the family, to watching movies, to reading, and now to actually working a little each day. So with this Thanksgiving season, you can bet I am taking care to count my blessings—little things like getting more than a few hours sleep at a time before my body freaks out, having a wonderful family who loves me and is doing everything they can to help me get well, GREAT health people who have gone out of their way to help me figure this out, living in a place where I have access to good stuff to get me going again.
Yeah, I thought this year I would be thankful for sales, and I am. They just aren’t on the top of the list anymore.
It is funny though how a couple of the reviews I’ve gotten for “A Time to Love” have mentioned that Jenna’s grief seems to “drag on” and how her recovery doesn’t track the easy road some have experienced. I have to say, my November has felt a lot like Jenna’s grief process—slow, meandering, getting a few things right as other things seem to fall apart… Strange how life sometimes really parallels what we write.
I hope you and yours have had a safe, wonderful, peaceful, healthy Thanksgiving, and I’m wishing you all a most wonderful holiday season!
About the Author:
A stay-at-home mom with a husband, three kids and a writing addiction on the side, Staci Stallings has numerous titles for readers to choose from. Not content to stay in one genre and write it to death, Staci’s stories run the gamut from young adult to adult, from motivational and inspirational to full-out Christian and back again. Every title is a new adventure! That’s what keeps Staci writing and you reading. Although she lives in Amarillo, Texas and her main career right now is her family, Staci touches the lives of people across the globe with her various Internet and writing endeavors.
