The Kindle version of my award-winning mental illness memoir On Hearing of My Mother’s Death Six Years After It Happened: A Daughter’s Memoir of Mental Illness is now on sale for just $0.99 through Tuesday, January 3rd. As always, the book is FREE with Kindle Unlimited.
My long short story Weekend Away: An Almost-Erotic, Almost-Love Story, is FREE for Kindle from 12/27 through 12/31. Download it on Amazon today!
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“And then we were standing, rising up from the water, and as the droplets cascaded down my naked body I imagined myself as a mortal and less awe-inspiring version of Aphrodite, and Jesse as Poseidon, except with, um, only one prong in his trident.”
Cindy’s friend Jesse is great – especially when he gets out of her way after the “benefits” part of their evening is over. So when he proposes a weekend excursion at a nearby lake, she’s naturally suspicious – isn’t that the kind of thing “couples” do? Now she might never be able to get the smell of him off her…
NOTE: Volume 1 of the series, Dealing with Vendors, will be FREE from Monday, 12/26 though Friday, 12/30! Sign up for my newsletter to be notified of future sales.
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Are you struggling to make payroll?
Are your vendors going unpaid and threatening to cut off your supplies?
Are your subcontractors refusing to work unless you pay them up front, worsening your already precarious cash situation?
Are your company credit cards and lines of credit maxed out, with no hope of borrowing more?
Are your employees getting irritable because you’ve reduced their benefits, and it’s been years since they’ve had a raise?
Are you getting irritable because you’re constantly worried about money?
Are you racking up interest and late fees on your debts, making it impossible for you to ever catch up?
Do you find yourself thinking, “I know we would be fine if only we could only get out of this hole!”
If so, the Managing Cash When You Haven’t Got Any series is for you!
You’ll find no abstract theory here, no conceptual finance; instead YOU WILL LEARN PRACTICAL, REAL-WORLD STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING CASH WHEN YOU HAVE NEXT-TO-NO-CASH TO MANAGE. I honed these strategies myself over ten years of handling the finances of multiple companies that were at serious risk of going under during the recession. The failing businesses survived, the borderline ones thrived, and the reason was clear to us all – it’s because careful cash flow management really can turn around a desperate business, even when it isn’t making enough money to pay its own bills and those of its owners.
In this first volume of the series, I address the issue of Dealing with Vendors. I’ll tell you HOW TO TALK TO YOUR VENDORS, what they really want to hear to keep your account going, how to ensure that you pay them just enough to keep them from cutting you off. I’ll tell you how to schedule outgoing payments so that they better fit with your incoming cash, and how to compromise with your vendors so that your payment schedule meshes better with theirs. I’ll explain the CRUCIAL IMPORTANCE OF HAVING A CASH MANAGEMENT PLAN and how having such a plan will ease the fears of your creditors even when you’re unable to pay them in full or on time. Finally, I’ll address how “BIG PICTURE” STRATEGIZING of your expenses and Accounts Payable can improve your cash flow, drastically reduce collection calls, and decrease strain on company personnel, making your business run more pleasantly as well as more successfully.
REMINDER: Volume 1 of the series, Dealing with Vendors, is FREE from Monday, 12/26 though Friday, 12/30! Sign up for my newsletter to be notified of future sales.
Waiting: A Story of Apocalypse by Craig Reinhardt will be FREE for Kindle from Monday, 12/26 through Friday, 12/30.
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This long short story was originally inspired by the History Channel program Life After People. The premise of the show is not to examine the potential causes of the end of humanity, but rather “what happens to the world we leave behind.”
It’s a fascinating program. It details the fates of our roads, our cities, our buildings, even our family pets and other creatures who depend upon us for a living. It quite often comes to the rather disturbing conclusion that in a pretty short space of planetary time – mere hundreds of years, not thousands – we will be completely forgotten by an Earth that may fare better without us. While in this story I ultimately chose not to focus on the mechanics of the destruction of the trappings of humanity, but rather on what it does to the main character, I think the former offers a world of interesting possibilities for post-apocalyptic literature and I look forward to returning to this subject in the near future.
“Waiting” tells the story of a middle-aged misanthrope who witnesses this degeneration, who lives long enough to see how quickly humanity can fail, how insufficient its infrastructure is in the case of a massive disaster. But what place is there for a person in a world without people?
Craig Reinhardt’s essay collection The Layperson’s Bible: Volume 1: Sexuality will be on sale for $0.99 from December 26th through January 1st. Mark your calendars!
As always, the book is also FREE with Kindle Unlimited.
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I was raised without religion. My mother was a lapsed Catholic, my father a lapsed Protestant. My understanding of Easter as a child was that it was that day you ate ham (as opposed to Christmas, which was that other day you ate turkey). I have been to regular church services exactly four times in my life, and I can’t say I remember much about them – except for the hymns. For that matter, I’ve been to Passover services exactly four times, too, with my ex-girlfriend. I seem to remember liking the music there, too.
In other words, apart from the singing, when it comes to the Judeo-Christian tradition, I haven’t a clue. I could not – and still cannot – tell you the difference between a Presbyterian and an Episcopalian or a Methodist and a Baptist. In addition, I grew up in New England, in an area where Jews were nearly as prevalent as Christians, and seemed to have nearly as many variations on their religious tradition as the Christians did. All of these different people, so much alike in their non-religious lives, yet each of them carrying a torch for some particular branch of a faith, the nuances of which I couldn’t begin to understand. What could they all have in common? The Bible, of course.
So I decided to read it. Yes, I read it, the whole thing, even the really boring parts about who begat whom ad infinitum. And you know what? It turns out that The Bible is really pretty interesting – particularly when you know next to nothing about the religions that use it as a basis for their doctrine and faith. And so I sat down and began analyzing what The Bible said to me as a layperson, someone with no emotional or historical attachment to its teachings and tenets. These volumes are the result of that analysis.
It is not my intention to judge the value, relevance, or accuracy of what The Bible says, nor do I pretend to be a religious scholar of any sort with special knowledge of biblical interpretation or history. Rather, I examine the meaning of what The Bible says to ME, an ordinary twenty-first century person without religious training or knowledge who has picked up The Good Book for the first time and said to himself, “Well, look at that! Who’d have thought that was in there all along?”
I had a lot of fun digging these gems out of our most famous work of literature, and I hope you’ll have fun reading them, too. This first volume is on everyone’s favorite subject: SEXUALITY. What does The Bible really say about homosexuality? About adultery, chastity, and incest? If you’re a layperson like me, I think you may be surprised by just what’s contained in those two testaments – and the impact those words have had upon our society down to this day.
Lori Schafer's Short Subjects I Feel Like Writing About 