In the summer of 2024, I was out walking my dog with my husband when I went into full cardiac arrest and complete respiratory failure. “Dropped dead” is the shorter term.
But ha! In the immortal words of Miracle Max, I was only mostly dead! Thanks to a heroic team effort by my husband, the paramedics, several doctors, and more than several nurses, I got better. When I woke up in the hospital two weeks later, I was told it was a miracle.
Altogether, I spent about a month in the ICU, with a long recovery to follow. My survival was due not to any particular strength of mine, but to the extraordinary care I received. (Which I repaid by being an absolute nutter to those poor people. Remind me sometime to tell you about ICU psychosis, a real thing that I am not making up.)
“Any kind of warning” was only one of the many things I did not have the day I collapsed. I also did not have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or high blood sugar. I was at the lower end of normal BMI. I’ve never smoked even once. I did not eat a drop-dead-at-53 diet, or move a drop-dead-at-53 amount.
The one risk factor I had for heart disease: stress. Which brings me to the point of this post.
You wouldn’t think writing fiction would be a stressful job, right? It’s not like I’m out there doing surgery or pulling kittens out of burning buildings. I’m playing with imaginary friends. I don’t even have to put on outdoor pants! This is the dream!
But the thing with doing that dream for a job is, you can only earn a living at it if you publish fast. Really fast. I was considered by my peers to be a slow writer at 3-4 books a year. And that’s about 3-4 times faster than I was comfortable writing. I’d been doing that for a decade. There’s burned out, and then there’s burned to, well, death.
Now, I’m a nervous girl by nature, so I’m not saying my job was the sole culprit. Many changes needed to be made in many areas of my life. But one of those changes was definitely slowing down. And, bonus! That’s a good thing overall for the quality of my work.
But it does come with sacrifices. I’m not making so much money anymore. Recently, the newsletter platform I’d been using for years announced the kind of price hike that is neither sustainable nor sensible for my business right now. And with so many of my readers also feeling financial strain, I’m certainly not going to raise the price of my books just so I can afford more overhead.
And so … ta da! I’ve taken it all online. My websites had been underutilized, offering a ready solution. And would you look at that, I hear blogging is making a comeback, thanks to the general hatred toward most every current social media platform (a sentiment I share). So l’m even on trend. But if you prefer, you can still call it a newsletter, because you can subscribe by email using the button in every header on the site, or the form below every post.
Other than the delivery system, not much is changing. I’m still here talking about what I’m working on, and about my dog. And still the latter more than the former.
One other thing that’s different, though: consolidation. I’m not producing enough with three pen names combined, let alone with any one individually. I’m still using the pen names, of course, but I’ve brought all my personalities together under one internet roof. The cordeliarook, jenrasmussen, and cairdarin domains now all redirect here to jrrasmussen.com. Why did J.R. get to be the central domain? Because that one came before Cordelia’s, and was designated as my primary domain by my hosting provider. So, one notch lazier than flipping a coin.
So that’s how I got here, and how you got here, too. Welcome to my underground lair creepy mansion not at all creepy mansion castle magical library internet home.
P.S. Miracle Max is from the movie The Princess Bride, and if you didn’t know that, go watch it (again). And yes, yes I did use the greeting from Disney’s Haunted Mansion as the title of this post. No regrets.