The Month We Used Our Two Tickets to Paradise

by | Oct 31, 2022 | Articles | 0 comments

I haven’t posted on the blog since 10/3, but I have a pretty good excuse: my wife and I were on vacation.

Unlike many of our peers, I especially do not like to let people know I’ll be out of town. No matter what kind of security system you have, it’s not easy to feel 100 percent at ease when you’re 9,000 miles from home.

Actually, my wife and I were more than 9,000 miles from home—9,407, to be exact.

 

You’re Going Where?!

And I must admit, I always get a kick out of it when I tell people who don’t know me well that I’m heading to Thailand.

Back to Thailand, I should say, since I’ve been there nearly a dozen times.

See, my wife, a.k.a. the lovely Sunny, hails from Thailandthe Ubon Ratchathani area, to be more precise. And she and I built a house on her parents’ property last year, which you can see above.

We hadn’t seen the new house in person ourselves yet, and, long story short, October was the only feasible time for a host of reasons. So off we went.

 

An Overdue Vacation

I know I’ve been kvetching about how I need a vacation for quite some time (here on the blog and to folks I know). I mentioned it in the September 19th post, Taking the Time to Tell You I’m Taking Some Time. That post alluded to the upcoming vacation without any details…just “I’m taking a little time off with my wife soon.”

What I didn’t say was that “little time” would be about three weeks…which I know sounds like a lot to most folks. But what I also didn’t say was that this was the first time my wife or I have taken a vacation since 2017.

Coincidentally, that 2017 trip was also to Thailand. So the lovely Sunny hadn’t seen her family in five years. We originally planned to return in 2020, but you probably remember how that year turned out.

And one last thing, to make this a somewhat writing-related post: I took a vacation from work of all kinds. That means I didn’t write the entire time, and I was fine with that. I realize many of my fellow writers think a writer never gets a vacation, thanks to guilt-inducing quotes from Ionesco or others.

But I’ve asked myself: do surgeons perform operations on their vacations? Do lawyers do any lawyering when they’re at the beach with their families? I’m gonna say no. Not if they want to be good spouses, parents, etc.

So no, I did not work. But I’m back at work now and will be around for a while. Stay tuned!

A Journey with A Few Heiresses

Way back in 2016, I got a guest spot on a blog called Writing in the Modern Age by an author named Marie Lavender. Of all the writers I've contacted online, Marie has to be the most prolific – more than 20 books published over the course of 15 years. Marie and I have...
labor

Labor Day 2022

To all my working friends, and those of you who worked hard until you retired: I'm taking the day off, and hope you are too. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for this quarter's newsletter, appearing in your inbox tomorrow. If you're not signed up, get it here. Happy Labor...
music

“Music Hath Charms to Soothe a Savage Breast”

So wrote William Congreve in 1697, and it’s still true today. Of course, not everyone today understands that “hath” meant “has,” or that a “savage breast” was another way of saying “wild heart.” And these days, more music is made to stimulate than to calm.My own...
book

Who Gives A Damn About Your Book?

Back in April, I wrote a blog post called What I’ve Learned in Six Years of Growing An Indie Author Business. Since I have those six years of experience, I figured I’d list six things I’d learned—not necessarily one per year, but one for each year. The response was...
happy new year

Happy New Year From Mike Sahno – Author. Speaker. Publisher.

Today was the last day of 2018, and it's also my last blog post of the year. I almost missed it. One of the only reasons I've had success as an author, speaker and publisher is because I've been both relentless and consistent. I used to think my natural, God-given...
annoying

Top 10 Most Annoying Words or Phrases for 2023

In 2018, I published a post called Top Ten Words or Phrases That Make You Cringe. I only included eight because they were so annoying. There was no need to torture readers with more.  Over these past few years, some of the worst offenders have fallen out of favor. And...
racism

Would You Like A Side Order of Misogyny, Prejudice, or Homophobia With That?

I didn’t intentionally set out to write a new novel addressing the rampant intolerance, Islamophobia, and racism in America today. I really didn’t. My novels always start with a character, or characters. Sometimes their actions get pretty hectic right out of the gate;...
Cataloging-In-Publication

What’s the Risk to Not Having A Cataloging-In-Publication (CIP) Data Block?

Over the past few weeks, I've been writing about "book-building" for indie authors. By that I mean putting a book together from your perspective as an author. So I haven't covered topics like cover design or interior design - you may choose those, but you're probably...
identity

Who Are You? And What Do You Want?

Readers of this blog who are also movie buffs may be able to help me out today: tell me where I got that title about identity! I’m fairly certain there was an old movie or TV show where a character said, “Who are you? And what do you want?” But for the life of me, I...
coding

You Can’t Do It All—And You Don’t Have To!

I wrote a post a couple weeks ago called What I’ve Learned In Six Years of Growing An Indie Author Business. One of the points ran as follows: Even if you're traditionally published, you still have to do a lot of the heavy marketing lifting. As an indie, be prepared...
self-promotion

What’s The Problem With Shameless Self-Promotion?

While I still find it somewhat hard to believe, I've been on Twitter for almost eight years. I know this not only because Twitter shows Joined March 2015 on my profile but also because, even if they eliminate that feature, I use a tracker called Who Unfollowed Me? If...
MLK

MLK Day 2023

Here’s wishing everyone a safe, sane Martin Luther King Jr. Day. For many of us, today is always something of a day of mourning: not only mourning the loss of a great civil rights leader, but also mourning the turn our great nation seemed to take in recent years....

Twitter Tips for Authors in 2023

If you follow my blog, you probably connected with me via Twitter, whether you’re a fellow author or not. In 2020, I wrote a post about Twitter for fellow writers that got a good response. Three years later, the landscape has changed, but some Twitter best practices...
rails

Going Off The Rails (But Not On A Crazy Train)

Last April, I wrote a blog post called Back on Track With a Work-In-Progress. Part of that post was to talk about the difference between a “plotter” and a “pantser” (and to describe myself as a hybrid of the two, a “plantser”). Another, less obvious motive, was to...
French

Those Tricky French Authors and Their Obsessions

Today’s blog post was originally going to be Write Whatever the @#$% You Want, Pt. III. However, after seeing parts I and II lined up, I decided to call an audible and make it something less repetitive. Somehow the SEO gods have gotten into my head. As I’ve mentioned...
scared

Write Whatever the @#$% You Want, Pt. II

In last week’s post, I mentioned a pretty well-known author who has publicly reported his publisher “wouldn’t touch” a new release, in part because a character in his novel referred to herself as “fat.” I heard this story on a podcast, and I remember thinking, “Wait...
censorship

Write Whatever the @#$% You Want

I’ve been stewing on this for a while. It’s been brewing for quite a while. I could probably write a song about it (how about a rap?), but I don’t think I will. This is more of a blog post topic, and it might even deserve a series. And that’s the title and topic of...
gratitude

Should Every Month Be Gratitude Month?

When I was a kid, I loved Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. I read it daily and collected nearly every paperback volume of the cartoon, so I could see what I’d missed since the comic strip’s inception in 1950.  Certain things stuck: quotes like “happiness is a warm puppy”...
robot

More Thoughts On Robot Writers and The Tech Dystopia

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post here called When Will the Robot Overlords Replace Us? Apparently, I’m fairly obsessed with this stuff, because every time I come here and empty my brain, it seems to come up again. Today is no different. Part of the reason,...