Ooof! It's been a minute, but what a month I have had! We have officially moved into craft fair season, which where I'm from runs opposite of the summertime farmer's markets and is an indoor event. I was hoping to have something new published and available, but sadly, did not accomplish this. I still did well enough to order more copies for the rest of the season at least.
BUT here is the really exciting part that has been going on while I have been away! There have been full miracles happening in my life and towards my career. It has left me in tears of gratitude more than once and I still tear up talking about it with others.
I was accepted into a two week Residency program at the Chateau D'Orquevaux in FRANCE!
And given my next novel I am writing takes place during the French Revolution, I am THRILLED to be able to do a bit of on site research while I am there with no distractions to work on this story.
But here is the really cool part. I had also received a grant to cover about 30% of the tuition cost for this residency. The Chateau had split the balance into three payments; the first due in two weeks from the offer and spread out over several months, the balance due in February. The payments equaled about $1,500 in dollars after the exchange rate. And quite frankly, my husband and I don't have that much to just drop at a moment's notice. So I set up a GoFundMe account for help.
Things started out really slowly. I was starting to really stress about making the payment and making the trip at all, even though it is scheduled for next summer.
So I mentioned this to an organization I am working with that is helping me to create a business plan and support my career. Mostly just to share where my headspace was at and to get some of the stress out. My advisor said she thought it would be possible to help, but she had to check with her boss. Which shocked me. I honestly wasn't expecting this. The thing about this organization is that it is funded by the state government... meaning things are SLOW and take time and paperwork, etc.
But I didn't have much time.
A day or two after this, I got a phone call from a dear friend congratulating me on this opportunity. She asked for the details of what it would cost to get me there. I told her about the possible support of this organization and how things were all so much up in the air.
This. Woman.
She said she had been talking with her husband. They both strongly support education and know how hard I work and wanted to support me in this endeavor, so if things didn't happen with the organization, I could rest easy knowing my deposit was at least covered.
And I cried.
Still tearing up as I write this and it's been almost a month.
Turns out, the organization not only covered my deposit, but my entire tuition. And this dear friend still wrote a check for $1,500 to pay for my plane ticket.
The funny part is that after all of this went down... the GoFundMe suddenly started doing much better. Which is wonderful, since I still have to pay for either a rental car or public transit (still figuring out which is the better option) as well as a few extra days of food and lodging to see the actual chateaux that I will be writing about at Guermantes and Denonville, if I can arrange that with the current owners. So I am still hoping for donations to cover those costs as well.
So if you are able, I am still hoping for donations to cover the costs of additional research, but at least now, I can breathe. I am going to France and am in the process of updating my passport, as well as studying the language and finally starting an actual outline for the story.
It has been an crazy month, to say the least, but in all the good ways. This month has felt like nothing short of a miracle. Maybe even a series of them. Either way, it has been beautiful to watch and very humbling in a way to see that I don't always have to be in control of how things happen, because things can fall in to place beautifully and on it's own.
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