Aslaug's Axe Shed

…I thought it would be appropriate to write a few lines here.

This Christmas will see the posting of the last two Transitions chapters. I’m not going to say ‘ever’, because one cannot predict the future, and who knows, in a few years I might want to go back and write something for that storyline again. At the moment, though, I think I’ve managed to write a good trilogy that many people have clearly enjoyed, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do so.

Grateful? Yes, because without all the people who encouraged me throughout the years, the 206 Transitions-chapters, plus an epilogue, plus 32 AVC-chapters and a prologue for that, would probably all have amounted to 5 or 6 chapters before I’d reach my usual ‘Who the hell will read this crap’-state of mind. I would then have deleted what I had written, and I would have never looked back. I would probably still be nurturing ideas of being an author, and I would be up to my 40th attempt at starting a book, all ending around chapter 6 with the same ‘no one will ever read this drivel’-feeling.

I may be the one who wrote Transitions and Amat Victoria Curam, but you, the readers, are who kept me going at it.

That being said, I have, as those of you who use my forum should know, come to the decision that I have enough experience at this by now, to create my own world. I have tentatively named it ‘Breach’ or ‘Breachworld’ and you will find out at the end of the first book in the series which will be posted here, on this site. The first book will be called ‘Witchhammer’, and like Amat Victoria Curam, it will take place in a ‘historical’ setting. Now, I want to make sure you all realize from the word go, that it is not meant to be a realistic historical depiction of a period, although certain things will be fairly accurate. I do not claim accuracy in this. The Breach setting is specifically NOT historically accurate for reasons you will all find out when reading the books. It is, however, a much darker setting than Transitions, and it will involve a lot of uncomfortable situations for the characters as well as for many of the readers. As usual, I hope you will all understand that I don’t do that just to make anyone uncomfortable but in order for people to ask themselves all those difficult questions we tend to avoid in everyday life.

On a different note…my blog entry from Friday has led to some responses already. I am very heartened by the support people have shown me, and I promise everyone, that despite how down I felt then and…to some extent…still feel about the situation, I will not go under because of this, and I will at least not give up on finding a solution to my financial situation without a fight. I promise that, on this the holiest day of the year for me. There is one person who deserves mention in all of this though. Many of you offered help in one way or another. Some offered to help set up a PayPal account, others suggested Payex instead since my bank frowns on PayPal users. Some have offered moral support in many different ways, and all of this is both kind and deeply appreciated. I needed someone to do this for me, because frankly I feel a bit like the world has taken it upon itself to kick me back down every time I try to get up on my feet. That sounds pathetic, but it all stems back to the years of my illness, when I was literally so sick I can’t remember much of what I did, and many of the things I do remember I really, deeply wish I didn’t…

But out of all these people, one of my readers, calling himself ‘Nameless’ on my forum, made an offer the likes of which I was frankly absolutely boggled at receiving. I won’t give you the details here, out of respect for what he did, but suffice to say that it was something truly generous and helpful. It is good to know that if my own attempts at fixing this mess doesn’t succeed (and believe me, I will not try any less hard for this), there are people out there who has my back.

If everyone would be as helpful and as kind to one another as people have been to me since Friday, the world would be a much nicer place to live in.

And there I was, thinking I had it all down so well this year.

Foolishly, stupidly I thought that maybe this year, I’d actually have the kind of Christmas I’ve hoped for basically since I moved away from home. A Christmas where I could give my family and loved ones some decent presents for once…and not just junk wrapped up nicely or cheap little tidbits that didn’t wreck my strained budget (which of course always left me thinking that my family deserved far better than what I could give them, which again always left me feeling inadequate and cheap).

Not so this year, I told myself! This year, I had more money on my hands than ever before in my life and I could start buying presents in very good time…

Oh yes, this time I could do things RIGHT. I even sent off Christmas-cards for people … some of which I know have arrived safely already.

Gods help me, I even allowed the yuletide spirit to grab a firm hold of me.

I should have known better. I really should. I should have remembered that Murphy has taken up permanent goddamned residence in front of my door, and that he dumps excess workload on me whenever he comes home at night without having spoiled enough people’s lives.

Today, I got told about the application put in by the museum to hire me for four months after my trainee-time with them is done come June 1st. Four months would be awesome. Three months would be just fine too…

You see, to go from the low rate of unemployment benefits that I get, to the full rate (or more precisely going from getting 80 percent of the full amount to the actual full amount), I need three months of actual work. Not spread out over a certain amount of time, but three months of continuous, uninterrupted work. Admittedly, it doesn’t have to be three months of work at the same workplace, but if … say … I had a job that ended on the 30th of January and I had a new job waiting for me that started on the 1st of February…I would have had ONE SINGLE unemployed day…and I would have to start over counting towards those 3 months.

Now…I need to go to the full unemployment benefits once I’m done at the museum. I don’t just ‘need’ it … I NEED it! Why? Because my student loan has to be paid back, starting on January 1st. That amounts to a staggering 2.250 kroner every single month! Over four hundred dollars that I MUST pay every month. Okay, they gave me a stay saying I could pay them 1330 kroner every month until June, but that was on the explicit condition that after that, I would be able to pay them more because I would have a job, and then the full unemployment benefits to help me pay for it.

Now, I won’t have that. So now … I have to pay the full amount from January or at least february. I will have to pay bills so heavy I won’t even be able to pay for my transportation fee back and forth to work every month without getting my bank to allow me to go into overdrawn for a week every month until the money is paid back. Naturally, that too costs money … which I myself will have to pay.

It is one god damned month of work. ONE. But unless I can find a job which is LITERALLY waiting for me the day after I stop my current job, I’m completely screwed. I won’t be able to pay my bills. I’ll barely be able to pay my rent. I have NO idea how I’ll feed myself, and I can forget ANY kind of amusement on the side. No trips to the cinema, no fun with my friends unless it means no expense AT ALL, no online interaction (yes, that’s right, I may have to give up the internet … it’s THAT bad…)

And this message I got on my last day of work before Christmas. Bless my boss for trying to be cheerful while giving me the news. She tried to make it look like ‘well, at least it’s two months. You only need to find one more month of work. It’s better than NOTHING…’ and of course she’s right, but that is no consolation in a situation like this, where we had applied for more … and didn’t get it.

The museum is short on money as it is and can’t pay for that months wages for me out of its own budget anyway…

I am so utterly screwed, especially considering that the Danish economy is officially in recession and our historically low unemployment rates are likely to be bound for the history books within a -very- short while. Some of the more dire estimates suggest we’ll see as many as 80.000 new unemployed next year and mind you folks…at the moment, we have less than 60.000 unemployed and that’s counting the people who are between jobs and those who flat out refuse to work.

What are the chances of a historian getting a job when everyone has to cut down left and right?

Not great, guys.

Not great at all.

I am so down right now that I don’t even want to write. At all. Period. Full stop. End of story. For more than five years, I’ve kept myself going by always AT LEAST having my writing … and right now, at this moment, I don’t even have that.

Hopefully, that illustrates just how awful I’m feeling.

Merry yuletide to you all. I think it’s all I can give you now.

For the first time in my life, I’ve managed to do what I’ve promised myself to do every single year.

Every year, come December, I’ll swear up a storm about how I haven’t managed to buy a single Christmas-present yet, and how I will be hard pressed to afford it with one month’s income (and I don’t even have to buy that many), and how I’ll be running around like a small ball of lightning around the 20th or the 22nd (Gods help me, I even managed to buy my last presents on the 23rd a few years ago), which really results in nothing except a bad case of stress, a highly increased chance of an ulcer and worst of all, my mood will be in the dumps all of the 24th because of stress.

Not so this year. This year I made myself a promise and stuck to it, and I’ve been buying Christmas presents for months. Not only did this have the added bonus of me being able to afford DECENT presents for everyone almost for the first time in my adult life, as I spread the expense out over several months, but I could also afford to send not one but TWO presents to each of Erica’s and Arty’s kids in England. And I could even afford a small surprise for a few friends around here.

Best of all, however, I had time and energy to sit down and write some Christmas cards. I’ve sent them, and I hope they will reach people in time, but since several of them are going across the Atlantic, I suppose they will get there when they get there. Next year I’ll make sure to send them sooner, but I had the most damnable time finding real ink. I didn’t want to write this with a 5-kroner ball-point pen, now that I’ve learned how to use a real one. Sadly, I did smudge the ink a bit on a few of them (I’m a left-hander and I used a kind of ink I hadn’t tried before, which didn’t dry quite as fast as the brand I use at work…oops).

However, the feeling of sending off Christmas cards like that … (or Yuletide cards as I really prefer to call them. I don’t like being a hypocrite) … is a great feeling and one I can HEARTILY recommend to everyone I know. I didn’t even write thirty or forty of them, because I know from personal experience that that makes it a chore, and it means you end up with pretty impersonal, standardized cards going out to everyone you know. What’s the point then? No, instead I sat down and wrote one card to send to Norway, two to England and five to the United States. Eight cards in all, and that meant I could think of something a bit more personal to write on each one, rather than the customary ‘Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from me’ and then your signature.

That would have been kinda anticlimactic.

However, the feeling I ended up with, having written these cards, was one of ‘hey…I know all these people, all over the world!’ and that felt really good. Sure I could have sent more cards to friends closer by, but those people I can either call or see in person and wish them a happy holiday. It’s a bit harder to do so with people living across oceans, and whose phone-numbers you don’t have. But for me, who has always feared loneliness more than anything else in the world, the feeling that there were people out there I could send these cards to was incredibly nice.

Well, we’re not quite at the 24th yet, so I’ll end this for now, and write some more later this month. But today’s piece of advice from me…if you don’t write your friends around this time of year, start doing so. It feels nice!

To all my american readers, a very happy Thanksgiving.

To those who are not American and therefore probably not celebrate the fourth Thursday of November … oh well, consider it. It’s not a bad idea.

As those of you who have been ‘with me’ for at least a year probably know, I am part of a small circle of friends … eight people in all … who have decided that Thanksgiving is an excellent holiday, even for non-Americans. We don’t celebrate it for any religious reasons, but we feel that it is not a bad idea to take one day out of the year to give some serious thought to the simple question “what do I have to be thankful for?”

Besides, there’s American football on TV.

ALWAYS a good excuse for us eight to get together.

So last night, we got together for the following meal:

For a starter, we had a delicious cold venison steak, marinaded in home brewed mead, fresh chili-pepper, salt and pepper and star anise. With this we had yams, star fruit, steamed white asparagus wrapped in wind dried ham all arranged nicely on a bed of fresh salad.

Very nice for a starter. After this, the main venison meal was carried in. A three pound vension roast with a center of just a bit of fresh chervil, sage and garlic. The roast was wrapped in smoked bacon and baked in the oven, along with small potatoes. With this we had sauce bernaise and a sauce made from the juice of the roast, fresh green salad, corn bread (one of our two American items on the table this year), home baked Italian style bread with butter and our respective choice of drinks. Most of us had some form of beer. No one had wine, a few stuck with soda.

For desert … and I tell you all, we were wobbling away from that table as it was … we had banana cream pie (the other American item), and coffee for those who like that vile, black stuff. The pie was amazing as well, but after that, my stomach was trying to tell me that if I ate any more, it would pack up and leave!

All the while we were gobbling all this good food, laughing, joking and having a fantastic time, we watched the sad, sad affair of the Detroit Lions getting thoroughly pumelled by the Tennessee Titans, and afterwards, the Dallas Cowboys proceeded to manhandle the Seattle Seahawks.

A little after midnight, I wobbled off home, falling asleep before my head hit the pillow.

As I did so, I reminded myself yet again, that I have a lot of things to be thankful for.

My family, who have been so extraordinarily supportive and helpful towards me these last few weeks where things looked particularly ugly.

My friends, and not just the ones I ate that wonderful dinner with, but also people like Erica, Maria Harrig, Tigermark, Silver Coyote, Kellan, Aramis…well, frankly, ALL my friends, everywhere!

The fact I have such a wonderful job which I like doing, and such amazing colleagues and bosses.

Life in general…

There are a lot of things to be thankful and grateful for, and you know, reminding oneself of that now … during the darkest, gloomiest time of the year where it is otherwise terribly easy to get depressed and sad … is a good idea. I am sitting here with a massive self-inflicted and un-pitiable tummyache and a big smile on my face. And I think I’ll keep that smile on my face all weekend, at the very least.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I look forward to many more good ones.