Smoke and Dreams

I’ve been very good about not blogging lately. I hope you all are proud of me. I finished the comprehensive edits on Penny’s single title and will submit it to one or two publishers this week. While I’m in Penny-mode, I decided to revise a first person erotic short story of Penny’s into third person and submit that as well. So I’ll continue to stay away from the blog for the next several days.

Why I’m away from the blog isn’t all good news, though. I’ve talked before about my dh’s small business, Ironhorse Caddybag. The venture is in addition to his full-time job, and he shares the business with a partner. Well, last week, I think it was the day before the Japan earthquake struck (or it might have been the same day, but we heard about the fire first), we woke to the news that our business partner’s workshop, where our ENTIRE INVENTORY was stored, burned to the ground.

A car and motorcycle were both stored in the same shop for the winter (we still have snow on the ground!). You can see the car in the picture below, on a hoist. The fire was extremely toxic, as our inventory was built out of plastic and fabric and metals, bubble wrap and cardboard, not to mention the car and motorcycle and other stuff that is found in a working shop! The shop was maybe two minutes from our local volunteer fire department, but the fire department had no choice but to let everything burn and try to control spreading to neighboring buildings (at which they were successful).

We are in the process of gathering together receipts for our commercial insurance, but we’ve lost our selling season. It’s difficult enough to start a new business and then discover in the midst of ordering your first product run that the United States (target consumer as well as Canadians) has hit a deep recession. Ours was a niche product, so, as you can imagine, it’s been slow going.

Of course we would like to rebuild the business, but that depends on so many things. Until we find out where we stand financially, I’m asking my Facebook friends who haven’t “liked” Ironhorse Caddybag yet on Facebook, to do so. And, if you wish, suggest the page to your own FB friends. This way, once we have replacement stock, we can get the word out quickly.

Any help in this regard is appreciated!

People have asked me why the fire hasn’t impacted me more than it has. I guess I’m trying to let it slide off me, much in the way I have learned to deflect rejections from agents and/or publishing houses over the years. I have suffered two major traumas in my life aside from natural occurrences like grandparents dying: (1) my husband’s brother, a good friend of mine, dying at the age of 25 from an asthma attack; and (2) our family experiencing a 5-car accident when our youngest was 11 months old that took three years of battling out-of-province insurance agencies to settle and left me with a whiplash injury that lasted 14 years. Somehow, the business inventory burning pales in comparison. Age and wisdom help. Plus, when I consider what residents of New Zealand and Japan have suffered recently, what would I choose? Our entire inventory burning in a fire, of course.

I find it kind of ironic that our homepage says, “while quantities lasts.” In a way, that’s pretty funny. The quantities didn’t last very long, however, not in the way we’d anticipated. Honestly, Universe, we were aiming for sales.