Easy Come, Easy Go

It was fun being rich for a day. I drove to Virginia to spend the night with my son and new wife, and then today head on to my parents in NY. The whole drive, I was quietly enjoying the feeling of being a successful writer, having sold 13,300 copies of my new book. Granted 5,000 of those sales had been for free, but the rest had registered as full price sales a week after the free day. I was dreaming of life without so much struggle as my reputation as a writer bounded like deer overpopulating the forests. (Though I think now it is actually coyote that are overpopulating, but they don't bound so it is not quite as picturesque a simile.)

Matt, Karissa, and I attended the opening night of the Washington and Lee Mock Convention. Washington and Lee have been remarkably accurate, more than any one else, in predicting the Republican nominee each election cycle. We watched a debate between Ann Coulter and James Carville, followed by a speech by Huckabee. Coulter was great, even skinnier in person than on TV, which seems impossible. I am not sure how her legs support all that beautiful blond hair up on top of that skeletal frame. Carville was entertaining, but talks like he has a mouth full of marbles and rambles so far outside the point that most of the time, I had no idea what he was saying or why. Huckabee made me proud to be an American- an unbelievably inspiring speech. When he spoke about how a culture that refuses to embrace and protect the weakest of us is doomed, the crowd of college kids erupted in applause. That gave me hope for our country's future. Carville's rant that he wanted to see the government giving out more free on demand "after morning pills" to anyone who wanted them was met by me with horror, by silence from the crowd.

But I digress. Back to being rich. During the break, I checked my email. KDP, who publishes my ebook had written. I had wanted them to verify the amount of oodles of money I had made on my soaring sales Feb. 8. They wrote it had been a computer glitch. I did indeed "sell" 13,000 books, but all on the free days. It had taken a week for the computer glitch to work out....and the soaring sales I saw on
Feb. 8 had been made on the free day, Feb.2.

Karissa put her arm around me when my voice broke telling her and my son. I blinked and reread the email stunned. I had never lost so much money so quickly, not even on my most hedonistic spending spree. Both of them are in law school, and I asked if there was anything legally I could do. I could, but "discovery" lawyers would probably end up costing me $250,000 to find out if this was all true or not, far more than the amount I had thought I had made.

Why did God yank this rug out from under me, I wondered? I must have shown something to HIm that indicated I was not ready for fame and fortune. Wallowing in obscurity and struggle must be better for my soul for now. But boy, it sure is not as much fun.

Proverbs 28:6
Better the poor whose walk is blameless
than the rich whose ways are perverse.

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