WORKING TOGETHER...

Okay, Norman and I are a few months into our joint venture. So, how are things going? To be honest, they’re going very well. When I told one person we were going into the writing business together, he told me Norman might be able to keep busy five to ten hours a week. Not sure what world that was in, but in our world, Norman’s working more hours than I am! So…what’s he doing?





• He’s handling book mailings and watches our inventory
• He takes care of setting up promotional events
• He’s tracking and entering contests
• He’s setting up databases to handle all our different kinds of emails and requests
• He’s taken over all the tax stuff. (YAY!) I did this for years and years. Believe me, I’m, MORE than ready to give up control in this area.
• He protects my time by answering phone calls, handling day to day situations like finding out why our trash company failed to pick up our trash, replacing our faulty water dispenser, and taking the car in multiple times to fix something that should have been fixed the first time!
• He’s done all the work needed to find us affordable health coverage. (No one provides it when you no longer work for a company)
• He fixes lunch for me every day and washes all the dishes. I still handle the laundry, and once a week we clean the whole house together. It only takes us a couple of hours at the most, and our house has never been cleaner! (My thanks to Deb Raney for this suggestion.)
• We go to the grocery store together once a month, but he picks up everything we need in between. This is such a huge help! (Now, if would just stop buying whole canned tomatoes instead of diced and French style green beans instead of whole green beans. Sigh.)
• One of the most important things he does is to keep an eye on me. I recently spent three days working nonstop on a deadline I was determined to meet. I worked morning, afternoon and night. After it was turned in, he insisted I take a day off. That’s hard for me to do, but it was such a wonderful day! And today we’re actually going to a movie! YAY! This part of our working relationship is so important because I can easily overdo it. Having Norman to watch out for my emotional well-being is priceless.
• Here’s something else really neat thing he does: He turns on the heater in my office every morning so I won’t be cold, and there is always hot coffee made for me when I get up! And when I need something to drink during the day, all I have to do is ask.
• In a nutshell, he does everything he can to give me more writing time.

So, as you can see, Norman is a senior partner in this endeavor. The more he removes other duties and concerns from me, the more I can write and the faster I can turn out books. Since this directly affects our finances, you can see how important Norman’s role is!

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