The Bottlefed Calf - and a Look Back

The solution for this twin calf, along with covering other chores, has tied-up my time this week. But I squeeze some writing in, anyway - and learn a few things. It's a process, life...

Hi,

Thanks again for being here and opening this. For being part of this community.

(Note: this is probably too long for email, and so may cut off. In such case, there’s a link at it’s end to read all the verbosity online…)

Too many emails? Too few? Go here to adjust your settings.

• Farming News - Calving season continues. A bit of (welcome) lull right now.)

• Writing News - Dissecting classics continues - and still dropping ebooks dropped behind the paywall for paid subscribers.

• Fiction News - Now we’re moving on the 3rd chapter of a new serial, from Book One of Hooman Saga

• Expectancy Factor - A new Nightingale classic essay

  ---

Farming News

A break from the usual - here’s Annie, my bottlefed orphan:

We’re still at nine calves now arrived. Here’s the fourth one.

Third generation of Mary Contrary. Her dad is our Hereford, so the coloring finally comes through. That heifer’s tail is white-tipped, and three booted feet, as you can see. So get your namerator busy. Reply to this email with your suggestions. I’m compiling a list…

Steers got back with the cows yesterday - or that’s when I found them, anyway. But our bull kept up by the house, so “all” I have to do is to get those steers back in and put another pasture or two between them to prevent a recurrence.

Tiny Home Progress

Our septic system and the rest of the site preps should start the day you get this. That will take about a day or two worth of work. Look for photo’s.

Got to the Amish to update our new 960 square foot planning. Enlarging our plan by four feet only raised the price by about a thousand bucks. They’re about six weeks out, but will take only two days to get the house up and “dried in” so we can start working on the interior.

Once the site preps are done, then I’ll start working on floor joists. I picked the brain of my Amish guy and we worked out how to best marry those wood joists onto the steel frame we’re using. And that’s over to me.

All I’ll need is to get the electric pole installed so there’s power to the place. Then a few weeks of daily work to get everything just so. And in a couple of months, we’ll have our new house.

Again, look for pix upcoming.

Writing News

[Still needing to get print proofs for that pentalogy of books (my five Writerpreneur books). I keep this sentence here to remind myself.]

Dissecting L’Amour’s “Gift of Cochise’ work is producing results. It’s getting more granular, and showing how W. S. Campbell’s course was put to work by this graduate.

All while I bring the next 16 chapter-lessons along. I’ve not told you that this Forgotten Secrets book was my work in distilling seven text books of the three OU instructors down from well over a thousand print pages down into some 220+ pages. It’s hardly more than an introduction to the wealth of knowledge these three aggregated. When you add in the reproduction of Harris’ “Basic Formulas of Fiction”, then we start giving a very workable approach to training professional writers.

And in working to teach these materials — through these Writerpreneur series and also the work of dissecting one of their graduate’s breakthroughs — I then learn all this material better myself. So I am reviewing all these texts as I go.

Again, it’s as much my education as yours in this area. Repetitive review assists retention and application.

Newsletter News

Still working to crack the paid newsletter scene and make it sustainable.

My continuing work in adding full books behind the paywall is an effort to make paid subscriptions more attractive. One resource I have is a massive back list of books, both fiction and non-fiction. So you’ll see these showing up there, while I update book-selling links to my own bookstore.

Becoming a tour-guide of sorts seems a sensible approach to afford enabling my subscribers to learn all I’ve discovered and documented.

All this work on these newsletters every week is simply to share the wealth of information I’ve researched and boiled down to simpler evergreen principles.

Life isn’t meant to be difficult. And in our Internet Age, anyone can learn anything — if you know how to distinguish fact from scam, and then distill what made that process work.

And so, my work of dropping ebooks into the newsletters, behind the paywall. While also keeping them available through my library storefront, where its a one-time purchase, often “Pay What You Want”. That’s the same approach for my 166 fiction short stories. These were originally written as parables, with workable life-principles at their core. And the process of writing then put those principles into tests. All grist for the mill.

Organizing with Tables of Contents for the mini-courses and series then makes my 900+ articles from the last couple of decades more readily accessed and understood. Plus, it gives me more inspiration when I update these, as I find time to do so.

Releasing “new” material once a week means we’ll be at this for awhile.

Same goes for the mini-course organization of my non-fiction backlist. I’m must being my own librarian who also owns a bookstore and accepts people buying coffee while they’re visiting.

Living Sensical

As last week, Living Sensical is an interactive system — each element relates with the others.

Again, the mnemonics are: Mind - Body - Value - Sharing.

In this, there are four bodies of data:

• Mind - self-help, personal development

• Body - homesteading, rural living

• Value - writing and publishing

• Sharing - community building through marketing

Long ago, I set a standard for the benefits I was receiving from these. I needed a way to keep myself on track with all I was studying and researching. These evolved into four questions:

• Does this make my life simpler?

• Does this bring me more joy?

• Does this bring me more abundance?

• Does this result in more peace?

And my practice in applying what I learned gave me a life-system that resulted in an always-on joyful peace of mind. I found myself with continuing good health. My writing and publishing financed a good living while I researched.

(The trick to this is to apply the Golden Rule. If you want more joy, abundance, or peace - then help others find more of this in their lives. Getting your life simpler is found in weeding out distractions and helping others do the same. Look for the evergreen principles and streamline your life habits down to just the core few you really need to live well - help others do the same so you get support meanwhile.)

And I narrowed my recent studies down to marketing (sharing), which is continuing by studying Substack itself. More to do here. But patterns and models are showing up, so I’m on the right track.

I’ve been reviewing my earlier works (compiled into The Expectancy Factor, described below) and found I have a couple of areas I need to release as reports. (Book Marketing Breakthrough and Cracking the Cashflow Code) The reason is to share these more broadly. All while I continue researching and compiling a third report, which is their sequel. I have the work on these, and the style of writing. It’s just testing these and refining them against results.

---

Most farmers have an off-farm income from another job.

Most writers support their writing with another job or side-hustle.

The point is - what brings us our bliss has us working at other things.

For me, it’s writing, farming, publishing. Somewhere in there, this combination is self-sustaining - while I work to improve the margins on all fronts.

Comparing my vast library of produced books, they also fall into this system above:

Mind - The Expectancy Factor and it’s supportive library of works.

Body - Homesteading is the current focus, with a revision and updating of Kains’ Five Acres and Independence as my current project.

Value - The Writerpreneur Series, all about how anyone can write and publish professionally.

Sharing - Out of that series, Copywriting for Authors gives marketing breakthroughs. While the various current economic platforms - such as Substack, Gumroad, Draft2Digital, Kickstarter, and Kit - cooperate to help an author build community and help people improve their lives.

While I’ve been working hard to assemble these materials into a working order, one that’s easily assimilated, the hard work continues. And you’ve seen my shift over to short mini-courses as the current most effective idea-container to share all this data.

All so people could escape the various traps - witting and unwittingly set - and pursue a long life of peace, joy, simplicity, and abundance.

Look for more about this in upcoming newsletters. I’ll be asking more of you in order to help you in what you want to accomplish and experience.

Stay tuned. And - keep an open mind.

---

Also published this week (ICYMI):

Writerpreneur Lessons

[Writerpreneur] Compelling Characters 01

---

Fiction Posts

Hooman Saga Book One - Mind Timing Chapter 3

---

Expectancy Post

[Change Your Life] - Nightingale: The Haves and Have Nots

---

Pro Writing Lessons

[Pro Writer] Hondo by Louis L'Amour - Dissection, Part 3

---

---

Thanks for being there, opening this.

Sharing is caring. You’re who I do this all for. I value your input.

Leave a comment if something strikes your fancy.

I hope your life is not too interesting to be overwhelming, but sufficiently engaging to keep you amused. (Like some of us here...)

Robert

PS. Again, you can always email me about anything.

PPS. And you can always buy me a coffee…

---

Bonus:

Here’s the nearly-final version of a book-in-progress the beta Expectancy Factor.

• 2 1/2 decades of research compiled into one massive book and a supplement.

• Currently available as ebook (epub and pdf).

• Audio lessons available soon.

• As it’s updated, you’ll be able to download the most recent version, as well as the course lessons for no extra cost. (I have to set it at a $1 minimum so Gumroad will host the audio files. As usual, it’s pay what you want, so you can come back to contribute more at any time.)

• And a bonus supplement: the Magic of Believing Field Guide (isn’t pictured - yet.)

Available for limited time as pay-what-you-want…

All while paid subscribers have instant access to this beta ebook below: