A few "thank yous" and a few decisions.

First off, some of you may have noticed a new layout at the Pepperverse. If not, go look. It's beautiful. songstress_magz designed it and coded it for me...it's really amazing and really sweet and generous of her. The best part of posting my stories is that I have now met a lot of truly wonderful people who make me pretty things. :)

Speaking of which, redqueen6238 is currently designing a page for New Frontier, and sadbhyl is currently beta-ing the first um...what? 16 chapters? Yeah. So soon it will have it's own home. Mr. William, like i said before, has been sent out into the world and hopefully it will too be archived soon.

Ok, so onto other things. I need some advice...and I know there are a ton of intelligent helpful people reading this journal. Wee! Ok, last summer I didn't work. I just wrote. As a result, we really took a hit financially that we still haven't quite recovered from. I want to take next summer to write too. Obviously, if we do this, some changes are going to have to be made. What I want to do is cancel my cable service (saving $50 a month), change my cell phone service to a much, much cheaper plan (ok, $25 a month cheaper), pay off as much of my credit card debt as possible with my financial aid refund (which can save anywhere between $100-$300 a month depending on how much I can get paid off. Let's say $150). So that's $225 a month. ANd I mean to start doing this now. If I'm going to seriously try to be a writer, I have to adjust my entire life around it. So by the summer, not only will we have fewer bills, we'll have more saved up.

So let's say by January, all the things I want to change are changed. That puts our monthly expenses at $1300/month. $300 for bills, Miscellaneous bills (food etc) is another $200. $800 for rent. Jaime makes $1400 a month and I make about $300. So 1700-1300 is a net savings of $400. If we budget carefully, and don't dip into our $400, that'll be jan-may (5 x 400=$2000). So $2000-ish in the bank when summer starts and I stop working for 3 months.
Does that sound reasonable?

Oh, and if you're still with me. I just got notification that I have to stary paying off my student loans in December. 120 payments of $100. That's fine, except I thought I didn't have to start paying it off until after i stop going to school full-time. So I'm going over to financial aid today and asking them about that. But if I cut down on my other bills, then I can afford the $100 a month...should I just start paying down that debt now?

Any suggestions? This isn't just me trying to get out of work, you know. I want writing to be my work. I want to be serious about this.

Watching the Ellen Show

I like it a lot. She's fun and it's fun and well, there's fun to be had by all. But I'm also scared. Remember how much fun the Rosie show used to be when it started? And remember how much it sucked by the time it was over?
What if Ellen starts to suck!?