The Moments That Made Me
A Marketing Tip
What I’m Reading
From the Research File
Pun of the Day
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There’s a hardbound journal on my desk that isn’t a journal at all, not in the “Dear Diary” sense, anyway. No dates. No daily grind. Just moments I don’t want to lose, written down whenever one comes knocking.
Last week it was being 22, and a woman I thought of as a friendly acquaintance just ... stopped seeing me. When I spoke to her she turned away with no words in reply. There had been no fight and no explanation was given. Just silence where a person used to be. At the time, somewhere around month three of that silence, I made the decision I wasn’t going to shrink myself trying to figure out why. I kept showing up as me. That was the whole lesson, and it took forty years to write it down in one sentence.
Before that, it was being 11, crouched under Mary Clock’s porch with three other girls who’d all read Harriet the Spy like it was scripture. We had a club. We had rules. We had a “headquarters” that was really just dirt and spiderwebs and a flashlight that never had good batteries. I hadn’t thought about that porch in decades.
There are more and there will be more that I write as they appear.
Here’s what I’ve noticed, though. Writing these down doesn’t feel like work. It feels like setting something on the table for company. I’m not performing memory, not polishing it into a lesson for anybody, and certainly not editing it for publication. I’m just putting it somewhere solid, in case someone ever opens that book and wants to know who I was ... before.
I’ve got books out there. And blogs. And a few newsletters. Years of writing, out in the world for anyone to find. But this is different. This is the mark I want to leave that isn’t for an audience. It’s just for whoever loves me enough, someday, to want the parts I never published.
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“You cannot sell two things at once.” ~Dick Benson
I love this one because I’ve broken this rule. More than once. More than I’d like to admit, honestly.
Here’s the trap: you’re excited about your offer, so you start piling in benefits. It’s a planner and a mindset shift and a community and a life transformation. You want people to see all the value, so you show them all of it.
And they buy... nothing.
Because a confused mind doesn’t say yes. It says “let me think about it”… which is the polite way of saying no.
One offer. One promise. One next step.
That’s it. That’s the whole tip.
Your sales page, your email, your ad … pick the one thing you want someone to say yes to, and sell that with everything you’ve got. Everything else? Save it for the back end.
Confusion is the silent sales killer. Clarity is the whole game.
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People of the Wolf by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear
I read this book about 25 years ago, and it made me want more. Not more books in general. More of this one, specifically. This world, these people.
It’s a fictional look at the earliest people to cross the Bering Strait and settle into what we now call Alaska. Prehistoric. Nomadic. Nothing but ice, instinct, and each other. And somehow the Gears made it read less like history and more like a story you’d hear late at night, huddled close, told by someone who was actually there.
What got me is how real it all feels. This isn’t a soft, romanticized version of survival. It’s cold hands and hard choices and people who had to trust their instincts because there was nothing else to trust. And underneath all of it, there’s this quiet thread about vision… about someone believing there’s more out there than what you can currently see, and having the nerve to walk toward it anyway.
It works beautifully as a stand-alone. But it also opens the door into the rest of the North America’s Forgotten Past series. People moving, searching, surviving. I loved it enough back then to follow the whole series.
I recently picked it back up, just for me, no particular reason. It hooked me again and my library card is ready to get the next book.
If you enjoy historical fiction with real grit in it put this one on your list.
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aka random bits of info you may or may not be able to use in your life
In 1859, the sun burped out a solar flare so massive it set telegraph machines on fire. Operators got electric shocks just standing near their equipment. The Northern Lights showed up in Cuba. People in the northeastern U.S. could read a newspaper by aurora light at midnight, like the sky itself was showing off.
That’s the Carrington Event. Want to know the fun part? It’s going to happen again. Nobody knows when. Could be next year. Could be in your grandkids’ lifetime. The sun doesn’t use a calendar.
Here’s the less fun part. In 1859, “high tech” meant telegraph wires. Today, it means the power grid, GPS, satellites, banking systems, and every phone in your purse. The National Academies of Sciences estimates a solar storm of that magnitude today could cost nearly $2 trillion, and that’s before we get into the part where the power’s out for who-knows-how-long.
So no, this isn’t a “the sky is falling” newsletter. It’s a “let’s be the kind of woman who already has a flashlight with working batteries” newsletter.
If it happens, here’s my plan:
Cash, actual paper cash. Card readers need power. Power is never a guarantee.
A battery-powered or hand-crank radio. This is how I’ll know what’s happening when the internet doesn’t.
Water and food that don’t need refrigeration or a working stove. Because the grid going down doesn’t pause my appetite.
A paper map. YES! I’ve always had paper maps in the house because GPS runs on satellites, and satellites do not like solar storms.
Charged power banks, stored now. Not “I’ll grab one when I hear a warning.” Now.
Hey, I’m not saying build a bunker. I’m saying: know where your flashlight is. Keep a little cash in the house. Don’t let your gas tank hit empty out of habit.
Because trouble, cosmic or otherwise, doesn’t RSVP. But you? You can still meet it with both hands free.
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I once had a job at a calendar factory, but I got fired because I took a couple of days off.
🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂
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My wish for you today…
May every zipper zip smoothly on the first try.
Charlene Burke
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