Minutiæ

Susan Alan-Wenswick is a pro­lif­ic Life Spe­cial­ist, work­ing in the metro Mia­mi area. She has writ­ten sev­er­al books, includ­ing most recent­ly Piec­ing Togeth­er Puz­zle Life, based on her blog Puz­zle Life.

I’ve been unem­ployed for almost a year and a half and afraid I’ll nev­er find employ­ment. I’m start­ing to feel like the world has just reject­ed me. What can I do?
Take a look out­side, sis­ter, because that’s where the old rules are. We’re liv­ing in a brave new world and if you’re feel­ing reject­ed it’s time to inject your­self right back in there. Start a home­made hon­ey busi­ness, or resell vin­tage cloth­ing online, or find a new avenue for your skills when your pub­lish­er drops you. I did­n’t know when I start­ed my Puz­zle Life blog that it would become the hit it did. Just goes to show that when life has you down, it’s then you have the most to come back up with.

I was using the “do the cor­ners first” method of your Puz­zle Life phi­los­o­phy, and I was so focused on me that my boyfriend up and left. How can I apol­o­gize, and inte­grate him bet­ter into my life?
Now that you have got your cor­ners done and have a prop­er Me-Foun­da­tion, you’re ready to build on that by bring­ing oth­ers into your life. Maybe it’s an over­bear­ing moth­er or a free wheel­ing sis­ter, a phi­lan­der­ing ex-hus­band or a ram­bunc­tious teenage daugh­ter. There’s space for every­thing with­in the Puz­zle Frame. For exam­ple, I recent­ly ven­tured into turn­ing my pop­u­lar blog into a self-pub­lish­ing hit. While the results may still be out, I’m hap­pi­er and more opti­mistic than ever. Just remem­ber the max­im: “Some peo­ple are sky, some peo­ple are grass, and only a few can be the sun.”

Hi, Susan, it’s Mar­tin from Bis­cayne Books, we’re won­der­ing when you’re going to be pick­ing up all the dam­aged copies of Puz­zle Life from your book signing?
Thanks for the update, Mar­tin. Part of the excite­ment of being a strong inde­pen­dent busi­ness woman is the risk, and sad­ly I was not able to sell all of the books at my recent sign­ing. There was a very emphat­ic turnout and I always want­ed Puz­zle of Life to be a slow burn­ing grass-roots book club book.

It’s Mar­tin again. I remem­ber how they got dam­aged. You tripped into the dis­play after refus­ing to leave the store.
Every­one likes to be fash­ion­ably late, so when only my florist Gre­gor DeChan­té Grove and his non-Eng­lish speak­ing Poly­ne­sian con­fi­dant had turned up for the book sign­ing after two hours, I knew that the throngs and hordes were only around the cor­ner ready to flood the store. Sad­ly, there was some con­fu­sion between myself and your secu­ri­ty guards. I end­ed up pinned beneath a pile of my own unsold books, trig­ger­ing the fire sup­pres­sion sys­tem and dam­ag­ing the paper­backs. It could real­ly hap­pen to any­one who decid­ed to wise­ly invest their sav­ings into self-pub­lish­ing a book based on their Bopp­bopp-cer­ti­fied blog. But, as we say in The Puz­zle Life, some­times pieces just have to be jammed togeth­er because they’ve been in the box so long they’ve warped. ♦