HOW IT BEGAN
Sometimes when you start out in life you don’t end up where you thought you’d be.
- I started writing my first book when I was 16 as a way of compiling information from a huge stack of old Mother Earth News and Backwoods Home magazines.
- I finished the book when I was about 22 and self published it as Deliberate Life: The Ultimate Homesteading Guide by Nicole Faires
- I learned HTML and built a website by the same name. It had a fun little forum and got decent traffic.
- Eventually, my little book got picked up by a New York publishing house who packaged it for the mainstream: The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading.
- I wrote a few more books. One of them is pretty popular: Permaculture for Beginners by Nicole Faires.
EVERYTHING CHANGED
In the meantime, I had 3 kids, got divorced, got remarried, had another kid, got another book deal, became suddenly widowed, had trouble with the big New York publishing house, made a major move with 4 kids under 14, and became a step-parent to 4 more kids and partner to a good man.
It became difficult to write. Not just because everything was a lot, but grief causes a kind of brain fog that’s not even fully understood. I struggled for several years, and then I experienced health issues that made the problem worse. It led me down a path that suddenly changed direction when…
THE WHOLE WORLD CHANGED…
…and suddenly everyone had brain fog. In retrospect, living in Canada during Covid felt like living in an active social experiment. I used most of my spare time doing the thing I loved most: research. We spent as much time in the bush as we could. I made it a goal to systematically practice as many skills from my books as possible. We built a bigger garden and a greenhouse.
We ended up deciding to make a major lifestyle change. We prioritized our health. We moved further out of town. Like many, Covid impacted us financially.
It became clear to me that many of the seemingly random traumatic experiences that I had been ‘victim’ to weren’t random at all. They could be traced back to corruption, social engineering, and lies from the very institutions that I should have already been wary of through my own writings. I knew what was wrong – but not what was right. How could I stop being a victim, and start taking control of our lives and our health, physically, mentally, financially, in our home and in our lives and relationships with others?
How can I opt out?
