A big-ass birthday discount for you and your writer friends!

I'm celebrating my 45th birthday with a 45% discount for new subscribers. Thank you for making this past year a truly special one.

My 45th birthday is nearly upon me. Because it falls on Labor Day, my birthday is always full of emotion. Back when I was little, it was the emotion of starting a new school year, coupled with the disappointment that I never got to celebrate my actual birthday with my classmates, because we always had that Monday off. I don’t know, it’s never quite the same thing, coming in with Dunkin’ Donut munchkins on September 5th instead of the 4th.

Now that I’m, well, 45, my birthday brings strong back-to-work nerves with a tidal wave of back-to-school fear from my little girl, who is starting a new school this year, and has understandable qualms about that. Her old school was a zero minute drive: the bus picked her up at 8:20am and two minutes later, she was at school. Her new school is a forty-minute drive away, and I’m experiencing no shortage of private histrionics about what this new time commitment will mean for my work life and marriage.

To add to this emotion and these nerves and the insomnia that now seems a constant part of my aging process, my agent has the first part of a new novel in her hands. I’ve put my heart into it along with a lot of hope and pressure on that novel to hopefully sell (once I’ve perfected it) in a brutal market. Because I’m not one to admit to eleven and a half thousand people that I’m alone inside my house, I can now tell you, after the fact, that I opted not to go to France this summer on my family’s annual exodus back to see my husband’s family, and instead stayed home alone for five weeks to work on the very book that my agent is reading as we speak. The time was long, the stakes are high. The kindness of my husband who took on the full load of parenting so I could have an inverse writing retreat was monumental.

Which is why I want to treat myself this weekend to some good old fashioned fun and have a nice reunion with my family, and also, truly thank you all for being such a vital and meaningful part of my first year on Substack. There are nearly twelve thousand of us here, can you believe that? Personally, I haven’t lost an ounce of interest in all the things I want to share with you and work through in this newsletter, so I hope you are on board with me for a fun year ahead.

But in the meantime, please enjoy a 45% discount to help me celebrate my 45th birthday! If you are already a paid subscriber, you have a special place in my heart, thank you. Perhaps you can use the discount code for a deserving friend in the form of a gift subscription.

Visit https://courtneymaum.substack.com/birthday to redeem!

This discount link will stay active until Monday at midnight when I’ll be 45.

Enjoy, and Happy Birthday to anybody else who’s also born this weekend. I hope it was a great one!

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being here. And good luck with back-to-school!

Courtney