Have Your Questions Ready for Another Informative Video Chat Tomorrow!

A sincere "Thank you!" to all my free and paid subscribers—you guys keep me going!

Hello Friends!

It has been another hectic week filled with surprises. Today, the tree service is finally supposed to come to remove the branches of the neighbor’s tree that are overhanging my house. This has been an ongoing saga since the summer.

The neighbor’s house is a rental property. One day, I saw the property manager and approached her about the tree. I offered to pay a third of the removal price if the homeowner paid the rest.

She presented the homeowner with the offer and he agreed! So I sent a check to the property management business and waited for the tree service. But the tree service took so long to complete the job that the homeowner ended up selling the house instead.

So, I called up the tree service and asked them to remove the overhanging branches, and they told me they could get to it in “early November.”

It just goes to show that no matter what happens elsewhere in the world, we have to dedicate a certain amount of our time to worrying about trees falling on our homes.

Confusion over payments and disputed charges

I wanted to mention quickly that I’ve changed the name on my credit card processing service. For the most part I leave it to Substack, but the mechanism is kind of cumbersome.

I originally opened my account with the payment service when I was a content writer. It asked for a web page, so I put in the name of my old blog “Streets of Lima” which I sometimes shorten to “stsoflima.” That used to be my twitter handle too before I deleted my account.

When I started this newsletter, I had it set so that kind people could pledge to support me. When I eventually turned on the payments (about a year later), I sent out messages because I didn’t want anyone to be confused by the charge on their statement.

I think I had 8 people who had pledged, and 6 didn’t have any issues. One payment didn’t go through, and the last person wrote me asking if the service that appeared on her bill was related to me. She sent me a screenshot, and I realized it was confusing because it still referred to “Streets of Lima.”

I thought I went through and changed it, but another recent charge dispute made me go back in and look for other places where the old, confusing designation might be lurking. I found one more instance and changed that as well.

I just mention this because I don’t want you to be confused if you see a change in your statement. The new charge should have my name on it, or it might not look different. That’s the trouble with these platforms. It can sometimes be hard to see what the users see.

If any of you have a question with what appears on your credit card statement, please don’t hesitate to contact me. It’s always best practice to contact the vendor before you dispute the charge, because disputing the charge creates further headaches.

I appreciate the support I receive from both from free and paid subscribers. The paid subscriptions allow me to keep going, and they always brighten my day when they come through. That being said, I understand that life can get in the way and it can be challenging to continue a sponsorship. I only ask that you unsubscribe rather than dispute the charge. It works a lot better that way (and it saves me a gut punch frankly)!

Here’s some puppies:

Question and answer session

Last week, I did my first question and answer session. I enjoyed it! I didn’t have any technical difficulties and my confidence in hosting these things is growing.

I only use a free Zoom account, so it’s limited to 100 participants. I don’t expect that will be an issue at least for a while. We only had 2 participants plus me last week, but I think that was in part due to scheduling the meeting on a Sunday at 8AM.

The next meeting will be on Friday, November 15th at 2PM CST (tomorrow). It will be a half hour session.

Again, these question and answer sessions are only available for paid subscribers. I’ll send out an email to paid subscribers later today. If you are not yet a paid subscriber and you want to join the meeting, now’s the perfect time to select from any of the membership tiers I offer below. Whatever you can offer is greatly appreciated. Here’s the biggest discount:

It’s very useful to me to hear the questions you have about writing on Medium and Substack, and I will share the relevant information on this newsletter. Perhaps I’ll even start recording the meetings and sharing those, but one step at a time.

Have your questions ready. As always, consider me a resource. I’m here to help you make your voice heard. We NEED rational voices out there!

See you tomorrow!

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Thank you so much for those of you who sponsor me. I’m looking forward to working with you to make the world a little bit better.

All of these discounts are forever.

My CoSchedule referral link

Here’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).

Here’s how today’s title scored: