Tag: Divorce

From TRIPSWITHJAMES.COM: A Request For Your Help

Subject: Exclusive Pre-Sale Offer: “Three Days in Hamburg & Other Stories”

Dear Friends, Family, and Esteemed Subscribers,

I want to thank you for being readers of TripswithJames. I have enjoy writing my articles for you over the years about travel and the film business. I’m truly thrilled to announce the pre-sale launch of my debut book, Three Days in Hamburg & Other Stories. 📚✨ I could use your assistance in making my first book a success.

About the Book:

Three Days in Hamburg & Other Stories is a collection of eleven captivating tales that will transport you to intriguing worlds. From crumbling marriages to lost fortunes, superpowered aliens to Viking zombies, these stories promise excitement, mystery, and unexpected twists.

Why You Should Grab Your Copy:

  1. Early Access: Be among the first to delve into these enchanting narratives before the official release.
  2. Special Price: For a limited time, the e-book is available at an unbeatable price of $0.99.
  3. Support a Dream: By purchasing during the pre-sale, you contribute to making this book a bestseller.

AMAZON LINK – http://amazon.com/author/jrc.128

How You Can Help:

  1. Order Now: Visit Amazon and secure your copy.
  2. Spread the Word: Share this exciting news with your book-loving friends and family.
  3. Leave a Review: After reading, leave an honest review on Amazon—it makes a world of difference!

AMAZON LINK – http://amazon.com/author/jrc.128

Let’s Make It a Bestseller:

Our goal? To achieve bestseller status by May 1, 2024. With your support, we can make it happen!

Thank you for being part of this incredible journey. Let’s celebrate the magic of storytelling together.

Amazon Pre-Sale Link – http://amazon.com/author/jrc.128

Warm regards,

James R. Carey Author, Three Days in Hamburg & Other Stories

P.S. Remember, this special pre-sale price won’t last long. Grab your copy now: Amazon Pre-Sale Link – http://amazon.com/author/jrc.128

MY NEW BOOK – THREE DAYS IN HAMBURG & OTHER STORIES – NOW ON SALE AT AMAZON.COM

James R. Carey’s debut on Amazon at $0.99 at www.amazon.com/author.jrc.128 , the book comprises personal, fantasy, and memory-based stories. The title short story, inspired by his own dissolving marriage amid the pandemic, is a semi-true story based on real life events.

This is my first book – one of several to come I hope. You can find it on Amazon.com for the price of $0.99 as a presale special. I hope that enough people will buy it and make it head for bestseller status. (One can dream).

Follow the link www.amazon.com/author/jrc.128 and that will take you directly to my Author page and you can buy directly from there. An excerpt to the title story follow below.

EXCERPT FROM THREE DAYS IN HAMBURG

“My cell phone rang at exactly 11 PM. I picked it up and looked at the caller ID. It was my wife. The call caught me by surprise as we had been having some tough times for the past few months. She was calling from Hamburg, Germany, where she had gone to visit her mother. There’s a 9-hour time difference between Hamburg and our home in West Adams, an area of Los Angeles where we had lived for 5 years. That made it 8 AM in the morning there. We hadn’t talked on the phone for a week, and our few emails to each other had been very terse.

“Hey, how are you?” I asked as I answered the phone.

Silence.

“Hey, can you hear me… Are you there…?”

“Yes, I’m here,” she answered in her odd combination of American & German accent. Something that I had always found very sexy.

“What’s going on? Everything okay?”

“Look I need to talk to you about something very important,” she said in a very flat voice. Hackles rose on the back of my neck and red flags began to appear. “I have been doing a lot of thinking, and I’m calling to tell you that I’m not coming back.”

“For how long? Is everything okay with your mother?” I asked, still unsure which direction this conversation was going to go.

“Mother is fine. I’m calling to tell you that I’m not coming back to you. I’m going to stay in Hamburg for a few more months, and when I come back, I’ll probably file for divorce.”

“What the fuck?”

“Look I don’t want to fight with you about this, please?” she said in a stern voice, cutting me off. “We just do this all the time. I’m tired of the tension. I’m tired of the arguments. I’m tired of being tired and stressed. I love you very much, but I just can’t go on living like this. So please respect my decision. Don’t call me and don’t write me one of your long angry emails. I just can’t take it. Please. And if you do call me, I’m just not going to respond. Okay? I love you, but I just can’t live like this anymore. I’m sorry.” With that, she hung up.

Shocked, I sat staring at the wall for what seemed like hours. Yes, we had not been doing well but I didn’t think it was this far gone. She went to Germany about three weeks before to celebrate her mother’s 70th birthday and to take a break from us and the tension in our house. It was the middle of the semester and I had not been able to leave my teaching gig. I had Face-Timed with my mother-in-law on her birthday and had briefly spoken to my wife. Things had seemed to be okay at least for the moment. This came as a major surprise.

Then I got angry. Really angry. I tried to call her back, but of course, it went straight to voicemail. Predictably, I left her an angry message. Then I poured myself a large Jack Daniels and stormed around the house for the next couple of hours holding imaginary conversations between myself and her telling her what a bitch she was, how unfair she was being and defending myself from all the supposed wrongs that I had done to her over the last few years. Finally, at about 1 AM, I took several hits of pot and fell asleep on the couch.

Somewhere I heard the distant ringing of a cell phone and some part of my brain realized that it was mine. Pulling myself from a deep sleep, I reached out for the phone where I had left it last night. Hoping that it was my wife, I looked at the caller ID and saw the number for work. It was 9:45 AM and I was an hour late for work.

In a groggy voice I answered, “Hello?” Lynda, my department head goes, “Where are you? You’re an hour late for your class.”

My thoughts just could not seem to connect last night to this morning, but I knew I had messed up in a major way. I just decided to tell the truth. “Lynda, my wife is leaving me. She’s in Germany and I have to catch the next plane to try and save my marriage.” – End of Excerpt!

(Excerpt from the short story “THREE DAYS IN HAMBURG” by James R. Carey. From the Book, THREE DAYS IN HAMBURG & OTHER STORIES. Copyright© 2024, James R. Carey. All Rights Reserved. Published with arrangement with CareyOn Creative, LLC, Atlanta, GA .)

Can be found at www.amazon.com/author/jrc.128

I HAVE ALWAYS WRITTEN –

My original plan for this book over four years ago was to be a few short stories surrounding a novella called The Ticket that I’ve been writing for about 5 years. It’s a great story in my head but it never has quite come together the way that I wanted it to on the page. So, it has never been finished.

That was the idea and then real life came along changing everything. A crumbling marriage, the pandemic, a move to the other side of the country, and a new city and start all seem to move the stories in another direction. The stories began to take on the form that they wanted to take, and I just kind of followed along.

Some stories are very personal, others are fantasy. Some are memories of people or places, and some are combinations of all the above. Some are new, and some are old. Some came very easily, and some took months to write. This collection of stories is quite different than the one I intended, but it is the one that came to life.

The title story was written in the early days of the pandemic in my home office in Los Angeles as I tried to come to grips with my dissolving marriage. My then wife and I were still speaking, and she was the first to read it. Her appraisal of it was “very hard for me to read but it’s very good”. Not sure if she meant that or not, but I will take it.

As a young boy I wrote ideas for stories and comic books. First it was crazy little stories about flying turtles or other idiotic ideas, but I thought they were funny, and it kept me entertained as I listened to my parents argued downstairs or sitting by myself in the school cafeteria. Later in my teenage years, the stories became dark ones of loneliness, escape, teenaged angst and desire. However, they could never finish because I wasn’t old enough to know where life was supposed to take you. So, if I didn’t throw them away, they got stuck in a drawer.

In college I discovered three things that I loved. First, was girls. The second was music so I wrote a ton of bad poetry and awful songs, truly little of which has survived to this day. The third thing I discovered was theatre so I wrote some unbelievably bad plays and screenplays. Not any of those survived.

Yet, I still continued to write down little ideas, thoughts, dialogue, situations, dramatic conflicts and the best of those got stuck in that drawer.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I had a writing partner for a while, so some of those ideas that had been stuck in the drawer for years came out. They were dusted off, reexamined and rewritten. Some were used, some were thrown away and some got stuck back in the drawer. Later when I opened my own theatre in Los Angeles with my partner Denise Ragan Weihenmayer called the Attic Theatre Ensemble, we had a lot of stage time to fill and actors to keep busy. So, I started adapting short stories and updating old plays to fill that void. The reaction to those adaptations was positive. I continue jotting down ideas and dialogue.

Eventually, I got married to a minor television star in Los Angeles and when her TV show got cancelled, I wrote her a play. She never performed in that play because we got divorced before I finished it. I did finish it, however. The play was a full-length comedy with dancing and the Devil, and a lot of food called Dancing in Hell. It got produced twice. Once at a university near Los Angeles, and once at my own theatre. It got complimentary reviews, but when those two productions were over. I put the script in the drawer.

I wrote a couple of short film screenplays that got produced, Owlman and A Cost of Freedom, but this was before the Film Festival circuit had become so big. So, the films and the screenplays went in that drawer.

An opportunity to start doing theatre festivals both in the United States and other parts of the world presented itself. This became a time period where I would write and perform one man shows and tour them around these various venues. The first one called Coming To Zimbabwe which debuted in Africa and was later optioned by a German production company to be done as a radio play for German speaking audiences around the world. It was the story of the first time I ever went to Africa and what a life-changing experience it was for me during a difficult part of my life. My second one-man show was called Mi Casa Su Casa where I talked about my large old house in the West Adams area of Los Angeles where I ran an Airbnb for 11 years and the people from all over the world who stayed with me. That was performed in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New England, and various parts of the United States and won several awards. Yet when those shows had run their course, those scripts got stuck in that drawer.

I married my second wife; a Danish woman and we had a very passionate but turbulent relationship. As our marriage fell apart, the pandemic struck, and I found myself stuck in my house in Los Angeles by myself for months. To keep myself busy I decided to paint a couple of rooms including one that had been my home office for over 15 years. As I was clearing out the room and moving items, I discovered that drawer with all the ideas, conversations, dialogue and scenarios that I had left shut for such an extraordinarily long time. As I read through the material, I realized that I had written a lot of stuff. I had written award-winning screenplays and theatre plays. So, with all this time on my hands, I decided to try and write short stories and see what happened.  I started and finished the first short story that I had written in probably 25 to 30 years and polished it in a couple of days. Then I rewrote a couple of stories that were in that drawer except now I was approaching them from an adult perspective. I changed them around a good bit and they’re in this book as well. With my marriage finally coming to an end, I wrote a fictionalized version of the last trip that we took together to Hamburg, Germany. Parts of the story are absolutely true, and other parts are as they used to say in an old television show, “the names have been changed to protect the innocent”. That story turned out to be Three Days in Hamburg and became the title story of this collection.

Over the past three years I’ve written more short stories, discarded them and written new ones. I have a novel I’ve been trying to finish. A memoir about my time in Africa that I have worked on sometimes. Written three more screenplays and a couple of them have being produced, but this book of short stories was always something I wanted to finish.

Now I have and I hope you enjoy it. I can’t say it was easy to write but it brings me immense joy to see it in its published form. Thank you for taking the time to pick it up.

Can be found at www.amazon.com/author/jrc.128

© Copyright Tripswithjames.com 2024. All rights reserved! Tripswithjames.com is a domain owned by CareyOn Creative, LLC, Atlanta, GA.

2023 Was A Great Year!

2023 was a watershed year for me. It was the best year that I’d had in a decade. The last really good year that I could remember was 2014 when I got married to my ex-wife. The day that we got married, I was full of love, happiness and incredibly enthusiastic about the future. I had a woman that I loved, my professional career seemed to be going extremely well and financially I had bailed myself out from the ruins of the worldwide fiscal crisis of 2008. What I didn’t realize was that would be the high point for a long time.

They say the first year of marriage is terrible and I can agree with that. After the euphoria of getting married had worn off, the day-to-day just dragged on my ex-wife, and while I didn’t know it, she was already planning her escape. Not every year was bad. In fact, each January as I looked at the coming year, it seemed like exciting things were going to happen both professionally and personally but by December our lives were filled with chaos, pain, question marks about our relationship and professional inertia. Then came a hard divorce, followed by the Pandemic, followed by a need to sell my house and leave my chosen home city of Los Angeles and a move to Atlanta, GA. The first couple of years in Atlanta were difficult. I found friends, and work but I never quite felt like I fit in here, and I missed parts of the life that I’d had in California.

And then in 2023, it all seemed to come together. I wrote, directed, produced and released an award-winning short film, Love Potion. The film did not win as many awards as some of my previous films had but we took a shot for the big time and film festivals like Sundance and Tribeca. We did not get into them, yet I am immensely proud of the film and feel it is my most complete movie. I acted in five movies, I appeared in five commercials, I was in two music videos including a game changing country western music video by Tyler Childers where I portrayed a gay coal miner who fell in love with another miner. The controversy that music video created was an amazing thing to watch and I’m proud I was part of that project. I bought a condo and put down new roots. While I did not travel internationally as I usually do during a year, I found myself working as an actor in Baltimore, Austin, Nashville, Charleston and Rock Hill, SC. I put the finishing touches on a book that I hope to release in 2024. Both personally and professionally, I felt more satisfied and complete than I had in a long time.

While 2023 was an amazing year, it was also a year of hard struggles, doubt, wondering where all this was leading, and a lot of personal reflection. One of my siblings faced a life-threatening blood disease and thanks to the stars above, they managed to survive. With all the professional success that I had during 2023, that was without a doubt the most important thing that happened in my life. My sibling survived, and because of that situation I took a look at my own personal life and my legacy. I realized I was closer to the end than I was to the beginning and needed to change my perspective on life and work. My life has often been about the end result. Producing the product, getting the job done, what is the end goal and how to find the next job. The older I get, the more I realize it is more about the journey than it is about what you accomplish. Completing the work and making sure that the project is excellent are extremely important, but paying attention to the day-to-day journey through life is equally as important. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” In 2023, I found that to be absolutely true.

I hope 2024 will be as successful both personally and professionally. It’s already shaping up to be what looks like an interesting year, but rarely does it happen that you have two incredible years back-to-back. I’m talking to a producer about directing a feature for them, my film partner and I are in discussion with another producer about a project we’ve already done that they might want to take to the next level. I’ve been hired by a local theater group to direct 2 plays for them including the American classic, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams about which I’m excited. Yet, I’m trying to keep everything in perspective and remember it’s about the journey and living in the moment.

To all of you, I wish a happy and successful 2024, and I hope your journey is exciting and fulfilling.

@ 2024, Carey On Creative, LLC., Atlanta, GA. Tripswithjames.com is a copyrighted entity of Carey On Creative, LLC.

Obtaining Cliché Status!

I am sure you have heard the old cliche about the guy who gets a divorce from his wife, sells his house and all his possessions and then takes off on a trip around the world to find himself? Well, I always thought that was a stupid idea! The wanderlust part of me always thought it was kind of cool, but the practical part of me thought it was absolutely ridiculous. Who gives up their life, their possessions, their job, their business to set out around the world to find themselves because wherever you go there you are. So just deal with it!

Well I have become that cliche!

The Cliché

Due to a dissolving marriage caused by lies, cheating, manipulation, and resentment, my wife and I decided to divorce each other after nine years together and five years of marriage. A very stormy relationship filled with passion and anger and arguing and love. Our views on marriage were just too different, and so what at first was two people trying to figure out how to hang onto each other became two people who were tired of the battles until it became two people who just didn’t care anymore. Like most guys, I hung on longer than my wife did. It has been my experience that when a woman tells you that she’s no longer in love with you, that’s the end and she’s not coming back. Guys tend to hang on longer and rehash the relationship over and over again to find out where it went wrong or what they did wrong or how they can put it back together or will she come back, and the answer is always no. So I found myself still hanging on and waiting for my wife to come back even though she had already found another lover and had moved on with her life. Unfortunately, she never told me that. She kept telling me that she was still just licking her wounds and staying at home to avoid the pandemic and working extremely hard at her job as a film translator. We had decided to blocked each other on social media to save conflicts and hurt feelings, yet one day a good mutual friend showed me her Facebook page and it was filled with references to her new boyfriend and the exciting new life they were leading. So what had started out as an amiable divorce proceeding that we did ourselves quickly dissolved into anger and accusations that ended up with us both ending all communication with each other.

So much stuff to get rid of

The result of which was a deep depression that was helped along by the COVID-19 restrictions in Los Angeles which took me a long time to work my way out from. Then one day I woke up and knew it was time to get out of here. I’ve lived in my home for 20 years. It has taken care of me, provided for me, created a business for me, and for much of my adult life as it was the first thing I had ever owned it defined me to a degree. It’s a large arts and craft house located in a historic neighborhood in Los Angeles and I have lived there with great pride as I have tried to restore this home over 20 years. In many ways I thought I would always be there till the end of my life. Yet with the dissolution of my marriage I realized that the City of Los Angeles a place that I’ve lived in for almost 40 years had suddenly seem to become two blocks wide and one block deep. That all my neighbors seemed to know more about me than I did. I felt like I had become a social pariah and that nobody wanted to talk to me or be my friend. Of course that was not true but everything in my house and everything in Los Angeles had become an emotional trigger for me that made me recall my wife and our failed relationship.

The stuff that is going with me.

So one morning I woke up and I became the cliché. The feeling became so strong then I could literally not sit still. I became the man who is literally getting rid of all of his possessions in an effort to find a new direction and a new life. My destination at least temporarily is an apartment in Atlanta, Georgia where as soon as I arrive and unpack my few possessions, I will probably jump on a plane and go to the Caribbean for two months to work on a suntan, lick my wounds and drink my share of umbrella drinks.

One of these is mine!

Yet, trying to sell your house and get rid of all your possessions takes a little bit more time than you might think. I was thinking that I might be able to accomplish this in just a few weeks. Yet this odyssey has been now going on for three plus months. My house is 116-year-old, and while wonderful does need a few upgrades. It’s a hot market and it’s a hot property but there’s a lot of stuff to get rid of, there were things that my realtor wanted me to deal with before he would put it on the market, and I had to deal with a tenant problem. I have a guest house in the back and a tenant that I needed to move out yet because of the COVID-19 rent restrictions and California’s tenant relocation laws, I had to pay this man several hundred dollars to leave because it’s not his fault that my life has imploded. There is a sum that I’m legally required to pay him, yet he wanted to hold me up for much more money because of the COVID-19 eviction restrictions so this caused a logjam. My realtor wanted me to spend hundreds of dollars on fixing up certain parts of my house which I knew the next owner is just going to come in and rip out, so we came to an understanding. And trying to find a reputable estate sale company took some time but we’re almost there. The few repairs start in just a couple of days, the tenant will be leaving by the middle of the month and the estate sale is next week, so progress is made. If all goes well, I’ll be out of here in a month saying goodbye to LA and headed to my next adventure wherever that may be, Atlanta or beyond.

The packing never ends.

This will be a little bit of an ongoing series that every once in a while, I’ll drop in a new story about my wanderings as I transitioned from one life to another. I hope you enjoy the ride and thanks for continuing to be part of my blog.