Today my interview with my publisher is up on their website, InkSpell Publishing.

My favorite part of the interview is the reveal of THE OBVIOUS GAME playlist. The chapter titles are actually all album titles from the late eighties and early nineties for no reason other than it's my book and I wanted to and the novel is set in 1990 and nobody ever either a) figured out they were album titles or b) told me that was hokey and ridiculous and I had to take it out. I haven't actually pulled this playlist together on iTunes yet, but dammit, I should do that.

The Obvious Game Playlist

Chapter 1: Pride by White Lion (1987) – When the Children Cry

Chapter 2: Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses (1987) – Welcome to the Jungle

Chapter 3: Scarecrow by John Mellencamp (1985) – Small Town

Chapter 4: True Colors by Cyndi Lauper (1986) – True Colors

Chapter 5: Can’t Hold Back by Eddie Money (1986) – Take Me Home Tonight

Chapter 6: Hysteria by Def Leppard (1987) – Hysteria

Chapter 7: Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction (1988) – Jane Says

Chapter 8: Just Like the First Time by Freddie Jackson (1986) – Have You Ever Loved Somebody

Chapter 9: Use Your Illusion by Guns N’Roses (1991) – November Rain

Chapter 10: Bat Out of Hell by Meatloaf (1977) – Bat Out of Hell

Chapter 11: Head Games by Foreigner (1979) – Dirty White Boy

Chapter 12: Faith by George Michael (1987) – Monkey

Chapter 13: Cuts Like a Knife by Bryan Adams (1983) – Straight From the Heart

Chapter 14: Double Vision by Foreigner (1978) – Hot Blooded

Chapter 15: Disintegration by The Cure (1989) – Fascination Street

Chapter 16: Poison by Bell Biv DeVoe (1990) – Poison

Chapter 17: Achtung Baby by U2 (1991) -- Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?

Chapter 18: Nevermind by Nirvana (1991) – Smells Like Teen Spirit

Chapter 19: Listen Without Prejudice by George Michael (1990) – Something to Save

Chapter 20: Out of Time by R.E.M. (1991) – Losing My Religion

Chapter 21: The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby (1986) –  Mandolin Rain

Chapter 22: Infected by The The (1986) – Out of the Blue (Into the Fire)

Chapter 23: Strange Fire by Indigo Girls (1989) – Strange Fire

Chapter 24: Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos (1992) -- China

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I put a three-book giveaway on Goodreads. If you use Goodreads, go enter! And if you don't use Goodreads, consider using Goodreads, because it's such a great way to discover new authors. And friend me there so I can see what you like. I think my username is Rita Arens.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Obvious Game

by Rita Arens

Giveaway ends February 05, 2013.

See the giveaway detailsat Goodreads.

Enter to win

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And, I've been writing a ton on BlogHer and forgetting to tell you about it. I bet you won't spot the theme!

• Marriage and Relationships During Unemployment
• Is Your House Above Average?
• I'm Doing the 52-Week Money Challenge
• Tips for Living on One Income During Unemployment

Beloved lost his old job on September 28, 2012. He got an offer for a new one on December 21, 2012. He starts on Monday.

We are returning to the land of two incomes and kissing that unemployment debit card goodbye.

I am exhaling, finally. We aren't going to go over the fiscal cliff as hard as I feared when Beloved's unemployment benefits ran out in March.

Growing up, the fear I fixated on was my dad losing his job. It was probably a bigger deal than Beloved losing his job, because at the time I was fixated, my mom didn't work outside the home. Sometimes I worried about it alone at night, in my bed. I don't know if the little angel has been doing that. I don't ask her, because I don't want to plant the fear if it's not already there. She hasn't had unexplained stomachaches or trouble sleeping or showed any other signs of kid anxiety, so I've tried to be very breezy about money in front of her.

My girl knows the reason we haven't been going out to eat or buying anything but the bare necessities these past few months: because we were waiting for Daddy's new job. She knew we had enough to be safe but not enough for the bubble gum every time we went to the grocery store. She accepted the cancellation of the full-on pumpkin party in October and the homemade birthday gifts for her friends during the fall. She asked when we could have a party again, and we told her after Daddy got his new job. That was pretty much the answer to everything. We reassured her she would still have a nice Christmas, that we would get each other smaller things so she could have a nice Christmas. And she did, mostly thanks to grandparents and my sister, who pulled serious weight this holiday, and for which I thank them.

I'm trying to unclench.

My restricting anxiety has been operating on all gaskets since September, and I haven't been able to resist tracking every penny we've spent on a daily basis. My sister asks why I would do that to myself, but it's comforting to me in the way counting calories in the margins of my high school notebooks was comforting. I know that once the income streams open back up, I need to stop that. I need to go back to being careful but not obsessive. I need to look once every two weeks, not every day.

The anxiety wants to keep restricting and pay off every single credit card as soon as possible so if something like this happens again, we'll at least have credit. Thanks to Beloved's work expenses and our own years of recession backpedaling, we had more on the cards than I could let myself think about and there wasn't much room to move. I'm glad that in three months, the only thing we put on there was my flight to ALA Midwinter after a friend offered to let me stay with her if I wanted to go to learn about librarians in relation to THE OBVIOUS GAME. But we paid the minimums for the first time in our entire marriage for three months, and it made me absolutely insane to not see that amount go down more.

We will pay off the cards in a realistic timeframe. We talked about it on New Year's Eve over dinner. We've learned our lesson. But just as I went on and on about my wishes to be debt-free, my husband told me as nicely as humanly possible that my clothes are all threadbare and my once-beloved J. Jill sweater looks like "matted felt."

It's true. Even when things are good, I am not good at spending money on clothes, and eventually I look down and realize the t-shirt I'm wearing is older than my daughter and is of an unknowable color. He said it really nicely: "Honey, you're prettier than you're dressing. You should buy yourself some new clothes." Of course, as with any painful truth, it was a little hard to hear, but your lover should be able to be honest with you about such things. I heard the love in what he was saying. Not "you look like a slob," but "you're only 38 and you should get some v-necks."

The answer with spending, as with eating, is somewhere between greed and starvation. I refuse to charge anything that doesn't absolutely have to be charged. I want us to be throwing piles of money at those credit cards, and we will throw the piles in as reasonable a manner as possible once we are back to normal, income-wise.

But I have to go to Target tonight, because I threw away all but three pair of underwear yesterday.

Things are going to get better now, and for my mental health, I need to stop counting things.

One thing about social media: It teaches you you're not the only person with problems. My connection to hundreds if not thousands of other human beings each day has made me more grateful for the good things in my life and more tolerant for the bad. No, everyone else is not sitting around on unicorn-fur couches sipping ambrosia -- they have cancer and bankruptcy and also new babies and cute puppies and lottery winnings. We are all in it together, for good and for bad.

As Beloved's job situation stretches on, I've found myself in several doctor's offices making sure the thing I have now -- my health -- is intact. Last week I went to a dermatologist to get my first-ever full-body skin cancer check. Basal skin cancer seems to be all the rage in my hometown for the farming crew, and I let my fair-skinned self turn lobster red way more times than I should have in my youth. I also tanned before prom, just sayin'. Luckily this time I came out clean, and I made an appointment to get checked again around my birthday every year.

Today I'm going in for a well-woman appointment. I haven't had one in years. Unfortunately, I was inspired to do so after a dear friend lost her cousin to sudden and unexpected girl cancer. Like two weeks unexpected. Though I don't even know this woman, I'm taken aback by the speed in which she was taken down, and it scared me enough to immediately book a Pap smear. I tell you this so if you are a woman, you will be sure to get one, too. So many girl cancers can be treated if caught early.

I'm not perfect with my health -- none of us are. And I try not to think too hard about my health, because I have anxiety disorder and if I think too hard about all the crazy-ass things that could give me cancer or brain damage or whatever, I'll freak out. It's so much easier to avoid breaking a bone than getting a terminal disease. I have a close relative who is dying of something completely awful right now that scares the shit out of me.

I try not to think about that.

But there are some easy things that I can think about, and one of them is skin cancer checks and another is well woman checks.

And then I'll go back to my job and hope everything else in my life works out just fine.

Two weeks ago, my husband told me he'd lost his job in a clean, P&L-based cut. And suddenly, that thing I feared ever since we got married and bought a house and birthed another mouth to feed happened, and I wasn't sure if we could live on my salary or not.

Whether or not we should be able to is beside the question. Of course we should be able to. But we weren't. My husband and I earn within a small range of each other's salaries, and we've always been a two-income family. We've both been laid off or about to be laid off three or four times each -- I've been in Internet publishing since 1999, and he's been in sales-related jobs since 2007 -- but only once before was it quite like this, and that was almost twelve years ago, before the little angel, before the mortgage, back when we were 27 and could just stop drinking beer for a week and everything would be fine.

There are other things I'm afraid of -- cancer, other terminal illness, the death of loved ones, finding a possum in my basement, the usual things -- but sudden, unexpected job loss without a back-up plan is something I've been afraid of since I was a little girl and my mom stayed home with us, so in my mind if my dad lost his job, we would immediately starve to death, like within days.

It's been two weeks, and surprisingly, we haven't starved. We haven't even been hungry. And though I have been through the usual gamut of emotions starting with shock and ripping through anger and fear, they didn't last long. I'm not sure why, actually. I cried last night for a completely unrelated reason, but that's the first time I've cried for more than about five seconds in the entire two weeks.

I have no doubt he'll have a new job that he likes eventually. He could probably have one right this minute if he were ready to go out of the frying pan and into the fire, but I've begged him not to do that, to be thoughtful in his journey. We're not spring chickens anymore, and I know as well as anyone that being unhappy with your work will rot your guts and raise your blood pressure. We're at that age where it would be good not to have work stress operate on your innards any more than it has to.

I don't know how long it will take, though. I'm staring at the tattoo on my arm of the word "now" and trying to mind it. It doesn't matter how long it takes, because I can't know, and I can't do anything about it, and right now, right this minute, I'm tapping this away on my laptop and listening to Drops of Jupiter and wondering when the leaves will drop. The grass that was so dormant it hurt your feet a month or so ago is lush again, the only evidence of the worst drought in years left in the dead patches scattered here and there, the lawn's scars from the summer of 2012.

When I was twenty-seven and this happened (again in a crazy P&L, lost-client situation), I was terrified and angry and took it all out on him. Even though it wasn't his fault, I thought he should've seen it coming, should've known, should've warned me so I could prepare myself. Then time passed, and the year 2000 happened, when I had three jobs, and then I heard a few jobs ago that I was going to get canned, and then I went somewhere else and lost projects and contracts and all manner of things until I guess I came to the place in which I currently reside: the place that knows there is no safety in the world of work, but there is usually a new gig around somewhere. There is no soft place, there are only places. Which sounds horrific but I find extremely comforting. Because if there are no soft places, then there are no hard places, either.

There are just places.

There. I just touched my "now" again, because in five minutes I might not feel so chill about our situation. I'm minute-to-minute with my anxiety disorder, but we don't have to be in a hard situation for that to happen. My anxiety disorder doesn't give one shit whether we just won the lottery or whether we just got sued for $100,000. It's all, HEY, YO, YOU AWAKE? LET'S FREAK OUT.

My thirty-eight-year-old self wants to grab my twenty-seven-year-old self and tell her what's the what: Two months from now, you and Beloved will get married. He'll have a new job within a week. He'll change careers twice again. He'll end up in the exact same place in eleven years. But you, my friend, will have lost or left SIX JOBS in eleven years. The bubble will burst. The economy will get shredded. You'll buy a house. You will love the house. You will invest money in the house. You will bring a baby home to the house. You will lose money when you sell the house. You will buy another house. Your cat will die. You will love the house. Your replacement cat will die. You will remodel the house, slowly, room by room. You will get yet another cat. You will teach yourself to garden. And then, when you're tempted to bemoan the fact that sometimes it feels like you're right back where you were in this minute, right now, twenty-seven-year-old self, you will realize that you and Beloved stuck through it together, every minute of it, and that's all that matters.

We're all the heroes in our own stories, and every story needs obstacles or they're fucking boring.

That's what I think in this bit of now.

So buck up, Rita.