I signed up on this one writer's site and they asked me point blank if I hired an editor. No I don't hire an editor. I taught ESL for 30 years and did professional proofreading, and I know a comma from a semi-colon. In fact, maybe I know it too well. I find it difficult to tolerate these people (see the best of indie site who can't use a plural apostrophe or don't know from present tense. But all I could do was answer the question. I reflect on the matter and can't blame them for drawing the line somewhere, and saying, I'm not going to just let any old "self-publisher" in.

On the other hand, I sit here trying to market my book, and find that my best choice in actually getting it out into the public is to read this one, about three hundred pages, where the writer is so garbled in her expression that I can already tell it will be a three-hundred-page slog. Surely there is a better way. It is read only; all I have to do is read it, not give a good review or say something I might regret. I find that complimenting bad writing is especially tiresome but I have found ways of saying it that are at least truthful and hopefully will be taken seriously by the writer.

It is a tough uphill battle gathering an audience and I might take my own advice, which is to not let moss gather on a rolling stone, keep moving, keep trying things that work, keep going no matter what. Perseverence is the key. I have twenty-seven books and have barely started getting them out there where people can see them. We are coming into the season when maybe somebody will buy them. One can only hope.

I should tell about the three books I have on my docket at the moment. One, I just finished; it was an excellent book. I do come across these every once in a while. It was a romance of sorts but not all full of the intimate details that the others get carried away with. A woman is digging into her past, gets obsessed with it, and finds way more than she is able to handld. Just an excellent book.

Another one is written by a friend of mine, and is really quite good too, though I'm not that far into it. His books are full of modern British young folks who keep up a lively patter as they go about their lives, and they seem to have the luxury of thinking about sex a lot and expressing it freely, while not worrying too much about the rigors of simply surviving in modern Britain. There's a ball in their future, a bizarre kind of dance, and they are all preparing for it in their own way. But my point is that in stepping into their world, I become part of this extended conversation which, though it has good elements of humor, is kind of endlessly intense. It's well written but I almost have to put it aside for evenings when I have more undivided time.

And the last one is a kind of fantasy where I see words that frankly I don't know, and wonder if maybe I should have read an earlier book, or maybe the author simply lives in her own world and only chooses to share the meaning of such things once in a while, or if you ask her. These guys are living in this fantasy kind of world, with swords and shields and the expectation of using them, and yet these words are being flung around as if we are all supposed to be sharing a mutual knowledge of what this world entails. And then, lo and behold, the poor main character steps through a time warp apparently onto earth. Maybe it's a space warp or some other kind of warp but in any case he encounters a beautiful young damsel and there you go. I am not actually following this particular story very well and it's similar to the others in that I might have to wait until late night to have some free time to actually understand it.

And then I may add this other one onto the mix.