Knee-deep in reading, having started a read-marketing site (yes, consider joining us if you are an author), now, I'm a little burnt out on reading and unable to enjoy concentrating on the usual. It's partly because I'm not a huge horror fan, and got a little too many horror ones in the spirit of the season, and just got tired of them. But it's also because my home life is a kind of a horror, so that just piles up horror on top of horror.

So, I delved back into the Puritan colony of late seventeen-hundreds Massachusetts, and that helped me get through it. I actually made progress organizing my book and getting it on the ground. It's a long, difficult book, and it flies through the witch trials because they only indirectly affect what happens at Harvard and the relationship between the people that run Harvard and the Mathers, Increase and Cotton. Interesting that, out in Salem, nineteen people are being executed, while at Harvard, one of my relatives is cranking out logic books in Latin and keeping mum. He dislikes Cotton Mather; he probably isn't big on spectral evidence; but you don't want to speak out against the big honcho especially when, at the time, he was directly employed by Increase.

Engrossed in my own little Puritan world, I care even lesss for the stuff I'm reading, although some of it is well-written. My read-only site has generated a little action but keeps threatening to stall. I don't quite know what to do about it, and, oddly enough, the other Read-Only site disappeared almost immediately after I opened mine. It's like that admin, who had done quite a good job, was just so sick of it, she was grateful to be out of there. She had kind of half-heartedly said, "maybe after the new year," and I found that to be unacceptable (waiting), which led me to start mine. But she apparently was very glad to just slip completely out of sight. Why? It's a mystery to me.

So far I don't find running the site to be that bad. I'm not one for disciplining people: telling them to do this or do that, or your book is too long, or inappropriate, or whatever. I will have to, of course. I might as well gear myself up to do what I have to do.

We all pick up an hour either tonight or tomorrow, sometime. I'll use mine doing the witch trials maybe.