personal report

There's some good news and some bad news. In the big picture, my life has become a lot more crowded, because i've started Door-dashing, and that takes up a lot of time, staring at the phone hoping for opportunities to work, when I'm not working, and then just working. I work about four hours a day but sometimes it takes more, and I am spending 3-4 hours refurbishing an old house that we are saving and fixing up. Not much time for writing!

The good news is that I will finish several as soon as I get my feet on the ground. One is a collection of short stories related to Disney (named either Slapping a Mickey or Have a Magical Day) and I'm going to stop at a dozen though I may not have quite that yet. The other is a biography of my ancestor, James Walker Leverett, who I've studied for years. I was deep in the Civil War with him when this whole financial collapse came (briefly, my son needed a separate house and we have to pay the bills for it), and I was unable to do much in terms of really finishing it, but it is almost done. If this house is to get fixed up and ready to rent/sell, I'll have more time on my hands.

One of the upshots of this situation is that I have become impatient with my read-trade regimen that basically provided me most of my marketing. It is not really working well; three or four months into not publishing anything, and my sales/reads have tanked. You'd think it would catch on a little better by now, but I'm not really the kind of writer that's going to catch fire. I'm stuck with what I've got. And I'm impatient with reading other things; life is too short for anything but exactly what I want. Life in fact is flying right by.

I'm seventy; I should be leaning back in my chair. I'm not. I kind of like door-dashing, and there's lots of material for writing in there (maybe that's the last of the good news), but it leaves me worn out, spent. I work until eleven some nights and then find myself sleeping in my chair around noon the next day. I'm ok with it, though, it kind of re-unites me with my early traveling days, except that now I'm making tiny sums instead of spending them. Kind of like how sanding and finishing a floor re-unites me with a floor I once failed to do properly in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And how salmon re-unites me with a salmon-boat I worked on once in my traveling days.

I don't think I'm finished yet but I'll keep you posted. Click on the writers in the templates of the main blogs, or here, to find more of what I do and say.