AI detection

With all this hoo-hah about AI, a market has sprung up for "AI detection." Unfortunately many writers submit 100% original work only to find that AI detectors consider it "50% AI-written" or "50% likely to be AI-written" with the numbers widely varying; it's general consensus that the detection software is useless. One will call it 80%, another 20%; they are so wrong, so often, that they might as well be picking the numbers out of a random number generator.

This leads me to wonder what the heck the schools can do about this. I'm sure AI is generating a lot of homework and getting away with it. But should a school invest in "AI detection?" I don't think so.

But it leads me to my ultimate question: How DO you know what's AI generated? If AI is as smart as we are, and uses language that we've been using for years, and always uses the language that is most commonly used to express something - then, it's kind of like us, in the sense that it's creating language the same way we are. It seems to me that if you track this down carefully enough, and let AI create enough, there will really be no difference anyway. So you can't tell what's AI-generated and what's not. You can't be sure of anything.

Somebody mentioned em-dashes, as if AI kind of had a preference for them, so they've stopped using them altogether so that the AI detection software doesn't scoop them up. But wait a minute! Why would AI prefer em-dashes, or anything, more than the rest of us? That's really a style question, and AI doesn't really have a style, does it?

Just thinking out loud. This "detection" software, after it determines you have written AI-like material, then offers to "humanize" it, making it less like AI. For a fee, of course.

The writer's block is killing me. I don't pick up my big computer, the one with word, any time I could be disrupted, which is most of the time. But even when I have an entire hour free, I don't pick it up. Why?

I actually have five or six projects going but all of them are suspended. Not a lick of work on any of them in about a month. Every day I tell myself "write!" but don't. Sometimes writing about it here> will help jumpstart me.

The big one is finishing up The Halberd which will finish up Beasts of Ayutthaya, a trilogy of three retellings of Beauty and the Beast. It's almost done. It shouldn't be this hard. The problem is you have to think deeply and carefully to finish it off. You have to cover your bases.

And lately I've been sick, recovering from surgery, laid up a little, ducking out of a lot of responsibilities. And Christmas is coming. We adults have to go out and buy junk.

Give me a kick in the patootie. I need to get going. I also need some exercise. And I need to get back into the self-promotion business. The holiday season was a wash but hey, really, in the big picture, the whole thing is kind of a wash. If I wanted to make serious money I should have just done it differently. Period.

Hopefully, I will have something to show real soon here.

 

Just did my numbers, and yeah, they're pretty depressing; I'll explain. There are several reasons and writing about it sometimes helps my mind and helps me work my way out of a funk.

First, I write down my ratings, US kindle and paperback, for all 30 of my books every Saturday morning, as part of keeping up on the marketing. I know how much they lose in a week, each of them, on both sides. This week I was a little late and didn't get to it until after noon, but they were terrible anyway. Most of my books aren't selling much. Those that aren't are losing over 100k on the paperback side every week, and that's disheartening.

But it's partly because I've almost totally stopped my social media barrage. That wasn't getting me very far, but it's what I had. I have a rebellious streak and when you have to market I shut down. It's Christmas. You have to market. But nobody tells me what I have> to do. It's the hardest time in the year for me to market.

Bad strategy...but I can't help it, it's just the way I am. I can Know I have to get myself out there, and I just clam up and don't. Oh well. But that's not the worst of it. The worst is that I've more or less stopped writing too.

I'm almost done with a trilogy, three different retellings of Beauty and the Beast, but the third one is supposed to tie it all together and it's just sitting there; I'm not getting to it. It's partly because, on a day to day basis, it's hard to pick up the old computer, with Word on it. I am literally busy from the moment I wake up. When I have a single cup of coffee I check the scores (the numbers) and mess around. I don't market anymore (like I used to) but I also don't pick up the big computer and write either. What's left is copious reading. I can always do that. But that's far less productive.

Out of the reading I get a good view of indie writing as it is - much of it better than me. Some of it worse. Some of it depressing. Some of it very entertaining. It's a mixed bag to tell the truth. But I'm embarassed to say for this week anyway, it's about all I've got to show.

Now I figure people are buying books again. Now if at any time. My Local Author Fair is at the library on Saturday, a week from today, and hopefully people will be buying. They're not especially picking me out online, paperback or kindle, though i do get a few sales. It's depressing. I should be world famous by now.

Local Author Fair

Two Galesburgers

Finished a draft of my new three-part book Beasts of Ayutthaya, which is actually three retellings of Beauty and the Beast, kind of like a symphony that revises and works over the same plot, developing it in 3d or something. Still lots of work to do on it, but I decided to mull it over before I made any changes.

First thing I needed to do was go for a walk. So out I went, and I went up Prairie Street to downtown to the indie bookstore in town, Wordsmith. I actually have done this now three or four times. It's about a mile, two total when I turn around. Lots of beautiful trees and houses all along the avenue.

The reason I mention this is twofold. One, I'll probably have my books on consignment at Wordsmith, if it works out. I'll keep you posted. I'm not totally crazy about putting books on consignment, ever since I tried it in Lubbock and someone stole my book, A Dozen Crime Stories. But if you're going to do it, the local bookstore is a place to start. I'm hoping to get to know them better in the process.

Second, each day I walked past the house of the guy who made Boxcar People, an NPR documentary about Mexican immigrants on Galesburg trains. Now I haven't seen this documentary, but the guy recently posted that he was coming out of seclusion after mourning his wife's death, and was seeking friends. In a way I was trying to offer myself up, and took him a book. Today I found his glasses on his walk, and took it as a sign that I should just knock on the door with my book and the glasses, which I did, but he didn't answer. I came home and wrote him a message on Nextdoor, where I saw his original post.

This happened with Judy too; she's a very interesting Galesburg resident who I wouldn't mind writing a book about. The point of each book remains to be decided, and depends on their involvement. If they don't really want a book, what's the point? I figured it was a way to contribute to Galesburg, explore it a little, learn a little about it.

So this guy apparently made a documentary, Boxcar People, possibly with the involvement or inspiration of his wife, who now has died. He may or may not want to talk about it, and I sure don't want to dig where I'm not welcome. But I think it's an interesting story, worth exploring. We'll see what happens.

In the case of Judy, she's a social media pioneer; she makes movies that are well known around the world. Her driveway is full every morning. One can get pancakes. I haven't pitched her yet though, just gave her a book. We'll see how it all pans out, so to speak.

update

Having finished two parts of a trilogy, and being almost done with the third, I am on a kind of roll with the writing, though it's been a long time coming and I feel I'm in danger of sinking again into oblivion when it's finished. The marketing is not so productive. In fact, I am using this post to wonder what the heck I'm doing.

First, the writing: on my Amazon, check out Be Our Guest and White Elephant. The Halberd is next, and the three of them together will be Beasts of Ayutthaya, part of the Global Beasts series. I'm proud of it. It's magical realism, my new genre. It may work or may not, but at least I'm producing something.

On the marketing front, there's read-marketing and machine-gun marketing. That's really all I have. Friends and family read them; others by and large haven't found them. The purpose of machine-gun marketing (put an ad on every single medium or place or platform you can. find) is to widen people's exposure. How many people even know I exist? I've been on some of these sites before but that doesn't seem to affect anything. My marketing doesn't seem be drawing many people in. Wasted energy, as far as I can tell.

On the reading front, I finished three excellent indie books and will review all three as soon as possible. Two were by good friends. I am attracted to the authors I like and just read them without prompting or exchange, and they're good for me; I enjoy them. Some are exceptionally well written. But on the review-exchange sites, my luck isn't very good. Some people leave good reviews which I don't always totally trust. Others leave bad reviews and I don't entirely trust them either. One guy reviewed my book after only reading seventeen pages. But he seemed to think it was ok to basically admit that he only skimmed it. Should we take him seriously?

This leaves me with four unfinished books, three of which are lousy to say the least. One is borderline entertaining, another is just kind of bizarre. One has to be done today. It's fair-to-ridiculous.

Such is life. Back to work.

White Elephant

White Elephant: A folktale retelling of Beauty and the Beast

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSSPDRNN

I'll take this opportunity to talk about this here. It is a folktale, set in the 1700's in Thailand, in which a woman falls in love with an elephant. It is the second book of three; the first, Be Our Guest, is more modern. You will remember that in the original tale, the spell on the beast is cast by a rejected bad fairy, who is mad at him and turns him into a beast. I'm kind of stuck on how that was watered down into an old witch mad at the prince for not giving her shelter. Well Disney can do as they like but I'll also tell the story I like. Now I have three (third one not finished) with six beauty/beast relationships to consider.

I decided to just go with what I'm comfortable with; I'm not touching bestiality, or serious LGBTQ type things, because I don't know enough about them and also because in the modern world they've become a target for fascist retribution. I just don't want to touch it, and if that makes me a coward, at least it makes me able to write. One of my best friends is like an LGBTQ+ pioneer and sometimes I feel like I should carry the flag but I'm not carrying that one or any flag, that's just the way I am. I do however like the idea of magical realism: not so sure I fit into it, but sure I can carry that banner a little.

My deeper worry is that I'm not representing Thailand correctly or carefully. This is Thailand in the 18th century - who am I to know what I'm doing? I'm a little more comfortable now that I'm writing about this one French missionary who just appears in it, but I don't really know missionaries either. Not to mention, the Thai language or culture. Do the wai? Make the wai? Perform the wai? What do I know?

Ah but give it a try. Folk tales are for the folk, and I'm a folk.

Be Our Guest

Same book, new cover
Be Our Guest: A retelling of Beauty and the Beast
I can now say that it's part of a set of three, all retellings of Beauty and the Beast; second one's done and coming soon.
Paperback $7.39, kindle $2.99, free on ku
https://www.amazon.com/Be-Our-Guest-retelling-Beauty/dp/B0FM82CSKX

A hundred thousand a week

OK so I track my ratings, one could say, obsessively. Every Saturday I write out all my books - I have thirty-two, though a couple are not technically mine, and I track overall kindle rating, category rating, paperback rating, and paperback category rating, also acx rating if I have an acx for that title. It's a page full of numbers that I compile as carefully as I can. It's not that I market all that much, or all that well, but because I do my own marketing, I at least feel like I should know where everything stands regularly. I'm on Amazon dot com, by the way, but I also do the others, just less regularly.

It's because of this that I know that things have changed rapidly in the Amazon rating world, and they are not going back. In the paperback column an Amazon rating now loses (increases) over a hundred thousand points in a week, and that's even when it's stable. Ratings can shoot to a low (better) number after a sale and then lose a couple hundred thousand a week until they reach that stable point, but at their stable number they never used to lose that much, never. And the ACX ratings are doing the same thing!

With the ACX ratings, the change is actually more remarkable, because for as long as I can remember they would only change by about three thousand a week, and now suddenly they are changing over a hundred thousand a week.

Both changes are due to AI, I figure. ACX/Amazon began order virtual voice about a month ago, and I figure that those titles are just now showing up and making a difference. When your title loses (increases) by a hundred thousand, that means that a hundred thousand titles shot up or into the picture in that last week. There is no way to know what percentage of those hundred thousand are brand new, virtual voice, or older ones that just got a sale. But one way or the other they vaulted in front of yours, moving it down. By the way, I have no idea whether virtual voice is any good; I'm considering trying it on one or two of my titles, but haven't yet.

In the paperback world one can only assume the same thing is happening. In the paperback world if one person buys at least one, that title gets a nice low (good) rating for at least a week until it starts (pretty quickly) picking up thousands of points a day as other titles pass it up. In order to stay high in the ratings (with as low numbers as possible) you have to keep getting sales or downloads (in the case of kindle versions) relatively constantly. There are probably people who do like me only they watch that dashboard constantly, because they can. I would only get depressed. After all, the vast majority of the action is the huge downward tug on all the numbers.

Amazon dealt with this, in ACX anyway, but just wiping out the numbers where nothing has sold over a year or two. I don't know the exact numbers but I know that some of my titles will fall off the cliff, i.e. lose any rating at all, if they are not read over a certain long period. This clears the board a little and helps them hide the problem of basically having a huge market with way higher numbers than everything used to have.

It's bloated; it's swollen; it's like the rising floodwaters of the rivers.

The question is whether the free market is going to sort out any of this excess AI junk or whether it will find a legitimate place in the market where it can survive and flourish.

So where are all these AI books that are taking up so much of this space? I'd like to know. But I'll tell you my suspicion. If you were to use AI to do all your thinking/organizing, and just create useful books all the time, what would you do?

First would be the self-help books. I can easily see telling AI to go compile all the tax-advice books into a single book; this is something AI can do. It doesn't even sound like AI because that's how those books sound anyway.

I would think biography would also be a lucrative market. Call up a wikipedia page, sic AI on all the newspapers, tell it to write it out; I think AI can do that.

So I can tell you what I would do, but have no idea what's actually happening. Something is, though, because the water's rising.

So maybe this is just a zon thing, nothing to worry about, but the site advertising my new paperback doesn't exist. It says "Live" on my dashboard, as if it has it, and there is a paperback, but when I click it, it's "sorry this. page doesn't exist."

My first thought, paranoid as it is, is that it's been flagged for copyright violations. I did after all put song lyrics in it - the title itself is a song lyric. Can Disney sue for that? Does anyone own the expression "Be Our Guest?" Perhaps the zon censors have to determine that. I thought what I did was ok, or I wouldn't have done it, and they might prove me otherwise but surely I'm not the first one to make such wrong assumptions.

The secood possibility is that it's malfunctioning for some much more random reason. Soomebody typed a 0 instead of an O, or. something like that? I have been. known to do such things so wouldn't be surprised. But it has been a dead site for two days now and the paperback link is therefore dead in all the other zons, FR, ES, DE, IT, AU, CA, JP, wherever zon is sold. Dead! Non-existo.

Which brings me to the final question. Here I am, at the edge of my chair, waiting to publicize, not wanting to publicize a dead link. Should I ask them? They don't seem to be telling me anything though I could check again. Should I push my luck? Will time heal this wound? I generally let their machinery work - if it's in some censor's backed up line, just let time move it to the front. But if they're not even telling me what's happening, I'm leaning toward the second possibility. Hmmm.

The trials & tribulations of a writer, I guess.

Be Our Guest

Be Our Guest
A retelling of Beauty and the Beast

Now available on Amazon:
Paperback $7.39 + shipping
Kindle $2.99
Free on Kindle Unlimited
(paperback link not working temporarily for some reason)

This tale is part of the Global Beasts Series in which every book features a different country. This one is set in Thailand, against the government shutdown of Tiger Temple, a famous tourist theme park in Kanchanaburi. It's a tale as old as time, but it can be seen in many ways, with a wide variety of characters. The original tale was written in 1740, and this one brings the original to light against the traditional ideas of karma, reincarnation, and animism that have been in Thailand since before Buddhism ever arrived.

check-in

My wife has been nagging me about clearing out the junk. I don't do it, because frankly, it makes me angry. I tend to save useful stuff: old pots and pans, random tools, four-legged nightstands, etc. Lots of books. The problem is, we always need this kind of stuff later. And "later" in our case might be when we have no money. It's one thing to get angry and say, ok, next time you need a pan, you can just buy one, they're only a few bucks. But I can already sense the time when even that will make me angry. What fun is it saying "I told you so?" Less fun every time.

Almost done with my fairy tale, a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set, if that's possible, in Thailand at the time of the forced closing of Tiger Temple. Does that make any sense? You might be able to sense who the Beast is. But I'm not giving it away and besides there could be more than one.

The problem is, I've kind of lost track of my other writers - those who wrote one set in each interesting country. We had a bunch of communal agreements and I lost track of those too. It was exceedingly difficult to finish, mostly because of time pressure here. I was working and we spend a lot of time just shuttling kids around. Turns out it's really difficult for kids to get started these days - get a car, get a job, get a life. And we have several we're watching out for.

Keep your eye out for the fairy tale, tentatively called Be Our Guest. Working on the covers and the before-TOC-stuff. Not to mention TOC itself. It won't be too long. It's just a fairy tale!

OK so here's my problem. I have agreed to write a retelling of Beauty and the Beast and am feeling some pressure to finish. That's partly because I don't really find much time to write. I sit down, turn on this old clunker of a computer, which is actually better than the one I used to use, and sometimes by the time I have it even on and set up to write, I am interrupted to do something or other or drive someone somewhere. It turns out that if you deal in teenagers, you have many many places to go long before they have the capability of actually getting there themselves legally.

Well anyway I have to get my mind in the mood for fantasy and folk tales, which used to be easy; I'd read folk tales all the time back when I was teaching. Now it's much harder. For one thing I read the news and the news has a way of hitting me with a sledgehammer over reality. But even Facebook is doing that. It draws my eyes down to Reels and the reels are all of torrential water shooting the banks of various Texas and New Mexico rivers. I know some of these rivers, especially the Rio Ruidoso in New Mexico, so sometimes it's a matter of seeing if I can find places I know getting inundated with water.

So I'm horrified but also dulled into clicking on reel after reel and these days for me almost two thirds of them are one flood or another. By the time I'm done I've had a tour of swollen rivers all over the place.

Now of course I can't do folk tales so I play the bog for a while. My sister and I occasionally play web boggle (here), one of the three best things about the internet (which are: Google, Blogger, Boggle). It's fantastic! And addictive! And though I limit myself to three at least after ten minutes my mind is clear.

But alas, I get interrupted again. Happens every time.

My problem is that my anger against the social media empires hasn't gone away. With every day of Trump's turning the army agianst its own people, yanking people out of their lives, creating terrorists by destroying families, etc., I just find it that much harder to say to people, hey, come to Amazon! Get on Facebook! See my pop-art ads on Twitter! Of course Elon has already turned against him. Too late! You put millions into putting him there, and now I don't want to be in the same room.

So what's left? Well there are these blogs, although even they are owned by Google and represent the same kind of benevolent self-publishing industry that I enjoy with Createspace. I'll defend a democratic, you-publish-it free speech kind of operation - and I'm sure both Google and Amazon are benefiting plenty, in their own way - still, they at least provide a public marketplace for me to speak my mind. Yet I feel like with my own energy and money, I should be setting up more of a you-print-it you-distribute-it kind of operation.

Recently I had to raise all my prices for Amazon paperbacks. According to Amazon it's become more expensive to print them. Apparenty it's become way more expensive in Australia and Poland, for whatever reason - though I'm not sure they've ever printed one for me in Poland. Nevertheless I had to cover their expenses, and in the process ask myself if it's really worth it to sell books when I'm getting less than a dollar each. Probably the answer is no, it's not. Raise them a little more. I've always had the Warhol strategy - volume over price - but I'm not generating the volume. I'm not flooding the market. That's partly because I'm shunning social media.

I wonder what other writers experience this (probably most). And what kind of solutions there are. Now my writing time - the one time I have to concentrate, Sunday morning (now), I have to concentrate on giving a ride. I forgot last week! Ouch. As the last of twelve children grind through their final years I'm left with a desk of unfinished projects, half-written books, like promises unfulfilled. But it's Father's Day, and my daughter wrote me a poem.

Time to celebrate, and possibly publish.

I've been somewhat paralyzed on the writing front. I have about eight ongoing things I'm writing, one urgent, and have done very little on any of them. Sometimes I write on the blogs. Sometimes I write in a personal journal that documents the trials of bringing up a violent kid come-of-age. But mostly I'm paralyzed; I write very little.

The fascist coup is mostly to blame. I always wrote to interpret American culture to people who are interested in it; the stories have gentle humor and love of the small town in all its twisted glory. Those days are over. The US has gone fascist, and that makes almost everything I've written hollow and pointless. Should I write novels of the resistance? Of survival during a fascist era, as are the spy novels I've been reading? It seems a retooling is being called for yet I am not quite sure on the strategy.

For example, the other day I decided to start with the pop art. If I want to get back on Facebook, the way to do it is to have lots of pop art, a different one for every page. To that end the best book to push is e pluribus haiku anthology, a rambling 3487-haiku tribute to the US but written from a point of view of a traveler in 1975 or thereabouts. What is that now? There is no hitchhiking, there is no generous populace, there is no easy-life-on-the-road. It's a historical thing but who wants to read history when a fascist is going on the march? Better to put my energy into creating something useful. But what would that be?

So in the end I did nothing. I have biography, family books, lots of poetry, short stories of American life, Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Disney. They are good and reputable but I don't feel like hustling them. The Quaker ones sell well and are picking up in popularity and my inclination is to go that direction even if those are harder to write and take more background.

The urgent one is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast which is mired in my own difficulty getting into fantasy when reality is so crushing. I want to use reality to fight reality, if that makes any sense. I'm a little leery of relying on shifting, beasts, and sex to get me through the tough times. But that one has a deadline, and the hard thing is, I'm not even clear on how bad the pressure is, but I know I have to get moving.

Meanwhile, the bond market is crashing. The farmers are screwed and angry. The economy is upset and people will stop their panic buying, and just concentrate on surviving. And me among them, though I have no money to wonder where to hide it. All my friends waiting on retirement have just seen 30k, 40k, 50k disappear. Uncle Elon saw 30 trillion or something disappear, and that didn't stop him. Blown up in the skies over Florida, maybe. Put all the government resources into a space company that doesn't have a CEO, and make the fleet all Teslas. That'll show 'em. We writers will sit here doing what, observing? Better than fantasy, I suppose.

New project

Got a new writing project but I'm not sure it will last. I did it for my sanity.

Watching the president put a wrecking ball to the government, I decided to delve into history and write a book about Andrew Jackson. The project would ultimately be to write about all 45 (two served two separated terms), but I'd start with Jackson because I knew the most about him, and because it would help divert me from the day-to-day anguish of the wrecking ball.

It turns out that there have been a few comparisons out there. But Jackson is not anything like the current president. For one, he was a man of the people, he cared about the common man. Also, he was a soldier and general, and fought in many battles. Finally, he was a gentleman, no talk about assaults and rapes.

He did however fill his cabinet up with his friends, and launch attacks on his enemies. He had a war with the Bank which he considered the enemy of the people. He believed in expanding the territory and went about aggressively making that possible. He was responsible for the Trail of Tears and numerous other savage assaults on North America's indigenous tribes.

Reading about his shenanigans in DC is a little comforting; in other words, delving into history had the desired effect of getting my mind off the travesty of the daily news. I'm not sure I can keep it up, though. I think I can tell a good story, and that alone may be worth the trouble I just took of getting all these books out of the library and starting to read them.

The librarian, by the way, was impressed by this old duffer coming along with a stack of five Jackson books, every one the library had available. The college library up the street has a half-dozen more which I would have to read there. But I have found over thirty-five biographies of him out there, some available online, some spanning back to 1915 and such. Very few of these were available when I studied Jackson in 1984 or so in a historiography class taught by a professor who I very much would like to credit, William Heywood. At the time we studied Jackson from every angle in an attempt to get a historical view, a many-dimensioned view of a very polarizing guy. This is the feeling I seek, to be able to back off and look at it from the big picture.

The other part of it is watching a democracy in action, a democracy that is clearly now in danger. We had three separate parts of our government and we did that intentionally. It was good, and it worked for a couple hundred years. One can argue that it has come to a screeching halt. I would argue that we'll have to fight as hard as Jackson fought, to get it back again.

I'm 71, so my first problem is actually reading all 30 of these biographies; I'm not sure I can. Also not sure I want to spend the next five or six years studying old powerful white men and the damage they did (with a possible break for Obama, or for something that is not presidential history). My overall plan would be to write a continuous history of the US whose high points would be 1) effectively, if briefly, expressing other points of view and showing how to access them; 2) surveying the work, academic and otherwise, that has been done on these guys, 3) having enough background so that people can experience the growth of the US and its changes over time. Am I that attached to the nation and its democracy itself? If so I'll be in deep pain for the next four or more years as we watch the rise of a country wrenched free of its stable status as leader of the free world. I find that, after I check the news in the morning, I not only like but also need to check in with the 1830s if only to regain my own moorings. So if my own sanity is the only survivor of this episode it will still be worth it.

It's quite a story and one I expect to rewrite a few times before I have it how I want it. Therefore I can't argue that it should be on the top shelf along with the Schlesinger series or Meacham's American Lion which I've started already. One guy, Remini, appears to have made an entire career writing about Jackson, with over a helf-dozen books, one about his soldiering alone. How can I read all these? Also, I feel some sense of obligation, both to my former professor and to the man himself, to get as much of the story as possible, and get it as right as possible. All people are complex and have complex reasons for doing what they do. We have to know what we're talking about here and the question is, can I, or do I want to, spend the next four or five years doing that? I may be ok here for a few months since I really like the 1820s and 30s but may find the larger project overwhelming after a while.

People like Washington and Lincoln have fifty or more biographies. For me to write a quick 200-page one would make me a much shallower writer and historian than most of the other 49. In some cases, and these are the ones I'm actually more attracted to, there are very few biographies out there and mine would become one of maybe two or three. Interesting! Maybe I'll start with those, after I do Jackson, or, if I finish Jackson. Maybe I'll just read about him and skip it.

Having a little trouble picking up my writing computer this morning so I thought I'd write a little about my two dilemmas: first, the one I'm in the middle of writing, and second, the huge idea that has kind of derailed it.

The one I'm writing: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Thailand. I get a little into it, and what derails me is not having a complete overall plan that would guide my step-by-step progress through the story. In other words, slightly confused about how to proceed. But that's not the issue really.

The issue is that this other idea is somewhat all-encompassing. That idea is this: Write a series of about 45 biographies of American presidents. Actually we are on 47 now, but he was also 45, and there was another one earlier that was two. You get the idea. Eventually hit them all.

Make them all uniform, just biographies, find meaning in their lives if possible and do more than a wikipedia page can do. Of course on some level it's designed after the wikipedia page. Who were they? What did they do? Why were they important? The goal being having about 45 of them. I can do them in any order I wish, and can rewrite or add when when I find things; I'm good at that. I figure writing 45 books might take about 8 years.

The obvious problem would be getting caught in the culture wars. Some people are already very unhappy at the way we teach history and this is not going away or getting any better. Some of us like myself are rewriting history to include the violent and degrading treatement of native Americans by Presidents like Jackson - what do you say about the Trail of Tears? The point is to be blunt, truthful, historically accurate. It was the undoing of the Cherokee and several great empires were reduced to prisoners in a short while. How do you put that in a biography and not make enemies?

Yet Jackson is the one I want to start with. The reason is that he is very much similar to the one we have now. Getting absorbed in the 1830s is one very effective way of dealing with an onslaught of news that basically is difficult to absorb. I know quite a bit about Jackson already, so this will be a kind of first challenge: make a good clear book that shows how he's important, and at the same time does not contain anything inaccurate.

As I think about it I think the process of writing presidential biographies would be a minefield, or rather, 45 minefields, each one with a fair number of mines in it. Careful now! Remember how unhappy everyone is about simply the way things are now!

I kind of want to make them an ongoing history lesson, so that we really get the whole picture of the times, as well as a good view of this guy's life. Each of these people is after all a product of their times.

Now, having stumbled around on all these worms that came out of the can, it's back to my original story, about wayward travelers in Bangkok, and pure magic. Traveling is after all, magic. If I can make someone experience that, I'll have succeeded with my Beauty project.

Writer's Blockade

OK this has become a little more serious than your average writer's block - it's been almost a month now, and I have several projects I could be working on, and I have zip to show for all that time.

It didn't stop me from publishing - if things were finished, ready, on the table, I put them out there. My son's book, a Quaker pamphlet that had already been written, and a set of short stories from the late fall = and I could reasonable be expected to keep myself busy getting them all out there and publicizing them.

Yet I flagged on the publicity arc too. I was into BlueSky, but stopped. Stopped on Twitter. Stopped on Insta and Threads. Only Facebook, my tried and true, where I feel some obligation to my family out there.

Also got a story in an anthology, Furever Friends, over the holidays, and it's doing pretty well I think. in terms of getting my story out there to new audiences. My story was fun to write, because it involved my own puppy who I adore and who keeps me company an awful lot of the time. This also stirred me up to contribute to another anthology which will be a number of retellings of The Beauty and the Beast; mine will be the story about Thailand. In Thailand should the beast be a tiger? elephant? something else? Let me handle it.

So I'm doing ok being a writer but I'm kind of slipping on just writing which in my opinion is more important. And I have a gut-wrenching personal situation to blame (you can scour these weblogs and I probably didn't spell it out anywhere, but that's because of the personal nature of it; let's just say our marriage is fine but things are tough). This kind of keeps me from just sitting down and being free, at night or in the day. It's just not coming, not flowing. In times like this I hit the blogs heavily, and the personal diary which I've relied on a little more lately. But what about these projects? It's not happening on them. In particular there's a novel, one which I like, stopped dead in its tracks.

I actually took some time off of door-dashing, at my wife's suggestion, and it didn't help. You'd think that with a few more hours a day, and being retired and all, I ought to be able to crank something out. On the contrary. My wife was right that I was moping around, limping, feeling old, 'bout had my back broken, etc. But that's partly because of having grown kids who are in pretty bad shape. In some ways I'm lucky and I should know it. Every time I go out I see people with true mobility issues, and at my age (70) many of my friends are meeting cruel fates which on some level they must have deserved, and same goes for me. We're all in a kind of a slump. And a deep, cold, long, dry, unchanging winter isn't helping.

There are issues associated with being a writer, and putting your thoughts out there in the world. Lately I can't even put my pop art on Facebook; I've gotten inward, non-social, reclusive. I want to come straight home, scroll around, see if for some remote possible reason someone somewhere has bought or read my book. I've actually had fun reading other books - escapism is a joy to be had - but though I get a sale once in a while I'm not really enjoying the fruits of all this hard work. It's not really happening. Not quitting the day job, which is "retired." Just carrying on, and hoping my general good spirit will ride me across the sea,