discouragement

I see an incredible number of writers giving up - stating publicly that it just wasn't what they'd hoped, and they were turning away. Most of them have a lot more invested, in terms of pure money, than I do. They bought a thousand of their own books. They paid a cover designer or an editor/proofreader. They invested heavily.

I on the other hand have invested mostly time and energy. As I've become obsessed with marketing, I've sprayed every possible free avenue with marketing until my twitter friends, facebook people, etc. are probably sick of it. I've kept up an unrelenting barrage of marketing of what I have and mostly to no avail. Sure I get a few sales here and there. On the paperback front which is especially bleak, I've resorted to buying my own to keep my ratings below ten million or below about fifteen, which is the level at which they stop even showing your rating. This is especially true of haiku, which simply doesn't sell, or at least mine doesn't sell. But I have used my marketing time to get Amazon gift cards so I'm not taking it out of the family budget.

In a sense this is an admission of failure and I know it. With the short stories I know that I have a few readers and will have more if I can crank out another collection of them, which should happen soon. My novel was a success but I also know that I've been virtually unable to write the second one, which is dying to be finished but just needs some attention to its organization.

In general I have about eight projects half done and a couple I even forgot about for a few months in the lead up to the big move from New Mexico to Illinois. A lot of these are close enough to being done that a little spurt of writing would just finish them. Instead I feel somewhat paralyzed by futility.

In my household a kid lives on McDonald's. That means twenty, thirty, forty bucks slips out the door every time we turn around because he likes to include his friends. I'm sitting here making maybe a buck on a survey, getting a book and giving it to a library, and he's out there slurping up frappes on our retirement account because he literally doesn't have a clue and feels like he absolutely needs it, and we have not effectively established a good limit. We are enabling him, I agree, so it's on us, but it piles up the futility. My ultimate goal is to be able to sit back, and let book sales and reads just kind of fill up the account whether I crank it out or not. For now, though, it will be necessary to crank some out. So it's back to work for me.

arrived!

Please forgive a little extra time when I can restore normalcy after a family move from Cloudcroft, New Mexico to Monmouth, Illinois and ultimately to Galesburg, Illinois. It will take a while to readjust and in that time I will not be cranking out the novels as I'd like. But don't worry, they're coming!

update

In the rush to market books I've lost sight of my creative juices, which would have me perhaps writing a short story even when I'm busy. I wrote this one, but it's true, and I don't consider that creative so much as just documenting. Life is crazy and worth documenting, but I need also to be cranking out things I can put out there.

I am definitely finding that the more I market, the less I write. I market primarily by exchange - I read others' books, they read mine. I do this as a layover so that I can gradually build an audience of pure readers - I am doing that slowly as well. People are finding out about my writing. It's not easy - in fact it's tedious - but it's what I'm doing.

The main reason writing has gone a little by the wayside is that we're moving in about two weeks. Two adults, four dogs, two cats, three teens, and a crapload of furniture, good and bad, new and old, clothes, genealogy, musical instruments, stamps and coins, you name it, it's going. An old doll case & dolls. Packing is on my mind. And the route, through about six states.

Be patient, I will come out of this a better writer.

One Woman's Voice

---

One Woman's Voice:
Biography of Elizabeth Mansfield Irving (1852-1939), elocutionist, patriot, women's rights pioneer

Available on Amazon, Kindle and Kindle Unlimited
paperback %5.95 + shipping
Kindle $3.99
free on Kindle Unlimited
ACX version coming
Non-zons (people who refuse to use Amazon), contact me & we'll work something out


This is a story of a woman who wanted to be an elocutionist, on the cusp of the nation's Centennial (1876), when women were not permitted to speak on important topics of the day. A gifted reader and orator, with a beautiful voice, she went into reading war poetry to reunions and encampments of Civil War veterans. She also inherited an insurance business when her husband got sick and died, becoming one of Toledo (Ohio)'s first women business owners. It's the story of using one's voice when one can, and getting one's voice when one is able. Her life corresponed with the rise of elocutionists as a united group, and the rise of the woman's suffrage movement, which ultimately gave women their voice in the political arena also.

Pile of Leaves: Stories of a Rake

KINDLE SPECIAL - personal favorite - Pile of Leaves: Stories of a Rake - short stories from an inspired era FREE on kindle TUE & WED Mar. 22 & 23 https://www.amazon.com/Pile-Leaves-Stories-Thomas-Leverett-ebook/dp/B004IK948M/

new blog

Of all my writing blogs, this is the one where I have a lot of stories, and speak freely about being a writer. It is not available to google, so I figure it gets its hits from people who know it's here or who connect up from one of my main blogs. It will probably stay that way.

I find that writing on blogs is easier than other ways, and now that I'm doing stories again, I've been using this one to just write stories on. There was a time when I did that here. I may go back to that, but for some reason I've been more comfortable using the novel idea site to just put things up. It could be that they are somewhat experimental when I do that.

So there's this new blog, best of indie, that I hope to use to unite all these blogs together. There are of course my press blog and my blatant self-promo site and I will include them in my reckoning. Since these last two require me to keep publishing things and I've faltered lately, they are looking a little desolate. But if I keep them all connected to each other and keep the ball rolling like a good basketball team does, I should find an opening somewhere.

Look way back in the archives of this blog. You will find some of my best stories here. My plan is to fix up all the writing blogs - make them a set - keep their functions distinct - and allow you to have a good look at my whole mind as a writer.

This one has the best name.

This site is a place where I've always talked about writing freely. Looking back over my writing situation I once noticed that the first stories I did were actually more inspired than the later ones, or it could have been that they struck people more because I was somewhat wilder when I started out. Most of those stories are on this blog somewhere, free, and in some cases linked from the template.

This blog is somewhat hidden though, as it never comes up on Google (I told Google "hands off"), so it gets its views from people who know it's here and have come here often over the years. Many of those people are my former students. But I like the character of it and want to keep it to some degree the way it is.

Another blog, A Novel Idea, has gotten a lot of those spontaneous stories these days. That blog is kind of like this one - relatively unknown, not really linked from anywhere, and originally I was using it just to collect possibilities for novels or things that had caught my fancy. Why did I start putting random stories on it? Not sure. I also don't know where I want this to go. In a sense I feel like I should have an author's page, or some place to really show off. On the other hand, I'm much more comfortable with just casually flinging around stories.

So where is this going? Not sure. Change is in the winds, though.