Jump right in and grab the money.

This blog post tells a little about my frustration with the all-fives reading for self-support culture.

First I should introduce my main political weblog, where I rant against Trump but also expound on a number of subjects I know about, like language change, technology in language education, etc. I've had this site for years and use it for serious topics. You may be surprised by how radical I actually am, though it's the real me every time. It's in opposition to my more personal one, out there; both have been around for decades.

The post kind of touches the all-five author-mutual-support culture, and it's possible I kind of just snapped when I was reading one more get-your-teen-into-the-stock-market book. My teens will never get into the stock market and I'm not sure I even like the culture where families encourage their kids to put hard-earned cash into American imperialism worldwide and at home. As for the all-five culture, I'm getting better at at least recognizing the books I'll like and want to give a five to, thus making the process more honest, at least for me. For me that process is partly about finding books I can give less than five too so they don't think I'm just being part of an enormous mutual aid system (which, actually, I am). I can say that I can well understand Amazo n's desire to crack down on such things but at the same time I have a right to read whatever I want and rate it at whatever I want according to whatever standards I choose to apply. True, sometimes I'll say to myself, you're scraping pretty low to give a book like this a five - but, probably, some of my five reviewers are doing the same for me.

Such is life in the mutual-aid caverns of indie book publishing.

 

Pressed for time now, I've had to change a few things. I had to go back to work, because of some personal financial disasters. Well, really because a house we set up for a disabled son eats up more money than we have. But at any rate, I've become impatient with reading indie work that I'm not totally enthralled with. Most of it actually has been quite good, but I'm still impatient with it.

I have my own read-only site, quiet little corner of the internet, and I'm impatient with that too. What do I have to do to get people to join me? A friend of mine posts several times a day, welcome these new members, etc. - where does she find them? I'd be glad to have even a few of them. My site is definitely endangered.

There are actually about a dozen of these writers-support-writers facebook sites, and I've been a big fan in the past. In fact, I still have time to read - it's writing that has suffered - but it's mostly that the rest of life is jammed up into the few hours I have left, and I'm a little frustrated with that outcome. There are lots of kids who need rides all over the place and they can only get them when I'm not working, but when I'm not writing, I'm somewhat crabby so what I really need to do is to figure out how to fit my creative urges into the remaining time.

I actually have about eight projects, all unfinihed, with one being one that I was actually closing in on, a history/biography.

The pressure would be on, you'd say, to write something that makes money. Yes actually the novel has done better than everything else, so novels are the obvious choice here, but the more I try to force myself to do it, the harder it ends up being. I just cannot force myself to write them even though there are a number of novels just dying to be written. Some even, I've started or are about halfway through. I'm stalled on all of them. I'm running around, working, doing a little reading, keeping up with the house and with life, but not writing.

And the weblogs! Here it is the twelfth and I'm just getting started. Hope you will see more of this though. I actually have a lot to say, and, to write about, to be honest. Life is short and the s-key is stuck. That makes a fine situation.

Coming Soon

The Story of My Life
On ACX

OK so I had to go to work, and got set up to be a door dasher. I'm not that good at maximizing my time & money yet, so I spent a little time out there reading while I waited for the dashes to roll in. But I've lost my patience for mediocre indie work - now that I really need the money, what am I doing just wating time reading? I need to be writing, if not making money or both.

I've been writing long enough to know what makes money and what doesn't. Unfortunately I write what doesn't and I'm totally absorbed in it (history) - I can't even turn away from it at the moment, because I'm approaching the Civil War with my great-great grandfather, and I'm totally seeing it from his point of view. Maybe I could quick write a novel that would sell? I doubt it. But now getting some money is of some urgency.

I'll have more to say. I have to maximize my time now - write what I can, and not waste time reading bad stuff. That's the first to go - I've become impatient with it. I can't bear it. I need to be out there making money.

This is the place I go to complain. Today I zeroed out, so that's my first gripe. No sales, no reads, no nothin'. Guess that means I'm just starting out, even though I have thirty books on the market and I've been around a while. One can still zero out, I guess. Blah.

Then, I have a stuck s-key on this little macbook air. Sometimes it doesn't make an s, sometimes it makes two or three, or makes them when I don't want them. It's like a little snake monster. Every word, like these that have lots of s's in them - I have to constantly check and retype them. A snake is plaguing me!

A few days back I went on a huge Facebook tour and advertised e pluribus haiku anthology on sites far and wide. I can't say I hit every site I know of, but I hit maybe sixty in the course of three days and then stood back and watched. Nothing. A few people liked my posts. Sometimes that's just friends of mine who happen to be monitoring those sites. Facebook will tell you when your friends are posting on sites you care about, and when that happens, I like them too. But no sales, no nothing.

I do find that making a lot of noise out there does raise my profile a little. People know who I am. They've seen my ads. They're aware of what I do. I still get zero days, as you can see, but it is growing gradually. I'm not going down.

It's all about survival. I'll make the Disney book as good as I can and we'll see what happens. No promises. I don't mind being a small guy in a big world. I should be writing novels, though.

sometimes I feel

like Amazon is flipping me off!

Creative resolutions

Over the break mostly I've been reading - a furious kind of marketing that I do when I can't seem to be writing anything, and everything around the house is bugging the crap out of me. It's a kind of escapism, read marketing. And I ignore tons of things I should be doing.

But it's not for lack of things to write. In fact I'm halfway through one, again, and just stuck on a fairly simple thing, and I could get that done with just a little running around. I'll explain.

The first thing on my plate is Vowels on an Elevator: Language as a self-organizing system, a language theory book. Theory of language is a chaotic mess, and as a result the standard in linguistics classrooms worldwide is to fall back on Chomsky, who at least had a coherent theory and spoke it forcefully for what has turned into more than 60 years. There were problems with his theory and there are osme huge ironies hanging over it, because he's changed his tune so much over the years that what we have now is quite different from what caused him to clear the deck in the 50s and 60s. But my theory has never been laid out coherently at all, and that's what I'm here for. What I'm stuck on is the history of who's on my side; what people have said about language as a self-organizing system? All I have to do is gather my notes, and put it on paper. So my first resolution is to finish the vowels book.

Then there are the Disney stories. I have actually finished about eight of them, which is a pretty good collection. I could easily stop at a dozen like I did with Walmart. But I'm finding, as I get into it, that there's a lot to know, a lot to get to the bottom of. And a big thing happened: Disney collapsed in the past year. All its movies tanked. I haven't quite figured out what to do with this information, besides put it in a story, which is half-written, but one thing would be to document it very carefully because we, right now, are at a huge crossroads for Disney and it may not come back. There are several theories about why it's tanked. But I was concentrating mostly on Disney World in Florida, and not too worried about the movie industry or the corporate structure. So the first thing I need to do is figure out what my scope is, and whether to go forward as is or what. So, second, finish Disney (that book is tentatively called Slapping a Mickey: A dozen stories from the House of Mouse).

That would be my eleventh volume of short stories which, one could say, would be enough if someone were to want to call himself a short-story writer. I'm kind of leaning toward novels, but, I don't quite have my planning game down, and it doesn't work at all if I don't plan. No sense even starting if I don't have a plan written out, I've concluded. So I have this one, about Texas, and it's a pretty good one with my statement about guns in there - and, I've kind of been mulling it over. But it's not planned; I'm not going to even start until I know where it's going. And it doesn't really even have a name, except that Red Dirt will be in it: and all that because of my general obsession with music and wanting to document exactly how cool it was to be a Texas fiddler. There are some really fine people down there and I absolutely want to give them enough space so that I'm not really writing about anything except how good they are at music. But this one is important to me: Get my novel game going and write at least one, starting with Texas.

My family history books are fascinating to me at least, and might go in several directions. I'm about to finish one of the guy who made it through the Civil War - so with the Leveretts, I have a pretty good steady line from the moment they landed in Boston, 1634, through some pretty murky times around the witch trials and then around the Revolution, and up to him - he was born in 1830 in Maine, came out to Illinois in a stagecoach, and basically survived the Civil War by being a pioneer with very young children out in southeast Nebraska, during the first couple years when just about every young American man was out there killing all the others. You weren't asked to abandon babies to their deaths, particularly not out on the frontier, though it was dangerous out there and the war actually was more threat to him than the Pawnee who at that moment were further west, though they would come back. There's a book beyond his, and I've actually started that too. Lots going on there in documenting the family. No resolution necessary though because it's taking care of itself.

In haiku I have a very tumultous inner life with it. There are things I could still do with haiku - tell a novel-like story, for example - yet actually marketing haiku is sometimes difficult. Right now, for example, I should be out there peddling Trump (epiphany coup haiku), but who wants to have anything to do with Trump? Same with 9/11. Great book, but who wants to go out there and sell 9/11? Or the pandemic?

You see my jam. I'm using poetry to talk about my inner feelings, but because of the difficult subject matter, I'm very hesitant to just take it out there and peddle it. It's not easy. Write more haiku! Peddle it shamelessly!

Check back with me in a while; hopefully I'll have made some progress.