Prairie Leveretts

A plains pioneer biographyBr>
James Walker Leverett (1830-1916) was born in 1830 and came out to Illinois on a stagecoach with his parents as a boy of four. He grew up on a farm near Quincy, but ended up moving out the prairie three times, once trying to homestead in southeast Nebraska Territory. This story tells about his life. I was interested in it for several reasons; one, the period of time is fascinating. Two, I also had many children and bounced around the prairie. Three, a lot of people claim him as a descendant and it's interesting to map out how we're related and make the connection. The story is interesting for more than the Leverett family, though. He's a guy who was totally in his period, knowing how to build and join wood to make houses, and he has a lot of wisdom to share with the modern generation.

Kindle version here.
Paperback version in review.
Hardback coming! (maybe ACX?)

My signature book, Five Second Rule, got a download today and I got that familiar good feeling as I got one of the highest (lowest numerically) ratings I'll ever get. In haiku you can get #1 this way, but in short stories you have to peddle and peddle and still be lucky to be in the top 300 when one is downloaded. But that's what happened tonight, so I'm celebrating a good rating (time to take advantage of it, and advertise?)

But unfortunately I also feel the resistance to starting up the marketing thing. I've been trying to finish up a book, and it'll finish, but in the meantime I'm having trouble reading, rating, putting these old books out on the market. Too much work! The world is ending, why should I be reading all this stuff?

On the other hand, as the country spirals into violence, maybe reading is the only safe thing to do.

Lately a cousin has asked me to co-write the story of her father, my Uncle Bones. Uncle Bones lived out in the desert for many years as a campground host and I always admired him, so of course I agreed.

But lately she's become excited by the arrival in Roswell, New Mexico, of Kevin Randle, ufologist and science fiction writer, so I looked him up. A Hawkeye (Univ. of Iowa grad) like myself, he got his journalistic start making good hay out of the Roswell incident but, according to the article, has become a little more skeptical over the years. The thing that sealed the Roswell incident in history is the fact that the government was doing a lot of cover-up, ufo or not, and even they have been forced to cop to much of it over the years and admit that, yeah, they lied a lot. But that doesn't mean there were ufo's. They had a lot of stuff to lie about.

Uncle Bones, my cousin says, knew the truth about what happened at Holloman Air Force Base in 1957. Am I revealing too much of our book before I'm even starting? Maybe. How does one even get to the bottom of what could have happened, or what really did? I think the possibilities will be made clear as we go along and I do hope we don't get in "trouble" with the authorities. Sometimes, with her, I get the impression that she wants to be the great knower of the truth that Biden and Big Brother want kept under the rug. I myself lean a little closer to just sticking with the facts, no matter how boring, but I'll be the first to admit that the universe is large and the possibility of other life out there is actually pretty good. We are just now, on earth, reaching the point where we could find something and reach out to it if it were there, so there's no reason someone else could not have reached that same level in the same amount of time or more.

My time in New Mexico would make writing this one a pleasure: the wide open white sands, the Tularosa basin, the desert expanse out by Roswell - if you were a ufo of any kind, you would surely choose this spacious landscape as a starting point, if you knew what you were doing. Some coincidence that this cousin is still out there, with all this knowledge that needs a book.

So a happy Fourth to all you writers out there, and I'll give you a little explanation about why I've benn so quiet here. I like to complain bitterly here about the travails of being an indie writer in this world, but I've come to see that I was privileged even to complain, because I didn't need the income and was able to make a deal with my wife: as long as I didn't lose money, everything was cool. So I built the business up until I was making about double what I paid for a KU subscription and I was happy.

But then things changed at home and suddenly I needed the money. So quickly I became a door-dash driver. And, much to my surprise, I liked it, partly because I spent so many years on the road, and now, in my better times, I was making just a little money out of being out there. It's a kind of low-margin trade, where all your free cash really goes right back into your car evenntually, but for the moment I was able to cover the household budget and then some, and it was good to get out of the house as a seventy-year-old who was too young to retire.

But alas, my creative juices were shot, even on my days off. It's like I'd poured all my creativity into reading house addresses at night, or figuring out how to park illegally but acceptably for a few minutes, and I came home unable to put together a wild set of stories. I kept marketing, but now, eight or nine months with no publication, I'm getting stale, and can only market old stuff. I too feel a burden marketing the same things over and over. Most of my friends have read them!

Furthermore, the penny-ante reading I was doing, I read yours you read mine, I began losing patience with that. It wasn't that the books were any worse or even different than they ever were. People on the read-share sites may have gotten a little looser to the morals (writers were never really a straight-shooting crowd anyway, I've found), but it was more that on my end, time was precious. I'm seventy. If it's not the type of book I'd want<.i> to read anyway, what was I doinng? I just let go of it. Now my KU reads are way down but I don't care that much. If my books didn't get popular naturally and organically on their own, they didn't. It's not the end of the world.

If I could write more, it would all come back to me. But here I am, and I'm not writing more. So what am I doing? I've always had this idea that if you have writer's block in one area just start writing in another. So I started back on my ancestors, specifically my great grandparennts living through the turn of the century, the Great War, the Depression, etc. I love that era. And they were interesting people. They didn't just sleep through it.

To do that I use ancestry.com and newspapers.com, and read through old censuses and old newspaper clippings. I may be in the last generation that knows how to read between the lines in a straight journalism report, so I feel like I'm using my skills well. And these were the early days for the region, western Iowa, anyway, so I feel like it's important to the historical understanding of the development of the area.

I don't want to say newspapers.com is a monopoly, but who goes off to scroll through independent newspapers' private collections which they let you access for a hefty fee? Not me. I get newspapers.com through my daughter and then find that they have only a fraction of all the newspapers out there, but at least they've culled through them so their little bot will pick up a name that you're looking for, and unlike some private newspaper collections, they can tell you if your relative is anywhere in there. It's fascinating, and it goes well with door=dashing.

And overall I suspect the whole thing is good for my writing in the end, that is, if I cann get out of dashing soon enough and back to writing stuff of all kinds. I started to write a novel about dashing itself but it's dead in the water. In a sense my dashing world is bound tight to reality and I don't want to change that. I could superimpose a murder mystery onto that situation but since one of my goals would be just to document the ins and outs of doing it, I would have a problem, or rather, I did have a problem, and I just stopped dead in my tracks. Now I'm back to the turn of the cenntury again. Give me 1898 and I'll sit here all night reading the papers.

And have a good Fourth. It's a fantastic country!

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.

Annie Lamott's contest

First, here it is; it's almost the last day:
Annie Lamott's contest

First, I want to say a few things before I enter. This post is my entry, that is, if I qualify. I may not, but it doesn't matter, because I want to talk about how she affected me. I don't really know much about her teachings as what I have read was a while ago.

I consider Annie a family friend because my wife knew her as a child in Bolinas, California. That's what may disqualify me. It is true that both Annie and I turn seventy this month but that should not be a problem. The family friend part may be, though.

In any case we would love it if she could fly out to Galesburg, Illinois, see my wife and see everyone in the writing community who would love to see her. We have a great indie bookstore that is struggling and maybe we could find a way to help it out.

This is how Annie has influenced me. As a starting writer, I made up my mind to write what I wanted and not worry about the money at first. It was good to have the luxury to do this and I took advantage of it by writing what I wanted. Times changed and I got sensitive to reviews and wanted to make more money just as a matter of principle and self-esteem; more money equals more success. Reviews of course are part of this process.

Through my wife I heard a story of Annie getting a 1 review because somebody got their book in the mail, wet. Wet! They gave Annie a 1 and that influenced her sales heavily for the first few months.

It showed me that as a writer you are sometimes at the mercy of somebody's whims or delusions or pure bad feelings. They obviously didn't read the book and that didn't even matter. Somebody's poor logic totally ruined her life.

Now I'm a doordash driver and I keep that in mind because I deliver a few meals wet, or cooled off, or to the wrong doorway. Things happen in the delivery businesss, and hey, I'd rather be making that money writing, but I'm not, because of patterns set long ago. Now I know what I need to do to make more money and I still can't do it because I'm so used to doing what I want that I can't break the habit. Well I can, but that's another story. I take heed from Annie's story because it helps me deal with the reality that whatever I do, the outcome is sometimes out of my control anyway. I can trust that good hard work and good writing will show through in the end, no matter what, but that may not solve the immediate problem.

I am interested in Annie's contest and how it turns out, and wish her well regardless of the outcome.

Marketers

A long time ago I friended my first marketer not knowing their entire game. Nowadays I know that the marketer's job starts with complimenting you, on a comment or by invading your dm box, and then friending you, and then peddling their marketing services. It's all part of a process and life is as difficult for them as it is for us.

As I put more ads on the facebook sites around, I got hit by more friend requests and random compliments. Some gushed about my writing but asked me where my books could be found. A little peeved, I'd ask them how they knew I was so great if they couldn't even find my books. More often they'd ask obvious questions, like how many I'd published, but how could it be that they don't know how to find that information if they're a book marketer? All in all I had no reason to trust them and especially no reason to give them my money which is ultimately what they wanted. It is still going on today. I have trouble doing mass ignoring every time I put out an ad.

I am friending each one, though. The first one I friended went through personal trials, which I saw on facebook, then lost her kids and had to move out onto the streets of Detroit. It was, is, scary to follow her & reminds me that these folks are real people who like books, at least for a short period of their lives, and have to make it the same way we do. it's a rough world, least I can do is show some sympathy. Of course I tell them right off the top, I have no money for marketers.

So I've picked up a couple dozen "friends" on both fb and twitter, and some will undoubtedly drop me the minute I tell them I'm not in the market. To some, it's all business. But I figure that since I do my own marketing, I'm in the same business they are and therefore it's good to have a few contacts in their world. They probably would increase my sales if I paid them for it, and I can't claim huge success in that field as it is.

My prayers go out to the 80 or 90% who don't make it, including all the authors who simply have to give up because they need to make a living and can't. I've been there, and now I'm doing Door Dash. And I'm lucky I have a running car, and don't have to sleep in it.