writing plans

This may be the wrong place to complain about the election, but if you'll bear with me the post is really about my plans as a writer. One post which I agreed with was about how now's the time for us artists to get to work. I entirely agree. The election spurred me on to real action which I hope I can sustain.

The most recent idea, which came to me only after I calmed down a little, was a new volume of Quaker plays. I have two books of Quaker plays already, and though I am not great at the placement of people on stage, or the actors/actresses, I love dredging up old Quaker dilemmas and presenting them as real stories. I put all my plays and my latest ideas here. The essence of a Quaker play is, how do you deal non-violently with a situation that makes you violently angry? That is the crux of our problem in the modern world, but is not the essence of every Quaker play; some of these will have other angles to view the problems from.

Here is the one I came up with right away, upon waking up and finding that a truly immoral man would lead our country. he knew she was 13 will be a haiku volume about moral corruption and infinite lack of compassion or morals. It will have 365 haiku and you can guess how it will be organized - in a haiku tradition, by nature, with attention to each day and things changing in nature. If one can fit rampant immoral crimes into natural beauty one has one's work cut out for one. That will be my challenge. There's an old story out there about his molesting a 13-year-old, and I intend to tell the story as carefully and accurately as I can. And never mention his name.

That's it. No need to complain about the election. It's time to get to work.

a little time with ACX

ACX is a kind of parallel market. I worry most about kindle and paperback, and in kindle there's kindle unlimited and kindle sales - so I consider at least three separate markets right off the bat. But ACX is a fourth and is a world unto its own. Its "readers" don't generally read from the other two/three, or respond to ads for them (I'm not sure of this); acx readers want the book to be in its own marketing sphere. It will use the comments from kindle/paperback, as they have to know what people are saying about the content. But if there are comments on the narration itself, they'll have to appear in the ACX page and be directed mostly at ACX listeners.

Recently I had a cochlear implant surgery, and therefore need to do listening exercises to develop my hearing from my new implants. So guess what I jumped into the ACX world.

I have all ten of my story collections and my novel on ACX; in addition, I have three family biographies on there and one that was written by my great-great grandfather; he was a crotchety old pioneer but I figured what the heck, get his story out there and see if there's any market on ACX for 19th century crotchety old men. I may actually listen to that, too, as part of my three-month introductory plan ($2.97 total), but I'm finding out lots of new things by downloading both my own books and other people's books.

Back when my hearing was crappy I'd given up on checking carefully the quality of people's work, but now I'm kind of into it, since, no matter how good they are, they invariably make mistakes (I too would do this I'm sure) and there is some naturual variation in both speed/tempo and pitch which you only pick up after quite a bit of listening. I might be able to get them on my phone; in that case, I can listen while I dash or while I'm doing pointless errands. It cheers me up to know that I can actually get something done in my down time.

When I listen to my own I have all kinds of freedom to think about how I'd want to rewrite, or I fill in background things I'd forgotten from when I published them. I need this information. The plan also allows me to download books that I just like reading although now I'm more in a hurry to actually get something written, and need some background which I can only get from those books. So I am reading about the Mayflower on kindle unlimited and have started, as part of my listening exercises, to read (listen to) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee which will fill in background for a book I'm reading about the period of 1890-1940.

It's good to know that some narration problems are universal, i.e. even the higher quality books have some mistakes in narration; and, that basically people do a pretty good job at narrating an entire book cover to cover in one voice consistently. I like to follow along and read while I listen; I catch everything that way.

As for the marketing, I'm still getting my feet on the ground. There are about a dozen sites to hit; I don't want to be too common on them though. Where do the ACX people go? I still need to find some of these places.

Once again my ADD has caught up with me. I was eager to finish another project, having finished a book in September; after all, I have about four almost finished. I set to work on the one closest to being done, but it didn't take; I got partway into it, and just couldn't do any more. I stalled a while hoping it would come to me and I could just finish. The timing was fortuitous; it would be good to finish it before Christmas. But the words wouldn't come. I was unhappy with the changes I'd made to what I had.

Suddenly, inexplicably, I got drawn back into the worlds of my great grandfathers. They lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa, at the turn of the century (~1900). One worked in a bank, and had run a magazine called the Trans-Mississippian designed to promote the Trans-Mississippian Exhibition in Omaha in 1897. He gave up that magazine soon after the exhibition. He was actually better suited to various other pursuits that made more money, like selling insurance and real estate, but with the exhibition over and the world going back to Omaha as we already knew it, he had no reason to keep promoting it, I guess. What I'm saying is I'm not really sure why he gave up writing when he seemed to be enjoying it.

The other one had taken the proceeds of his farm inheritance - he had sold out to his brother - and set up a hardware store in downtown Council Bluffs. They sold everything from big stoves to get you through the winter to foot balls, the newest rage in the physical education craze. Their ads were all over the Non-Pareil. His partner, Charles Swaine, joined the national association of hardware-store-managers and they had a pretty good run, from the end of the 1890s well into about 1920.

Somewhere in there maybe the monotony of standing at the cash register ringing people up got to him. He had grown up on the farm and as far as I know chose to come to town and set up this store, but maybe he was doing it just because his older brother wanted him out of the farm and had first dibs on the farm which didn't have enough room for the both of their families. In any case he had this idea of setting up a self-checkout grocery store. Today we have Aldis and a few others like it but in 1920 this was a new idea and people weren't sure it would work. Look, he said, you can save all that money that you have to pay to keep the cashiers here, to keep them paid and happy, if you just do the work of checking out, bagging, etc., yourself. You'll save tons. I'll pass all the savings to you.

It was a failure. By the late 1920s he was a traveling salesman, or traveling something, and died on the road in Watertown South Dakota, at a young age. So I see him as a kind of Death of a Salesman character.

The story is rich and has texture. That's why I'm drawn into it. The Roaring Twenties was a wild time, money flying around, people drinking in speakeasies, etc. Downtown Council Bluffs was a lively place. The other great grandfather was ousted from the bank where he worked, but did ok selling insurance, which was a new thing, and managing real estate. He was a historian and gathered information particularly about the area and about the different tribes that had occupied it. His son would marry the hardware-store man's daughter.

In the end the story has to do with cultural assimilation. The hardware store man was from a German family; like most of the farmers out in Minden (outside of Council Bluffs) they had emigrated from Ostfresia or the part of north Germany closest to Netherlands. The German Americans, at that time, had to hide their identities because of World War (, and this would get worse in World War II. One had to hide any evidence of one's past and work on one's accent so that one didn't even sound German. This was not easy.

One reason I'm drawn to this story is that it's fairly clear in my mind, just not yet written. The people in it are all very interesting characters yet distinct, and they totally lived in their time. There's a kind of gap that I don't know a whole bunch about, the first decade of the century, but after that, the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, etc., I've pretty much got that down. I know where the story is going. It will end up that the culture gap just rips apart the family. And that makes for a huge tragedy, but it's only one of many that presumably were common in those times.

I'll see if I can get a good wide outline of it down, and then work on the details. If I'm inspired to write, I have to write, quick while the writing is good. That other stuff will have to wait.

Great review

for Prairie Leveretts
from a blog I love and trust!
https://booksthatmakeyouthink2.co.uk/2024/09/11/prairie-leveretts-thomas-leverett/

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.