My luck has changed a little, but which direction, it's hard to tell. As I get more wrapped up in marketing, I get less able to actually finish what I'm trying to write. So, a little bit of good marketing luck, is bad writing luck.

It's absolutely addictive, trying to wipe a couple of million points off of my "boards," what I call my chart of 28 books, a kindle rating and a paperback one for each, and a similar page for international rankings, which span six or seven countries, with a few paperback ratings there as well. I mostly stare at the .com ones, trying to discern how I can get a single rating to jump (knocking off a couple million), or to be more precise, how to knock enough millions off of the chart to make up for the few millions it's going to add naturally in a given week.

The week I came back from New Mexico I'd had a bad week, and hadn't knocked off a single million. The boards pick up a few million naturally every week so there's a kind of minimum, but with nothing knocked off, it was all losses. So I looked at it over and over again. Finally my luck changed over the weekend. Got a few million knocked off of there. Today, a few more. Altogether I can say I will knock off about eight million and it's not even Tuesday, so that makes it a good week. And it ensures that the grand total (if I should add up all the ratings, at least on the .com boards) will be lower than it was.

But alas, it's my puritan book that is hurting. I look back at that and find things I didn't even know as I was writing. I'd kind of left it in the lurch, as I went to New Mexico, and let a few facts flail in the air. Now I try to write, and it's not easy.

I do know quite a bit about the subject matter, which involves early-1700 Harvard, but I confuse my facts if I'm away from them for a while, and then it's actually dangerous to sit down and try to write on it. Instead, I should gather all my facts first, and then pounce.

And, while in the middle of a huge fact feast, I find myself impatient with writing fiction. Yes I have a novel almost done. It's inspired and I even have some ideas for it. But at the moment I can't even spin a good fiction.

One of the books I'm reading is full of glamours and the like. I have like no patience with that. It gets worse when fantasy is piled upon fantasy; glamours squared. I can't take it. You can pull my imagination with a little bit of that stuff, but, it makes me want to go back into Puritan New England, where everyone is just balls-out nuts, and it's all real. Who needs glamours?

Late at night, and I'm here complaining. The blogs are hurting too. Usually I have a dozen by now; this month, I lost my strongest week. A whole week of blogging down the drain. I'm playing make-up ball.

And the Guardians got stomped in Texas. But now they're in Pittsburgh, and maybe their luck will change.