Lessons from the Authors' Fair

 

Another Authors' Fair has come and gone, and I thought I'd write down a little of what I'd learned.

I have an old friend, N.R., who joined me for my third one and we sat and talked a lot. She has three or four books but I really like them because they deal with Alaska. She also has a different perspective on marketing.

It was a somewhat slow day; it seemed like all of us (about 14) were competing for the same two or three people at any given time. Sales were slow. There was no sign at the front of the (brand-new) library and apparently they didn't get the word out very well.

It's the only time in the year that I get all my books out so I thought I'd photograph them just as a kind of record. They are impressive and pop art is part of the picture. I have a unique brand and I can now see it coming through on a wide variety of titles. It was time, upon viewing all 28, to make specific goals of which covers I wanted to redo; there are quite a few.

I got a collection of bookmarks, some laminated, and got to ruminate on what exactly makes the best bookmark. Who knows? Mine is already improved but still embarrassing by the standards of most of the ones I picked up. How much deviation is there from the standard size? Does lamination improve a bookmark? How many people actually use bookmarks?

N.R. and I talked about other fairs, other goals. One of my goals is Prairie Lights in Iowa City. But it may encompass making a new cover and a new campaign for my novel Tall Corn State. I am going up to Iowa City on Jan. 6 so that may be my opportunity to push the issue. Put it on the list of goals.

At Christmas time I offer all my family and close friends a free book. I may do that again. It's time to reflect on a year's work, take a little break, start fresh...

Local author fair

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.

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.

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.