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!