temporarily, i have a little dilemma. the sun comes up in the morning, and my chair is directly in it, to the point that, on a brilliantly clear day, as most of them are, i can't do my work in the morning without shutting the blinds. but that kind of disrupts other people who would simply like to live in the living room...generally i can work while they live, but in the mornings i can't work without shutting them in my cave. one solution is to simply go work outside in the mornings. but in the winter the outside is cold in the morning, and doesn't warm up until the sun has been out for a while warming it up. it's life in new mexico.

a careful study of my selling statistics shows that an old book of mine, actually the first collection of my stories, is selling better than the others. one reason could be because it has "esl" in the title. my name has always been associated with esl so old students who liked my writing could be finding me through this book. or it could be that esl is simply selling well these days, in kindle and in paperback. i'm not sure, and it's tending to make me go in a direction of one of my original plans, which was to make esl books. i even started one, but got it out last night to find that it only had three stories in it, and needed some work. at that point, i got tired and went to bed.

at the moment i'm fighting the sun; it's coming up quickly in the southeast, and dooming any work i might be able to do at this chair. we live in a tiny house and it's unlikely that, in the winter, i could simply do my work in the bed, or in my son's room, or some other place. there just isn't the space. and, i'm in the habit of waiting until night, when my wife is in bed, to get going and do what i want to do, but night, as you can see from the anecdote above, has its own problems. i work around the house; i improve on the landscaping around here (it's a gorgeous pine-forest / sleepygrass kind of place), and i do some of the upkeep, shopping, laundry, etc. required to get the last four teenagers off to school in the mornings. that would be my time, when they are at school. that's the time i often find myself unable to work.

another example is today, saturday. the fourteen-year-olds are still asleep, it being only nine. the eleven-year-old and the eighteen-year-old have already eaten but don't cause me much trouble. but the sun is coming into its own, and, boom, might as well be doing anything else. move the chair? it's possible, but, at the same time, not possible. that may be the angle i work on next.

in a little bit my wife will take the girls horseback riding. this is a good development, basically, because they don't generally leave until about eleven, and by that time the sun has risen out of where it blasts me. i often find that being alone is the best way to really get started. i feel like i haven't quite been able to put my whole self into this writing business yet - i'm sixty five, time is running out, and, though i've written quite a bit, my insistence on doing my own marketing, and not spending money, has meant that whole piles of books are sitting on my "bookshelf" (an amazon word for the books you have made) not selling, slipping in ratings by a few thousand a day, eight thousand a day to be exact.

most of my haiku books are in the eleven million range, fifteen million, eighteen million, etc. story books more or less the same. at eight thousand a day, it doesn't take long, and it isn't like people are snatching them or ordering printing runs on them. i'm talking paperback rating here, which is different from kindle rating; the kindle rating includes everything from how much people actually read without buying, to the paperback sales too. in kindle rating my story books are in the two-million, three-million range, and their ratings, too, are losing out on a couple thousand a day. in other words, i have to keep people interested, in order to keep them from slipping down into the ten million.

and i don't even know if people care about this stuff. i know i myself didn't care for months on end, then i looked all this stuff up all of a sudden and whoa. i found i didn't even have a kindle version of some things. i had some books that were totally unrated - i guess if they don't have a sale, there's not much of a way for them to quantify what they've got. and i hadn't cared, hadn't done a thing about it. i get author's copies, which don't count in the ratings, and i give a few away, here, there, what have you, but i find that even giving them away, to friends, to neighbors, to relatives, doesn't count for much. you hope they'll read it, like it, pass it along, cause some other residual sales, but, i think it ends up on their shelf, looking good (to me), but not counting for much. could be that i'm not really that great of a writer. if so, i'm ok with that.

i was a good teacher, i know that. i don't really need to rely on the image of "writer" when i have the image of "father of ten." i'm not even sure why i get all into their science, what happens, how to influence things, what to do about it. it has occupied a couple of days. i went outside to work on cleaning up the property, moving a gazebo, moving a fire pit, walking around in the cold winter sun, and basically, i became eager to come in, and work on the writing. everyone goes out on the horses, i work on the writing. make a big fat cup of coffee, sit down with the puppy on the lap, and check out the ratings. then write.