i no longer have to tell you all my marketing travails here - this is the last time - because i have another place to put it. but i'll give you a rundown - i have about thirty blogs, in various states of disrepair; i'm going to make a half dozen of them commercial (not this one), and i'm going to upgrade the appearance so that if you happen to land on any of the thirty, you'll have a pleasant experience, and maybe learn something, or if nothing else have good choices of places to go from there.

this is the only one where i feel like i can post any time, and not have any pressure to post a certain uplifting thing, or an educational thing, or an appropriate thing. it's just a ramble about my life, and that's why i put it in all small letters. but it's been around forever. it holds my family. it holds most of my book just passing through: autobiography and true stories from out there...all those true stories? out there? look down in the template and you'll get most of it.

for the most part i keep my family out of it. i have ten children, so that would be worth a book of its own, but i consider their stories to be theirs, and i don't want to mix up their version and mine. better to keep my ideas about bringing them up between me and them, and let them get their own ideas when their time comes to bring up their own. all that is in another realm.

on the other hand, i have a steady machine going for publication, and i operate in several genres. i've given up short stories for the time being; having about eight small volumes, i've run out of "short story" inspiration. i have a choice to make about my family stories, to start on my mom's side while I'm still deep in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, or go charging forward with my dad's side, into the nineteen hundreds and past the pandemic of 1918. I don't really know how my family dealt with that pandemic, or if they lost anyone, or how it affected towns like council bluffs or ames or wherever my grandparents were. anyway with them i'm about at 1918, and could easily keep on going with who i've got, coming into that era, but i'm still finishing the book about the civil war, and i should probably wrap that up before i move on.

i have a couple of side projects. one is to compile esl writing. the big one is to put together just passing through - i've been working on that for a long time, almost done, but life itself is so intense and bizarre that i know i'm not done. one son drove a car over the cliff the other night - and into some trees, so he lived - but that's just an example. can i wrap up a book about my life and call it finished? i'm still bringing up five kids in a pandemic. just because one is 28 and one is turning 19 in a week - technically on their own - doesn't mean i'm in the clear, and can really look back at my life. no i can't. so i'm kind of shelving that one, in favor of compiling esl writing and doing some of the other ones.

one of the things i've found is that in the non-fiction genre - historical writing about real people who were also my ancestores - there is an almost infinite wealth of rich information to dig up and share. i am actually related to a guy who was on the mayflower, and in fact one of the leaders of the pilgrims. and the pilgrims were much more hippie-ish, much more radical, than the puritans. this one guy named his kids patience, love, fear, and jonathan - i'm descended from patience - and i want to do a book about just her, and call it patience. i want to know how people at the time saw the difference - and why for example one would move to plymouth or scituate, or one of those cape towns, up to boston, or the other direction. did they see one as more liberal? or less? or more prosperous?

one of the books which i've actually done research on is powder rock - this is a place just west of boston where a lot of my ancestors ended up in about 1750. they put a powder house up on this rock overlooking dedham and the upper charles river, because they felt they might have to defend the river valley from the occupying brits who came by, soldiers who were rude and took what they wanted. this was a large and beautiful natural promontory up on the edge of the river, near what is today dedham, and the area was quickly developing. the massachusett were rapidly disappearing.

there are a couple more. thirteen altogether. these are things i really want to do, too; they include the big one, vowels in an elevator, which is about language as a self-organizing system.

but back to marketing - the picture is bleak. i don't sell a whole lot. maybe i'm kind of a backwater type writer - since i don't hire anyone to go out and market for me, all the noise i make is just a waterfall in a wide sea. or maybe it's just not good enough for people to invest big money into it. whatever the reason, i sometimes feel like i'm spinning my wheels. but i make pretty books - and i'm continuing to crank them out. whatever else is happening, that's what i have to show.