glory be, but the first came on a tuesday, which means i'm doing all my statistics. my anemic book sales, my blogs, my twitter hashtags, i'm trying to keep up on the marketing stats.

first job is to find out where the people are. there are plenty of people on twitter, but i'm not sure any of them care about my hashtags, or even my books for that matter. do people read? and if they do, do they read books? i don't thinks so. but it doesn't matter, i'll clear out what i have and start a new tack.

one possible tack is pop artist. in fact i have been doing pop art for years, and have tons of it on my computers. it overloads the computers, and if i had it in books, i could let go of it on this end.

another possible tack is biography. you write about someone's life, and you are attached to that person forever. and it could be someone who is still alive, or someone who is not. doesn't matter. millions of lives are free for the taking. you write about them, you attach yourself to their life, interesting or not. biographies actually sell, especially if you do someone like kamala harris or tom cotton. people want to read about someone's life (sometimes) and they're willing to pay.

the last option is the quaker direction. my plays are like my stories; they're online for anyone who is even looking for them, so no wonder sales are anemic. i can't really expect people to buy books that they can get otherwise. yet sometimes they do, and they like quaker things. there is a kind of quaker revival going on zoom. not sure i want to write about that since i'm in the middle of it; i'm more likely to write quaker history which is an ongoing passion.

then of course i've found things in the genealogy files. there's frank - he's the geologist who walked from ames to madison, first cousin three times removed, i like to say. there's margaret irving, daughter of a prominent family in toledo, who became my grandmother on my mother's side - i just found her scrapbook. now that's wild. and i don't quite know how to deal with it.