a kind of milestone for me, two books published in the same month. the first was my novel, an enormous occasion in my mind, as i'd been trying to finish a novel for forty-some years. this second one is the third in a series of non-fiction books about my family (see post below this); it's called Pioneer Leveretts & the 1600-mile journey; and it pulls together everything i know about a family legend (true) of a 1600-mile stagecoach trip from maine to illinois.

the more you read about the early 1800's, the more you realize this is just how they lived back then. they were proud of these two horses that got them all the way, all 1600 miles. on their stagecoach they had literally everything they owned: cookstove, spinning wheel, tools, cooking implements, enough beds for mother, father, and three boys 5, 4 and 2. that four-year-old was my great great grandfather. the two horses, so faithful 1600 miles faithful, died soon after arriving in quincy. for one thing, it was an illinois winter. also, there was a cholera epidemic that took 6% of quincy in that very year.

so i had a lot of fun finding the facts, and as in all of these books, i don't consider myself done yet. i'm done enough to get it out there and see how people feel. but all three books - and i now know it will be six or seven before it's finished - are unfinished, really. getting them up on amazon is a way of getting them off of my hands.

and off of my computers, which keep breaking and failing, and / or being needed by family members.

Pioneer Leveretts & the 1600-mile journey

$5.99 in paperback on Amazon
$3.99 on Kindle
Free on Kindle Unlimited

Part of the Leveretts in the New World series

OK I admit this is for my family, as it's about my great great great grandfather. A legend was always told in our family about a 1600-mile stagecoach journey from Maine to Illinois, and I finally found enough information about it to put it in a book. That journey was in 1834, so this book starts at the beginning of the 1800's and moves right up through the Civil War. It is third in a series. I am finding it extremely interesting that truth, sometimes, is way cooler than fiction, and, it's true. Enjoy!

ah, the retired life. what i have done is to put a lot of energy into writing, and it's just a natural product of having a little time, and kids growing old enough to want to be in the other room playing internet themselves. they are now all over eleven, so they have minds of their own, and something like forty-three years of active parenting is fading into teen parenting, which also isn't easy, but which at least allows one to write a novel.

my novel (scroll down if you're really curious) is actually a kind of success, in that a week or two later its ratings are still under a million, and people are telling me "i couldn't put it down," and things like that. i am about to put out a family-related book, third of a series, but am thinking of writing another novel while i'm on a kind of roll.

the novel i've got my eyes on is the texas novel, which was maybe about half done before it got stalled out. it was actually my second one; my first is also stalled out, and it was my third that i actually finished and published. but the texas novel is about addiction, and family helping each other, and guns, and the pure corruption of academia. my problem really is that it's so blatantly set in lubbock that i can't help make it be about tech, and i still work for tech, so i feel some obligation to conceal the truth.

i resolved that problem with the iowa novel by simply changing all the characters so that there was nobody who even remotely resembled the real people involved. i'm not sure i can do the same for texas people in that there is only one university there, only one department, etc. i may have to do that part of a novel in some other place.

but it's ok, the novel is still only in its planning stage, even though it's half-written, and such things will solve themselves.

the marketing is busy and good. what i do is i read other people's work, and they read mine. everyone wins. i grow my audience. i read lots of cool things. i find out what's out there.

slowly, people find me and read my iowa novel. well i've been here all along. and when i get it together, i'm going to put just passing through: true stories from out there, which stars this very blog, out on the table. it's just a matter of time.

 

it's saturday morning, and it's somewhat typical weather in the mountains of south central new mexico: it's cold, and windy, and extremely dry, and everyone is scared to death about fire. actually what is not typical is that a lot of clouds are being drawn up to the north into colorado, coming from the sea down in southern mexico, and with them they will carry a lot of moisture which will become two or three feet of snow up in colorado. but here, no snow, just the appearance of clouds, which in itself is a little change.

the publication of my book came and went, and it was exhilarating. for a few days i would look at my stats and i'd actually sell stuff and it was a good feeling. it was mostly my friends and family who said, i'll buy it, and just did. it was, after all, quite cheap, and it was about something a lot of them were similarly invested in, namely time in iowa city in the seventies when we were all young and innocent. but after a few days sales died down and it went back into doldrums - i open up the stats, and not much has happened. but i'm in a groove now, i read for others, and they read mine, and i know that people are reading it out there, and i'm happy about that.

and this leads me to finish what i have on my plate, which is about five projects, two or three of them almost finished. one is a family drama of the 1600-mile journey out to illinois from maine, so i've just put that on the front burner in hopes of finishing that soonest. but the joy of writing novels and getting them out there has me wanting to finish my one on texas sooner too. it, i would say, is more like 60% done, it has a little more work to be done on it. but it's a novel; that's the attraction. i sometimes think, this novel business, it's really fun, you get to construct a whole world, and give your spin on it, and throw in crime or erotica or whatever you have to, but then you have a novel.

the family one puts me in 1834 in quincy illinois when the business of abolitionism was jut getting off the ground. this relative was a fire-and-brimstone congregationalist pastor, and when he got out there, people like elijah lovejoy (also from maine) and all these other pastors were there, saying, if you are really a christian you have to do something about this institution of slavery. the underground railroad came back up through quincy and on up to illinois and the ancestors' house, just a few miles north of quincy, was part of it, apparently. but the leveretts themselves seemed to avoid trouble since violence often followed it not too far behind, and they moved to their own place, just east of quincy, which did not seem to be an active part of this route. i can't tell exactly because a lot of records are obscured.

in the texas story you have red-dirt musicians, crime, and a hot and dusty west texas college town that everyone will recognize pretty quickly although i don't believe i'll ever tell its name. that's because basically i still work for the college and i have to be pretty careful about what i say, i think. i have a lot of things i want to say but i think i'll shake up the truth value of it a bit in the novels as i don't want anyone really confusing it with reality.

reality, though, i must say, is far wilder than fiction in any of its forms. when i ran out of stories of the wild sixties and seventies i dug back in to old puritan times and found all kinds of stuff. my own view of it is that once the gun got in the picture everything got mucked up. before guns, if someone took you prisoner and put you on a boat, all you had to do was jump off. if they didn't have a gun there was nothing they could do about it. then, after guns, they were able to hold people at bay with the guns and basically make them do whatever they wanted. it was a step down for humanity.

to the native americans who occupied the american continent when the europeans arrived, the gun and disease went hand-in-hand. here they both arrived at the same time. you'd have these big stocks of gunpowder that would blow up, or be used to shoot people indiscriminately. and then, people would just keel over dead all over the place anyway, gun or no gun, just because disease was ravaging the place and killing maybe one out of every eight or nine people. we can't really imagine how horrible that was: nowadays we shut down the whole economy for maybe one out of a hundred. but back then, smallpox was taking one out of eight, or one out of six, or even one out of five every time you turned around. and there were others. measles were deadly; a kind of dysentery had wiped out native americans before smallpox even arrived. cholera took 6% of quincy the year my ancestors arrived, and that wasn't unusual. maybe we should bring back the idea that they are related. here we are, still armed to the teeth, hundreds of years later, but the gunpowder is just sitting there, and it's disease that's doing lots of the killing.

as for my books, i have a few more. there are memoirs, they've been top-shelf for quite a while, and are in fact almost done. the system is encouraging me to finish whatever i can finish. family history has another one almost done, and a biography, of a relative not ancestor, but nevertheless one of the more interesting of people. and i'm rewriting the first two family books (puritan leveretts and eighteenth-century leveretts which were somewhat poorly written and disorganized. i am becoming more kindle-oriented because i'm reading more of my own books on kindle as i go. bad formatting, wrong fonts, etc. are beginning to irritate me. but it's only a matter of time and i'll figure out the system.

cold, clear, windy, fire season. in a pandemic with a lot of anxiety, but, having survived, i have a story to tell.

Tall Corn State

My first novel
$6.99 + shipping on Amazon
$6.00 on Kindle
on Kindle Unlimited
ACX coming

There wasn't much crime among the Actualist poets or the vegetarian restaurant people of Iowa City in 1975, but there was crime in the town around it. This is a crime and coming-of-age novel about those communities at that time.

hallelujah, i finally finished my novel. it's not that one novel took me forty-five years, but i've been trying to finish one for forty-five years, and this is the first one that went all the way to that point. i have it on kindle now and you will soon see big ads splashed all over the place for it. i am not happy with the cover and still have to work on a good cover for both kindle and book version. but it is on its way.

one of the hard things about it is that i know both friends and family will read it eventually, and it's all pretty personal including unfaithfulness, lots of marijuana, all kinds of crazy people, and in general me as a twenty-one-year-old not having a clue what i was doing. i ended up putting it all out there, not even fictionalizing a whole lot except the names of my friends, and just running with it the way it was. i like it that way because i can stick pretty much to some of the wildest things that happened in that era and i feel like i'm documenting the era pretty truly. it was a wild period of time and i think it deserved a pretty good view of it.

as the week unfolds i will do an entire ad campaign, here, on the other blogs, on facebook, everywhere. i'll even get it on instagram which is ordinarily way out of my sight, not on my radar. linked-in too. it's big, and it's worthy of telling all my friends. i'll have you know that you here on this blog are one of the first. but before it's over, everyone will know.

it's called tall corn state. keep your eye-bulbs peeled, as we say in my household. it'll be coming around soon.