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.