almost finished

my autobiography, which includes the name of this blog in its subtitle, is almost finished. ironically as of now i have said almost nothing about this blog in the text, and i have to address that issue. this blog has in fact played a huge role in my becoming a writer, and, since it goes back years and years, it is an extensive collection and almost a complete diary of my writing history.

but diaries are organized by time, not by event, and they are therefore hard to find information in, unless you are aware of the time. also i realize that i drive people crazy by using all these small letters instead of just giving in and writing like people think i should. i do that, as you know, to put my personal stamp on it and distinguish from things i want to sell in the market. this is my own personal space. and one reason this blog has made it longer than most others is that i have done it almost entirely for my own reasons as opposed to trying to get it seen, or read, or get more hits on it. i do it in order to keep writing. i do it when i have writer's block in other areas.

i should mention that it is part of a system of about forty blogs, most of them linked from the template to the side, and really i use them all for that purpose, although in general most of them have specific purposes quite separate from being a personal diary where i vent and muse about my life.

but we are nearing a time where i will be celebrating this blog as part of the publication of my autobiography, so it's time to fix up this blog a little and make it ready for celebration. it's like a wedding, or a coming-out party, but it's online. you will see this blog, dressed up and made presentable, very soon. but only if you read this blog, will you even know anything is happening.

some new covers

late at night again, and I'm out on the cool porch enjoying what has been a cool summer. the rain has let up a little. the valley is scorching as usual. but i came back from the valley - went down to el paso, to take my son to the train - and the desert, greener than usual, was also scorching as usual. you could drive on the fresh tar that was smooth but felt like it was sticking to the tires, or drive on the funky old road that felt like it would rattle the car a little. and it was a long desert. it snakes through this one town, orogrande.

orogrande is famous because it has a bar, and is the only town in that part of the desert for a hundred miles. well, one year they had a murder, and since the population fo the town is only about ten, they had a murder rate of 1/10 for that year, or even for that week. it was the highest murder rate in the world, possibly the highest ever anywere. and all because of one guy, presumably.

so i came through orogrande both ways; on the way down, we were held up a little by the fact that they were carrying some monstrous two-laned machine down the road, at a reasonable speed but still less than the 75 we could have gone if they'd picked some other day. on the way back, it was much smoother. the customs guy asked me to open my window, because he didn't believe i was alone. but i was. there was nobody hiding in the footwells of the back seat. back out into the blazing sun, i rolled into alamogordo where i finally mailed a covid test and then up the mountain and home.

the covid is really putting the pressure on people, especially on the schools, because they're well aware that one kid who walks in the door can infect the whole school, and we're sitting in a community that is maybe only half vacccinated and it's not the kids' fault if their parents are too dumb to take care of them. the school feels obliged to watch out for them, particularly if they are too young (<12) to even get one, but the school also knows that if they're unvaccinated, they'll take that covid home and get the parents, and it will indirectly be their responsibility. it's ravaging the town as we speak. it's coming around to about everyone.

i enjoy the night quiet. it's a busy time, but, i think i need a bit of mountain air to relax into it.

a nice cool night - the whole summer has been cool and very very wet. the nineteen-year-old went to college today, so his puppy is very despondent and I'm kind of hanging around keeping the puppy company. at one point i just told him, this boy will be back someday but not for a little while. you'll have to get used to him being gone.

the puppy is resilient, driven, intense - but he let me take him for a walk, nothing of course like his boy used to do, but still, along a slightly different path but much shorter, and that seems to be what the puppies need to settle in for the evening, having gotten their fresh air and their time out in the open. he is really going to miss that boy.

i've had some success in the marketing world, not so much with my novel, which was kind of a success anyway, but with my short stories. i have nine volumes of them going back over ten years, and yet i've virtually unknown in the short story world; i've barely found it, and it has definitely not found me. but i finally found a community of people who read each other's work and now quite a few people know me as a short story writer. i've shown maybe half or more of my collections - and since people are reading them, they now have much better ratings. best yet, if feel like i have at least some recognition as a short story writer. before this, almost nothing.

through talking wuth friends, i've become more convinced that we're in sever trouble on this earth. places with fires, other places with floods, there just seems to be calamity around every corner. on that note i leave you, because of course i write, and even that doesn't amount to much, and if people threw the earth out of whack it's getting a little too late for me to do anything about it. notice, that's what i'll do. point it out. the way i put it tends to make people a little divided. but hey, let's just say that if the system didn't keep cheating popular-vote winners, we wouldn't be in this kind of fix. chou

the rain is pounding us. it's been coming down for about two months, more than double or triple what we usually get in a whole year. it washes down into the gullies and washes and down to the rivers - probably even the rio grande has water in it by now.

i see the rain a little differently from most people around here. they're used to it dry - a year or two without it, and they're still here, hanging on, not eating from a garden, maybe, but still eating, beef jerky or elk jerky or beans. they're tough. they can go years without water, but they aren't crazy about it when there's too much of it. in a place with bad soil or no soil, there's nowhere for the water to go, and that's trouble.

i feel like telling about my southern illinois days - about how the mighty mississippi would rise up and take whole towns and wash them down to new orleans. and about how this other river, called the big muddy - although that's what the mississippi itself was often called, informally - well this river did quite a bit of damage of its own. our tiny little county seat, murphysboro - was right on that big muddy river and it would get cleaned out. and i wanted to say that flood could be worse than fire - because when you have a couple feet of water on your floor, it's mostly mud and muck and every other foul thing. there's no cleaning it adequately, you might as well start over.

but i still remember the rain as a refreshing thing - it cleanses your soul, it takes dirt and grime that's been there for weeks, and washes it all down the way, like the laundry. when it's over things grow. the water is going back where it belongs - deep underground - where if we're not too greedy we'll leave some of there and stop fighting over it. i myself am glad that the earth is fighting back - as if it has taken it upon itself to deliver karma to every municipality that has abused it, one at a time. we have tried not to abuse it, but I'm not sure it agrees. we will probably not get washed away like murphysboro.

i like to say the spring behind my house is the seventeenth spring. our neighborhood is called sixteen springs, but i can hardly keep track of the springs around here, let alone know how many there really are. one neighbor says she has two, and they both have water this year, for the first time in years, and another neighbor says they have a spring too and it too came back. my spring, the seventeenth, comes out of the dry mountains and it has never come back. although maybe with all this rain, it will.

i've become obsessed with book marketing and ratings. i've been trying to keep those ratings real low by getting people to read the books. it's an interesting calculation. you watch the numbers amazon gives you for the success of your book, and anything under a million, i consider that success right off the bat. but it's not that simple, because they change every day, losing sometimes as much as five or six hundred thousand a week. you can't rest, or your books will sink in the charts.

the folks around here aren't big readers - i could go on doing this for quite a while, and they'd be none the wiser - although probably if you told them there was an author in their presence, they would take a shine to that. my overall impression is that it would be good to leave them in peace. covid is about to descend on their peaceful, mask-resistant environment, and it will probably pick up a few victims based on what we know of the variants going around. what happens is, if you have a community that sticks together, and agrees to shun vaccines, and where everyone gets together a lot, well, they're kind of doomed. the covid will get them.

and that's what's new from the mountain - nothing much. but i'll let you know the minute i hear anything.

it's late at night, cool and dark, eli's puppy is waiting for him; maybe he's in the shower. some cicadas have arrived to southeast new mexico, maybe, but it's already gotten cooler, with the rainy season, and they won't have much of a run way up here where it's 7300 feet. nevertheless they make us, me and eli's puppy, feel like we're not alone. it's a busy night out there in all kinds of ways.

one is just that it's saturday night. around here that means i can stay up late working on my writing, but now i'm tired, as often happens late at night when i finally have time, and that means i will more likely not be able to do serious writing but rather do this, or stats, or some such thing. i keep working on it even when i'm tired but i don't force myself to do something when i'm too tired. i'm also almost done with my autobiography, so in a sense i'm dying to get it finished and get it out there, but still late at night, like now (after eleven), for me to try to work on it will just be too much. so i don't.

speaking of that autobiography, though, it's based partly on this blog and even has this blog in the title. "Just Passing Through: Autobiography and true stories from out there, is its title, and it should be out this week sometime. i am right now deciding whether to put pictures in it; i've never been vain, but what's an autobiography without pictures? not sure what i'll do about that.

i am rewriting the japan chapter now - that means i am at 37 out of 99, almost halfway through the stories. the end is near. i will have a book soon.

some people say you shouldn't write an autobiography unless you're famous. but i've redefined famous in several ways. one is that nobody knows what will happen after you die, so you should write one anyway. but another is that your relative fame over time is really going to depend on your descendants, if you have any, who will always be interested in your life, or to be more accurate at some point might be interested in your life. None of my kids or grandkids are interested at the moment, or at least, maybe i will find out if they are, because if they are, they will ask for my book. but for the most part, they aren't reading too many of my books. they just aren't into reading about ancestors, or old times, that much. you have to have a proclivity to read that kind of thing.

my autobiography is actually kind of lively, like the novel; it has some wild things that i did that most people don't get to do. it's not like the historical books about the family that i've been cranking out - still, i've run up against this problem that a lot of people simply aren't reading much at all. it's not that they like other stuff better than they like my stuff. it's more that they don't read any stuff, and may never again. it's not a reading-rich environment. modern america, and people are finding it harder to read, not easier. schools are losing their grip. kids are going off into reality with fewer skills and no enjoyment of it. that's a gradual decline really - not true for everyone - but for the nation as a whole, our collective reading skill is slipping a lot these days, with the pandemic and people just not doing as much of it as they used to.

i myself worry about getting too absorbed in reading. i check this one site fanatically and then make a deal - you read my book (x pages), i'll read yours (x +/- y pages) I end up reading like crazy and hoping to see someone giving my ratings a boost by reading mine. i slavishly check the ratings - sometimes every hour - to see if any of their work has shown up. i work on getting better ratings - they'd slumped for a while as i'd virtually given up.

the problem is, i have over thirty books - i can't keep all of their ratings up. it's overwhelming, and i give up sometimes for weeks at a time. they slip by the thousands every day. fortunately my standards are low - ratings under a couple million, i still consider good, and all of them look better than they used to, so i feel like i'm getting somewhere. people are reading my books, slowly, and my star is rising. but the question is what is it doing to my life? am i not going for walks, working on the yard, being outside as much? definitely, i'm not. i'm hoping to maintain a healthy balance even with this active addiction/obsession going on - not easy.

the autobiography is wild - i'll warn you right now. it starts out right here at this blog (check template) where, if you've been checking in, i'm sure you know a few of my stories. i'll tell more. i'll have a party. i'll celebrate the release of this autobiography. it'll all happen soon, and it'll happen here. stay posted!

so i was on a roll, having finished frank's biography, which was a complex and difficult task, but, having the euphoria of finishing and producing a book, i thought i'd finish my autobiography, which is about 95% done anyway, by the way. finishing two in quick succession - how exciting!

but immersing myself in my own life, especially as it developed over the years, was kind of jarring, and now i know why i keep setting it down for indefinite periods of time. now by the way, its setup is this: fifty of them, the evens, go through my life in order with roughy fifty places i've lived over the years. it just goes in order, but, keep in mind that i'd lived in like forty places before i was even twenty-five, so if you look at it like that, it's a little heavy on me as a youth, and i have to spread out the more substantive stuff that i did, after i lived in a single place for like five years in a row.

but then the odd numbers are true stories, and many of them are here (see template), and that's why it's called just passing through: autobiography and true stories from out there, so this very blog will play a starring role, because as you see as you scroll down, it's been around the block, and holds a lot of good stories.

it's actually an amazing blog, holding everything that it does, but one thing about blogs is, how are you going to know what happened in some given month of some given year? it's impossible to find anything in here unless you make a directory or something that will help somebody find something. it's quite a challenge. but i'm going to celebrate it anyway, especially if i manage to finish this autobiography.

so i got sidetracked into marketing, and that's intense as usual, and involves me reading lots of books and people reading mine.

in general they like mine; i can tell; i'm getting some return sales whereby if someone tells everyone they have to just buy my book, they just do it. i can tell i have a slightly better image in iowa city because of the few people who have read it and actually said to each other, yes, that was a good book, an iowa city book. people are reading it and they seem to be giving it good reviews too, so that makes me feel good. all i have to do is write another - easier said than done.

of course nobody seems to want to read about my first cousin three times removed, but you know what, that's ok, what's important is that i have it all in book form, kind of like making my amazon dashboard my own personal attic. it's my legacy, what i'm passing along, good condition or bad, that's the attic for ya.

got an unusual number of hits this month, especially here. whereas i might get a thousand in a month, all of a sudden i'm getting seven thousand. what's up with that? some sudden fame. maybe blogger put me on the carousel, which i think is a random benefit and gives you suddenly hundreds of hits from out of nowhere. in my case i think they scrolled down and clicked on my other blogs too, because some of them went from like twenty to eight hundred a month, no special reason, the best i can figure they're just clicking on the blogs in the template. or maybe the little squares. they like those, so they go through them, and we're talking hundreds of people here, because all of my blogs are getting hundreds of extra, new hits. seven, eight hundred more than usual. it's amazing.

or maybe i'm being investigated, and the blog division is all looking into my nefarious activities.

i say that last sentence in jest. marketing, that's all i'm doing.