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.