finished my book today; it's been a long slog. I will for sure advertise here, but I'm feeling a little hesitant at the moment because it's not quite through the mill at amazon, i.e. not available to the public yet. it's finished; it's in; i'm celebrating.

it is basically a biography of my great grandmother, a performance poet of the late nineteenth century. poetry was different then, so i put in a lot of poems that she read, or rather, parts of poems that she read. i could almost hear her read when i did it. she was a lot more than a poetry reader, so i put all that in there too. and it has a killer picture, which i will see now every time i open my bookshelf.

i am thinking of having an online book release, though i have no idea how i'd do it. i think zoom is a good venue for such things but my zoom is still such that i can't share things on it - something deep in the permission has given no permission. so until i figure that out, i guess i won't do any such thing. i have eleven cousins - or what's left of them - who would be interested in her, since she's their great grandmother too - but i don't have all their e-mails. i'm just thinking out loud here. i want to get this book out there.

actually it has one unfinished edge to it - the index. the index is only for the paperback, but nevertheless i haven't finished it yet. in my opinion all good non-fiction books should have an index, so i intend to make one for this book. nobody says it has to be perfect, or that it can't have a little character of its own - so i give it some character. you'll find good things in an index.

the weather is gorgeous here - blue sky, warm, green coming out, dry and windy as spring always is. it snowed a couple of times and we're getting the benefit, with the green - some years there's no such thing - but what i like is the clear blue sky. my wife says, time to get out there in it, we won't be here forever. i totally agree.

the reason i call the book a slog is that basically i got bogged down in it. i was still doing research at the last minute, which is the wrong order, but i'm having trouble with that. for example i want to write the next book, with research also not done, and i really should be doing all the research first, before I write. But I have these ideas and just want to get them on paper, so that I have a kind of template to fill in the details as I pick them up.

but this is a bad order. when i was doing research at the last minute, i found things i wanted to take my time exploring, but time was out. i was sick of the thing. i was trying to get it out from under me, so i could do the next projects.

it's kind of like last year's cow poop. time to bury it, get it over with, get something good out of it, move to something fresh. and it's april, time for a month of big-time celebration. i'll celebrate by advertising constantly.