exhausted from moving - it's been a long slog, with box after box coming from storage over to our new house in the center of galesburg - this particular move, from storage to town, is only about three miles, but we moved also from monmouth (about fifteen miles) and beyond that, from new mexico. so it's been a summer of moving, constantly picking up boxes of junk and getting them where they're going.

my relentless marketing isn't amounting to much, although i now have a readership that i never had before. in other words, i slogged away writing for ten years, just dropping stuff in the amazon sea, and now, when i write something, people read it. sure, most of those people are authors, my friends, who are engaged in read-trading for mutual benefit. but on one level, it doesn't matter. i write, they read, i have an audience. i have ratings, too. i'm working on getting the paperback ratings out of the clouds now.

galesburg is a wonderful town, very illinois and a little rough at the edges. it has trains going through it in all directions, and they disrupt you almost wherever you go, unless you stay on the very big streets which apparently got bridges a few years back; in other words, it used to be worse. you get stopped a lot. you sometimes watch a precession of flat cars go by, with graffiti (sp?) on the flat part, various tags from around the world. these trains could be going anywhere; some are long. but i like that - i'm no longer in a hurry.

the illinois steamy weather also is a little excessive. today i might have gotten heat stroke; in any case, i had to stop and rest, drink stuff, get in out of the heat. i have one more load; naturally it has a monster in it, but then i'll be done bringing it here. all i'll have to do is distribute it within the house.

my marketing has slipped, maybe because it was somewhat without results anyway. time to get back, at least to the blogs, and recover what i had going. i'm going to make galeburg blogs - hardknox by name, you heard it first here. look for it. it'll have lots of train pictures.

back to Illinois

we've been happy in monmouth, so much so that the older boy doesn't want to move to the larger town; i also am content to hang around in a house that's way too small, in a village that's also small but just right for me, where everyone knows us already and we have at least established a presence that they're used to. our four dogs and two cats have to adjust and the neighbor dogs adjust to them, but that's already happened. i've increased my walk routes so that three of the four get a mile or more, which means i get four miles sometimes. i've arranged my walk routes according to the berry bushes, as opposed to according to beautiful old houses that i was feasting my eyes on. the weather is very typical illinois - hot and muggy, well muggy some of the time.

the sun is going down on a fourth of july. firecrackers can be heard around town, and soon the village will probably have its own fireworks. we were going to go into galesburg, the larger town, for theirs, but nobody seems to be in much of a hurry to go anywhere. instead i'm watching the sun go down on another independence day.

i find myself unable to really sink my teeth into my creative projects, even when my wife is gone. i have several - a kindle vella project, a quaker play about george fox, a novel about texas, and a string of short stories that is now over fifteen, but needs to be maybe twenty-five. i should be able to write a short story, eh? for many years no matter how busy i was i could come home and write a short story if i set my mind to it and got nine volumes of them that way, just conjuring them up during a busy day and pulling them together at night. now i'm spent, can't seem to come up with more very easily. instead. i stall and read others' novels as a way of read marketing, which is good for my ratings, but bad for my creative juices. right now i'm reading about vampires, not especially enthusiastic about it, and feeling just too drained to start writing a story.

the reading has given me a nice wide view of what's out there, but it's become a little limited in the sense that it doesn't take long before you've read everything out there, everything on the market so to speak, and it also doesn't take long to lose patience with either the content (way too much romance out there - this vampire one is actually a romance) or the horrible writing. Most people are decent writers, tell a good story, know from a comma and all, but I still have limited patience with stuff I ordinarily wouldn't read anyway. it has helped my ratings though - all my books are below three thousand now (all the short stories, which i care most about, but also the novel and the five family non-fictions). Other authors surprisingly like the family-related non-fiction. It's as if they too are sick of the sappy fiction romance. I'm surprised to see the Leveretts and my great grandmother hae such good ratings but I have to admit I enjoy telling everyone about them and the times they lived in. for some reason they are like me - the more they write the more they are attracted to the plain hard truth.

I think i'll like living in these small towns. it's like someone told me a long time ago - there's not much to see, but what you hear makes up for it. I've feasted on the old houses - there are quite a few beautiful ones in the area, built by the old railroad barons maybe - but it being a small town and all, it doesn't take long before you've seen each one a hundred times and it doesn't look so special anymore. But the berries are ripe and delicious, and nobody seems to mind if I take a few as I bring my dog around one more time.

it's fourth of july eve, or third of july, and firecrackers are going off all around our town, which tonight is monmouth illinois. a somewhat typical small town in that people don't have a whole lot to do so people load up on firecrackers and can't wait to start setting them off. it upsets the dogs of course. i was waiting outside this house in my car, and an enormous blast rocked the neighborhood; it took me a while to figure out that it was a firecracker. even now i'm wondering if maybe it was a gun.

a good half of the country is agonizing over an abrasive feeling of having the country taken over by the fascist wing of unjustified power represented by the supreme court and its intention to roll back years of progress in equality and women's rights. some are boycotting all celebrations just for that reason alone. i myself am uncomfortable with the symbolic essence of fireworks, which seems to say, violence is what this country is all about, but since it's mostly just a color display, i'll probably take at least one kid to the public fireworks display anyway. it's what you do. these small towns, there isn't much else.

not that that justifies it. sometimes i just want to take a deliberate quakerly approach and say, if we don't like symbolizing independence with violence, let's find something else to do. my wife says it's all about food - barbecue chicken, that kind of thing, and that's why we're cooking up a big thing. there are two other things that always fall on the fourth though, an annual quaker gathering and the rainbow gathering.

i have never actually been to the quaker one. it's in virginia this year; i can never leave the fam for a whole week and haven't yet been able to get them to come along for a week. as for the rainbows, i used to go to those, or did at least once, to the big one, but what i'd have to do is drop every responsibility and just shoot out to colorado for about a week. sounds like fun, yes, but eventually i'd have to come home.

a little whimsical dreaming about the vast expanses of countryside out there - and how most of it is only accessible if you have plenty of money. we've been living on credit cards already, no sense getting further extended. aaaach. fireworks is it, for entertainment.