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.