got jabbed yesterday afternoon, and i've had sore arms all day today, causing me to lose all my motivation and collapse in my chair, where i do minimal marketing work and don't have the motivation to do anything substantial. likewise on the house, where i swept the basement and hauled off some garbage, but did very little else. it's cold and rainy in galesburg, in spite of it's being homecoming weekend at the high school, and they had to move the pep rally inside, it was so cold and rainy. but i moved inside anyway, feeling kind of covid-ish and getting very little done.

i have done my best on my new book and it's time to face the fact that it's just not as good as i hoped. it doesn't meet rave and stunning reviews worldwide as people scoop it off the shelves. on the contrary, it will take its place among nine other collections of short stories, and be one more subject of my relentless marketing and constant attempts to get someone to pick it up. no problem, although most people would throw in the towel, i am not nearly ready to throw in the towel, although i have not been able to produce the kind of novel that would bring in that kind of acclaim. i have what i have, i do what i can do, and the world will just have to bear with me while i get reorganized and crank out something it cares about.

In fact, the fact that we sold our house in new mexico, took that huge chunk of cash, and made it disappear in lightning fashion by paying off debts like this house and the car payment, thus making our living situation easier, has made me take a deep breath and decide that now is the time to produce the things i have always wanted to produce, namely a book on my great-great grandfather (a guy born in about 1830, who served in the Civil War, and settled the plains several times), and a book about language theory. Neither of these, I expect to become best-sellers. They are on my bucket list for life, namely among the important things I want to do before I fade into a cloud of dizziness, inability to walk, etc. In a sense I'm in a hurry to finish these. I am not in a hurry to make big cash from what I write (a very difficult undertaking anyway, possibly out of my reach) so a choice has to be made.

the new book takes its place as the 27th book on my shelf, with one of them being one that i didn't actually write, but merely typed, the memoirs of another great-great grandfather. it is possible that i'll have more of these before it's over. i'm kind of into typing up old yellowed-out documents from within the genealogy files and if i find enough good material, i'll type it all up. but i could type up virtually anything that's sitting there, has demand, and is having trouble coming online with everything else. if nobody types (or scans), nothing happens, if nothing happens, it's not available. but if someone like me is in the right place at the right time, something could happen. some guy scanned all the works of plato into one volume on kindle, and he's making a fortune as we speak. he's a guy to keep track of - he's doing what i want to be doing, deciding what gets saved by being moved over into the digital world, and letting everything else go.

i fret considerably about the paperback and hardback books, worldwide and especially nationwide, that simply get left in someone's living room until they die and then nobody knows quite what to do with them so they go to a dumpster or to a local thrift store if they're lucky. one of my goals, bucket-list, visionary kind of thing, is to organize (or at least understand the organization of) the kind of safety net that's already out there for these thousands of books. thousands of people my age are dying every day and with them hundreds of books each are being lost or deposited into that in-between space where someone might read them, or find them, but most likely they will be at the bottom of some dumpster with a box of old shoes on top of them. information is being lost. old classics are disappearing into the mist.

but that bucket list is not taking precedence over the one i mentioned first. yes i'd like to save the nation's books. but first i need to promote my twenty-seven, and it's possible that in the next few years i'll need to use my books to raise some income. i haven't reached that point yet. i'm still making about thirty a month, in spite of all the read-marketing, writing and publishing i do, and that's a pitiful sum for what really amounts to a second career, a part-time job. not sure i can turn that around in my lifetime, either, if every new thing i turn out meets a lukewarm reception like this latest plate of spaghetti, and people turn their back on it for a trip to the mcdonalds of publications.