the rest of the world is gearing up, or unwinding, for a big thanksgiving tomorrow, but we've already had ours. last night we had our kids and grandkids over, an unruly mob, and had a huge thanksgiving party. there were about twenty, i think, counting my daughter's boyfriend and his younger brother, and my son-in-law's mother, and her dog, which she keeps with her at all times. our dogs were very interested in her dog - hers was a girl dog, actually smaller than my little feather, a yappy young feller who falls in love with every dog he meets. so that was one of the dramas. feather was trying to get to know this annabelle, and she was a little bit shy.

one son came down from chicago; another had flown in from new mexico and is still here. the two daughters live in brimfield, only twenty miles away, and their five girls were all here, as were our three children. lots of turkey, lots of other food, lots of noise. in general i liked it.

now of course we still have the warm glow of too much turkey, the tendency to want to nap and take it easy, a quiet kind of sloth. the dog is parked on my lap, having given up on annabelle. the weather is warmer, mild, nice outside, so really i should be giving dogs walks again, but when sloth overtakes me, mostly what i do is reading other indie books to help on my own averages - i read theirs, they read mine, sometimes reviews are involved, and it all works out pretty well. i've done a lot of reading, learned a lot, and come out with much better ratings.

my latest project, a kindle vella project, is slowly but surely turning into a novel. i have the impulse to document my eighteen years or part of it at southern illinois, at the same time i want to tell a gripping story and just have a good time writing a book. there's lots to put in there! lots happened. i have the same impulse to get it all in writing, make people know what it was like. quick before the memories start to escape me.

with a son still here, i feel the need to talk to him. but, he lived with us for years, and i rarely talked to him. he's not so much anti-social, as just easily entertained personally, without any interaction whatsoever. he does fine. i'm sure he's not mad at me for ignoring him. it's a calm afternoon, and with the weather being somewhat pleasant, i feel no need to change anything.

there will be more, though, not only tonight but also tomorrow. one never gets through the holidays without plenty of family, and i kind of like that; i get along well with the ones i have around, and they are at least comfortable coming here, soaking in the ambiance of grandma & grandpa's house. in that regard i'm lucky. i have seen lots of different arrangements, and this really is one of the best.

another saturday night, a very cold one, with a few inches of snow out there, but nothing like buffalo where it's what, six feet? or seven?

my family will undoubtedly talk about buffalo tomorrow in our zoom, because we all lived there, it's something we have in common. my older brother really only visited, and i was there only two years, but the younger two were there seven and eleven years, enough to get a sense of the place. while i was there they had a nine-footer - historic even then. this one may be nine or more before it's over.

there was a lot of lore and culture related to the massive snows they had there - most people had at least one good story. what was remarkable really was that they were used to it. the snowplow guys would get out there and tear around, and the streets would be plenty icy, and there were lots of accidents and people died from trying to shovel it. but all that was pretty much the usual - what they did under these extreme circumstances. these days, just reading about it makes me cold, and makes me not want to go outside.

as a page-read addict, i sit glued to my kindle counter (see yeah write) and tonight i'm wondering if it will inch over a hundred. those fellow authors out there know that a hundred is pretty puny and won't amount to much in terms of real money. but it's not a matter of money. it's a matter of pure addiction, watching to see if your ship comes in. it's a little arbitrary, and totally out of my control. tonight some pages came in but they were totally not the ones i expected to come in; they were for a different book. ok but i'll take what i can get. the two i was watching for might show up tonight, and be there in the morning, or might not come for a while. the question really is to what degree the addiction is hindering my daily functioning - i'm not writing anything because i'm so bound up in reading to get page-reads, that i'm slogging through stuff i don't even follow, sometimes, just to get page-reads. it should all come out in the wash, so to speak, as some of what i read is really good, and generally, it corresponds - i read a hundred, somebody out there reads at least a hundred. on an abstract level i'm doing ok - well more than a hundred a day. on a financial level, still quite poor - actual sales would be better than this piddling income. mentally, i've become a wreck. like page-reads is all there is.

kids have retreated. they're all into their own addictions. i like the food smells of the season: being indoors, having my wife start already on thanksgiving preparation; expecting many people here for the big day. the house is warm; i like walking the dogs in the cold, then coming home, sitting in my warm chair, staying out of the worst of the weather. it'll be a big traveling holiday and i'll be going to st. louis on mon. to pick up one son. hopefully it will warm up. i can only think of buffalo, and of being out there, when the drifts are going over your head.

in my chair, on a cold mid-november day, snow and ice outside. i'd listen to the song, "cold rain and snow," but i've lost enough of my hearing that i wouldn't enjoy it much. instead i am reading and writing a variety of things. my wife is impatient that i spend so much of my time in this chair, dog on my lap, in a prone position.

yet most of my business is absolutely here. i've read a huge volume of indie works, in the process of getting my own ratings up to a respectable level and having an actual readership, albeit entirely other authors. i don't know well how to widen my base, get more readers, though i'm trying other things, but that - mostly signing onto amazon ads - is also a kind of prone thing. i do it here at my chair. i see little point in going out in the snow except when absolutely necessary, like taking out the garbage, running kids around, or maybe shoveling, if it comes to that.

the house is actually quite comfortable. the recliner goes back and from here, i look at the neighbor's trees, and at a fireplace that we haven't run too much. it's got a problem, which is that its own fan blows out its little propane jets. what's up with that? i guess i'll have to find out.

i write a few experimental stories, which is good, because if it weren't for that, i'd have nothing to show for several days. if they're any good i take them off that site and save them. if they're in between or i don't know quite what to do with them, i leave them there and let them take up space. my fanatic read-marketing sometimes bogs me down. it saps my creativity and it makes me check the read sites a little too often.

somebody asked what we readers get out of all that fanatic reading and i answered them. maybe that was the wrong thing to do, late at night, because it got me thinking and that made it hard to sleep. but i shouldn't complain - comfortable chair, warm bed, enough food, nice-smelling house (lots of bread & cooking) - things could be much worse.

i will, eventually, spell out what i've learned from reading volumes of indie works on the market. it's really quite incredible, that people are cranking out so much, and that some are so successful in a very competitive world. you crank it out, someone will read it, somewhere, and if they like it, hopefully they'll keep reading. one can only hope. i like to dangle my characters over the edge of the important ledges of life, and then that kind of keeps the reader out there, staring at the abyss, and i know that's a kind of torture so in the next story i promise i'll bring them back to the mundane at least temporarily. i like to sprinkle widespread geography throughout my stories just so mundane people appear to have widely various possibilities, and are aware of them and act upon them at will, just so the reader doesn't get bored. i'm still working on the one you're looking at (probably), train yard. it's an example of a story that could be a little tighter in terms of how much information i give the reader.

cold rain and snow. dog barking outside. she's a labrador and actually likes this stuff, but she likes to bark when she's had enough of it. when a dog joins your family, it expects to have a place, right near you.

 

"school is hell," as general patton once said, or maybe i got that a little wrong, and it was about war, and i should remember that since today is veteran's day. i took my kid to school one day and said, "another day," and she said, "another day of hell," which got me thinking, it's not easy for a kid who gets teased a lot and who struggles to maintain. but it's easier in school than in war.

i got a book to read about afghanistan so am spending veteran's day reading a guy's stories about all the crazy stuff that happens way over there where nobody's watching. i shouldn't put down what they do or minimize it. war in all aspects has always been about the lowest point of human existence - we are apparently the only animal besides ants that sends large numbers of ourselves into organized wars against other large numbers of us. over in ukraine basically both sides are digging in and the result will be a depleted population on both sides to the point that there will be little left to defend the significant territory that both cover. someone will have to go in and clean the mess - restore farmlands, restore power and infrastructure, make it so towns have water, that kind of thing. it will take years and it will be a wasteland in the meantime. and every russian and ukrainian family with young people aged 16-15 will have trauma in their midst.

meanwhile i sit back here in my chair noticing that the last three of our children, all adopted, are having much more of a problem with school than any of the others. they simply are on the outside of life with all its expectations, all having conditions that make it difficult to keep up with them. whereas most people find that if they key on certain skills and abilities, they'll be able to do what the teacher wants, no problem, keep the adults happy, let them focus on what they care about the most, relations with the other kids. with our kids it's a little overwhelming to try to keep up with the rain of assignments and expectations that come down, and they soon have to choose between social life and passing. well you can guess which is winning most of the time.

it's not like there's a threat of death or being blown up or being overrun by enemy mortar fire or that kind of thing. it's a much slower, more painful kind of death, death of hope, death of any real chance for success.

happy veteran's day, everyone. thank you for your service.

covid in the house: my daughter brought it home from school one day last week; my wife got it for a couple of days, and i got it for a little longer. feeling really crummy this morning, i had my wife call in about some praxamid, or whatever that stuff is, but on the phone she alarmed the hospital with an oxygen reading of 80 and a general report of how crummy i felt, and they told her to bring me in.

so we shuffled off to the er, where i felt a little frumpy and overall more healthy than most of the people i saw there. the doctor, who could see that the low oxygen reading was simply faulty, since i was now producing good ones, didn't even check for pneumonia outside of listening and looking at me breathe. they decided i was ok and sent me packing. they have their beds full with people who are in much worse shape.

all this has made me grateful to come home and sit my chair in the gentle afternoon sun. the hallowe'en experience last night wiped us all out though my daughter, who'd had covid since like thursday, finally went back to school; now my son might have covid. My wife is feeling better. i feel like i can let her cover the urgent things and take my time getting back in the groove.

last night we felt that with the sun going down, the hallowe'en trick-or-treaters were coming out. We had two enormous bags of candy to give away that we'd got for that purpose. I was the sickest of the four of us, but with three known covid cases, we didn't know how to go about giving away the candy. finally i put it on top of the steps and sat away from it a bit so kids didn't have to walk right up to me. i didn't rake the leaves from the walk, though, so they had to brave their way across big orange leaves all over the path; this was enough to keep some of them away. still we had a steady stream until both bags were gone. likely more than a hundred or two.

it proved to me that hallowe'en is still alive and well, at least on the north side of galesburg. i'm sure we got the rest of the town's youth and quite a few from the countryside as well. i'm sure they considered this the best neighborhood because relatively nice houses are not too far apart. i'm sure that some neighbors met the challenge with major electrical displays and a spook house on their porch. but i'm also sure it was too much for others, and they had to just give up after a while because there were just too many kids.

the costumes were interesting, different from what i'm used to. the new thing to me was the blown-up dinosaurs, maybe seven feet, somewhat realistic looking balloons - also some costumes that had little lights going off in the faces. another balloon costume invovled having an alien carry a person up to the steps looking for candy. the alien is the balloon, in the back, but the feet come out the front so that the person does look like he or she is being carried.

the good thing was seeing a couple hundred, as if we had all of western illinois in our neighborhood. cars were parked up and down the street. the sidewalks were full. it was the place to be.

too bad i had covid, or i might have been able to meet a few people.