it's late afternoon, but about ten degrees outside, actually fairly typical for western illinois, i suspect. nobody seems too alarmed by it. yesterday when i walked the dogs, i slipped five times, so today, i worked on the walk a little, so we and the mail person wouldn't fall, and then i gave up, came inside, didn't walk the dogs. the sun is setting on the ten-degree neighborhood, and i'm in here typing.

i'm a little stirred up, actually. i've been spending all my time reading other people's work, and that's somewhat enjoyable, but i'm not finishing my own or in some cases not writing any of my own. there's only so much time in the day. it's always easier to read than to write. after i have my coffee, i just want to read some more. today i fixed the sink and did some cleaning but basically i wanted to read, and i did. now i'm tired; i'm not sure i'll write anything.

so it's gone for months now. no novel on the table, but three unfinished ones stalled. some rewriting happening, since i'm unhappy with some of what went out earlier. but even that's a slow process. it's not easy to pick up the clunky computer that has word.

meanwhile a heart report came in. that is, because i'm old, i'm really not supposed to be taking powerful meds. it was a relief to me, since i kind of suspected that. but it's disturbing too, a wakeup call. if you're not going to write the language book now, when will you? time to get that show on the road too.

the weather will break; it won't stay ten forever. even tomorrow will probably be warmer than today with its ten high. the sun keeps shining and the days get longer. eventually it will all thaw.

question is, how many of these seasons do i have left in me, and what am i doing about the shorter nature of each one. my time is running out.

back in illinois now, I remember how long a winter can be, with day after day of cold, somewhat snowy, blustery weather, difficult driving, people indoors going a little crazy from not going out at all. The cars you see just tend to live with problems that are more easily fixed in good weather - falling mufflers, broken taillights, that kind of thing, and the police generally let them drive around that way until spring. i have trouble motivating myself to walk the dogs, since the windy cold biting air can be unpleasant and the mushy snow and ice make walking difficult.

at home, i check the "dashboard" constantly in hopes someone somewhere is reading or buying my books. that's bleak too, as it's january, though things have been looking up in general. if looking up means going from thirty dollars to forty a month, what's the point since we spend that much just feeding teenagers over a weekend. nevertheless the only way to a better income is to keep plugging away, up through thirty and forty to perhaps higher, and the only way to do that really will be to produce more, so i might as well get back to the grind and just crank it out.

really the new year has brought a lot of self-evaluation and a little self-doubt. in this post i complain bitterly about the futility of heavy publicizing, but that's what I do, and slowly I get a little more organized even as i am sometimes flailing with what exactly i'll write, and when, and exactly how to crank out a few more products. some of my friends are in a real groove, cranking out successful novels or moving up the ladder in some kind of way; i feel somewhat mired in adhd-style scattered production, having a lot of things partly done and nothing to call finished. i am considering cranking out a quick haiku just because i can easily write about seventy haiku in a week if i have to, but that would be just to have something that i finished, something i know i can pull together and put out there.

it would also be because in general i find some interest in putting a small book of haiku, about 28 pages, in front of people and saying, "read this." it doesn't take that much of their time. they usually enjoy it. my deeper purpose, tho have a lot of my work read, will have to be teased out of the things i can get anyone to read. the only way is to have things that are good, and interesting, out front where people can find them.

the bleak gray january is turning darker as five o'clock is already upon us and my little corner in the living room is getting steadily darker, and the dog at my lap, on the armrest of my chair, has given up barking at the neighbor dog who he can no longer see and who it's pretty clear we don't care about. the dogs were making a horrible racket earlier, but all for nothing, because whatever dog was out there didn't care about them, and we didn't care much to be warned about them. it's a town. there are dogs. get over it.

but meanwhile, back in new mexico, a huge chunk of mountain came down and crashed on the main highway going up to our village, and it was a large enough chunk that it would take more than a group of worker men to remove it. and further, the question is, did it ruin the road and therefore it will require another week to rebuild or regrade it? i suspect that the entire mountain now has to be careful, and go around, on a road that goes through a couple of creeks if i recall, and winds around back in the canyons. my wife was caught back there once in a snowstorm and will never forget it. i can picture myself back in our old home, forty miles from a town with a hospital or groceries, wondering if, when that forty becomes sixty, it might be worth it to bo back the other way. they will be quite isolated for at least a month while all this gets resolved, i believe. and i'm glad i'm not part of it.
our life in town is so easy, with everything about a mile away. so easy, i almost feel guilty.

it's a restless day, i don't seem to be getting much done. it's a saturday afternoon, the house is empty except for a son holed up upstairs, and for some reason i have crickets in my ears which is my name for tinnitus, ordinarily much worse when my hearing aids are not working or out of my ears. perhaps they are not working. i haven't been hearing much either.

i have an extraordinary impulse to write the story of john the younger, an imperious president of harvard in the early 1700's, and i know plenty about him, and could probably sit down and do a fairly reasonable job just here in my chair, based on what i know. i'm coming up to his story in the rewriting of puritan leveretts but have got bogged down on some details and as usual, either you go all out and do the research, or you just figure you're not going to know everything and will have to put it down as you know it. this is my third or fourth time around on this stuff, pequot war, english civil war, oliver cromwell, restoration, hanging of the quakers, that's kind of where i am, but it draws me in like quicksand and then i can't do anything else. perhaps my impulse to write about john the younger is my youthful impatience to get all that witch-trial stuff behind me and just move on with other dirty 1700's-type details.

a couple of side notes on john the younger - he is not an ancestor, but had nine kids, of whom only two lived. those two were women and so no leveretts today claim john the younger as an ancestor. but he is still probably the best known of the leveretts, better even than his grandfather the governor, or frank the geologist, or my sister margot, or even me. he is famous. so my impulse really is partly to make a pretty good flag to put at the front of the entire operation. it would be book five of leveretts in the new world.

another thing about him is that my book eighteenth century leveretts has been interpreted as a biography of him anyway, and appears under biographies of educators in its rankings. i could make it more thoroughly about him, as he cast a huge shadow over the entire eighteenth century, but in a way i find these two cousins that went to harvard during the revolution far more interesting. they also are relatives, not ancestors, as far as i know, yet they led very interesting lives and the revolution truly stirred the pot for every family in massachusetts at that time.

i'm moving from project to project unable to settle on any given one. i've done plenty of reading, but still not quite enough, given that i've pledged out to six of them, way too many at one time, and can't seem to sink my teeth in enough to stick with one until it's finished. one is by a friend of mine, extremely well written, and even that one is hard for me to get my mind into as i've got all this puritan stuff going on and just can't relax into long sentences (her style). others i would be content to just flip the pages, as they aren't really going anywhere anyway. but i can't seem to settle. i keep thinking of this other stuff that got kindled somewhere in my mind, and it keeps me from being on a single path.

went out and picked up leaves for a while this afternoon. they'd been sitting in the front yard in piles, and now the grass is more exposed; it was looking pretty yellow when i got the leaves off of it. the leaves had placed a damp organic blanket over the whole yard; not sure if that's good or bad for it, but they're gone now. my arms got a workout, which was good, they were feeling ready to fall off for disuse.

the project you see beyond here is family pictures. deep inside this blog are pictures of my whole family. i don't label them at all but to me the whole point is that you should be able to find pictures of my family in here somewhere. so the secret to me is to make the links such that the pictures can remain unlabeled, yet will still show the astute visitor what they are looking for. it's a january project. i will work on it more as the month comes to an end.

back to the grind - six books on the table. ratings that are getting better. a few sales even. some reasons to enjoy staring at a sheet (newly updated, on saturdays) with a couple decent ratings. like i'm some kind of author.

family zoom, 1-9

 

the new year has come and gone, and a thick fog has settled on the town as the workers take down the christmas decorations from the lampposts. i went to the post office this morning to send three things: books to my sister, pamphlets to chicago, and a kind of a tool (my present) to my son, who couldn't bring it on the plane. the post office was efficient. i was in and out of there in minutes.

in galesburg the big question is whether you'll make it to the center of town without being interrupted by a train, and then, if you do, whether you'll make it back. my luck was with me. the cars around me all took their time going across the tracks - i think you do that, here. i'm a little leery because i'm only hearing out of one ear (have to go to the audiologist also, sometime today). making sure no train either way, i cross the tracks gingerly.

one is supposed to have new year's resolutions. i have many, most involving my willingness to go forward without adequate preparation or skill, for example in zoom meetings, or in sending out pamphlets. with the pamphlets there's a question of whether cardstock pamphlets can qualify as media mail; most people think so, but one post office worker in ruidoso said no, they had to be bound. i've actually brought this up with the quakers as it's kind of a moral question whether i should just go in there, say media mail, let them take it if they do, but let them refuse me if they don't. today it was no issue. media mail was cheap. they let me. it was no problem.

on the read marketing i actually backed off for a while, trying to get other things organized, like christmas, that needed tending to. i'd gotten a little obsessive about it, reading all kinds of stuff, some of which i had no real passion for, and i sometimes find myself wondering if life isn't just a little too short to be reading stuff you have no business reading. at the moment, for example, i'm reading a book about a woman who, following instruction of her husband, gets drawn into a camp of wild orgies and sexual dominance, in return someone is reading my 3487 haiku from my traveling experience. this, happening in england, is making that book hot on the haiku market in england, which is a pretty easy category to master. in other words, the mere fact that i've put my haiku out there to some degree has risen me to the top of the haiku world, both here and in england, and i enjoy having a category that i'm all over, although, no sooner do you rise to the top of it, you start your inevitable fall back into obscurity.

the town, i've come to realize, is saturated with awareness of the train - whether it's raining, foggy, whatever, people are always figuring when it will come by, and figuring how to go around it when it does. the bridges to some extent have made it all a game of going around, when, in the past, there was no going around. they're big. they're loud. they're marked with art that most of us can't understand. and they're totally ours to own and glorify in.