i'm a little depressed on the keep-reading front. the reading is ok; i've found some pretty good books, and have a few more piled up; i even have a WWII habit developing as that is an era that has kind of swallowed me up. yet the reading is tiring, slogging even; the weather is good, and i want to garden and do some other things, and it seems like the reading is tying me down.

it has helped me with my ratings. some of my friends out there in the author world actually buy my books, which is something i rarely do for them, and the actual sales count a lot more than just the reads, which are down to like a third of a penny per page. nobody even counts pennies these days, you find them on the street, even up to quarters, and people aren't concerned about them, they keep asking at the store if they can just keep them and give them to some charity since they're so inconsequential. but i'm a writer, i count third-of-a-pennies, because i badly want someone, anyone, to be reading my work at all times. and i've become so obsessed with that that i no longer produce any work.

the latest thing i produced, almost finished, is a play about a quaker bible that was written in the early 1700's. it came along at just the right time for several reasons. one, i'm bogged down on the story of john leverett, who also lived in the early 1700s, and this gives a different view of that era, an era when people cared a lot about language and began to produce interesting literature. second, it's perfect for a book of quaker plays that now has fox and naylor, but nothing between them and the later eras. and finally, it's up my alley as i'm interested in the art of translation and proper expression of ideas, and it shows a little of the problems in accepting one version of the bible as the absolute truth.

the guy who wrote it, anthony purver, was undoubtedly a quaker, grew up in a quaker community, was taught of the scriptures as one would be taught in the early 1700s. i liked his diligence in trying to get to the bottom of the translations, trying to express everything correctly. apparently his version is scorned by biblical scholars for being indirect and inelegant, but they point out its value in offering a different perspective and explaining why certain language was even then obsolete. he explained everything he did in copious notes about the process of translating. the problem was, people who buy bibles want assurance that it's the absolute truth, not notes on why what you put there is better than another way of putting it. scholars might be wanting to look at it from different angles, but the average bible consumer wants only one very clear angle.

i have two novels that are not quite being finished. of those, the one on texas would be the most fun to market and get out there. i'm getting hungry to market something new as i've been pushing the same-old same old around for a little too long, and i've gotten so into marketing that i've been unable to actually finish anything new. my problem with novels - there's actually a third one too - is that though they are the sexiest, most recognizable, they also need to be well planned. and i've become a little careless with the planning. careless, and just plain impatient with pulling fiction out of the air.

another saturday. i mowed, and now i'm drinking blonde coffee. oh well.

saturday morning, and i'm hearing crickets (tinnitus) even though i have my hearing aids on. the hearing aids make almost anything much louder, so any street noise takes over and i forget about the tinnitus, but this morning, no street noise. no other noise. no house noise. just crickets.

there are sales in the neighborhood, but on my way up broad i saw this totally mangled car; somebody had really plowed into its back corner. i slowed down and tried to figure out whether it had happened on broad but it didn't seem like it, because there was no other glass around and it was properly parked. i'm still a little amazed that anyone could flip a car on broad but they did so now i'm a little wary. broad is just a brick street, room to park on the edges, and in my humble opinion thirty is a pretty good limit for it and one shouldn't push it. maybe you flip by trying to flip, or running up on your side tires just for the sport of it, i don't know. in the case of this mangled car, it was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time, being mangled in back and all. somebody is out a car.

my garden plans are beginning to get going here; that's my weekend.

i'm tired of the whole read marketing thing. i've gotten so i want to read some world war two novels, and have them stacked up in my ku waiting for me. meanwhile i'm slogging on things i don't really like, though a few of them have been good. the admin of two of the sites ripped me off, if i'm not mistaken, and i'm having trouble getting back on the site where an admin can so casually take advantage of people. the other people on those sites are just as bad. there's one site with good and vigilant watching but it very rarely turns to things i can use. but the worst thing is that all three of my books in-creation are just sitting there while i obsess. i have to get moving on the writing angle of it and if i don't what's the point? what is there to market? i'm in kind of a slump.

the guardians are also in a slump; i've taken to keeping good track of baseball, and it's mostly because i swim. when i swim i need random pleasurable facts to integrate into my consciousness gently, gradually, and pleasantly. so keeping track of baseball gives me something to work on while i do my laps.

the pupppies are happy. they get plenty of exercise, and they assert their personalities. even with only two small ones, what we've got expands in voice and personality to fill the space. their brother and sister, the large ones, are gone but not forgotten. it's a cold spring morning, and flowers are blooming all over the place. might go check out some garage sales.

i had an unexpected success, a marketing confluence where my book e pluribus haiku anthology unexpected reached #8 for a few hours this afternoon. i noticed, and quick put it on twitter and facebook and all the places i might brag to someone. but then i noticed that chat gpt had written #4.

quick i downloaded it, and noticed that for the most part it was crap. a few times the computer strung together some images, so one could call it poetry, because if you read it and don't know that a computer just pulled the words out of the air, you still get the same images, right? it brought up issues about what haiku is, because of course the computer doesn't know from syllables, or rhymes, or a good sound, or anything. so i'm one of many who will read it and say, this computer doesn't know crap. but here it was at #4, two years and two months after it was published.

i fully expected my download to kick in and make it #1 when i checked again tonight at about seven. Instead, it was now #13 and mine was #14. oh goody, i thought, they'll travel through the lists together. but in fact if one downloads it at two in the afternoon it will take three or four hours for amazon to give it credit and bump it up. so after about an hour, in which i wrote this post about it, i checked again. and now, this book, autonomous haiku machine, was #11 while mine was #18. it had now received its bump from my download, and moved up as a result two places, where mine had moved down four by virtue of not having any new downloads. i can expect it to move down four every hour or two until the dust settles, i guess.

you can tell by my post that i'm not crazy about the book. i'm curious, though, about chat gpt in general and the worlds we live in - of poetry, short stories, novels, and history - what happens when chat gpt fills up all these #11 slots and people really don't know who wrote it? or care? this particular book, chat gpt is even in the title, you have to try hard not to figure it out. but it's interesting that slowly, it will worm its way into our world.

just read a book so good it blew the other stuff i read right out of the water.

the book was called the last orphan and was historical fiction. it made me seriously reconsider all the agonizing i've been doing about genre. it was so good. it made me want to write historical fiction.

in brief, it was based on a true event in the early 1800s in which mormons set upon a stagecoach party and killed everyone but eighteen kids. they gave out the eighteen kids to people in the community telling them that they died in an indian raid and to keep their mouths shut and just raise the kids for a few years. two or three years later the government came around seeking the kids and got seventeen of them. the book tells a story about the eighteenth. i find it interesting that in reality there was an eighteenth out there.

one of the best things about the book was that it had a lot of dialogue. the dialogue was all in there for a purpose, and was very realistic. the woman from arkansas had a lot of arkansas expressions and it was, as far as i could tell, all very realistic. this alone would take a lot of research.

the guy appears to have done it himself; he hasn't written a whole lot of others; he is a fallen-away mormon but, though most mormons are bad-guys in this story, he's not entirely slanderous to the mormon church. in other words, he handles a sensitive subject well. many mormons may not agree, of course. but history is history. he doesn't seem to have made them worse than they were.

it was so good, i haven't even reviewed it yet. but i will. one has to help out an author like that.