it's friday night and i'm exhausted. these days a week is five days of school; several people are involved, one of whom i have to drive three miles to pick up. that one doesn't always go to school, but he always goes to work, so there's no shortage of rides happening all over the place. fortunately our cars are running well.

not much longer, i like to think. they are getting older, and scattering to the winds. we are getting older, and increasingly unable to keep up this pace our eight-year-old will probably go with her aunt in indiana. our seventeen-year-old, who knows. one seventeen-year-old is about to graduate, he also will likely scatter to the winds. they just won't be around.

i made up my mind to be there for them to the bitter end. let my wife decide when enough is enough (though it clearly is; we are arguing about #11 and #12 here, and there are a few more). crucial for me is keeping my legs and ankles so i can keep coming up and down the steps. driving is not a problem for me but my wife reports severe back pain when she drives too much, and she makes me do all of it. we're just too old.

but the good news, and to me this is great news, is that i'm in a groove with my writing. just produced a book, a fairly substantial one, in about sixteen days. it will take another four or five before i publish it. but that was really cranking! i kind of put everything else aside. i didn't publicize the other one, published on the 13th, very heavily. it was like i just had a good idea and ran with it, and kept running. it ran me all the way to the end, and now i just have some tweaking, and formatting. done!

it's a folktale, told by a grandfather to a kid. the kid is of indeterminate age but sets the stage and hopefully peoplle will know: this isn't the steamy variety. people get together, people do it, but that's not what it's really about. and so, once again, i feel like i haven't quite fulfilled my promise to write a steamy 18th century fantasy roomance retelling of Beauty in the Beast, though i doo have a romance, and have some fantasy, and this time anyway, have the eighteenth century.

more later...

Be Our Guest

Be Our Guest
A retelling of Beauty and the Beast

Now available on Amazon:
Paperback $7.39 + shipping
Kindle $2.99
Free on Kindle Unlimited
(paperback link not working temporarily for some reason)

This tale is part of the Global Beasts Series in which every book features a different country. This one is set in Thailand, against the government shutdown of Tiger Temple, a famous tourist theme park in Kanchanaburi. It's a tale as old as time, but it can be seen in many ways, with a wide variety of characters. The original tale was written in 1740, and this one brings the original to light against the traditional ideas of karma, reincarnation, and animism that have been in Thailand since before Buddhism ever arrived.

i feel an enormous sense of relief. today, as i've finally finished my folk tale, Be Our Guest, and run it in the amazon kindle machine, where it should be published shortly. it's possible that it will run up against copyright infringement, since i borrowed song lyrics freely, but to me that is fair game - even the title of the book is a song title, but though i'm borrowing the feeling of the song, and using it with all the associations it has for most people, i see it more as a cultural icon, like saying the word imagine. is this not just part of the culture we share? should i get disney's permission to print one of these lyrics (not to mention, about 22 lines more or less). i decided it wasn't necessary. i might have been wrong. in that case, i'll write them right out of the book.

given that the book took months to write, and that it was an enromous ordeal, and that it put me months behind in house projects not to mention other things i've been trying to write - well, all this leads up to the idea that i need to take a little break. maybe not, in the big picture, a break from writing, but more a break from my usual routine. i have done absolutely no marketing in a while, except to respond to comments on the author train which are essentially i-read-one-someone-reads-mine. these are good for me because i spend a lot of time out there waiting for one boy or another, with my phone; i like indie writing; i get ideas from the variety of things out there. it is bad in the sense that it detracts from the projects mentioned above. my total final basic time to write is actually quite limited. i am now figuring out how to allot time better, so that i can do distractable things when i'm likely to be distracted, and undistractable (if there is such a word) - my most precious time - in carefully planned little blocks early in the morning, etc. the problem of course is that i'm not always at my best early in the morning. and also, that i tend to get distracted even when i think i won't.

in some ways i'm disappointed by the latest book. i didn't have the guts to throw myself full-fledged into the many-lovers or LGBTQ trends. I have a really good friend who writes a lot of mixes - fairies have power, yet are gay, etc., and i've read some reverse-harem romances that one could say are at the cutting edge of the genre. you have powers, magic, a coven, lots of steamy sex, empowered women, and soomehow of all their men lovers, some of whom are shifters, none of them ever get jealous. well, that's a fantasy, as one of my characters pointed out. i actually had a main character who wrote shifter novels. it was fun - i like including writers with all their angst - but i just couldn't bring myself to write in that direction with my own folk tale. i had too many other things to say.

i think karma and reincarnation are important topics, so i said my piece about them, or at least had my characters do it. the one liberty i took was that the main characters always understood whatever the animals said. i consider this not so much to be magic, but rather just to be a case of heightened sensitivity, which we all could cultivate if we really wanted to. at one point a monkey berates a guy for behaving in a certain way when he's married. what does a monkey care about marriage? i'm kind of laughing at the traditions here, even without blatantly going against them, but i'm not sure if the amazon censors will pick up on this or not. in fact, i'm fairly strongly doubtful about the whole project altogether. but hey, if it passes through the bowels of their censoring machine, you'll see it here. soon. and on many of these 29 blogs.

saturday morning and the cool air has energized me as it usually does. cool, fresh, fall is coming, time to clean out garage and basement. quick! things might happen.

one thing i like about my wife is that she's not going to hang around not doing anything about a problem or bad situation. if something has to change, she'll set about to doing it, and it'll get done. no moss growing on these rolling stones.

but projects are backing up: mowing and mowing battery, clean-out, trimming prolific weeds and bushes, lots of things online. i keep track of the blogs and my dismal sales and that always reminds me of how much i have to do online - i sit here every day, and often it's so overwhelming i just slip into online boggle out of sheer tiredness. Likewise the cars are coming back to earth and I'm not quite maintaining them adequately, not to mention doing anything about garage and basement. She's thinking: get it out of here!

now that the weather has cooled off, i've lost my excuse.