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...