i've decided to applying myself to marketing the same way i apply myself to writing - with a kind of random but totally focused burst of energy. random in the sense that if i were really trying to build the whole thing up gradually and steadily, i'd have been doing this all along.

i went back and took a hard look at my blogs. here i get hundreds of visitors every month - over a thousand on this site - and I'm just spewing here. i'm a writer and my blog links to absolutely everything i do, but the words, all in small letters, are just whatever i'm thinking at the moment. and yet, you look for a way to get people to notice you, a thousand hits a month isn't a bad start.

of course the non-commercial nature of the blogs is part of their draw. they just collect information, for me, and so are kind of repositories of certain kinds of information. some i've let go for about five years. and they're still getting fifty or a hundred views a month, just because they're there, they're useful, they're in the right place at the right time. but if it takes a thousand views to get one hit, and a thousand hits to make one sale, might as well start in with the views. i have well over a thousand on this blog alone.

a i started this blog with the purpose of practicing my writing in a constant state of present relaxedness - practice practice practice, noticing, putting everything in words - and it's all here, my whole life, family pictures, everything. eventually i added the links on the side. and the pictures. and kept track of the stories. i advertise my books; it isn't enough. i don't write enough of them, and i'm not done. but these blogs are where my life is. i can give you a report, but let me just say, follow the links, and you'll see what i've been up to.

so my relatives got out to quincy illinois in 1834, just when steamboats were getting serious and the railroads were getting out to the mississippi and pushing out to the missouri and beyond. the railroads were competing with the steamboats and were winning because they could build lines straight west, whereas the missouri set you up in the dakotas and montana and that wasn't as good. when pike's peak happened it was all about colorado. but my relatives ended up in the southeast corner of nebraska, and when my great-great grandfather got his wife and kid to come out from warren illinois, they took both - steamboat from warren to quincy, down the river; train from hannibal to st. jo., and then steamboat again up the river, from st. jo. to rulo nebraska. you'd never know there was a rulo, nebraska, but apparently you got off there and went eighteen miles west, by horse again, to get to where they were.

the problem was, their first baby died immediately after arriving in nebraska, in the summer of 1849. the civil war was just starting. it was a wild town. but here they were, burying their kid out on the prairie, and blaming themselves, i suppose, for putting her on all that public transportation where she could have picked up something.

in the end you can't help these things. that's why everyone is going on living their lives - because at some point, disease is just going to take some of us. the great-great-grandfather himself, he'd grown up with a brother, one year older, but at the age of about 23, that older brother took a steam boat up to st. paul and got cholera. it was fatal, those days. he knew it was all over.

mark twain lost a brother, too. i went and dug up the whole story. first, he got the younger brother a job on his boat, a steam boat called the pennsylvania. then he got into a fight with the captain - the captain was about to beat a kid with a large chunk of coal, and he clobbered the guy with a chair. the guy was the captain, so he pretty much knew his time was limited. he corrected the captain's grammar as the captain was chewing him out. out on the curb, talking to his brother, they mused about life and growing up together. but the brother got back on the pennsylvania, and its boiler exploded a few days later. everyone dead and injured; the brother was both. Mark Twain saw his brother die and never forgot it.

my great great grandfather had both those things happen - lost a baby, and lost a brother. i can only imagine. he still managed to raise six, though, and they were all ok in the end. one of them was my great grandfather, who now is only four steps above me. this guy too is an interesting character. as are all of them, i presume.