My box of gratitude journals should arrive any day now. I’m very much looking forward to getting them.

There are several local people I want to give them to as holiday gifts, since I don’t have enough income to get anyone anything else this year.

I have $4.91 in checking and a little over $100 in savings to carry me through the rest of this month. That’s how slim the pickings are right now. So, yeah, the only gift-giving I’ll be doing this year (darn little of it) is book-giving (by request ONLY). I have several copies of each of my titles in my library cabinet, so the outlay to get them has already been made. I can’t afford to mail them to people farther afield, though.

I have another journal with DeForest Kelley quotes to publish which I wrote two years ago, but unless I get some commitments that they will be bought, it’s on the back burner. I just took a look at it again, and it’s really terrific, I think.

(Dang!)  Seeing something I wrote so long ago allows me to see it with fresh eyes and really gauge its quality.  I think it’s a winner! But then, I never release any book unless I think it’s a winner plus an addition to the common good.  But when so few people actually buy them, it’s disconcerting as hell.  Makes me feel (oh so briefly), “Why bother?” But when I hear back from those who do read them, and see the reviews, I remember why I bother: I make most readers’ days or lives at least a little bit better/happier/wiser, that’s why!

I was born to write.  But it seems that not that many people were born to read. Which brings us back to the malaise the world is in right now.  If nobody is busy learning/reading anything new, we’re going backward as a civilization, not forward.

I have lived a thousand lives because I read books.  Too many others are missing out on one of life’s greatest pleasures: splendid teachers (writers)!