So 2021 is now in the books. All things told, it was a pretty good year for me in a whole lot of ways. I saw my sixth novel published, I connected with a remarkable network of Alexander Hamilton scholars and enthusiasts in my efforts to promote the book, and I saw it open with the strongest online sales of any of my previous works, and am ending the year poised for even wider success with PRESIDENT HAMILTON: A NOVEL OF ALTERNATIVE HISTORY.
This year also saw my son-in-law discharged from the military, returning to our home town with my daughter, and finally the two of them moving in with us as they prepare to construct a home of their own. Now as the year has ended, my other daughter and her husband are talking about temporarily moving in as they prepare to move to the Dakotas at the beginning of summer. I'm not too sanguine about the possibility of seven people under one roof, but it looks inevitable at this point, so we'll all have to make the best of it. My wife and I just celebrated 37 years of marriage, and are looking forward to another (mostly) happy year together.
One other neat development here at home was that we finally did a couple of things we've threatened to for several years - we closed in our side porch and turned it into a walk-in closet, and we had a working shower installed upstairs, so that the entire household is no longer dependent on a single tub. These improvements will be here long after our kids have moved out, and have gone a long way towards making the house more livable and comfortable.
I finished another year of teaching in the middle of a pandemic without contracting the dread COVID-19 virus in any of its variants or permutations. My wife and I both got the Pfizer vaccine in April and the booster in December, so we are as well-protected as two people in our profession can be. Of course, a breakthrough case is always a possibility, but if that does happen, I am hoping that the vaccines will keep the symptoms mild and the infection brief.
For the first time in several years, I'm not writing another book. I started a new novel in January, but it fizzled out after a prologue and a first chapter and I haven't been drawn to return to it. Will I at some point in the future? Hard to say. My literary output has been limited to the occasional short story - all of which I publish here on my blog for you all to read. The most recent one is in the previous entry to this, scroll back through previous years and months for more. I have about 15-20 short stories on here, totaled. I'm sure there's another book or two lurking in my head, and at some point my muse will sprinkle enough fornus on them that they'll take root and begin growing chapters.
In my hobby, I have had a fun year of collecting arrowheads and fossils. The first half of the year I was doing no book signings due to the pandemic, and we had abundant rainfall, so I found a lot of nice points washed onto gravel bars in the local river. The latter part of the year I got busy with book signings and the rain gave out, leaving the river a weedy, muddy mess of thoroughly picked-over gravel bars. I didn't go hunting nearly as often, but I still managed to find a few more points on some of my other sites, ending the year with a total of 77 intact artifact finds. I also downloaded and began playing a new (to me) video game, FALLOUT 4, which promises to be a wonderful time-waster during these bleak winter months.
I read 46 books last year - mostly biographies but with a generous mixture of fiction thrown in. My favorite non-fiction read was Robert Caro's majestic four volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, while my favorite fiction read has been my belated discovery of Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN series. I watched about 87 movies, re-watching some classics and discovering some new favorites, plus my usual dose of B-grade freebies on Amazon Prime.
So despite the general suckiness of 2021 in the realm of politics and current events, I feel like we had a pretty good run of it. So what does the New Year hold? That's always the big question. I hope to take PRESIDENT HAMILTON out of state and maybe even get the opportunity to do a signing in New York City before the year is out, but as Yoda said, "Always in motion the future is." Or, as my friend Tom Westfall is fond of saying: "Man plans, and God laughs."
So the future will do what it does, and I will do what I do, and I'd like to invite all of you Faithful Readers to join me on the ride! And, like all long journeys, you might need a good book to read along the way. So if you've stuck with me all this way and read this rambling entry, I'd invite you to stay the course by clicking the link below and ordering your own copy of PRESIDENT HAMILTON today!
https://www.amazon.com/President-Hamilton-Novel-Alternative-History/dp/1632137100/ref=sr_1_23?dchild=1&qid=1624931942&refinements=p_27%3ALewis+Ben+Smith&s=books&sr=1-23&text=Lewis+Ben+Smith
