Bookstores

Does anyone here watch Bones?

I was catching up on the latest season when I heard something that really caught my attention.

"Bookstores are the hubs of true, complex critical thought."

Temperance Brennan has a point!

When I was younger, book stores were always a sort of magical place. You could learn things you didn't even know you were searching for. You could experience new things in rapid, rabid succession. There was a freedom in bookstores that didn't exist in the library.

Looking around today, there's only one bookstore and it's not really convenient to get to. Books are such an important part of life, it's almost impossible to imagine that some day we might not have access to these vital intersections of ideas.

I remember the first bookstore I ever shopped at was a small, second-hand affair in a strip-mall. It was dark and dusty and only had the one window at the front of the shop. You could buy books there, used of course, and then sell them back when you were finished for a ten percent return on the original cost of the book. It was the perfect revolving door of reading and I loved it. I would carry home brown paper grocery bags full of books, read each one, then take the majority back for someone else to enjoy. If I happened to fall in love with one, which occurred once out of every thirty books or so, I could simply keep that book.

The key really was the ten percent return. If I bought a used paperback for lets say ninety-nine cents, and it originally cost $4.99, I would get a forty-nine cent return on my original investment. Since the stock was always circulating, there was never a shortage of things to pick up and I really felt there was value in trading them back in for others to read. Of course, this trade in price only worked if you wanted store credit to buy more books. If you wanted to simply sell them for cash, you got ten percent of the actual price you paid for the book. It was a pretty great system.

I haven't seen a store like that in years. Where else could you find erotica stashed next to Shakespeare? What other place could you meet a wide range of people, even as a child? Where else could you have discussions, sometimes heated, over the change in authors behind some beloved franchise?

I really wish we could bring back the small trade-in friendly bookshop. Anyone still have one by them?

Happy Birthday Archie Goodwin!

Since this is Girl Week, who could resist ending it with a celebration?

I love celebrating fictional birthdays. Mostly because I don't have to buy any presents.

But this one is special. It's Archie Goodwin's birthday. Wolfe gives him a beautiful bill fold, Cattleya orchids on one side, 52 Colt automatics on the other. Archie would trade it for New York City, if you "threw in a couple of the nicer suburbs". I'm sure Fritz made the best cake ever to celebrate.

This is just another great example of Wolfe taking the time to actually show the appreciation he clearly feels for the work that Archie does. It's a great time for us to appreciate all of the joy we get from reading Nero Wolfe, since without Archie, the books would be rather boring.

So, grab a slice of cake, a Nero Wolfe novel and wish Mr. Goodwin a very happy birthday.

ADHD Author

I don't know if this happens to a lot of people, or happens frequently, but I had the oddest experience today.

I was working on my new book (something funny, but with a different topic from my last work which no one seems interested in, which is fine) when I all of the sudden had a mental image of a completely different idea and it captured me with such ferocity that I immediately had to open a new file and start in on it. It was as if my writing had suddenly become dangerously ADHD. It was the weirdest experience, and a new one for me.

Probably a great poet.

I've noticed lately that the more I write, the more ideas seem to arrive. It's quite different from how I was when I was younger. I remember wanting to be a writer as a teenager. I also went through a phase where I was a poet. I won some awards and things, but obviously you can't make a career out of poetry, or so I was informed at the time.

Regardless, I seriously believed I was going to be a writer, as a life path, job, what have you. That persisted through college, where I met with several other people. I thought of them as less than intelligent. They boasted, they too were going to be writers! Some had already been published. That pretty much soured the whole thing.

I really thought that you had to be brilliant, technically astute, a wordsmith, really have something worth saying or reading to become "an author". Suddenly faced with people who I did not want to listen to in conversation, let alone read anything they might write, I decided that if that was what it meant to be "a writer" then it was not for me.

The main argument was that I felt I didn't have enough skill, talent or drive. I just wasn't good enough. I didn't think most people who wanted to be "writers" did either. Most importantly, I didn't want to bore people and I didn't think I had anything that really justified anyone's attention. I apparently still don't.

I never really invested myself in writing because I thought you couldn't make money at it. I grew up thinking that the most important thing in life was income. I sadly wasn't wrong. But now I make time to write, tweets, journals, this blog, my books. I may not have anything that other people want to read, and that's alright.

I write selfishly now. I write because it feels good. I write because I have these ideas and it seems like an injustice to myself not to put them down for posterity.

It seems incongruous, but the more I write, the more I have to write about. All of that time wasted as a teen and even into my early twenties, thinking that I should not bother writing things down until I had that "one big idea", that "bestseller" material. I am just now starting to realize that all of the things I did bother to write down were practice. I may never get to the gold-plated-top-dollar idea that makes me rich or famous. Now I know if I don't write things down in the interim, I will never get there.

Every day that we write brings us closer to our best work.

(I feel like that last part should be a graphic. Maybe I'll ask that nice person to make another one!)

Top 10 Video Games for Authors (and everyone)

My favorite Trivial Pursuit, for example.

I'm a huge fan of games, be it board, console, PC or other. One of the pluses about being a gamer is the ability to really take off into a world that is not your own, live another life. Games have the ability to communicate those stories, just as books do. What is being a writer, after all, if not a storyteller? Writing is a skill that we take years to develop in most cases. We hear from an early age that reading is essential to our craft, that the more we read the better we will become at capturing our stories, be they fiction or non-fiction. Lately, books have gotten cheaper, and people read more on computer screens than paper. But in making that shift to reading on the screen, we should remember that there is another new medium that should not be forgotten. Video games.

We think of them usually as a few mindless hours to distract a child or a fun way to kill time. Some make money streaming their games for others to watch (reminiscent of the days we used to go over to our friend's houses to gather around one N64, PS or dual each other at Pong) or record their gameplay for uploads to YouTube. These mostly focus on the technical skill of the game, how to beat a boss, how to kill faster, more efficient travel, tips and tricks. But playing a game yourself, especially a well-crafted game, with a story you can get invested in, that can be a transformative experience. There are some games that suck you in just as deftly as a well-written novel.

Modern video games have the potential to be just as epic, enthralling and engaging as the storytellers of old. Modern writers should consider playing games to see if there's anything they could absorb that may make them more effective storytellers. Most importantly, they can be an important bridge to the older forms of storytelling which relied more on verbal and visual communication, less on written words. Video games are the visual and verbal storytellers of our time. They are the modern equivalent of the shaman dancing around the fire, the old fisherman with his tall tales of giant creatures, the mother soothing her children with fairy tales. They are showing us who we are, and who we have the potential to be. Like any good story, video games fill a void within us.

Therefore, since it is #NationalVideoGameDay, I'll be giving you my:

Top 10 Video Games for Authors

Please keep in mind, these are not reviews, they are merely opinion. Some of these may be based loosely on books. This list is not based on gameplay, difficulty or personal choice, simply on quality and depth of story.

Honorable Mentions:

Silent Hill Series, Resident Evil Series, Prince of Persia (They made movies.)

10. Alan Wake, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare (Steam)

9. Thief (Amazon)

8. This War of Mine (Steam)

7. Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (Amazon)

6. Fallout Series (Steam)

5. Witcher Series (Steam)

4. Uncharted Series (Amazon)

3. Assassin’s Creed Series (Amazon)

2. Gone Home (Steam)

1. Bioshock Trilogy (Bioshock, Bioshock 2, Bioshock Infinite) (Steam & Amazon)