Why is the Apocalypse the big seller?

I sat down the other day to think about the future of writing, that is to say, the future we as writers see being published:  Hunger Games, Wool, etc.   Yes, I speak of the trend of the Post-Apocalyptic young adult.  I won't pretend to know what started this trend in books specifically but readers seem to love bleak futures where young people have to fight against the power.   It's very "Thunderdome" if I want to use an 80's reference that I hoped we could get beyond by this point.   Lame jokes aside, I wanted to delve into my own thoughts on why readers are gobbling up the uncertain and certainly unappealing future.

Before I begin, I will admit I haven't read these books.  I've been meaning to read Wool since it looked interesting but Hunger Games I avoided because honestly I don't like seeing children getting killed, especially over food.  I certainly know the story, the trials and triumph, but it just didn't appeal to me. Still, its not far fetched to imagine these futures becoming a reality in our time.   With threats such as ISL, the incursions of Russia, Iran's belligerence and the dysfunction of governments and the world at large, I think we as a public half expect to wake up one morning and find the apocalypse became reality.

We've seen it in movies, Mad Max and a few others, and its also a popular trend in games such as the Fallout series which pictures a post apocalyptic America circa after the cold war went red hot.  Certainly we don't want such things to happen, but we like to read about them or experience them because of that hair's breadth proximity to our very real situations.  Heck, I wrote a semi-post apocalyptic book when I was 12 and it was one of the first things I ever created as an honest novella.

Reading a post apocalyptic book, especially for a teenager, I think it's easy to put yourself in the shoes of someone like Katniss (the heroine of Hunger Games if you didn't know).  Katniss wants to save her family, save herself, but in the process she stands up to an oppressive corrupt system run mostly by old people who say they know better.  It's the classic teenage angst against "the man" against the odds of the situation.  Teens and even adults can picture becoming a hero and leading a revolution that remakes society better and stronger than before.

In this sense, the hunger for apocalypse is really the desire for the aftermath.  It is the desire for utopia to come, for the return of life, of beauty, of peace.  We as readers long for the trials of our tiring lives to end, and for the proverbial savior (religious or fictional) to deliver us.  In that sense then, it is not the apocalypse that sells, it is the eternity thereafter.

We, the writers who are about to die, salute you

I have stepped on this battlefield before.  These sands dark with the blood of those who came before me.  The air is still fresh with sweat and toil- sounds of anguish, despair, triumph rise around me.  A crowd of thousands, eyes watching, eager for their bloodsport.  I stand tall, defiant, eyeing the emperors in their box- the senators in their stands, the common folk rabble rousing all around.  I lift my sword and speak.  "We, the writers who are about to die, salute you!"

So it feels today in the world of publishing, of writing, but then again, how has it been any different to those who came before or will come after?  We are here not by our own choice, but by a passion, that insatiable hunger.  Gladiators might have sought glory, and so do writers and we face very similar, almost insurmountable challenges.   Winning favor with those publishers (emperors) in the box, or those agents (Senators) in the stands and especially the crowd (readers) is no easy feat.  We have to know how to walk, how to talk, how to wield our weapon of writing.  Strike hard, strike the heart, draw the blood, quick decisive- yielding only to their desire.

Our enemies of course, are fellow gladiator writers   We spar, one against the other, vying for attention, for affection. Our criticism is our sword, our self-worth a shield.  We clothe ourselves in the armor of words and wield them just the same as weapons.

 If it is not the writers, then it is the beasts of the arena, our own writing that we must face.  These are wild untameable forces that are unleashed upon us to the joy of fellow gladiators and the crowd.  Those beasts can maul and tear just as much as the sword can, our armor of paper and ink easily yields to the doubt of our own words.

The history says, that once in a while, a gladiator was given a wooden sword by an emperor, in due diligence of service and honor of worth.  This signified and end to their servitude, a release from the bloody arena.  Writers don't have this proverbial weapon or way out.  While we may withdraw from writing, it remains like a fire in our veins that can't be put out.  We are proverbial slaves to the craft, chained to the arena.

It is a very bloody business, this writing, and like gladiators, you see very few who succeed. Our bodies usually are bruised and broken long before that, we are slain, or we fight on.  Once in a great while though, one gladiator bests the odds, bests the rest, and oh how the crowd swells in his or her presence.  The rumbling roar, that trembling earth, it shakes the foundations of the soul! How can others, waiting in the pits for their chance in the arena deny it?  They have a chance, surely, for the same glory!

Perhaps they do, perhaps they don't.  Only the crowd, the gods, can say.

In Defense of Huckleberry Finn - My Take

My childhood seems a lifetime ago, a time on which I can look back with the fond memories of forgotten summers spent pining for another week of freedom.   As a child, books were a part of my summer as much as summer camp with Boy Scouts, the beach or visiting Grandma.   I didn't mind these reading lists, in fact reading was as much a challenge as a pleasure for me (maybe that makes me weird).   Among my very favorites, even when I was very young was Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.  I first got hooked on the book because my parents had the book on a little white set of cassette tapes.  I'd pop the suckers in and listen to them for hours on my little tape deck in my room - over and over again, I couldn't get enough.

Twain was as masterful a writer as he was a storyteller, and the words came out like sparks of lightning laced in starfire - quick, rich and suspenseful.  Everyone knows the story, or should, and they know it comes from Twain's own experiences as much as it does imagination.  In a way, the book was his own recollection of the freedom of childhood, thus its appeal to me at that tender age.

 So it came as no surprise that I was interested right away to discover the sequel, and often thought superior title, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I never got to read the book till high school though, and looking back, I wish I had read it earlier.  The book is a coming of age story, a story of friendship that surpasses the bonds of race or age.  Its a struggle of a boy growing beyond the boundaries of childhood, beyond the prejudices of the people around him.   Its a human story, perhaps one of the greatest American novels ever written.

Yet, you will find such hatred and vitriol for this book, a fear to read it and teach it nowadays- all because of one word.  We know the word I talk about, and I wont utter it here, but lets give it some due attention.   Words were Twain's greatest art, he famously said that

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Twain lived in a time when this word had the very same meaning it does today, denoting racial prejudice, hatred, fear- yet it was the word used.   People seem to only see the word, and not the world surrounding it- that is to say, they don't see the lightning bug in the lightning.  We should look at the book itself, the meanings, the philosophies, the message beyond ONE word.  We need to embrace that word, hate it, but embrace it.  It should drip from the proverbial crevices of our mind when we see Huck set out on his own, seeking his freedom.  We should feel his torment, drawn between choices of good human nature, and his own interest.  We should rejoice when he makes the right decision- we should weep to share the woes between him and Jim.   

We, as readers, as writers, can only hope to accomplish such things, such lightning in a bottle as Twain does when he evokes this word.   He evokes a time, a place, a meaning that hasn't changed.  Twain, I think, knew the changing world, the changing of a word.  He used it in the sense that it was something the future understood was evil- as slavery was.  The story isn't even about a race, it is about two people, a boy and a man, the friendship and conflicts they endure in a pursuit of different freedoms.  

To deny this truth, to ban a book on one word, is myopic at best, unintelligent at its core, and deceiving at its worst.  We deny where we came from, we deny our own prejudices, and thus we cannot overcome them.  We throw a book away, we hide it, its meaning to future generations because we are afraid of ourselves.

I would like to hope Mark Twain smiles down on me as I open this proverbial can of worms.  I don't defend a use of this word by any means- indeed as a white male, I am the last person who should make this argument.  I wonder if I am wrong, alone in this train of thought, about a book, about a journey into adulthood- into enlightenment.  Something Twain knew all young boys, girls, men, women of every race and culture seek to embrace- and which he wrote as his masterwork.

The "Immortal" Writer

We writers are an unusual lot.   Nowhere in the world will you find a group of people so eager and anticipatory of critique, so willing to stand completely out of their comfort zone.  Indeed, only artists succeed and sometimes supersede us in this desire.

A writer, like an artist,  can reach right into his or her own heart and draw out the living soul to put it into something visual,  something that the eye can read and discern into fact and reality even if it is not.  The reader can, in an instant, know about a person a place and a thing that lives and breathes in their own imagination for as long as they keep it there.   In this way, I think, the writer is immortal, and that is how writers and artists sometimes transcend the mortal boundary if they are good enough.

In the "Hundred Foot Journey" Hellen Mirram said it best when referring to how Michelin Stars determine the true quality of the chefs who receive them.  I am paraphrasing here but she says, "One star- they know you are better than any other, unmatched.   Two Stars, is unheard of.  Three stars ... you belong to the Gods."

It is this mythical yearning, almost Herculean feat to which each author ascribes themselves in every word they make and every book they create.  Scientists can quote facts, politicians can cede lands and taxes, Movie stars can be immortalized in film, but it is in writers that the history of these things is written.

It is strange for me to think that my own journey as a writer began with a search for immortality.  My first "self-published" book, Aboard the Phantom Express was inspired by my fear of death and dying.  Then like now I sought something that would live on, that would preserve "me" for others to see and remember.  I thought, perhaps vainly, that if people remembered my writing they would remember me.

It is that unknown which we "Godseekers" fear after all.  The great story yet to be written, the story which no author other than our Creator knows.  Some of us are just happy to break even in regards to immortality.  We could gladly settle for fame and fortune, but these things are only fleeting.   No, it is the yearning that makes us great, the determination to seek that near-impossibility of the immortal.

So I ask my fellow writers, am I wrong in this?  Am I alone?  I am certain we all seek to see our soul down on paper, immortalized and enduring.

Ray Bradbury Lived Next Door

It's funny what you remember sometimes.   When I was a kid, I lived on in Los Angeles.  At the time it was a fairly typical suburban neighborhood, if suburban was in the middle of a bigger city.  My memories of the street and the house I lived in are very fond, I suppose all childhood ones should be.  We had any number of interesting characters who lived on my street most interesting case was a blue house just up the street from me.   

At the time, the house was no more a curiosity than any other house.  It had a picket fence in the front, a few bushes, and almost ll the windows were usually draped or shuttered whenever mom and I walked past.  I really didn't pay it any mind back then, even when my mother told me someone famous lived there.   When I asked who it was, she told me his name was Ray Bradbury and that he was a famous writer.   I didn't know who Ray Bradbury was of course.  I was only four or five years old.    I don't remember if my mom ever asked me if I wanted to meet him, if she did I likely shied away because I was very bashful.   I have a feeling she left the man be.

Thinking of it now though, I wish I had met Ray Bradbury back then.   Since I am a writer now, and I've read many of his books, I can appreciate the chance in a 20/20 aspect.   It was the first of two times I had a chance to be face to face.  Bradbury was always elusive I suppose.  The second time was at a writer's conference in Santa Barbara.  He was in ill health but came all the same to sign and do a speech.  I got in line and was about to get a signed book when he was pulled away for his speech.   I don't remember much about the speech now, sadly.   

What I do remember is his writing.   Of all his varied writings, only two make my top list, even as one of my favorite writers:   Fahrenheit 451, and Dandelion Wine.  Fahrenheit has a very Orwellian 1984 vibe, and the idea of turning the concept of firefighters on their head still resonates today.   In an age where books are no longer as valuable with the internet, it is easy to forget the value of the written word as it is and was.    

Dandelion Wine I wrote about in high school for a creative writing project.  I was to copy Bradbury's style exactly, so I chose his description of the white sneakers and made my own style.   It was apparently so good that the teacher and several others weren't sure if I had just copy pasted his exact words.  (I hadn't.)   

Later in life, once I was established in writing, I pondered writing to Bradbury and telling him how he inspired me.  I just kept putting it off I suppose, something I regret now.   The man died just a year or two ago, and left a legacy of science fiction that still resonates today.    As for his house on it was sold and repainted to an ugly yellow.   The white fence was ripped out, as was the flower garden.  You wouldn't know the history to drive by it, unless you looked up the house on the internet.   Still, it is rather cool as a writer to say I lived next door to Ray Bradbury.

Cannery Row - A retrospective

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia a dream.  Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.  Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps,,, gambler and   sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody.  Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men” and he would have meant the same thing.” 

So begins John Steinbeck in Cannery Row.  Steinbeck always has a way with words and description in his opening pages which fascinated me.   He was one of my earliest inspirations in writing, sitting in my High School English History Class with my teacher, Mister Simon, I can recall reading The Grapes of Wrath.

I see myself there, almost on the edge of my seat, hanging off of each word of a man who transformed life into ink.   In Steinbeck, there is always that quality that does not parse or color things more rosey than the reality.   He is frank, and he captures a reality of places and people who very truely existed.   

Not many people know the truth of Cannery Row in Monterey in California.  Back then it was called Oceanview Avenue and it was the waterfront industrial wherein the Sardine factories that fed a nation were located.    Steinbeck captures that place and time in that semiannually Steinbeckian (yes that is a word now) manner.    Reading through the pages you find both charming and conniving characters, mysteries and fantasies, a reality of a place and time over fifty years ago that is long gone today.

John Steinbeck would not recognize the Cannery Row of today, though he bears part of the credit that inspired its transformation and popularization.  The other resident local that bears that distinction is the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which stands within the block radius of what Steinbeck WOULD recognize.

John is one of my heroes when it comes to descriptive writing, along with Ray Bradbury and Herman Melville.    When I was in high school I tried to practice both their ways of writing, and with Bradbury I had some success.   Steinbeck remained elusive, but he continued to inspire so much so that when it was time to go to college, I chose to attend university at Cal State Monterey Bay.  There were other reasons going there of course, but being in proximity to Steinbeck country was one of the biggest ones.

I  got to see a transformation of Cannery Row in my years there.  I have fond memories of the way it used to be, though even that way is not familiar to the Steinbeck description.  The largest transformation happened when I was long gone, graduated and moved back home.  I didn't see the change coming.

Recently I came back once more, on a busy summer Monday, to retrace my steps and the steps of Steinbeck on Cannery Row.   I hope to share these experiences, along with pictures in a few future blog posts.   My hope is to enlighten others and share a passion for a place and time long gone.  My own retrospective on Cannery Row, that poem and stink, the grating noise and quality of light, the habit and tone, the nostalgia ... and the dream.

1000 Pageviews and Thoughts

This is a special moment for me!  Small as my following may be, and humble as my beginnings, I have reached a 1000 pageviews of this blog!  This might not seem a tremendous number, but for me, it is!   I wish to thank everyone who has looked at my blog and given it some thought and opportunity.  It is my hope the site will continue to grow with time and I can reach the numbers of some of my new friends, fellow authors, illustrators and creative partners.  Today I thought I would branch from my usual repertoire about my book or my journey to Japan to talk a bit of nostalgia.  Whether this is well received well, I will see!

My beginnings as a writer were very humble.  I remember having a creative inkling from my earliest days.  I would take my little figures (action, playmobil, legos etc) and creating stories from things I read or even watched on tv.  Today I suppose these would be fanfics, but at the time they were my own little world, kind of like what Pixar does in their stories with "Toy Story."  A kid playing with his toys, a world apart from what most people know.  Certainly I am not likening myself to them, but everyone knows that story and can relate in some way.   I certainly had many of the toys.

I was also fond of certain television, and I had the pleasure of growing up in a golden age of very thought provoking, interesting stories in cartoons, no less.   This was a golden age, when I think children were not treated with the "Dora the Explorer" mentality.  Some of the conversations and dramas played out in cartoons of this time were very dark with deep and fascinatingly evil antagonists, but at the same time they had a heroes journey in their protagonists.

There were movies too, I loved "Back to the Future" and "Indiana Jones."  "Star Wars" was a staple, along with many Disney features.  It was a golden time for all of these before prequels, remasters and terrible sequels.  There was the original "Lion King" which was essentially Hamlet.   Yet for all this I didn't really start writing until the sixth grade and read the book, Dinotopia by James Gurney.

This was a turning point for me, for it combined two of my great loves, dinosaurs and fantastic settings. Gurney is a master storyteller.  The book itself is a "journal" but with beautifully picturesque artwork detailing this world where dinosaurs still live.   The paintings are immensely expressive and evoke a steampunk atmosphere that I very much wanted to visit.   I mean, what kid didn't want to go see dinosaurs?

Dinotopia wasn't just a book, it was an experience.  It is meticulously cataloged, to the point it could very well be Jules Verne, and it takes a lot of inspiration from that.   The machines, creatures, even the writing style is very Vernesque.  It's wonderfully atmospheric, and the fact that there were talking dinosaurs, or dinosaurs of any kind was just icing on the cake.  This is a MUST read for any child, and I hawk the fact it inspired me whenever I talk to kids in class at my workplace.

I remember the writing assessment I had after I read the book where I was to propose a letter to the author. I wrote a detailed letter, asking many questions and talking about my favorite parts of the book. At my Mom or Dad's prompting (I forget which, sorry Mom or Dad)  I actually mailed the letter to Mr. Gurney. Much was my surprise when I got a letter back, not just any letter.  This was on Mr. Gurney's signature typeface.  It was about two pages or so, back to front with a golden letterhead.  Mr. Gurney took the time to not only answer my questions but provide insight, and his young son (who was seven at the time) also wrote in the margins and on the back.

It was a uniquely personal letter, and I hope to scan a copy and put it up here soon someday.  I never forgot that moment because I wanted to be a writer from there on.   I wrote Mr. Gurney one more time, but lost correspondence after that.   I am glad to see he has continued his work and not only written more about Dinotopia but made a blog about his work which can be found here.

I don't know if I can measure up to his creative genius.  I certainly am no artist like he is, but that simple act of kindness started me on a long journey.  It is an act I have yet to receive from an agent or a publisher of any kind and one I think more should try to attempt.  After all, we are all writers, creators and geniuses in our own way.  It only takes a moment of inspiration to set the pen to paper and begin.

In Search of the Seussian Poetic Edda

As a child I was a passionate lover of all things Dr. Seuss.  Among my most favorite books, of course, was The Lorax.  Beyond the messages of consumerism, industrialism, man vs. nature, and man vs. himself, The Lorax is a very human story with remarkable points to this very day.  Can nature sustain man?  Is it right for man to demand so much of nature?  Man can create wonders, indeed, but at what cost?

Adversely, if nature is supreme, is it right for nature to halt a market that supports other people, indeed a great number of people?  One could bow either way and still be in the wrong, depending on a certain point of view.   The Lorax asks tough questions that make children and adults wonder to this very day.

Strangely, this modern age has not produced a Dr. Seuss to ask similar questions or new points of the technological age.  Adversely, we have produced an age of "Once-lers".   Yes, I use the term "Once-ler" to describe a one-and done way of thinking, my way or the highway.  Be it business, politics, the environment, we are all "Once-ler's" now, even in the field of writing and perhaps especially so.

No one writes like Dr. Seuss, and people would likely laugh if you tried.  Indeed, I would argue that the man was the last master of Poetic Edda, or poetry collections with a certain way of speaking, telling stories with words that had a deeper meaning.  The Norse Vikings were perhaps the best known for their use of poetry to describe the great feats of their gods.  Other writers and cultures adopted similar word of mouth or word to paper ways like the Poetic Edda stemming right into the modern age.

The closest thing I have ever seen come to it is JK Rowling's unique and fantastical use of words and phrases in the Harry Potter books.   Words like "Voldemort" conjure such great images now that we know them, but imagine the joy in creating these things in the beginning.

It's something I strive to try to do, what all authors ultimately seek.  Look at JRR Tolkein, a linguist who created his own languages first and from them sprang Bilbo, Frodo, Sauron and all the rest.  Indeed, we would not have Middle Earth, dungeons and dragons and such without Tolkein's own Poettic Edda.   It is incredibly hard to find words that don't exist, then try to construct them into reason.  Seuss worked meticulously on his words, just as we all do.  Indeed, he said that the key to good writing was "meticulosity"  a truly Seussian word.

Most of his words were of his own cadence, a sing-song rhyming meter, a Poetic Edda I would like to dub Seussian.  Let's take something from the Lorax.

"You won't see the Once-ler
Don't knock at his door
He stays in his Lurkim
on top of his store

He lurks in his Lurkim
cold under the roof
where he makes his own clothes
out of miff-muffered moof."

-The Lorax, Dr. Seuss


First, there's the term "lurkim" and what a perfect way to to describe the building we see, a jutting juxtaposed old thing out of a Salvador Dali painting.  What is a lurkim?  We may at least understand that it's a home of a sort, and he lurks there like a hermit never leaving.  Indeed he 'lurks there."  What better place to lurk?

Again such pleasure is taken in the creation of a word, of a phrase to describe a place where something called "Once-ler" would live.   Then we get into a more fantastical phrase.  "Miff-muffered moof."  As adults, as writers, if we didn't know where this came from we might scoff.   "What in the blazes is 'miff-muffered moof!'  That's not a word!  Cross it out!  Come up with proper words and context for your rhyme!"

Here is the genius of Theodor Geissel.  It doesn't have to make sense in an overt sense, even though he worked diligently in his specific choice of the words to describe it.  The imagination does the rest of the work.  We might imagine tiny sootball shaped things with a thousand legs, like living dust bunnies crawling along the floor only to be scooped up and knitted into feeble fabric clothing this strange person.   This is the power of Poetic Edda.

Suess goes on to set a certain mystery and aura of the Once-ler, and then later of the Lorax.  Their story is a cautionary tale worthy of a bard's song.  This is something we desperately need of our writers, our poets and our bloggers of the modern age.

As writers, we look to men like Suess and Tolkein.  We talk ceaselessly of sentences, verbs, nouns, grammar, and beyond all that the meaning or meaninglessness of our work or the work of others.  As children, we write more freely with open hearts and minds, and Seuss embodies that as an adult writing for children.  The ultimate power is in the lesson of words and that we create our own Poetic Edda.

The Networked Age

I grew up in a simpler time, before the advent of the internet in the heaviest quantities.  Looking back it makes me feel old to recall the block of a computer we had, the brick of a cell phone we used and how when I went to the library I used the dinosaur of a box that was known as a card catalog.  These days I get weird looks when talk about such things to young kids who are at the age I was back then.  They stare, tilt their head to one side and seem to mentally say, "God this guy must be 60 years old.  He likely rode dinosaurs to school at the rate he's talking."

I won't say things were better when I was a kid, oh no.  Kids today have a wonderful world of information I could only dream of when I was their age.  Of course, by the same token they are more wired and plugged in to technology than I ever was or could be.  They grew up with twitter, facebook, and phones the size of a wristwatch.  I suppose by the time they're my age, they will look back and recall to their kids who communicate to people through cybernetic implants or some such thing. Those kids will stare, tilt their head, and remark mentally to all their friends through their own implants how it must have been when the dinosaurs roamed 2014.

This is a phenomena I call, "The Networked Age."   Mark Twain coined the term "The Gilded Age" to describe the industrial revolution following the Civil War into the beginnings of the first World War.   He, like me, grew up in a time of tremendous change, when America was transforming from a purely agrarian society to one governed by iron and steel.  To Twain, the world was getting in a big damn hurry.  Wealth and opulence were in abundance on the surface while being supported on the backs of the working class.  Thus "gilded" gold over plainer iron.

Its a fitting metaphor, and thus I come back to my own, "The Networked Age."   The term comes from our dependency on all things internet, on networking through ones and zeros taken form in words or pictures and information that we then process.  We are all about networking, exchanging ideas and thoughts to one another from across the country and the world in ways Mark Twain could scarcely dream of.  Indeed, this blog is about networking, about growing myself as a writer.  That, however, is only a surface image.

What lies beneath is the truth, beyond the plastic coating and fiber-optics are a human heart and spirit yearning.  We all yearn for that human interaction, something physical and emotional.   The internet is a social platform yes, but not the same as the one we could physically create in closer proximity.  It is both a blessing and a curse.  I find the internet as new and expansive as the imagination.  It is able to recall or summon anything at a moment's notice but at the same time bound to it's power.  By the same token, when it's gone, we are disconnected and perhaps discontent.

What the future holds for the Networked Age is uncertain, for it is a shifting and tidal phenomena that grows with the humans who yearn for more.  Dreams such as the cybernetics or even virtual reality are swiftly seeming more a reality.  We find ourselves inspired by it, yet we yearn for more.

Lament for the Small Town Book Store

I have a lot of fun little conversations with the kids where I work sometimes.  Coming from a completely different generation, their insights into the information age are always funny to me.  Kids today (God, I sound old saying that) have no perspective on what it was like to live before the common use of computers, cell phones or the internet.

I get to talk to kids sometimes about my books, and they are always interested to discover they have a writer in their midst.  Yet in speaking to them, I find an unsettling fact.  Not a single one has a good bookstore to go to.

With the dawning of the information age has come the growth of e-books, of finding everything instantly.  This instant gratification is a good thing in some respects.  I can in a moment's glance, find out what people have read, what they thought about a book, look through the book from the comfort of my home and then purchase it.  The book will then come to my computer, or my door.  It's quite extraordinary.

Yet despite this, I pine for a simpler time, a time when my hometown had more than a single bookstore in the big box known as Barnes and Noble.  Small bookstores were plentiful here back in the day.  We had four in San Luis Obispo.  You could walk into the Earthling, the Novel Experience and you would always find quirky characters in the store as much as you would in the reading the material.   I suppose for writers, bookstores are like a bar.  You go in and it's the local watering hole, the solace, the oasis for creative ideas.

I can remember vividly walking in and seeing the owner of the Novel Experience on a regular basis.  She was a woman larger than life, with dark purple tinted hair and flowing gowns and beads and bracelets on her arms.  Her laugh was hearty and infectious, and she knew books as if they were lovers.  She could, at a whim, recall any story, recommend things for any aged reader and have a discussion of plot and characters.  It was a remarkable.

I grew up on a diet of Novel Experience.  It is what helped to forge my strengths as a writer, my passion for books.  The owner of the Novel Experience was my window to the world, along with the local library.   

Unfortunately, the Big Boxes came and took that away.  Small stores couldn't keep up with what their larger cousins could do and one by one each shuttered their doors.   The Novel Experience put up a fantastic fight, but it was a losing one.  Eventually, it shuttered its doors.  Then, the Big Box stores met a similar fate, the mighty brought down by the internet in a matter if 5 years from the shuttering of the small stores.     All that remains is a single Barnes and Noble.  Big, and rather imposing, it doesn't have the personal charm that I would like.

Yet in some places, the bookstore remains.   What was my surprise to travel to Iowa City, Iowa, for the famous Iowa Writers conference to find the town has no less than 5 - 7 small bookstores.  The most famous, Prairie Lights, is a legend in the writing world.   Walking in, I found the shelves of books, the coffee shop, the quirky characters.   After so long, it was like coming home again.

The age of the bookstore may be alive and well in Iowa City, and perhaps smaller bookstores will flower from the corpses of big ones again.  Perhaps then children will go to them once more, and seek the beauty of books anew.