Tag Archives: Personal

Mount TBR

The to-be-read pile: It’s something that every avid reader I know has. There are all sorts of landscapes to be found on the slopes of this mountain for avid readers. My own contains plenty of mystery, science fiction, horror and thrillers, but also contains books on sports, on music, on wine, on history…I don’t even know what’s in it anymore. Only the parts I can see, which are heavy on Deaver, Connelly, Child, King, Grafton and Evanovich. I don’t have a clue how many books are in the pile anymore. The only thing I know for sure is that it got a whole lot bigger when I got my Kindle Fire, and while I’m pretty sure most of the content is genre fiction, I haven’t a clue how many unread books there are on that device either.

Before I got married in ’98, I lived a bachelor’s life. I had a small house with three small bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, and one bedroom was my “music studio” with my keyboards and guitars and an old Tascam Portastudio that recorded four tracks on a cassette. Another was my library and writing room, where my bookshelves contained my nicer hardcovers and double rows of paperback books. Then there was my bedroom. I wish I had a picture of the mess that it was. For a booklover, the mess was sort of beautiful. There were books everywhere. Stacks lined the far walls of the room to a height of about half the distance between the windows and the floor. At least three feet of books (the windows were small and set high), with the columns of the paperbacks lining the walls. I don’t know how many there were. I know that I never got to most of them, and I still have most of them, boxed, in my basement (though a few made the trip to the attic at my office).

Now my TBR stacks are confined to shelves in the basement, in my bedroom, and in our home office. I don’t know the count, but I’d guess thirty in the bedroom, thirty in the office, and another million or so in the basement. Oh, and then there are the ones next to my bed, in the drawers of my nightstand where they are out of sight if not out of mind. And three or four sitting on top of the nightstand, still IN sight, and still IN mind. Oh, and I forgot the stack that’s here at my dental office. Probably less than twenty here.

The Kindle has made it easy for me to pile books on Mount TBR, because the guilt about the sheer number of books is easier to deal with. Also the cost is significantly less. There are only a couple of authors I buy when they release a new book (King and Coben, though F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack series was on that list until it was finished). The rest either get bought off the bargain bins, or when I have a coupon to supplement my 10% B&N discount. I still have quite the physical Mount TBR, but the virtual mountain is growing by leaps and bounds.

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Price of books…

A while back, I purchased a book by F. Paul Wilson, whose Repairman Jack series is one of my favorites. While the series is finished (at the end), Wilson decided to write three prequels detailing the early years of Jack in NYC. The first of these three is called COLD CITY and it was priced, at the time, at something like $3.99 as an ebook, I think. Maybe have been a dollar more or less, but I’m certain that it was below $5.00.

I read it, enjoyed it a lot, and went to check on what the next book, DARK CITY, costs as an ebook. I was surprised to see that it costs $8.54 on Amazon. More than my max for an ebook for my personal use (I sometimes go higher for books for my kids). But what surprised me even more was that the cost of the paperback is $8.99. In the dialect of Jack’s friend Abe, “I should care how the words get from Wilson’s imagination to my brain?”

Just so we’re clear. I have a B&N membership. I get it usually at Thanksgiving, and it costs me $25.00. Over the year, I believe it pays for itself, buying books for myself (mostly bargain books off the remaindered shelf where I only save about $0.70 or $0.80 per book, but I buy 10 or 15 of them a year, maybe more) and buying books for my kids (also usually around a dollar savings). With the card, however, you also get more coupons and better coupons. For example, toward the end of the year I was routinely getting 20% coupons every week, and I even got two 30% coupons (one of which I didn’t use). I’ll have to track it more carefully this year. But I’m sure it paid for itself last year, since we bought a bunch of Dr. Who stuff for the kiddies as well.

At $8.99 price point, with 10% off for certain (via the card I already have) and perhaps another 15% off via a coupon which will probably come soon via email, the final cost of the book will be $8.09 plus tax at the most, and $6.88 at best, if I wait for a 15% coupon (which I certainly can do). So let’s see. I get a physical copy of the book, which I can resell or give to my buddy down the road, for $6.88 plus tax, or I buy an ebook which I can’t do anything else with after I’ve read it (except read it a second time, perhaps), for $8.54 (without tax today, but as soon as Amazon opens their facility in Illinois, then with state sales tax as well).

I think I’m going for the physical copy. Not that I care. If the ebook was less, maybe in the $5.99 range, I wouldn’t hesitate. It would already be on my Kindle. I’d probably be reading it now.

Whose bright idea are those prices, anyway?

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Lit Fic vs. Genre Fic

I like watching movies. And I tend to like adventure movies, you know the type. The big budget thrillers and sf/fantasy spectacles. I enjoy the “smaller” movies, the ones that study characters, that use the sense of place as a major part of the story, the ones that explore relationships. But on the big screen, and often on the little screen, the movies I’ll pay to watch and maybe even buy tend to be thrillers and sf/fantasy. LORD OF THE RINGS, ENDERS GAME, THE HUNGER GAMES and CATCHING FIRE, and the HARRY POTTER movies are just a few examples of movies I’ve seen and enjoyed in the last several years.

Over the weekend I was watching the first lecture of one of “The Great Courses”, this one on analysis and critique while reading and writing, and how it can make “me” a more effective reader AND writer. This first lecture sets the agenda for the 24 lecture series, and in it the professor talked a great deal about tone and about word choice. She gave some examples of “good” writing versus “bad” writing versus “okay” writing.

“Okay” writing seemed to be technically solid but artistically bland.

I thought about that as I read the passages she presented in the lecture, and I agreed with her fully that her examples of “good” writing were far more artistic. It was like looking at a photo of a weedy pond, then looking at Monet’s Water Lilies paintings. Both showed sort of the same thing, but there was a richness to Monet’s work that certainly isn’t found in a simple photograph by an “untalented” photographer.

Then I thought about watching movies, specifically, the movies I like to watch. To me, reading a lot of genre fiction, which is concerned primarily with telling a story, conveying the action that occurs to resolve the conflict, is a lot like watching some of these big budget movies. They aren’t out to explore the relationships between characters to any great depth, certainly no deeper than needed for the story. They aren’t concerned so much with exploring the issues that rise up in the story beyond what is needed to serve the story.

Or maybe they are. Maybe it is simply that they emphasize the story above these other things, while those smaller “films” and literary fiction emphasize the relationships, the characters, the issues, in the absence of compelling story. They find a way to make the “story’ about these items. The conflict comes out of them, not out of some larger plot construction.

Does that make any sense?

As I thought about my fiction, I thought that no one is ever going to file my stuff under “Literary Fiction”. Why is that? I pay attention to my word choices. I try to explore my characters’ motivations a little. But writing like the examples given by the professor does not come naturally to me. The metaphors and similes, the figurative language, the artistic flair that was evident in the writing in her examples, it just doesn’t flow off my pen (or my fingertips).

I write like I’m watching a movie. Character A goes here, does this, has this expression on his face (mirroring his mood), Character B and C do this and that, then this happens, and so on and so on. Like I’m watching and describing action on a screen. It strikes me that a lot of genre fiction works this way. I don’t know about romance, but SF/Fantasy, Horror, Mystery and Thrillers all seem to, at least to some degree.

I once wrote a piece about something Laura Lippman had written in one of her excellent mystery/thriller novels, something about how I could never have come up with the plot device that she did. I know she responded to the article, but I don’t recall exactly what she said. But I saw it as Ms. Lippman having a literary bent to her crime fiction. I know a lot of authors have that. Maybe it’s something that comes with time.

In the meantime, however, I think I’ll be content with “writing the movie”.

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About Me: 20 possibly interesting things…

I saw a post on author Randall Wood’s blog titled 25 Things About…Me and thought it might be fun to do something similar here. So, without further ado:

The first pop song (and the one that got me started on “that” kind of music) that I heard and really loved was Paul McCartney’s Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey off his solo album, RAM. I was about 11 or 12.
I wrote my first complete story as a seventh grader. It was called “The Argonauts” and it was about a baseball team made up of all my friends that competed against other baseball teams from other cities. My teacher said I should become a sportscaster.
I started taking organ lessons at age 5. My teacher was a man named Kay McAbee, a well-known show organist. At that age, I was considered to be something of a prodigy.
I joined grade school band in 6th grade as a mallets player. In those days it meant I played glockenspiel and chimes for that band. My band director was named Mr. Dan Kobe.
In little league, I played second base. My first game I went 2-2 at the plate and made like 4 errors in the field. I never got another hit the whole season, and I only made like 3 errors in all of the rest of the games. Turned out I was pretty good defensively and pretty horrid at batting.
I published a magazine called “Rock” when in junior high. We only made one copy and we passed it around to kids in our class. We published at least 5 issues. It was all about the stars of that day and age – bands like Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Chicago, Elton John, and Led Zeppelin.
I was ranked first in my class my freshmen year in high school, out of 600 plus students. I ended up graduating in the top ten, but could never get back to first after a disastrous turn in my speech class, which I took during summer school. (Bad idea for me.)
I decided that I wasn’t going to be a bell player in high school band and took drum lessons. I marched double tenors for two years and snare for two years. I was section leader for a semester my senior year. I was the only one who could play every instrument in the section. Playing multiple instruments became a theme in my life.
I knew that I wanted to be a dentist when I graduated high school and it was a major reason I went to Loyola University in Chicago. I wavered in that goal between junior and senior years, when I thought I might like to go into graduate studies of chemistry. But I went to dental school anyway and haven’t been unhappy with that decision.
I played in rock bands all along. Some of them were called TANGENT, EXODUS, TENTATIVE, and NITROUS ROXIDE. While playing in bands in high school I realized that if I wanted any say in the song selection I better learn how to play guitar. I started singing in TENTATIVE, and in NITROUS ROXIDE I was the primary lead singer. Ever since then I’ve always done a portion of the lead vocals, up until now. I can play guitar, keyboards and drums, and I can fill in on bass if needed. Later I have played piano and keyboards on my friends’ CD projects: The Exit Specialists.
Favorite musician growing up: Paul McCartney (and Wings). Favorite band now: The Beatles. I didn’t stray too far. Favorite musical era: Late 70’s/early 80’s. I loved the Cars, the Stray Cats, Crowded House, the BoDeans, New Order, the Cure, Erasure, Rockpile, Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe…should I keep going?
I saw a Chicago band called Mike Jordan and the Rockamatics over thirty times. Maybe even forty times. They were a tremendously fun club band back in the 80’s and into the 90’s. They had roots going to John Prine’s backing band, The Famous Potatoes. Other favorites that I saw more than twenty times: The Elvis Brothers (from Champaign) and the Bad Examples.
I was exposed to the writings of Isaac Asimov in eighth grade, and the writings of Stephen King in late high school, but I really got reading King in college. Other favorites included Robert Heinlein, Dan Simmons, Orson Scott Card, David Brin, and F. Paul Wilson.
I joined Prodigy (an online dial-up service) back in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s and was active in the Stephen King Club and another bulletin board called King-Horrible? When Prodigy raised rates, we migrated to Delphi Internet Services. We started out in a virtual corner of a forum called The Clubhouse, but we soon formed our own forum called The Book and Candle Pub. There I helped run the place, moderating discussions, coordinating author visits, and doing a little of this and that. I started writing seriously again at that point. Some of the authors whose visits I helped coordinate included David Feintuch, Jack Chalker, Janet Young Brooks (aka Jill Churchill), Bill Pomidor, and Terry McGarry.
I wrote my first novel-length work in the late 1990s’ It is a “dental mystery” and I’m currently rewriting it to bring it up to date and plan on publishing it when it’s ready.
My favorite baseball team is the Cubs, and I also enjoy watching pro basketball. Michael Jordan brought me into the NBA, but I have stayed with it and I love sports statistics.
I love to ride, though I haven’t done it much in the last couple years. My longest ride was on the Elroy-Sparta trail in Wisconsin. We did a little over 50 miles on that day. Most of my rides were more in the 25-30 mile range.
I broke my ankle in late 2011, and still have the plate and pins fixing the fibula. It has really affected my mobility. That was the first surgery I’ve had.
I used to dream of retiring from dentistry and opening a brick-and-mortar bookstore. Now I don’t know what I want to do when I retire. I still might try the bookstore thing, but probably will look at a specialty mystery/sf store, something more like that.
My favorite vacation spot in the whole world is probably Arizona. I’ve traveled to every part of the state except the southwest corner and have found so many cool things to see and do there. From spring training baseball to Sedona, it’s my favorite state. (I’m not so impressed with their politics.) My second favorite is probably Disney World, and I’ve been there enough times to feel that I could write a sort of guidebook about it (under my real name) called DOING DISNEY!