Slice of Life: Another Story

(Missed Monday's post because of connectivity issues, but here we are.  I need to establish a queue or something.)

Anyway, off the top of your head, how many independent bookstores can you name?  Around my neck of the woods, there are very few, and most of them are used bookstores.  In fact, I can't think of one that isn't.  There's one large chain bookstore left.

I'm not complaining, though.  I love used bookstores.  They smell like knowledge.  I can't describe it any better than that.  And there's no used bookstore that's quite like Another Story.

From the outside, you might think Another Story is just another house in Allentown, although the words "Another Story" painted on a large side window are admittedly a little suspicious.  Walking up to the front porch, there's a figure wearing one of the store's t-shirts, and it gets me every time - I start to say hello to the guy, then remember that it's just a dummy.

Inside you'll meet John Furphy, who has my nomination for one of the Lehigh Valley's most colorful residents.  He's quirky, he's chatty, and it's hard to not want to talk to him for hours because he has some hilarious stories.  He's also a lover of terrible puns, so you can imagine that he and I get along just fine.

I had heard of Another Story, but I only visited it recently in my quest to sell some valuable hardcovers from the Folio Society.  I wish the place was closer because I sort of want to hang out there every day.  It's at least two rooms deep, with books crammed into every possible space (and even a few that I wouldn't have imagined).  Many of these are really old books, which always make my fingers itch to pick them up and carry them around.  Others are of more modern production, however, and as a confessed bibliophile, they all call out to me.  No matter what you like to read, Another Story can help you.  No, you can't download a file for your Kindle or anything, but you can pick up a solid cover filled with pages and let it take you to another world.

The store's Facebook account is even more fun.  Furphy provides us with all sorts of fun things, like a little contest where you have to decipher the puns that are really the names of authors, or a photo of a set of stairs where all the steps have been painted to look like the spines of books.

The big question, in this uncertain economy, is how long we'll get to have Another Story in our midst.  Business, Furphy admits, has been on the slow side.  That's why I decided to write about it, to get the word out about this awesome place.  Whether you live in the area or just pass through, try to find the time to drop by 524 North 18th Street in Allentown.  It's practically in the backyard of the upcoming Allentown Fair.

More people need to find this hidden treasure in the Valley.  It needs - it deserves - our support.

The Angel and I

My survey is still ongoing, so if you haven't already filled in the answers, please consider doing so.  Also, if you have filled in answers, please leave me a comment if you were one of the people who were interested in doing a guest post on my blog or in having me do one on yours, because otherwise it's going to be hard to figure out who you are.  I didn't think that part through quite far enough.

One of the questions asks about things you'd like to see me cover in this blog, and at least one person (maybe more, I haven't checked the results today) wants to know more about my experiences with publishing.  I've talked in bits about my online publishing experiences, the most recent of which is a new and interesting gig writing local genealogy articles for Examiner.com.  They have localized content from all over the United States and are always looking for more writers, so if that sounds like something that might interest you, click here.

The thing that I tend to be questioned about the most in my writing career, though, is When are you going to publish this novel you keep talking about?  I guess it's a legitimate question, seeing as I've been working on it for two years.  The problem is that my narrator, Gabe, has a tendency to only really get chatty at inconvenient moments.  Like, for instance, while I'm driving, and thus unable to write down what he says.

Setting aside time to work on my novel isn't always easy; as my friend and former boss Anne once pointed out, I'm too apt to consider it something I do for myself, so it gets a lower priority than it should.  But even if I do this, Gabe doesn't always cooperate.  Today, for instance, I could be working on it.  It's raining, I don't have to be at work for a few hours, and it would be ideal to sit here with my laptop and talk to the angel.  (Yes, my narrator is an angel.  No, he's not that Angel Gabriel.  It makes sense in context.)

I got up.  Spent a few minutes talking to the cat.  Came downstairs and put frozen waffles in the toaster.  Started a load of laundry.  Opened my laptop to read my email, respond to a few messages on Twitter and Facebook, and get my daily chuckle from NotAlwaysRight.com.  Then I opened my word processing program.

I stared into the abyss the computer screen.  The angel stared back.

I love Gabe, actually.  I sometimes get some very entertaining private laughs out of him.  He's entirely too literal to be allowed, so he comes up with some really odd ways of looking at the world around him and, consequently, around me.  His companion is Sarah, a perfectly ordinary teenaged girl who looks at the world in perfectly ordinary teenaged ways...usually.  She does maintain the belief that butterflies can't be trusted, so these two understand each other better than you might expect.

I'm at my best when I'm writing down their conversations.  Sometimes I wish the novel could be nothing but their conversations.  Their interactions are just so...real, to me.  I'd like to finish the manuscript by the end of this year, sort of a Christmas gift to myself, which is why I do a lot of reading about the publishing industry and try to figure out how I want to go about it.  (Hat tip: I read this article just today and found it interesting.)

A few of the survey responders were pestering me to share an excerpt of the book here on the blog.  So I'll close out today's entry - and hopefully inspire myself to do a bit of work on the manuscript - by sharing one of Gabe and Sarah's conversations.  Be sure to let me know if you like it.

"So I have this assignment and it makes no sense," Sarah told me as we walked home one afternoon. October was upon us; the first few weeks of the school year, during which the teachers will somewhat ease their students into the routine, were over.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"We're doing this unit on ethics in social studies." She sounded mildly irritable, although it eased somewhat the farther we got from the school. "The comparative value of human lives. Is one life worth more than another? Like, is the life of a nun worth more than that of a bank robber, or something."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. Like I said, it makes no sense."

I rolled my fingers around in my coat pocket for a moment, and pulled out two quarters. "What about these?"

"What about them?"

"How would you describe them?"

"Well... this one is really filthy and looks like it might have been run over by a truck a few times," she said, "and this other one is almost new."

"What's the dirty one worth?"

"Half a can of soda," she quipped.

"And what's the clean one worth?"

"The other half."

"So you agree that they have equal value?"

"More or less. Unless you're a serious collector."

"What's the difference between them, then?"

She paused. "What's been done with them?"

"Exactly." I pointed to the newer quarter. "Every life starts out fresh, like this. The choices that are made over time will either enhance it or tarnish it. But that doesn't mean it ever loses its value."

"Okay, note to self, Gabe is my new homework guru." She pocketed the quarters. "Thanks."

"I never said you could keep those," I protested. She just laughed.

Rain, Reading, and Reviewing

I'm writing this from an extremely soggy Pennsylvania, which - after being lashed by the fury of Hurricane Irene - is currently suffering the additional indignities of the remains of Tropical Storm Lee.  This past Tuesday was my birthday (I continue to be thirtysomething), and it was suggested that I had wished for more rain on my candles.

In all truth, the weather around here is a little scary of late.  Flooding is happening all over the place; the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is recommending no unnecessary travel through the eastern part of the commonwealth.  Rivers in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey are approaching levels they haven't reached since Hurricane Agnes visited us in 1972.  I didn't exist yet at that point, so this is the worst it's been in my lifetime.  The Weather Channel people are referring to it as "the Historic Northeast Flooding," capitalization theirs.

But despite the delightful squelching noises that the ground now makes when walked upon, we move forward.  Today is International Literacy Day!  A day when people around the world celebrate the written word!  Being able to read is hugely important for adults to make informed decisions and steer this planet toward a better future.  Yet almost 800 million adults are still unable to read.  Check out what the International Reading Association has to say about this occasion, and find out how you can help to maybe bring that number down some.

On a final note, I recently started a second blog.  The Opinionation Station is for reviewing the story quality of video games.  I'm finding I have a little less to say on this subject than I originally expected.  However, I may end up not needing it anyway.  I'm very excited to announce that your intrepid blogger is the newest staff writer for AngryWeb, and will be doing all manner of geeky writing therein.  This includes video game reviews.  My first article went live a few days ago, and I think I'm going to like this gig.

Besides, hunting for nerdy news will give me something to do while I'm listening to the rain.  The Weather Channel just informed me that it's expected to continue all the way through the weekend.

After Irene

As promised, I'm devoting today's blog post to letting you know about how you can help with the post-Irene cleanup.  Like with any natural disaster or other large, life-changing situation, there's got to be a lot of money spent to help make things better now that it's over...and there's bound to be some lowlife scum who try to capitalize on this by pretending to be raising money for a good cause when that cause is really their own bank account.

Make no mistake, it's a mess.  Flooding and ruined buildings, and I already commented on the (thankfully relatively small but nevertheless devastating) loss of life.  But it wasn't as bad as it could be, and that's in no small part due to the excellent job done by authorities in preparing and evacuating and whatnot.  Still, it's a mess, and one that we all have to clean up together.

Charity Navigator, which I know I've mentioned more than once on this blog, has a blog of their own and has a very helpful post listing several charities to which you can donate with complete faith that your money will be used to help those who were affected by the hurricane.  I do want to give special props to the ASPCA, who mobilized to transplant shelter animals out of the path of danger.  (In a similar vein, props go likewise to the shelters in New York, who welcomed household pets with open arms.  Speaking as someone who would not go to a shelter if I couldn't bring my cats, I know how much this meant to a lot of people.)

But if you'd like to do something a bit more personal, a bit more direct, I do have one suggestion.  This comes by way of sci-fi author John Scalzi, who I mentioned a while back as breaking open the Cooks Source scandal to the world.  He linked his Twitter followers to the blog of fellow author Kate Messner, who wrote a post about a small-town library in the Adirondacks that's in desperate need of help.  The Wells Memorial Library in Upper Jay, New York lost pretty nearly its entire children's collection to flooding, because the books were on low shelves where children could reach them and, unfortunately, so could floodwaters.  So they're looking for donations of both money and books.  Contact information is all in that blog post, along with that of a bookstore local to the library that knows exactly what they need and can help you make a donation that will really benefit the library.

Please spread the word - and if you know of any other projects like this one, send them my way!

The End of Pottermania

I'm taking a break from the Writing About Writing meme, mostly because I'm concerned that you guys might all be incredibly bored with it, so instead I'm going to talk about the fact that the last Harry Potter film debuted this past weekend.

I haven't seen it yet, so don't worry about possibly finding spoilers in this post.

Harry Potter first came to my attention in the summer of 1999, when my husband and I were operating a sunglasses stand on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. (No, really.) I kept hearing the name in different places, but I'd never met the guy, so it wasn't until I walked into the now-defunct store Zany Brainy and saw the first book on display that I even realized all the fuss was over a children's book character. I read the description on the back, decided it might be a good way to pass the time, and bought a copy.

I read it in its entirety the next day during my shift at the stand, partly because it was a really dull day and partly because I read quickly. I reached the end and went back to the beginning to start all over; I enjoyed it that much. When Kevin arrived to relieve me, I handed it to him. "It's brain candy," I said.

A mail-order book club was offering the first three books in hardcover, so I ordered them and was thus caught up with the series as it existed in one weekend. From there it was a matter of killing time until October, when the fourth book came out, and I took my younger sister to the midnight launch party at our local bookstore. This became a tradition for me with the rest of the series. I bought her a copy, but she let me take it home and stay up all night reading it (another part of my tradition), and then I joined the rest of the fandom in trying to endure the "Three-Year Summer" until the launch of the fifth book.

Those books got me through a pretty tough time. I was having medical issues that have never been entirely resolved, and at one point I was very quietly scared, but Harry gave me a much-needed shot of courage. I wrote a letter to J. K. Rowling, telling her this and mentioning that I had adopted the name "Lady Norbert" to use online, after the dragon Hagrid hatched in the first book.

I never got an official response, and the unofficial response is probably not even that. But I like to think that she got my letter, and that it was the existence of Lady Norbert that caused her to announce, in the seventh and final book of the series, that Norbert the dragon was in fact a girl. I'm sure it's just wishful thinking on my part, but I don't especially care.

So I'll be seeing the movie soon. And I imagine I'll cry when I do. Not for the deaths of beloved characters; I went through my grieving process when I read the last book, I know what to expect. I'll cry because the twelve-year thrill ride will have come to an end at last.

But oh, what an adventure we have had...I wouldn't have missed it for the world.