Tons of books and toys.

I've turned back into a pumpkin.

It was only a matter of time. I'm not writing, I'm not walking, I'm lazing around the house.

But I had an intense five or six years of writing, which is pretty amazing looking back on it. I currently have 20 books for sale. (Though "The Darkness You Fear" seems to be MIA at the moment.) 

20!! Pretty crazy. I was very, very diligent, writing most every day most of the day. I'm not quitting writing by any means, but I'm definitely slowing down. Between changing the store around and family visits, July is going to be a wash.

I spent all day yesterday going through online lists of cult books and classics, and then going to my wholesalers and ordering them. Got a pretty big dent on them for a couple of thousand dollars--which would completely blow my weekly (or monthly) budget out of the water. 

On one hand, these are the kinds of books I want to sell. But it may take some time to sell through on them, especially the three times it takes to justify keeping them in stock. And yet--that's the direction I'm trying to move.

I've got both orders sitting there while I mull over the possibilities. It was a valuable exercise even if I delete the orders because I got a pretty good sense of how much I'd need to order to have a really good stock of this stuff. It's not an impossible number or an impossible amount of money, but it is stretch to order them all at once.

Meanwhile, I finally got a hold of a couple of toy distributors to set up accounts. I'm going to try to carry some tween type toys in the store, because that is a group that is coming in the store with their families and can never seem to find anything.

Toy catalogs. My God, so much stuff! I thought I was immune to sensory overload, but my eyes are melting.

Does the world really need this stuff? I mean, it's pretty incredible. So much of it is retro, and so much of it is cheap plastic, and so much of it is doubtful--like all the slime and little toys with small pieces. And why does everything have to be so potty mouthed?

I'm sure there is a whole range of toy material out there--but I need something that is less than ten dollars, that has some appeal, and also fits the image of the store. The thing about toys is that you have to buy them in units--half a dozen or a dozen at a time. Each company seems to have a couple of toys that I'm interested in. So I think I can assemble a viable product line. It's a bit of a gamble, but I need to try to continue to mainstream the store--we're getting the foot traffic, so I want to make use of that.

I don't want to make the store too tacky (well, even more tacky) though, so I'm going to need to be careful.