One more reaction to "Astounding."

John W. Campbell was a writer himself, best known for "Who Goes There?" the basis for the movie "The Thing." But in his later career he mostly spun off ideas to writers.

Which got me thinking about story priorities. Obviously, with S.F. the most important factor was the idea itself. It was assumed the idea would be written up competently. Which is why characterization and style in early S.F. is mostly missing.

What are my story priorities?

Making this up as I go along, I can divide them into three: Storytelling, writing, and ideas.

When I talked about this to Sabrina she immediately asked the difference between storytelling and writing.

Writing to me is the word choice, the sentence structure, the style (whatever that is). Storytelling is putting the elements of the story together in a readable way.

So what are my relative strengths?

I think the storytelling itself comes to me relatively easy.

I'm fairly facile in writing--though that is a element that can be improved forever.

Finally, I need a basic story idea, but I'm not pushing to change the world.

Looking over what I've written, and in reading reviews, it's clear that most people like or dislike a book because of the storytelling and/or ideas. Writing comes last.

Of course the writing effects both the ideas and the storytelling in infinite ways--but the readers usually aren't paying attention to the magic behind the story.

This is all pretty rough theory and mostly for my own clarification.

This break in writing has me thinking about how I want to approach my next projects, and I'm still wavering between the two extremes of just getting my stories out there--or taking the time to research, plan, and fully think through a story before I begin writing it.

Basically, I can do the former forever and a day, but in order to take a step upward, I probably need to do the latter.

Problem is--I may never do the latter. 

Misfits fitting with misfits.

More thoughts engendered by the book "Astounding."

As much as I love S.F. and Fantasy, I've never been able to settle into the fan community. I mean, I guess for a long time I thought I'd be a natural candidate, but when it came down to it, I felt as out of place among the fans as I did with everyone else.

I couldn't quite go all in. It seemed like everyone else immediately bonded through their shared interests. I remember going to Ore-con after I wrote Star Axe and feeling completely out of place.

I love the subject matter; I read an awful lot of it--I also read about it, which is a different thing altogether. I never saw the need to choose one type of story. I always read in all genres as well as non-fiction. My reading is pretty esoteric.

I'm not putting it down. Sometimes I've envied people who seem to fit in so well, even when it's misfits fitting with other misfits.

Bottom down, I'm a loner. 

So instead, I created a space that I felt comfortable in. Probably much more than most stores, Pegasus Books is a reflection of my interests. Even though I might be able to claim being Chief Nerd, in most ways I have never quite understood my own customers.

I've just managed to hide it well. Heh.

A reckoning.

None of what's happening politically is new--it's just risen to the surface in a metastasized form. Either we'll deal with it or we'll die...or we'll shove it back under the surface until it rises up yet again.

I finished the book I talked about yesterday: "Astounding," by Alec Nevala-Lee, about John W. Campbell, the editor of the above pulp magazine during the Golden Age of S.F. and into the modern era.

The author does a very clever thing: while he profiles Campbell for the entire book, warts and all, he saves the biggest wart for last. The most problematic flaw of Campbell was his racism. It wasn't subtle. I suspect that if that had come up earlier in the book it would have left very little sympathy for the man.

What's interesting to me is how pertinent to the current troubles this book is. What many Republicans are currently saying is just a more disguised way to express the same racism. The reckoning for Campbell has come in the last few years. The "best new novel" is no longer called the "John W. Campbell Award."  He's been banished. Cancelled.

As he should be. That doesn't keep me from reading about him and his influence on the S.F. culture--it just means an award doesn't need to be named after him.

L. Ron Hubbard was a sociopathic lunatic!

I'm reading "Astounding," by Alec Nevala-Lee, which is about John W. Campbell, his coterie of writers such as Heinlein, Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of S.F.

I already know a lot of this, but this goes into much greater detail. I'm going to probably write about this book some more, because there are all kinds of evocative things in it, but for now--halfway through--I think I can safely say that L. Ron Hubbard was always batshit crazy--a full-on psychopath; a charming, charismatic, lying loser. He failed at everything he did, then lied about it all, made up shit that for some reason others believed even thought it was ludicrous on the surface.

You want to know what it reminded me of?

A certain current president.

Same bullshit, same narcissistic psychopathy, the same amazing phenomenon of gaining followers despite it all.

Same thread of paranoia and destroying everything and everyone around him. Even some of the same type of political extremes.

We really are just monkeys.

The basement of broken toys.

I had to get to the store by 8:00 Sunday morning for the comics to be taken away. 135 long boxes, or approximately 40,000 comics. The roughly 100,000 sports cards are gone too.

There was undoubtedly good stuff in there, but we could never get to it. It was always down the list when things are working otherwise. It's like knowing you could make some money at a second job, but wanting to keep your main job. Anyway, what's done is done. 

It still leaves a ton of junk in the basement, though it gives me a bit of room to look around.

Basically, the basement is full of semi-interesting stuff that has no real value and yet I hate to throw away. Boxes and boxes of broken toys, promos of all kinds, tons of old magazines and price guides, defunct or broken equipment, still a huge amount of books and non-sports cards.

It's probably going to take a couple of weeks to move stuff. The original goal was to make room for all the used books and bookcases. Now I'm seeing that we have lots of other stuff we'll need to move too. The most useless stuff is stacks and stacks of old magazines, Wizards and Becketts, and old price guides. Have no idea why I saved those.

I'm going to dive in on the 1st of September and hopefully have it all done by mid-month for the plumbers.

It feels good to have that taken care of.

There's a reason Google and Amazon own the world.

Turns out, selling a ton of books means spending a ton of time online ordering. I've really only set up with one publisher so far--the biggest, Penguin Random House. I do have an account with Scholastic, which is also important for our store because of their great YA stuff, but I've only ordered once from them.

I get an extra 10% discount by ordering direct from the publishers.

In return, I probably double the time spent on ordering. I don't hate ordering like I do some things, so I'm willing to do it so far. But it certainly gives me pause about setting up with the other Big Three, which would probably account for 80% of our orders. I've had no trouble meeting the minimums shipping for PRH, but it's a laborious process because of their lousy search engine.

My book distributor has just as bad a search engine.

What I end up doing is using Amazon to find a book, copying the ISBN number and then going back and entering it. If I can't find it on Amazon, I'll can always find it on Google.

Ease of use. What a reason for world domination, eh?

Humming right along and then...Bam!

We're getting 14 large boxes of graphic novels today.

What the hell?

So we've been humming along with small orders for a couple of months while sales have been good. Making a decent profit for once. Then BAM!

So this was basically 6 times our normal week's total. In other words, a month in a half worth of orders in one week. Some of it was apparently normally ordered stuff that was building up--without us being completely aware--over the last couple of months. Some of it was a large order Sabrina made of Image graphic novels on sale.

But it obviously got away from us.

So a large chunk of the profits we made over the summer are going out the door in the next week.

Oh, well. I literally turned to Linda last week and said, "This is going too well. Something's going to happen."

We're in terrific shape. And we will be well-stocked, to say the least. Over the next year or so, we'll profit from this order. But damn it it wasn't a cash-flow demolition. We're still coming out of this summer in better shape than we've ever been.

Unless there's something else coming down the road.