Jas Faulkner

So You Want To Be A Writer…

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by Jas Faulkner

Tabitha and Samantha, my UBS  owning friends down in Mississippi, found out I knew an author who would be passing through on her way to a signing in Jackson before zig-zagging up to Memphis and then to Atlanta and then back west to Birmingham and…you get the idea.   Fortunately, so did Tab and Sam, who helps her sister run a bed and breakfast.  They offered my author friend a night of peace, quiet, and fresh vegetables from the kitchen garden, which she gratefully accepted.

Before anyone nods sagely and mutters, “Yep.  Celebrities get the breaks.” you need to know two things:

First:  Samantha sold a novel that was optioned for a movie that sat in development limbo for nearly a decade before it was finally made into a straight-to-cable feature.  She knows what it’s like to be expected to act like a celebrity when the truth is that few people in the room actually know who you are or what your situation is.

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Chick Lit Of The Sea

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By Jas Faulkner 

For a long time, popular wisdom dictated that genre fiction for girls consisted of dainty prose about the vagaries of friendships and horses that no one else could tame.   There were exceptions:  the intrepid sleuths and a few other heroes who occasionally saw print. There were even a few girls in R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series who didn’t mind  taking on whatever was growling at the foot of the basement stairs or becoming monsters themselves.  Love it or hate it, this would change in 2005 when the first of a series of novels by Stephanie Meyer dominated nearly every sales indicator.  In spite of tepid to unabashedly negative critical response, in 2005, seventeen million people, mostly mothers and daughters, bought copies of Twilight.

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The Book That Can’t Wait

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by Jas Faulkner 

Anyone with a tall “to be read” stack will get chills at the thought of  “El Libro que No Puede Esperar”  (translation: “The Book That Can’t Wait”).  Eterna Cadencia, a publisher and bookseller in Argentina, has reportedly published a collection of stories by up and coming Latin American writers featuring a gimmick that garnered the imprint a lot of attention outside of its usual market. In the interest of creating a sense of urgency that these authors should be read, and read soon, a promotional video reports they have printed the books using an ink that begins to degrade as soon as the book is exposed to air and  light.  Break the seal and you have two months to read the book. The fading process starts immediately.

The promotional video about the book that has gone viral (en Inglés, gracias a Dios!). Mainstream outlets such as Wired and Huffington Post have already reported the story as gospel.

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The 30,000

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 by Jas Faulkner  

In those odd moments when there can be plenty to do and yet the mind wants to wander through Binkley’s anxiety closet,  it is easy to come up with hypothetical catastrophes that put us through a Green Beret-level obstacle course.  We see the thin veneer of civilisation stripped away as a mob mentality nudges thousands of people off the side of a cliff in a carb-fueled rage, all neatly battered, fried, and served on a biscuit with a side of fear and loathing of The Other.

Those of us who are caretakers of libraries, whether they’re large public archives of wisdom passed down through the centuries or linen closets that have been converted into repositories of books we have known and loved; we have all wondered what we would do if we only had a small, undisclosed time to save what we could.  What would we grab first?  Who could we trust to protect what we hold dear?  As a bit of woolgathering, it’s scary but there is the comfort that, at least for now, the chances of seeing our libraries destroyed is  fairly remote.

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Crash, Burn, and Learn

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by Jas Faulkner 

“I love my rejection slips.  They show me I try.”

                                                        -Sylvia Plath

One of the hard truths of the pursuit of writing is also its most delicious irony.  There are few if any artists, writers, creators, innovators and iconoclasts (principled and otherwise) who experienced a smooth, straightforward path  that is innocent of rejection.  You crash and burn and then you learn.

And you keeping moving until you get it right.

So many people tell me my work is easy.  For the record, I know I  have it good and I am very aware that it came about by dint of equal measures of stupid good luck and talent.  It also entails a lot of hard work, sleepless nights, and dealing with people who don’t understand or respect what I do.   Fun?  Yes.  Easy?  Uh, no.

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Dancing About Architecture

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by Jas Faulkner

author’s note: This is very, very late.  Late as in this should have gone live on Friday late.  Next week is the start of a new era at Bookshop Blog.  I won’t go into details.  Let me just say that I think you’re going to like what you see.  One change I can tell you about is that my columns will now appear every Thursday.  What else is happening at BSB?  You’re going to have to come back to find out.  Now, on with this week’s column…

Keith Richards’ “Life” gives a Glimmer Twin’s-eye-view of life as a Rolling Stone.

The date and time stamp thingie on the lower right hand corner of my screen says it’s 2:20 pm and the date is 8/3/2012.

Here is the list of top 20 best selling music biographies as of that moment on Amazon.com:

20. No Regrets by Joe Lyden and Ace Frehly

19. Bruce Sringsteen and the Promise of Rock n’ Roll by Marc Dolan

18. Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good by Corey Taylor (Slipknot)

17. Mercury by Lesley-Ann Jones

16. When I Left Home: My Story by Buddy Guy and David Ritz

Motley Crude: Sixx’s book pulls no punches when it comes to life in a hair metal band.

15. 1d in America parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 Special Edition (Niall’s unofficial diary)  by 1d Fans International

14. It’s So Easy by Duff McKagan (Guns and Roses)

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Sludged by By Their Covers

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by Jas Faulkner 

Is this the personal library of Roy G. Biv? Nope. Just a demo picture for purchasers of books-by-the-foot.

Many years ago, the University of Memphis* announced they would be temporarily closing the student store they ran in the basement of the UC so they could retool it.  Many of us could not see anything good coming from this.  As young as we were , we still hated change.  Aside from the textbooks and other required items for classes that occupied the back right corner of the space, there was a section for MSU swag, the equivalent of a small convenience store, a smallish card and gift shop, an impressive art supply section and what amounted to a miniature version of an 80s’ vintage mall bookshop, only better.  It might have been clunky, but that permutation was fine and dandy by us.

Actually, that wasn’t quite the case. In truth, no one was too terribly concerned about the possible loss of an on-campus place to meet all of our  our Doritos and Tigers shot glass needs. We were quite worried about losing our bookstore.  No, not the one with all of the ugly, only slightly useful tomes covered in “used” stickers.  The shelves in the front half of the store held the books we wanted to read and keep.  There were collections of classics in every discipline represented at the university.  For many of us who were away from home for the first time, it was a chance to begin building our own libraries.  Those of us who had grown up with rooms full of books wanted shelves of our own that represented who we were or at least who we thought we were.  We walked by the windowed half of the basement of the UC as the staff began to prepare for the temporary closing.

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Are We Setting Ourselves Up For Another Alexandria?

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by Jas Faulkner

Did Hypatia shush the barbarians one too many times, thus causing the destruction of the Library at Alexandria?

At a recent gathering of oral historians and archivists, the subject of data retrieval long after collection came up. Hard copies, acetate based media, anything mechanical, was still alive as far as many curators were concerned. However, when it came to digital media, the prospect of anything outliving its technology was far less likely.

One archivist recounted discovering that she needed to find an engineer who could help her recreate the the technology needed to rerecord interviews that had originally been stored on cylinders.  Finding a person who could do this via word of mouth took roughly two weeks.  Once the material was retrieved it was archived in a way that assured that the content of the interview would be accessible regardless of future technological changes:  a paper transcript was created and carefully stored.  The kicker came at the end of the month when the archive’s administrators refused to reimburse the personnel who elected to bring in the technician.  The administration’s argument was that a perfectly good digital copy had been made and should have sufficed when the need arose to retrieve the recording.

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