GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #605: ANDERSON'S

 You've heard me mention Anderson's as my favorite bookstore before. There are three locations. There is the original in Naperville, which is where authors usually go for signings. I've met a lot of people there, from Clive Barker to Weird Al to Penn Jillette to Dave Barry to Sarah Pinborough to . . . hell, I've met a lot of authors there. It's a great place, and their signings are always worth it.

There is another location in Downers Grove, which is also a pretty good store. It's a good backup if I can't get out to Naperville. And then there's the LaGrange location which I've only ever been to once. Parking is annoying, and I have to walk a distance to get there, which is never good for my bad leg. I also don't like the layout there.

Once upon a time it was easier to get to an Anderson's because there used to be one in Elmhurst a mere ten minutes from my place. I miss that one a lot. Back when I was still doing Tabard Inn I even got issues one and two in there on consignment. It was a great place. Elmhurst really needs a bookstore.

But Anderson's hasn't been in Elmhurst for maybe 20 years. Before that there was this great used book place called the Thrifty Scholar, where I got a lot of awesome books before they disappeared almost overnight. And then there was Ye Olde Book Worm, but I've mentioned that here before a few times. That really was the best bookstore Elmhurst ever had.

Now Elmhurst doesn't have a bookstore. Not really. There's A Book Above behind Mama Maria's on Vallette five minutes from me, but I've only ever been there once. It's more or less a children's bookstore with some stuff for any adults who may be waiting for their kids. It's not a great place. The only time I was there I bought a book just to be polite and left.

We need a real bookstore in Elmhurst again. Every once in a while I fantasize about opening a bookstore of my own, but I know it would fail in no time flat. I know books very well, but business? I have a rudimentary understanding, and that's no way to run a bookstore. Besides, the rental costs for apartments are out of control in Elmhurst. I can't imagine how much it would cost to rent a store.

Until someone thinks to bring a real bookstore back to Elmhurst, I guess I'm stuck driving great distances to get my fix. There's also the Frugal Muse in Darien, which is great, but also it's quite a distance. There's always Half Price Books, but I'd much rather go to indie bookstores. Ah well.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #604: FUCK IT

Child of Rage by Jim Thompson

 

A while back--A LONG WHILE BACK--I wrote about how I was saving Child of Rage by Jim Thompson as the last book I will ever read. Now that I'm older (and possibly wiser) I think maybe I've made a terrible mistake. And according to that old GF column I knew exactly why it was a terrible mistake, and I decided to go ahead and make it anyway.

Well. Fuck it.

Considering all the shit I've been through, there is no way to guarantee that I would know when I was dying. I mean, I've been there before. I survived one death sentence, and I've survived a dozen brushes with death. I could have gone at any moment, and I would have not gotten to Child of Rage. I don't know how I'll die. Right now I'm not certain that I will die. Surviving all the crazy shit I have? It's a shocker that I still walk amongst you. Yet here I am. Maybe the world can't kill me? Although for a while I thought that I had died, and that I was living in the afterlife. 

(If you missed it, when I got out of the hospital in 2020 after going through king hell alcohol withdrawals, I thought I might have died in the hospital and that I was going through the motions of a very boring and annoying afterlife.)

I'm fairly certain that when my time comes, it will be a heart attack. It's the way I'd prefer to go. I don't want to linger for months on end. I don't want to be a burden to others. I don't want to suffer. A heart attack puts you down nice and quick, and you don't have to deal with long goodbyes. So if I'm right, I'll never read this book. What am I going to do, stop a heart attack so I can read a novel?

And remember, I wondered if it was possible that the book was bad. Thompson wrote a lot of great books, but there were a few stinkers in there. I'd feel like a dumbass if I saved this as my last book and it turned out to be shit.

So fuck it. I'm reading Child of Rage now. Watch, it turns out to be Thompson's best book and definitely worth saving it for last. Ah well. We'll find out soon.

I may have said this before, but I'll say it again. Once upon a time I drank a half a fifth of whiskey and wrote a story called "If I Drank as Much as Hemingway." It was a very funny and spot on parody. Then I finished the bottle and wrote "If I Drank as Much as Faulkner." It was funny, but it was also a mess. I told myself that one day I'd drink two fifths and write "If I Drank as Much as Jim Thompson." But I'm pretty sure that would have killed me even at the heights of my boozehound powers. Jim Thompson was a rare alcoholic. He made it to his seventies, boozing at full force. He literally died from drink. So yeah, maybe it was a good idea that I never did that one.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #603: A QUANDARY

 Whenever I see a Kindle book for free, I pick it up. I have a library of unread books on my phone, but I will get to them all eventually. It takes a while because I only read them when I'm on lunch at work (I don't want to soil the pages of a book with my crumby fingers, so I use my clean pinky to swipe at the screen) or when I'm waiting at a doctor's office or something along those lines. But I feel it's important that when I pick up those books, I leave an honest review. That is the unspoken cost of a free Kindle book, and I never want to ignore that.

So now I come to a quandary because I'm currently reading a really, really bad Kindle book. Whatever you're imagining, it's waaaaaaay worse than that. I don't really want to leave a review because it could only be harmful, but at the same time I don't want to shirk my responsibility.

\

It occurs to me that a few of you reading this might think I'm talking about you. Don't worry. I'm not. I'm not naming the author, but I'm 99.9% certain I don't know this person, and this person doesn't know me.

Anyway, I thought maybe a wishy-washy way to get out of it and still complete my duty would be to leave a one star review and say that it didn't do it for me. But a part of me feels that it's not fair.

What I really want to do is leave constructive criticism. Because I get the feeling that this is the author's first book. Or, possibly, the author is a teenager who doesn't know what they're doing yet. There is a statement at the front of the book about how the author wants to become a better writer, so why not offer my assistance?

Except I've been told that when I give writing advice, I can be very abrasive. I swear I don't mean it that way. I try to be as nice as possible, but for some reason, almost every time, that person tells me I'm being a dick. Considering how I have a somewhat known name in the writing community, it would probably look like I was punching down. That wouldn't be my intention, but I feel certain that would be how it would be taken.

I'm probably going to finish the book during my lunch break on Saturday, so I have that long to figure out what I'm going to do. I could just not finish it and delete it from my Kindle library and pretend I never saw it, but that would be the coward's way. I'll probably figure something out. Maybe.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #602: FAILED IDEAS

Can't stand my work? Blame this book.

 

So here's a peek into my thought process behind ideas, in particular ideas that I should not have had. This happens to me often, sad to say. I come up with this great idea before I realize that it already exists in a very blatant way. This is the most recent idea that went south on me.

Writing last week about Vivian Schurfranz made me feel nostalgic for the kinds of things I used to write. My first stories were imitations of the Hardy Boys, so I started thinking about those books on Friday and throughout the weekend. I kind of wanted to go back and read some of the classics. 

If you don't know, the Hardy Boys were created in the early 20th Century. They're brothers who follow in their father's footsteps to become detectives and go on all sorts of adventures.

Then I started thinking, why don't I do something like the Hardy Boys today? Except they'll be actual teenagers instead of the sanitized all American clean boys that we know. These teenage brothers would think about things like sex all the time, just like actual teenage boys. And hey! What if they hunted monsters instead of criminals? Wouldn't that be cool?

It would be cool. Except at that moment I realized there already was a duo of young brothers following in their father's footsteps, hunting monsters. Supernatural, in other words. Whoops!

Although that goes a long way towards explaining why I enjoy that show so much. It's not just a love of horror. It brings back a feeling I used to have often as a child. It scratches that same itch.

Maybe one day I'll tell you about the time I came up with the idea to have a detective tracking down aliens and bigfoot and other monsters while accompanied by his skeptic partner . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #601: WELL, THAT DIDN'T WORK

 So once again I'm rethinking my self-promotion plan. When I started pimping one thing every weekday, there were mixed results. Sometimes it worked out. Most times it did not. Plus it started to become a bit of a hassle. Sometimes I'd even forget to post something. Or I'd remember and get annoyed at it.

So maybe I'll try something else. Here's what I'm thinking. I have copies of my own books, so I figure I'll pimp those. One a week. If someone buys from me, there will be some additional incentive. Not sure what that is yet. I'll figure it out. So I'm taking a week long break from promoting my own shit while I sort out the details.

Ah! Maybe a sampler package of my work! That could be a good incentive. I'll put together something digital. Put a complete short story in there. Maybe novel excerpts. Things like that. Would anyone be interested in that kind of thing?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #600: HAVE I REALLY WRITTEN 600 OF THESE FUCKIN' THINGS?

 Wow. I've written a lot of these. I had no idea that this would last quite so long, but here we are. I wondered what the hell I should write about, and I thought why not write about writing? A lot of you know that I decided to become a writer when I was a little kid reading Hardy Boys books, The Haunted Fort in particular. And I may have mentioned this before, but considering my interests, I had a very unusual first mentor.

Vivian Schurfranz wrote historical novels geared toward young adults, usually girls. When I was in junior high, she visited our school to talk about writing, and I got super excited. She was the first author I'd ever met. She also made a presentation on the subject at the Elmhurst Public Library, which I also went to. As she signed a copy of one of her books for me, I got to talk to her about writing. She wanted to see some of my work, so she gave me her address in Evanston, and I started sending her stories to see what she thought.

She encouraged my writing a great deal, probably more than she should have, and I got to know what writing for a living was like at an early age. It helped me a great deal in my development as an author, and I owe a great deal to her generosity. I can't tell you how great she made me feel as a kid whose sole ambition was to one day have a book out there with my name on the cover. She made me think like this was something I could actually do.

Lo and behold.

I don't know why our correspondence fell off. I found a lot of old letters recently, one of which can be seen above, and I used to write to a lot of people back then. For some reason during high school I fell out of the habit. Out of curiosity I looked her up online. I doubted that she would still be around, and it surprised me to find out that she passed as recently as 2018. I wish I'd continued our letters. I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have liked the stuff I write about now, but it would have been nice to check back in with her.

I wonder if, without her influence, I would be an author today. I'm certain I'd still be writing. That's not in question. But would I be a published author? I don't think so.

Inspiration comes to us in strange ways. I'll bet you didn't expect to learn this about me today. Here's to #700 . . .

OK, I just remembered I did touch on this before, but I didn't go into a lot of detail. And that was waaaaaaay back before I even hit my 50th GF column. This one's better anyway.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #599: MORE SHITTY NEWS

 You might remember when I wrote about my pain recently. That tennis elbow? It turns out that it might not be that at all. Because I got sick of the pain today and went to immediate care. The doctor examined my hand in particular because that was the worst of it. I figured maybe there was an issue with a tendon or something, but it turns out to be shittier than that.

I have a very short list of things that would make me drink again, and this near diagnosis is on that list. It's not certain yet. I haven't been tested. But the doctor said that all signs are pointing to one thing in particular.

He says, in all likelihood, that I have rheumatoid arthritis. He has advised that I try not to use my hands very much. That is horrifying news since typing is very important to me, not just as a writer but also as a salesman. I spend eight hours a day typing, and I have to be fast because often people talk fast when they're looking for something, not realizing that someone has to take that information down.

It's not definite. That's probably why I didn't stop at the liquor store on the way home. Not yet. I wouldn't be surprised that if it does turn out to be true, I might not make it a full year without a drink. Because I am not going to stop typing. I'm going to have to type faster to get it all in before I can't do it anymore.

It would also put the final coffin nail in my plan to exercise. Try to work out without using your knees and elbows, places where I'm feeling all that pain. Who would have thought that my bad leg would eventually become the least of my pains?

I'm starting to feel a little sorry for myself, so before I talk myself into getting drunk, I'm going to sign off for the night. Hey, tomorrow is gonna be GF #600. I'll try to be more cheerful for that.