E-Books, Dead Trees, and Writing

Woohoo! The box from Writers' Digest arrived yesterday, and I now have my own shiny new copy of Characters, Emotions and Viewpoint to pore over, mark up, and learn from (as well as the other 4 books in the "Write Great Fiction" series. Now to make sure that the task of writing up the exercises doesn't actually interfere with getting started on learning to actually write creatively...

We went shopping this weekend, and took a look a the Barnes & Noble Nook line of e-readers. B. and I are quite happy with our Kindles (though we're seriously considering getting a second one each, tied to each other's Amazon account, since sharing isn't particularly easy on the Kindle...). I picked up a copy of the first book in Jim Butcher's "Codex Alera" series, B. picked up the first of Jeanne C. Stein's Anita Blake novels, and then we went to Tattered Cover to cleanse our souls a bit.

Sadly, we found that we're just not liking Tattered Cover nearly as much as we used to. I've had this conversation with other book lovers and TC fans, and the theater space just isn't quite as cool as the old space in Cherry Creek. The downtown branch still has a lot of that atmosphere, but the Colfax branch is closer to us. The business of selling books is rough even in the best of times, and the pressure of e-books and online sales is taking its toll, sad to say. Thing is, keeping the kind of inventory on hand that got us hooked on Tattered Cover in the first place is nearly impossible for a brick-and-mortar store anymore - which creates a really vicious circle for bookstores, as customers who used to be able to pop in and trust that they'd be able to find at least one copy of any given book in a fairly extensive series (say, the Martian Tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs or the Company novels by Kage Baker) find that this is no longer the case and turn to Amazon. We found a number of books on writing, style and grammar - but it was a much smaller shelf than we were expecting, honestly. I replaced my missing copy of Strunk and White, and found the parody version A Manual of F*cking Style (which I'm loving). B. picked up a grammar workbook, and I found The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time, which looks like a great deal of fun.

I'm also finding that I like my Kindle a lot more than I thought I would. The advantages of electronic copies of books have long been obvious to me (my back still twinges at the thought of carrying a weekend's worth of so-called "light reading" around in a backpack), but I hadn't realized how quickly some of the quirks of book handling would seem to be irritating - marking your place with a bookmark, turning pages, keeping a stack of current reading by the bed, schlepping half of it into the den or downstairs, etc.

Books on Writing

One of the books that I checked out for perusal on our Moab trip was one of the Writers' Digest "Write Great Fiction" series - Characters, Emotions and Viewpoint by Nancy Kress. After giving it something of a quick skim to see what Ms. Kress covered and what sort of writing exercises were included, I'm now in the process of typing up a set of worksheets with each of the exercises so that I can start working my way through them, once I get to the point of doing actual writing.

And my lovely wife has decided to purchase the entire "Write Great Fiction" series for our edification and instruction, so I'll be working through the rest of them eventually, as well!