Patrick Swenson

It was a whirlwind summer, full of writing opportunities and workshops and conventions and…

Well. The blog post title sounds kind of gloomy, so let me explain. Tomorrow I head back to school to greet students for the new year. (It will be only a partial day of classes since much of the first part of the day is reserved for the incoming freshmen.) I always feel blue as the summer comes to an end, for a variety of reasons. This year, I am bummed I didn’t get more writing done than I did. I’m bummed I won’t see some of my writing friends and convention compadres for a while.

But: It was a whirlwind of a summer, as I said. I attended Clarion West get-togethers ands various author readings. I managed to catch up with a lot of work related to my small book publishing company, Fairwood Press. I got to meet my agent, who was in Seattle for the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference, and I got to attend and be a workshop leader for the Cascade Writers Workshop in Portland Oregon. I traveled to Calgary, Alberta to take part in When Words Collide, a genre convention for writers. I went to Montana to visit my family. I had lots of time hanging out with my son Orion. And just this weekend I traveled to San Antonio for the 71st Worldcon, and even got to hold a Hugo Award won by Joss Whedon for The Avengers. (He wasn’t there, so the award was accepted by someone else. I managed to wrest it away for a few minutes.)

I’m excited for the new school year, I really am. It’ll just take some time to adjust. Mostly, I have to adjust my sleep schedule, which is completely contrary to my natural pattern of night owlness. I’ve got good classes, a lot of eager students (I’m overloaded in three of the classes at the moment), and plenty of learning to pass on. I also, as usual, find myself a bit innundated with more Fairwood to-dos. And due to a lackluster summer of writing, I’ll have to crank up the heat on writing book two.

Sleep can sometimes be a premium during the school year. How often do you give up on a few hours of shut-eye to get things done? It seems almost a given. I still put in a few all-nighters during the year just to catch up with the tasks that stack up.

I was at school most of the day, and dragged myself back home by 11 p.m. And now it’s officially tomorrow, just past midnight. There’s a late load of laundry going right now, still in the wash cycle. Oops! Gotta get those bills paid for the month too.

What am I doing here writing this blog? I’ve got work to do!

No, this isn’t a Firefly post.

With the demise of Borders, and the “iffy” future of Barnes & Noble, many book buyers who love to frequent brick-and-mortar stores are nervous about what is to come. Will they have to buy every print book online? (Well, there are those discounts, and fast shipping.) Will they soon have to read everything in e-format?

How can a traditioanl paper book buyer find any peace?

A while back I contributed to a special section in Locus magazine about the small press and independent press. One of the questions asked about the future of publishing, and I have always thought that when the big chain stores go out of business, we’ll see a rise in the independent bookstore. Indeed, the early numbers are already bearing out that idea. Chains put a lot of the independent bookstores out of business. Amazon, ebook retailers, and other onlilne venues had a part to play in crippling the chains. So why not bring back the independents?

Just today I had lunch with my sister in my hometown of Kalispell, Montana, and afterward she took me across the street to their new bookstore. Before this, the city of Kalispell had a big Borders. It did indeed drive my sister (and others) crazy not being able to go inside a bookstore to browse. Now here was this independent store (Bookworks). Small, cozy, limited selection, but it absolutely bled charm. They knew my sister by name. They told her the book she’d ordered was on its way, and apologized for the delay. Granted, the science fiction section, tiny by most stores’ standards, had a lot of big name fantasy authors (Butcher, Martin, Brooks, etc), and a bunch of Orson Scott Card, some classic authors, and a few odds and ends. But there were some nice surprises. I saw a book on the shelf from a friend of mine, and one of the owners said those books were doing well for them. (I actually ended up buying something from the mystery section, Craig Johnson’s The Cold Dish, the first book in his Longmire series.)

There’s something to be said for the homegrown experience. Sure you’re paying full price for books. Sure you’re waiting a little longer for special orders. But in my opinion, nothing beats a good tour of a cozy bookstore. My sister didn’t hesitate to mention my book coming next summer from Tor. The owner said, “Oh, science fiction or fantasy?” She knew the imprint. She asked me for the title, and told my sister to make sure to remind them when it got closer to the pub date.

A friend of mine has a local bookstore he goes to in his hometown of Sumner, Washington. They know him by name. He orders books through them. They also have a thriving online business, which keeps the brick-and-mortar store going.

Don’t you wish you all had a corner independent bookstore just around the corner from you? Total serenity.

If you are one of the lucky ones who has the cool bookstore nearby, it’d be fun to hear about it in comments.