The Path of the Bookseller

Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. Lots of things happening, including deciding on things that won’t happen. The biggest thing: I’m staying in Cleveland. This is good.

At the start of May, everything had fallen apart. My job had dwindled down to close to nothing, including two weeks in a row in which I had only six hours of work. I had informed my landlord that I would not be able to pay my rent, and that I would leave by the end of the month. I also told my managers that I would be leaving. My appplication for a position at a store in San Francisco was pending, and it looked like I had two possibilities: either I would get the job and somehow make the move, or I would end up back in my mother’s basement back in New Jersey.

I was completely surprised when, at my annual review, my boss asked whether I would stay if he could somehow create a full-time position for me. I told him that I probably would. Over the course of the next week, he pulled the necessary strings, and was able to offer me the full-time job, with benefits, and a guarantee of the appropriate number of hours of work each week. I accepted immediately.

Compounding the luck, when I got home, my IRS refund was in the mail. I immediately called my landlord, and told him that I would, indeed, pay the rent. He was pleased, and agreed that I could stay, continuing the month-to-month status.

Ironically, I got a call about 90 minutes later from the San Francisco store offering me full time work there. That would have been a great job: classical music specialist at a store that had the latest technology, was actually profitable, had really good management, and was eager for me to try new things. But I had to turn them down, with deep regrets. Even though friends had worked together to assure me a place to stay for the first few months while I got situated, there was just no way that I could make the move.

So I’m staying here. I’ll probably be moving into another apartment sometime during the summer. My current house is in a tricky financial situation, so moving out of it makes sense. I want to stay with the same landlord, since he’s a real mensch and he has a beautiful place coming open soon, in the neighborhood in which I initially wanted to live. I would be a couple of blocks from a thriving neighborhood, including my favorite coffeeshop, a great library, an indie cinema, and the like, and the walk to the bus (the same line that I ride now, which goes directly to work) is half as far. I would be paying the same rent as I do here, though the space is, more appropriately for a single person, about half as large. (I’m still paying only half the rent for the current place, even though my roommate bailed out months ago.)

While all my current stuff will fit there, though, there won’t be room for much more.

I’ve decided (and the decision has been much less difficult than I had thought) to sell off the bulk of my CD collection. It has been sitting in a friend’s basement in Berkeley for almost exactly a year now, and I’ve found that I don’t really miss it.

It consists of several thousand discs, with a lot of avant-garde music of different genres as well as a lot of more popular music. It’s all neatly boxed up, and I systematically created a visual catalog of it as I sorted and boxed it. I may post the photos here.

My dream would be for it to be bought up by some sort of institution and become its audio library, though I doubt that that could happen. I don’t have a price in mind for it.

I’m open to and eager for suggestions as to how to handle this.

I also have a lot of books there, but I do want to bring the books to Cleveland, once I get the new place. Creating effective space for books in cramped quarters seems easier than CDs. It seems counter intuitive, since CDs are smaller, but with the smaller spines, one has to get much closer to CDs to see what’s actually on the shelf. Or at least one with my aging eyes and progressive trifocals does.

I’m continuing work on various projects. I thought I had finished The Book of Voices, but I haven’t. Putting it together, I realized that I needed more continuity. I’m adding more interludes with Elisheva at several points in the book, particularly where the stories took jumps in history. Looking more closely at her, I realized that I had unanswered questions, particularly why her memory had disappeared and was returning, and why she was left alone in the stone room with the angel. Answering these is opening more questions about her order of prophets. And this is leading to at least one more Biblical monologue, from the voice of Sarah (which I hope to post within a week).

The more I’m working on it, the more I realize that, although it isn’t strictly a work of science fiction, it draws very much on the traditions of the genre. Its structure is what John Cowan and I used to refer to as a “cobble.” (I think he made up the term, but I’m not sure.) Independent stories that work on their own are organized in a timeline resembling a novel, with connecting material both within and between the stories. This reaches back to classics such as Heinlein’s Future History series, Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Niven’s Known Space, and Asimov’s Robot stories and Foundation novels (later retconned into a single stream (to which there are couple of subtle references in The Book of Voices)). And even though the technologies in it are related to magic, the workings of angels, the nature of souls, the operations of entities unbounded by time, and the like, I find that I need to track them and to try to keep them as rigorous and consistent (within the parameters of the various characters’ understanding) as I would with any conventional science in traditional science fiction.

So that’s where things are now. No doubt there will be major changes in the future, but for now, I’m just trying to catch up with myself and breathe.