The Path of the Bookseller

Things have been both insanely busy and quiet here in frigid Cleveland.

I’ve moved into a beautiful, relatively tiny new apartment, a few blocks from the Cedar-Lee Theater and from Phoenix Coffee on Lee. It’s a one bedroom space on the third floor of… um… what would be called a duplex if there weren’t a third floor, but I’ve never heard one called a triplex. It’s big enough for one person — except that I still have a basement crammed with CDs and books in California and a garage full of books in New Jersey.

I’m still at the bookstore, and now a supervisor there. I’d avoided getting promoted for as long as I could, but our staff had gotten cut back so far that the current supervisors couldn’t take lunch breaks, since we always need to have at least one supervisor or manager on the floor.

So I took the position. I’m learning to fit in. It’s interesting to see how much of what I encounter boils down to moral quandaries, balancing what’s best for the customers against what’s best for the company, and deciding what to do when a bookseller and a customer have very different views of what just happened in a transaction.

The pay is still terrible, but I’ve managed to trim down to a fairly frugal lifestyle. Part of it hinges around what might seem to be an extravagance: I’ve gotten an iPhone.

While maintaining a iPhone might seem expensive, it’s balanced by other savings. I have chosen to have neither a landline phone nor a Net connection, other than the iPhone, at home. I’ve also curtailed my hanging out in WiFi cafés (a habit that was proving both expensive and caloric). My previous phone had died just as my AT&T contract was up for renewal, so when I spotted a refurbished 8GB iPhone 3G at att.com, the die was cast. I’ll probably post more about the phone later; suffice it to say that using it is giving me repeated jolts of “Holy frak –I’m in THE FUTURE!”

On the creative front: I’ve promised myself that I’m going to finish writing The Book of Voices by the end of the year. I had thought that it was finished last spring, then decided that it needed bridging passages, telling more of Elisheva’s story, at key points along the way. Then I decided that it didn’t need them. Then I decided that I couldn’t decide. Then I realized that the worst case would be to leave the bridging sections unfinished, so I’ve decided to finish them. Then I’ll get into the messy business of trying to find a agent, publisher, and all that, unless something better comes along.

I’ve decided to publish 19th Nervous Breakdown (aka The Book of the Blog) myself. In doing so, though, I’m wondering if the subtitle could be better. Right now, it is “Adventures on the Path of the Bookseller.” I’ve realized, though, that the overwhelming majority of the pieces in the book deal with selling music, rather than books. I’ve thought of expanding the subtitle to “Adventures on the Path of the Book and Music Seller,” but have been told that it is both cumbersome and “lacking in zip.”

So I’m opening the question to the Group Mind; What might a better subtitle be?

And now off to sleep, in preparation for another day of work. (Ah, December retail… as much fun as a barrel of tiny rabid pandas. Only colder.)

[Sent from my iPhone ]