Tag Archives: Wendy Welch

The Day After Syndrome

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Those of you who do any kind of travel for work will recognize this syndrome: you go to where you’ve been invited, do your stuff well and intensely for a week if you’re in a festival or at a conference, or if you’re an itinerant consultant or storyteller, several places over a month or two.

And the last night, post-reception, post-e-mail exchanges with other artists, post-follow-ups on future events you’d like to get contacts for, the last night before you go home, you walk or cab back to the hotel contemplating all the wonderful people the world holds, how glad you are you got to teach writing skills to so many students, how energizing and lovely they were, how happy and blessed you are to do this kind of work.

Entering your hotel room, the evening lies spread before you like a peacock’s tail: will you swim first, walk across to that little Greek diner and get your salad? Check your e-mails? Download and post your photos of the two schools and the festival talk you did that day?

You sit down. And that’s the last time you move, except to pick up the remote to find the latest reality TV show, and sure enough here are a bunch of decorative thirtysomethings all mad at each other for no reason you can discern, but wait, are those dead people? Oh, this is the one your friends have been talking about for the past year, but you can’t follow a thing. Why do they keep killing each other instead of the zombies?

You might also find energy enough to open that ale you bought at the beginning of the week in a fit of localvoreism but didn’t drink yet because you’ve been doing three events a day and chatting with people and you wanted to be clear-headed.

After the zombies, a rerun of a Hollywood talk show will appear. You’ll channel surf, sit through half of something called Game of Thrones–and if you thought the undead-ers were incomprehensible…. If it’s a game, why are all these people screwing each other all the time–literally?

Hi ho the glamorous life. You can get a lot done during the weeknights back at the hotel, high on events that have gone well. Discipline exists for those evenings. But that last night before you go home, just take two aspirin and go to bed hollow, drained, as if the Dump Truck of Art hit you from behind, then sped off laughing while your body lay sprawled on the pavement.

It will pass. By the time you get home, you’ll be raring to get back to your writing schedule, answer e-mails that yes, you’d LOVE to go to the next place. More cool people to meet, fun places to visit, great ideas to explore. Life comes back.

exhaustion photoIt’s okay to take that night off, the day after; regroup, recharge, relax. Just stay off social media and DON’T take any selfies. Trust me on this; no good will come of it. Put the remote in your hand, and don’t touch anything else with an On switch. This, too, shall pass.

A Row by Any Other Name….

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bookstore prettyWhen Jack and I visited other bookstores a couple years back on our “Booking Down the Road Trip,” we picked up lots of good ideas from other owners. These included suspending signs from the ceiling to let customers know what was on the shelf below.

Thing is, over the years, one’s sense of humor tends to develop a … caustic approach to identification of book genres. Ask any bookstore owner–although they might obfuscate or distract. It’s not that we’re proud of our subversive humor. We just need it to stay alive in the book business.

So here are a few of the headings under which Jack and I have recently filed books:

FLEAS AND FANGS (Paranormal Romances) – With my friend Melissa, who runs the bookstore Parkville Bookworm in Maryland, I am waiting for the day someone invents a gorgeous, do-gooding zombie in a tux. If he sparkled in the moonlight that raised him from the dead, well, that might be cool, too. One is tempted to speculate on the romantic possibilities of undeadness, but that quickly devolves into a non-family-friendly sexual pun war, so we’ll stop now.

LATTE LIT – This is actually a term coming into vogue as a replacement for “Chick Lit.” It refers to sophisticated good reads of a novel nature. In our shop, we had a section called “Other Times, Other Places,” where I put Historic Fiction and also books featuring protagonists in or from other countries. (Think Robin Maxwell meets Jhumpa Lahiri.) Keeping these outside general fiction lets people who enjoy “Hiss-fit”–as a cynical friend of mine once called Phillipa Gregory and friends–browse without interruption.

GUYS WITH BIG GUNS – Every bookseller goes through this crisis: do thrillers go in mysteries, horror, or war fiction? After moving the political thrillers (read: Vince Flynn and Dale Brown) between war and mystery six or seven times, and trying to keep Ken Follett away from Stephen King, we finally created a new room in our bookstore called “The Mancave.” Here we put thrillers that have to do with politics or war, and the Westerns. They seem to get along well, especially after that movie “Cowboys and Aliens.” Go by, mad world.

HUNKS AND HORSES – This is the feminine end of Westerns – the Linda Lael Millers and Janelle Taylors. The funny part is, if we cross the gender divide and put Longarm in Hunks and Horses, Cassie Edwards in Guys with Big Guns, and the covers are neutral (as with some library editions) men and women will buy “the wrong” Westerns. Proof that tenderness and strength belong to both genders and both genres. :]

CLASSICS – Not an unusual sign, but in a fit of pique one day I grabbed the ladder, crawled up it, and scrawled with a sharpie on the laminated sign “because we liked it.” This is the preemptive strike answer to that question every bookstore employee has been asked: Why is [insert title here] in Classics? We’ve heard this most recently about James Baldwin’s books, and Little Women. (Children’s, apparently.)

So there it is – the secret snarkiness of bookstore owners, revealed on the walls and hanging from the ceilings. I’d love to hear from shop managers and shoppers alike, about signs or shelves you’ve seen.