Huzzah!

Well, it’s officially official!

My store is going to be participating in the Fantastic Four Fiction Tour! Okay, so it’s not really my store, but seeing as I am now officially the ‘signing event liaison’ it is my event! And now is when I start working on it, which includes but is not limited to the following:

1. Calling the local print media and talking to them about the event and faxing them the press
release
2. Brainstorming on how to decorate the store for the event
3. Allocating funds for refreshment for the authors (it’s evening so we are thinking
light snacks and refreshing beverages like tea (hot and cold) lemonade, and water.
4. Creating decorations
5. Praying about the event
6. Talking to customers about the event
7. Talking to customers about the event
8. Briefing the owner and staff on where we are with the event
9. Praying about the event
10. Talking to customers about the event.
11. Interfacing with publishing houses and ordering the books
12. Talking to customers about the event
13. Talking to customers about the event
14. Praying about the event
15 Receiving the books
16.Talking to customers about the event
17.Talking to customers about the event
18. Prepping the store
19. Praying about the event
20. Hosting the event.

Nothin Much

It has been one tiring, annoying, tearful week and I am so glad that it is over.

Spider Man. . .Spider Man .. .Does Whatever a Spider Can. . .

From all the horrible, negative reviews my co-workers were giving Spider Man III, I thought that I was going to be so disappointed when Mom and I went to see it this evening. Just goes to show that co-workers while usually right, can be dead wrong at times about movies and this was one of those times.

I think that they didn't have a good time at the movie because they weren't good Spidey fans. So, here are some tips for those going to see it--and everyone should go and see it, it really is superb!

First of all, any Spidey fan worth their webbing knows that the story line is going to be angst ridden and more 'cerebral' than other comic book character movies. This is not your typical ''kill em all and let God sort em out'' movie and if you go in expecting to see plain ole' violence and mayhem then you are going to be sorely disappointed. So be a good Spidey fan and remember that when you go to the movie.

Secondly, you need to be up on what happened in Spiderman II before you go and see Spiderman III. There is a lot of closure brought to things that happened in the second movie in the third, and a lot of foreshadowing done in the second is resolved in the third. So, review Spiderman II before you see Spiderman III.

Thirdly, be prepared for a long sit. The movie started at 6:45pm and ended at 9:00 pm for us. Show time was 6:30, I'm counting from when the previews actually stopped and the movie began.

Now, to answer some complaints from my coworkers.

1) It dragged, there wasn't enough action, you were too often asked to look at the emotional side of things.

Right, well yeah this one was slower than the previous two movies, I agree to that.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of action sequences in this movie, Peter's not doodling tic-tac-toe on the sidewalks or playing hop-scotch and thinking about his mistakes, not hardly. But the action sequences are more spaced out than in Spiderman II, which means the pacing is slower. Also, having 3 villains in this tale makes the focus divert, and while the story lines interlace well, you have to be paying attention for them to make sense.

Too emotional? Bah! Spider Man isn't Batman (who is emotional too, it's just rage and revenge that he deals with mainly) he's younger, he's just recently lost his uncle, and he's had some pretty weird/odd/devastating things happen to him. It's refreshing to see a hero who isn't a hardened commando being an island unto himself and never second guessing his actions or doing the wrong thing.

I loved the rehashing of Peter and Harry's friendship, I thought that came through as one of the shining points of the movie. There are other twists and turns among the relationships that make the tension within and the tension without well balanced, and fans of the comic books will see nods to plot points in the relationships between Peter and Mary Jane, between Mary Jane and Harry, and between Harry and Peter.

There are some sweet revelations too! You learn more about what happened the night that Peter's uncle died, how the Hob Goblin really met his end, and what drives the Sand Man to do what he does.

2) There were too many villains.

Too many villains. Oh, really? This is likely the last Spidey movie! I want to see as many villains as possible in here! And, in the plot it made sense for Son of Hobgoblin to be in there as well as Sand Man, they tie into Spiderman II and those plot points needed to be tied up neatly. The only villain that they could have done away with and not lost anything would have been Venom. Aha, I hear you yelping at that. No, I didn't think you'd want to lose him.

That's one of the things I loved about Spider Man comics, the villains were never wooden or two dimensional. They all had reasons for doing what they are did, and their actions were justifiable to them, as outrageous as they might have been. The movie carries on that tradition of villains that aren't evil merely for the sake of being evil (even Venom has a reason for doing what it does) that Stan Lee started.

3. There were corny parts.

(MINOR SPOILER ALERT)

Don't scroll further if you want to be totally surprised by the movie.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


















Are there some corny bits? Uh-huh. Peter's walk down to get a new suit is . . .groan-worthy but I think it's suppose to be groan-worthy.

4.) There were too many CG fights and not enough real ones

I don't know that this even deserves a rebuttal. I think they might have slept through the fist fights Peter and Harry had. And the ones that Peter and Venom had. And the one that Peter and the Bouncer had.

The special effects were mind blowing, Sand Man is truly incredible. Some of the fight scenes, especially the ones where part of him is worn away. . .took my breath away they looked so real. The web-swinging shots were amazing as always, and Venom gave me goose flesh towards the climax of the last fight scene.

So, in summation (having tried hard not to expose any spoilers) I can say that this movie needs to be seen on the big screen to be appreciated, that the plot was outstanding, that the acting really by everyone I think was pretty solid, and the special effects were the best to date for Spidey.

So what are you waiting for?

Go see it!

Eight Random Things

Right, so today I've been tagged by Wayne Thomas Batson, author of The Door Within, Rise of the Wyrm Lord, and The Final Storm to post 8 random things about myself. Go check out his site, Enter the Door Within, after of course you check out some trivia about me.

Here goes!

The first rule of the game, however, is to post the rules of the game. Here they are:

Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.

At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Hmm, eight random things. . .


1.) I nearly didn't survive infancy. Due to a lack of fatty tissue around my brain, (that's right, I was the opposite of 'fathead') when I would get a fever I would go into massive febrile seizures. Through prayer and also medication, that was finally brought under control .. but if I'm a lettle different now you know why!

2.) I came to know Christ when I was four (knelt down in front of a t.v. during a Billy Graham crusade when he gave the call for people to come down and give their lives to Christ)

3.) I have been in private school, public school, and also have been home schooled.

4.)I lived for 3 months in Ireland working as a missionary

5.)I collect signed books and to date have ones from authors Donald J. Sobel, Timothy Zahn, Wayne Thomas Batson, George Bryan Polivka, C.Peter Wagner, Nancy Winslow Parker and Howard Weinstein.

6.) I am addicted to long sharp metal pointy things (mainly swords)

7. I have a boating license and can pilot craft up to 40 feet.

8.) I can read upside down and backwards.

haha, now to go and tag as many as I can. I don't think I'll be able to tag eight bloggers but letsee. . .I think I'll tag

Artchick
Halfelvenwriter
Josh

Because there just aren't that many bloggers left that haven't been hit, I mean paintballed, I mean tagged.

Loons, 127 years, and a Lion Paw Table

Today Mom took me up to PopPop's old house. Eventually it'll be sold, but right now every one's going through and taking things that are meaningful to them and we are getting ready to have the community yard sale this Saturday and clear out all the things that no one wants that we are sure aren't worth that much anyway. Like the garden gnomes. And the old camera from the 80's. And the Pyrex dishes that have so many scratches in them they aren't fit for baking. We went up today for another reason though, we went up to continue the restoration work on my table. That table has been in the house nearly since it was built and it holds a lot of memories for me. It's a genuine 'lion paw' table, each of the four legs are carved to resemble lion legs, and the foot of each leg is a lion paw. My family has celebrated countless birthdays, anniversaries, Mother's Day's, Father's Day's, 4th of July's at that house and we always gather around those deep carved paws. Meals were eaten on that table, cards were played on that table, Trivial Pursuit was played on that table, play dough and paper machete and crayons and markers all were used on that table. But what I remember the most, the strongest, is hiding under that table and hugging the wooden paws pretending they were Aslan's feet and feeling safe there during thunderstorms.

Over the years, sitting in the dinning room in all that humidity and moisture, somehow the tablecloth that had been atop the lovely wood became fused to it ( and it was one of those wretched tablecloths that have the green furriness underneath ) so before anything else can be done to or for the table, that green gunk has to be scrapped off. And boy howdy is it ever a job! Mom and I used goo-off or something like it and plastic spatulas (never to be cooked with again) and the going was super slow. We had to wait for the goo off to soak into the light green film of fuzz over the wood before even attempting to scrape. And then, we'd scrape scrape scrape and only get a few centimeters of the green stuff off. The longer we waited, however, the better the stuff came off and when we waited almost an hour, we were able to get long sections to come up. Today we got about a third of the table scraped, and I'll be going back up there this week or next to take another stab at removing that awful film.

After lunch we went up into the attic, and we found PopPop's year book from 1933 and MomMom's from 1925. One was a college year book, the other high school. But all the girls looked so glamorous there! Like something out of the silver screen! And all the college guys with their hair just so and their serious, non-smiling faces, they might as well have been film stars too. But the best thing we found wasn't in the year books, it was in another photo album, the kind with the sticky pages and the clear film that flips down over them to keep them in place. It was a marriage licence, dated 1880! The horrible thing was that it had been stuck to the stickiness of the photo album sheets, and either it fell into four pieces or it was torn into four pieces to fit in the pages. Mom and I almost cried. I mean it's a piece of family history over 127 years old and that is how it was being kept?! *AH*

Anyway, we are now looking into having it professionally cleaned, mounted, and framed. I mean there's no monetary value in it, seeing as it's in four pieces but it was a real wow just to be able to look at it once we pieced it back together.

Before we left the house, Mom and I went and sat out on the porch (having finished our mile walk for the day) we were relaxing and talking and suddenly there was a great commotion out on the river. A pair of loons (and I do mean the birds) were fishing. At least, we think they were fishing. They were smacking the surface of the water with their wings, and then dunking themselves under the surface, and bobbing up several feet from where they started. This went on for over an hour, water going every which way, loons diving, loud annoying sounds echoing off the water. Granted it's only about five feet deep between piers and such but they ruckus they made with the wing slapping seemed to get everything wet.

Now I know what it means to be 'crazy as a loon'

Save them from Returns!

Today I scanned out and disked over 45 titles, all destined to be returned to the publisher. This past week I've scanned out over 271 titles. All those lovely books, not wanted and not selling are going back to the publishers. If we haven't sold it in six months it's going back. If we've sold one copy in the last six months then one copy stays and the rest of that title go back. If it's a new release it gets flagged to be watched for the next six months and then I'll be going through and purging them again.

And we aren't the only store doing this!

Think of it, hundreds of Christian bookstore clerks, scything through the isles, separating the books that sell from the books that don't sell, and you have the power to determine in what group your favorite fantasy books will be put.

Okay, maybe that was a bit melodramatic, but the truth is that what makes money for the store stays, and what doesn't make money for the store goes.

Make sure your local Christian bookstore knows that you love Christian fantasy, or those books will wind up back at the publisher this month.

I love it when this happens!

So there I was, cramming about 45 minutes of writing time in before work yesterday, really enjoying writing Mynasthoa, and it happened.

I was clicking along nicely, enjoying the scene and thinking 'wow this is fitting together really well' when I stopped to check the use of a semi-colon and that turned into a quick reread of the paragraph I just finished. It's good I though to myself But there needs to be some dialogue in here to break up the monotony of description and action. It's not a silent film after all. The problem was, he was by himself and I didn't want to change that. So after several attempts at letting him ''think'' about where he found himself and some introspection, I decided to let him talk to himself instead and even that wasn't really working all that well until he called out for his pupil. That was enlightening because 1) I didn't know he had pupil and 2) I didn't know that he needed a pupil.

By having just that little bit of one sided dialogue where he's calling out for Elias (this is one name that I didn't especially pick/check behind the name/agonize over) not only did I break up the description of the scene but it intensified because Elias doesn't answer. It was just one of those ''sweet'' moments that I savor. Everything just came together, all the things I've learned, all the points I wanted to make, and I even got a good 'test response' from a coworker when I read it to them. She wants to know more---and even said that I was being very unfair and she expected me to give her more to read this week.

I Got Tickled

Yesterday wasn't a good day for me, I think a lot of you have guessed that, seeing as I've gotten a slew of ''Hey, what's wrong, don't lock it all away inside, and we are praying" encouragements. So thanks for that

Today I was reflecting on something that happened earlier in the week, and I have decided that during this rather gloomy time, that the Lord has taken to not only giving me kisses each day, but that on some rather hard days, He has taken to gently tickling me as well.

This Wednesday, was such a day. Now because we are in close proximity to a school that is having Wayne Thomas Batson come and do an author night, my store was asked to procure the paperback copy of The Door Within lost chapters edition. (Shame on you if you don't have your own copy yet!) because that was the one thing they didn't order.

So, I ran around like a mad hatter on April 25th, got all things lined up and in their proper order for the 150 copies of The Door Within to come to the store. The very nice sales rep on Thomas Nelson's end put a rush on the shipping to make sure they were in my store by the 4th so the school could pick them up on the 7th and they'd be available for purchase on the 8th. So far so good. On Wednesday of this week (for those counting along that would be the 2nd) 11 boxes arrived from a gift company, 1 box from a distributor of books, 1 box from a music company, and 5 boxes from Thomas Nelson. I was not laughing at that point, because the 11 boxes were large, heavy, and full of Christmas product that we weren't suppose to get at my location, they were to be sent to the main store and on top of this, they weren't suppose to ship till September. So, wrong location, wrong month, large headache for me. Thankfully the owner was up there and she told me what needed to be done seeing as my branch doesn't have a manager just several senior staff and I was on duty when this happened. Anyway, back to the ticking. The tickling happened after the rather stressful morning, after the Bible Study was over, after I had a chance to fill my grumbling stomach, after the mad rush of customers.

I had to check in and front-list the Nelson order (150 copies of The Door Within Lost Chapters Edition will not do so themselves--though it would be nice if books would just sign themselves into the store and we could eliminate this step) and part one of doing so was to unbox and count the books.

Now paper is heavy, 1 box of The Door Within Lost Chapters Edition weighed 15 pounds, and the other 4 which were all the same size and larger than the first weighed 32 pounds a piece. (For those still counting that's 143lbs of Door Within goodness) So like any good store clerk, I slit open the boxes and began disemboweling them rather than picking up and moving 32 pounds at a time. Well, you can imagine that 150 copies of a book takes up less room inside boxes than outside boxes. I had them piled on the floor in rows, counting and stacking as I went. And I kept thinking of the scene in the book where Robbie and Aidan are making a fort. . .and there are all those lovely books that I'm. . .making a fort with and I just lost it. Right there, in the middle of the floor with customers gently stepping around and over me and the books which were stacked in small towers all over the floor. I howled. And one day, I hope to come across some hapless clerk howling among piles of my most recent tome, for similar if slightly punch drunk reasons.

Yeah, that was most definitely a tickle. And I needed a tickle this week. Desperately.

Pays off to be behind

So, work is hard and boring, my life outside work right now is hard and boring, and I have been hiding from reality by watching movies every night. I am not a movie person, I'm not a music person so the net result is that I am way behind on new artists to listen to and movies to watch and when times like this hit it pays off to be behind. So far this week I've watched Wallace and Gromit-Curse of the Were Rabbit (for those wondering about my sanity Ralph Fiennes is the voice of one of the characters), The Illusionist (that took two nights because it's rather long, though incredibly good, and I didn't have time to watch the whole thing on Wednesday) and Open Season (watched for Martin Lawrence sake, not for Ashton Kutcher). I'm thinking that this vegging out isn't so bad, I mean I don't want to do it forever, but really it's been rather nice. The most positive note in my life right now is that friends and family are praying for me, and that I am surrounded by people that love and support me. Oh, and that the doctor seems to be determined to get to the bottom of why I am going through these sineus tachycardia episodes. Yep, still having the episodes, no real change really, sept now I try not to even chart them that much unless one gets really bad. It's easier on me if I recognize that it's there, do what I can to lessen it, and move on. Right now, that's what I need to do to stay sane. Letsee, anything else to report? Oh, I'm working on something with Myas, so all ye Mynas lovers can rejoice, it's coming along quite well and the ole man's starting to be less two dimensional though he annoys me still in some ways. Anyone else have a character that they write that really seems to work well but you'd actually not want to meet? Oh come on, tell me I'm not the only one out there that has this problem. Someone? Anyone? Your silence is so encouraging. And I think with it some of you are lying " David. . I could burn in hell for the lies I've told. Make me look good you said, be creative you said." Oh, and major points to anyone knows that partial quote. *Gasp* it's actually from a movie. Right well I'm off to avoid some more reality.

Tips from the Other Side of the Counter

I love Wayne Batson's idea of going this May or June into Christian Bookstores and encouraging the stores to continue or expand their Fantasy area by buying one of our favorite fantasy books! Working in a Christian Bookstore, I can tell you that sales really are looked at, and what moves gets brought in again and what doesn't move doesn't get brought in again.

I thought I might put some short tips here for those of you gearing up for the besiegement of the stores, you know it's always easier get inside a citadel if you have a person on the inside. So gallants, I offer my service as that person!

Hundreds of small crises happen each day in Christian bookstores, the incorrect stock comes in, someone doesn't show up for work, the computers refuses to do what they are suppose to, a customer is unhappy with something they bought, sales fliers have expired coupons, and the public bathroom runs out of toilet paper or paper towels. All of these woes and a thousand and one other combinations, happen every day. And, 99% of them are shouldered by the Manager of the bookstore.

Which is why I am happy not to be one, being one of the senior staff is hard enough! Why am I sharing this? Well because most likely when you go to talk with your local store manager, there will have been two or three problems that have occurred and when you ask to speak with the manager, the natural assumption will be that you are bringing another one along.

To stop this ''problem solving'' mindset, there are a couple of things that you can do.

1) Let them know that you don't have a problem (kinda simple but it works), but rather a request to make. We like requests. We get requests all the time for things, and if there's a way to get the item or book that was requested in, we do so.

2) Point out something positive about the store before broaching the subject of what it is lacking (those lovely, can't-live-without-them titles of the fantasy genre)

3) Be well informed and site places where they can go and do research themselves when you mention how well the books are doing and how fantastic the authors are.

4) Understand that getting the books into the store once the decision has been made might take a while. If they go directly to the publisher (and they already have an account) it will take between 3 weeks and 4 weeks once an order has been placed. If they go through a distributor the wait will be between 2 and 3 weeks at the most. So, check back, but be patient!

5) Don't give up if you get a no the first time!