Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Loompanics RIP

As I’ve said before, if I’m not updating here, it means I’m busy writing on a real project. And I have been picking at something for a little while, and making okay progress. I’m still at the beginning though, and too scared to jinx it to mention anything about it. The best explanation to this phase of the writing would have to do with the metaphor about swimming across a mile-wide lake. If you swim out a hundred feet, it’s pretty easy to turn back and swim another hundred feet and then go home. If you swim out a thousand feet, it takes some work to quit and go home. If you’re out three or four thousand feet, you might as well just finish. I need to get down a solid layer of wordcount on this before I even make any decisions on what stays and what goes and how the plot will unfold. I have become the king of false starts in the last few years, and I really need to stick with this one and keep it going, until it’s to a length where I figure I can’t put it down and quit anymore. When Summer Rain was a bad first draft and I gave it up to work on my second book, I eventually had to come back to it and start the next draft, because I invested 80,000 words into it.

(That’s probably not a great metaphor, because I can’t swim.)

Speaking of Summer Rain, I got the hardcover, and it is pretty amazing. I love that it’s done with a color jacket and the actual book has gold lettering on a cloth binding. Very classy. I know nobody else will give a shit to buy one, but I’m glad to have it on the shelf, with the others.

And speaking of buying books, Loompanics is going out of business! For those not in the know, they are (were) the big one-stop catalog for all of your paranormal, fake ID, lockpicking, drug, sex, and spying book needs, many of which you can’t find in stores. They used to put out a great zine-like catalog, and I could just read the catalog itself for hours, poring over all of the strange books they sold. They were located in the Pacific Northwest (Port Townsend, WA – a bit north of Seattle) and I first got their catalog from a zine show or the book fair or something about ten years ago. They’re the kind of store where I would put in a mega-order for a half-dozen book every once in a while when a bonus or tax check came in. Anyway, they are closing shop, and are running a 50% off all stock sale. I placed my order, and I hope I get at least some of it before everything runs out.

I’m still reading as much as I can, as I work on this new book. John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk is currently going – the original version, not the new-and-(un)improved IG Press version which will come out in the future.

Okay, back to work…