Chapter 6

  It had gotten a good deal warmer since I began my talk at ten am, but there was a beautiful breeze blowing in off of Mirror lake so we rolled up the sides of the tent, to keep the tent cool. Sven was so red I pondered if he was going to pass out from the heat. Or that he was so angry that no one had supported his position when he had taken his shot at me.

  I hope enough of our writers noted Sven’s response to my appeal for essays from the Writer’s Workshop guests. Amy didn’t want him moving in and that was good enough for me. Amy likes just about everybody, she even liked Anais when Anais was still my nemesis. So like I said she likes just about everyone. After giving the collective a house, they ought to let her have a veto, at least this time and not just because I am in full agreement.

  I mean the guy called me an old hippie, like either of those things is something to be ashamed of. The way I see it being old is just being lucky. I mean the planet has been trying to kill you since the moment you were born. Then when you are old enough to understand them the American advertising industry tries to get you to kill yourself with tobacco, saturated fats, Alcohol, butter and junk foods that’s when they are not busy trying to get you to buy things you can’t afford and don’t need.

  Like smart appliances that first spy on you then report all that info back home. Sure the appliances are smart, it’s the people that buy them that aren’t. Smart tv’s that report home your favorite shows so that the ad agency can send a personalized list of products chosen just for you. Probably more crap like smart toilets, so the ad agency knows when you’ve had a bowel movement. What a load of crap. See I got that whole rant, just by being called old. It was being called a hippie that made me think of the advertising agencies. All the hippies I knew were happy with a record player, lots of records, a few books and a jar of peanut butter. If you had a bong, they probably wouldn’t turn you down.

  Drugs the hippies achilles heel, too many lost to too many drugs. I wonder if it was really for recreation or was it really self medication. Because the hippies had to survive the world trying to kill them, the ad agencies and then the government wanted to kill them in Southeast Asia. Then they criminalized LSD and pot. They gave a hippie named John Sinclair ten years in jail because he gave, he gave, not sold, gave an undercover cop two joints. John Lennon wrote a song about it. A little over fifty years later, New York state made three hundred and sixty million dollars from legal pot sales.

  Amy, Bianca and Monique are bringing food out of the house. It’s time for our lunch break. Which means it’s time for me to get inside. Lucy has someone for me to speak to about the part time job. Lucy is at the counter speaking to a woman whose back is to me. But I’d swear she looks familiar.

  “Hi Laura.”

  “Hi Zoe, what are you doing here? Is everything alright at your store?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. The building was sold and the new owner claims that they have to double my rent so that they can start making a little profit. I was barely making enough for Cillian and myself to eat. I know you don’t sell used books, but Lucy said you might be interested in some of my stock. Ten cents a book and I’ll help you move all that you buy.”

  “Laura, I interviewed Zoe last night, and I want to hire her part time for a two week trial starting tomorrow if that is alright with you.”

  “Lucy, you are the manager, so like I said, the decision is all yours. But Zoe tell me about the books?”

  “There are a lot of them in there, I generally sell them for around a dollar. When people would bring books for me to buy, I’d give them twenty five cents per book in cash or fifty cents on credit.”

  “Fiction or Nonfiction?”

  “Both maybe sixty percent fiction and forty percent nonfiction, Laura.”

  “Alright Lucy, call Lis and see if she can come in right now. If she can, Zoe can she go to your store and look over the books?”

  “Sure Laura why?”

  “We’ll take all of your fiction, but our sister store in Woodstock might want your nonfiction.”

  “Laura, it’d cost more to ship the books than they are worth.”

  “Not if we ship them ourselves.”

  Lis was on her way in when I called Willow.

  “Hi Willow, how are you, Pappy and Phoebe?”

  “Good Laura, but aren’t you supposed to be at a writers workshop this weekend.”

  “Yes we’re on our lunch break, I have a talk to give in about a half an hour.”

  “I’m calling because the used bookstore in Saranac is going out of business and I’m buying all the fiction. I have Lis coming in, she can call you in say half an hour and she can tell you titles and stuff.”

  “Laura, I’m not sure I’d have the cash right now if there are a lot of them.”

  “Willow, I’ll pay for them and you can pay me back when they sell.”

  “Laura, I can’t do that. It’s very generous but no.”

  “Willow, look this woman is on her own she has a son. The landlord of the bookstore just doubled her rent. So if you don’t take the nonfiction she’ll probably have to throw them away. Lucy is hiring her part time so you’ll have to see her sad face when you call the store. Don’t let a little pride stand in the way of helping someone out. I thought we were family.”

  “Laura, if you weren’t such a nice person, you’d be terrifying. Weaponizing family. Next you’ll be telling me if I don’t take the books, I’ll make a puppy sad or someone will throw cold water on a cat.”

  “Yes, Willow, Snidely Whiplash is filling a bucket of ice water as we speak.”

  “Laura, you have uncovered my weakness, I can’t allow a cat to catch a cold. Oh curses, foiled again!”

  “Nice use of a tagline, Willow. If you want we can move the books from her store to our boathouse and then whenever you come back for a visit, we’ll load them into the bus for you.”

  “No, Laura, that’s too much work, books are heavy, that way the books will have to be moved twice. I’ll see if my part timer can cover the store. Actually Laura, I think that I just had a wonderful idea. But I need to try and work it out onto paper. Yes I’ll take the books and yes I’ll come get them early next week. How would you like to go into business with me? Just think about it. Call me later this afternoon, when you get a break from your workshop.”

  With that Willow was gone. I looked forward to Willow’s idea about working together. I doubt it’ll be a dull business meeting. Nothing about Willow is dull.

  “Zoe, if you wouldn’t mind taking a seat in the reading nook. I need to have a quick chat with the manager.” Zoe left to take a seat. I used the store’s laptop to find the standard deduction for a parent and child. “Okay Lucy, what do you think? Would you like to work with her?”

  “Yes, for sure and now we are going to be selling used books like you wanted to and we start with a full stock. What do you suppose Willow is thinking of?”

  “I have no idea Lucy, but I’ll bet you it will be fun. It may slow down some of the other things I had planned around the store but if you or Willow come up with an idea, then I think I’d have to be an idiot not to try it out. You two young ladies were born to be booksellers. Offer Zoe sixteen dollars an hour, five hours a day, six days a week, full health care for her and her son and two weeks vacation. Now I have to find out if she can work for a quirky old hippie, if she leaves then you’ll have to continue the interview process, we’ll still buy her stock if she wants us to. If she comes back to the counter, offer her the job and when Lis gets here the two of them can go to Zoe’s store and move some used paperbacks back here, fiction only and we want selections of romance, mystery, fantasy and science fiction in that order. Why in that order?”

  “Because those are our best selling genres in sales order. When they bring the books back, how do you want them added to our database? Should we create a new database devoted to used books or should I create a new field in the existing database with a toggle Used or New?”

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  “Good question, if I wasn’t here to ask and you had to decide on your own. Which would you choose and why?”

  “Hmm Laura, I’d add a new field, but only after backing up the database. The reason why is it will save us double work down the line. If someone asks for a book we only have to search for it once. Sales reports will be accurate in one report for both types. But we will have to be careful, adding the books to the database, making sure the books are added under the proper type, otherwise the pricing will be wrong, we’d lose money selling a new book for a used price and we’d gouge a customer if we charge retail price for a used book.”

  “Exactly Lucy, that’s why you are the store manager. Ask Gemini how to create a form for adding books to the database. Then make two forms one for used that only includes a price field for Used and one form for New that only includes a price field Retail, next color the Used form green and the New form yellow. Why color the forms like that?”

  “The color helps the person entering the information, it is a visual statement, this is used or this is new. Green is the color of eco, nothing is more eco-friendly than used. It keeps a book out of a landfill while not requiring a tree be killed to produce it.”

  “Perfect, you have this completely under control. I just hope we have enough broken down boxes to move a fair amount of books here. Oh I almost forgot we need Zoe to give us a count of books so that we can pay her. If she doesn’t have a database, she and Lis will need to count them all before they start taking books out of there, I don’t want to cheat her.”

  Then I went over to the reading nook, I had to know if the former owner of a store would really be ok working for a sixteen year old high school student? If not, I had a real problem. I want to give her a job, she has the experience and then some. She obviously needs the job and is probably willing to take any job at this point, she not only has to feed herself but she has a son to feed and clothe and he also has his own set of hopes and dreams.

  “Zoe, I’m pretty sure that Lucy is going to offer you a part time job. But before I approve it, I have a couple of questions. As a store owner do you foresee any issues transitioning from an owner to a part time worker?”

  “Laura, I may have owned the store, but honestly it felt like it owned me. It barely made a profit, I worked ten hours a day six days a week and eight hours on Sunday. I could have made way more money working part time for minimum wage but the store at least included health care. I’m not going to get that part time. So for the time being we’ll just have to take a chance that we don’t get sick.”

  “Zoe, will you be able to take orders from a sixteen year old young woman? Will you be able to refrain from telling her what to do?”

  “Laura, the best part of this whole mess is that I will no longer be responsible for a store. Aside from the long hours I worked, even when I got home to spend time with Cillian, I was distracted with worry about the store. For the past few weeks business has been really bad. Ever since that protest march at your store where you took apart that woman on live TV about how she lied about Lucy. Business was down at least thirty percent. I can only assume that those former clients came here. So while it might not have been my fault that the store failed, it wasn’t your fault or Lucy’s. It was my mom’s store and she wanted me to have it, but we both agreed that it’s time to give up the dream of owning a store. Originally I wanted to be a writer, so I’m used to hard work and long hours. After I get done working here, I’ll head home and work on my novel. I’m actually looking forward to being told what to do. As far as a sixteen year old doing the telling, Lucy seems pretty mature for her age and is actually older than I was when I started working at the store for my mother. Strictly speaking it wasn’t legal, but because I was working for my mother. I couldn’t really say no. After a while I started to like working there, what’s not to like being around all of those books.”

  “What about your son, will you be able to work ten till three o’clock six days a week. Do you have child care? I don’t know if that is too personal, you don’t have to answer if you don’t wish to?”

  She laughed. “No it’s not too personal, we live with my Mom so she’s watched Cillian everyday since I took over the store. I’ll actually be able to spend more time with him now than ever in his whole life. I hope I don’t disappoint him.”

  I was satisfied, I really hope that this works out for everyone. She is certainly motivated to do the work. She’s not doing this for herself, she has someone who is depending on her.

  The lunch break was almost over for the writer’s workshop so I hurried back to the tent. I hadn’t had time to eat but I was hoping to score a couple of Amy’s homemade chocolate chip cookies to power me through my talk. I looked over the crowd of writers, most of the collective’s writers were out here as well as the guest writers. Sven wasn’t among the other writers nor was Jade. Maybe they wanted to eat elsewhere or needed something from their hotel rooms. I hope that I hadn’t driven them away by my appeal for help from them this morning. I probably should have waited and instead of asking for the first slot of the weekend, I should have asked for the last session, tomorrow evening.

  I really hope that I haven’t cost the collective money. Will Bianca have to refund their attendance fees? If so, I’ll have to come up with a way to pay back the collective. But as I’m about to start my talk, I’m relieved to see Jade arrive with a laptop in hand. I’m so glad that she hadn’t dropped out over the protest e-Book.

  “Okay everyone, let’s get started. I’m not going to drone on up here for a couple of hours. I don’t think that is any way to learn. So I’ll just say a few things first off. Why should you listen to what I have to say? I was an Editor-in-Chief at a major publishing house in New York for thirty years, well the last ten I was Editor-in-Chief, the first twenty years I worked my way from a line editor to copy to acquiring to developmental to managing. So I’ve edited lots and lots of books. I was ruthless. Some writers actually hated me. That is the first thing that you have to learn if you are going to self edit your own book. You have to be ruthless. The second thing you have to do is set the manuscript aside for at least thirty days, six months would be better. Why would I say that? Wouldn’t it be better to tackle the book while it is still fresh in your mind?”

  Flynn raised his hand. “Yes, I think it would be better to do it while it’s fresh, you have a clear picture of what you are trying to convey, after thirty days you are likely to forget the little details, six months would be even worse.”

  “By worse you mean you’d have forgotten what you are trying to portray.”

  “Yes, Laura exactly that.”

  “But Flynn, that is precisely why six months is better. Yes, you have forgotten the details so you are looking at the scene as the reader will. If what you wrote isn't clear to you after six months, imagine how confused the reader will be by that scene when seeing it for the first time. That’s why you need distance. The editor might be your first reader, when the editor doesn’t understand a scene it is unlikely anyone in your audience will understand it either. Do you see what I’m saying Flynn?

  He nodded his head in the affirmative. Sven stamped into the tent. Glaring at me. So it looks like I didn’t cost the collective any money after all. That’s great, personally I’d rather see him gone and if it was my money, I’d offer him a refund and call it a day.

  “Alright, who can tell me where you begin the editing process?”

  Aubrey began, “I always start on the line edits.”

  “Aubrey if you mean running a spelling and grammar check that’s fine and a good way to start especially if spelling and grammar errors distract you. But not if by line edits you mean ‘improving a sentence’ because you might be wasting your time.”

  “What do you mean wasting your time? Isn’t editing meant to improve the sentences that make up the book?”

  “You are correct in everything you are saying, Audrey. But where you are the most correct is you want to fix the sentences ‘that make up the book’. Not the ones that aren’t going to be in the final draft. What you need to do is to look at every scene in the book and see if it advances the plot or the character or both. If it doesn’t do at least one, even if you think it is the best scene in the book, you still have to remove it or see if it can be merged with a scene that does advance plot or character. So you don’t do a line edit until you are sure the scene will make the cut. You might just be wasting time. Fix the big problems first, structure, then pacing, then you look at the story and character arcs, then have a look at point of view. The voice and theme should be uniform and remove words used over and over. Make each character's voice distinct. Any questions.”

  “How can you keep track of the structure of a big novel, I mean a good novel hopefully is pretty complex right?” asked Luke.

  It’s not as hard as you think. If you use a table or a spreadsheet, called a plot grid, you make up a group of columns labeled something like this.” We had a white board so I made a grid with columns labeled Plot Points, Scene number, Time, Main Plot, Sub plots one column each, Main characters one column each. Then for the rows you use whatever structure you are aiming to use. A really basic one like Point of entry, Inciting Incident, Mid Point, Climax, Resolution. Then just chart out every scene, either as an outline if you are a plotter or as a scene check after the book is written. NOw a lot of this is aimed at a fiction audience. So raise your hand if you think this plot grid is a waste of time for an article?”

  Hazel raised her hand

  “Thanks Hazel, so a plot grid for a nonfiction article about say a winery or a resort or even just a hike, The plot points column you can delete, Scene number becomes paragraph number, Time you can delete unless you are describing your time spent somewhere. Main plot and subplots become What and why it’s important columns, next you have location, main features, practical details, and lastly Insider tips. Then you take a look at each paragraph of your article and make sure that you can put it in one of the columns, if it would fit into two columns consider splitting the paragraph up into two paragraphs. If you have any paragraphs that don’t fit any of the columns ask yourself why they are there, because unless you can tell your editor why exactly that paragraph needs to be there, rip it out before they have a chance to. Especially in today's day and age every paragraph counts. If a reader is getting bored with your article, he probably has a plugin that asks an AI to summarize a webpage. So you have to grab the reader lest your carefully crafted article is reduced to bullet points by the AI.”

  “You are ripping my guts out Laura, why work for three days if I’m going to be reduced to bullet points anyway.”

  “You don’t have to be reduced to bullet points if the content is interesting. Try to get something dramatic in the first paragraph, how the winery was on the brink of collapse, how that was going to hurt, somebody, the owner, the whole community but now from the pictures and your descriptions it’s doing quite well, then towards the end of the article resolve the mystery. Of course you might not be able to find something dramatic in the history of the place. Then look at it from another angle, what’s it doing for the community today. Did a couple just celebrate their fiftieth anniversary, if so get and give details of those fifty years. Something dramatic has to happen to even the most boring person over that span of time. Also you were there so you can always write about something interesting that happened to you. Did you meet someone tall, dark and handsome in the first paragraph only to reveal your handsome stranger is a retired champion race horse they have living on the property. Find the oldest employee they have and ask him his most dramatic story about the place, if nothing really dramatic ever happened, make it funny and intriguing that nothing dramatic ever happened. The strange, the funny, the dramatic, people want a story, give them one, even in nonfiction.”

  Then we started having more of a discussion, the workshop writers, our writers and myself. For every hard and fast rule there are exceptions sometimes made by great authors. But if you look carefully you can see why they broke the rule and why it worked in their piece, but why it in general will not work. The discussion reminded me of meetings at the publishing house when a bunch of editors all working on the same book would go back and forth on what changes were necessary and which should not be made. It was interesting, I hope we have more of these workshops. Then we had a short break before Monique was set to talk about graphic novels and story, along with finding an artist to collaborate with if you wanted to write a graphic novel, but were not an artist.

  I was going back inside the store to see if Lucy had any counts, yet for the used books I had just purchased. When suddenly Sven came stomping over to me. Fury written all over his face.

  “Give it back or else.”