And in more Fiction River news, Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds is in audio. WMG’s marvelous Jane Kennedy did a multi-voice volume that really does justice to the stories. You can order it here.

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But I grew up in the Midwest. The land is firm there, solid. When someone builds a road it remains a recognizable road. Frigid winters and hot summers may buckle the pavement, but the road beneath remains something you can trust.

I love explaining Oregon road signs to Midwesterners. “Do you know what ‘sunken grade’ means?” I ask.

“No,” they say, looking at me distrustfully. After all, if they drove to my house, they saw several yellow signs warning about sunken grades.

“It means,” I say, “the road can fall away at any minute.”

The Midwesterners reel in shock. Roads are permanent, some say to me. That’s not possible, others say. You’re kidding! most of them exclaim. They look up the terminology, and learn that I’m right.

Roads out here, built on cliff faces, or over mountains, or on ground composed mostly of sandy soil, fall away on bright clear sunny days with no storms on the horizon. And no storms in the recent past. The ground slowly crumbles. The road sinks, or it doesn’t. But one day—preferably when no car is on it—the road will dissolve.

In fact, there are two stretches of highway near my hometown—one to the east, and one to the south—that the road crews have tried for decades to stabilize and cannot. Every time I cross one of those bits of road, the ground beneath me is different than the time before even if my crossings are only hours apart.

For fifty, maybe sixty years, certainly for the bulk of my lifetime as a writer, the publishing industry has been a Midwestern road. Occasionally a flood or a massive tornado will take out a section, but honestly, if a road disappears, that disappearance was something traumatic, an Act of God.

Lately, the publishing industry has been an Oregon road, with lots of sunken grade signs. Almost all of this uncertainty happened because of distribution changes, most of them in the e-book arena.  The biggest shake-ups occurred between 2009 and 2011. Then, as big publishing realized they were living in Oregon not the sturdy Midwest, they adjusted their business model just enough to make it viable through the transition.

Bookstores, on the other hand, seemed to be the cars on that sunken grade as it fell into oblivion. Last week, I showed you how the bookstores have recovered. That recovery is continuing. And a whole new revolution is happening.

In fact, at the moment, we’ve left roads filled with sunken grade hazard signs and have taken to driving on the beach itself. The sands of the publishing industry are changing that quickly.

The sea-change—which is what shifting sands are, after all, a change brought by the sea—means different things for different parts of the industry. As I showed last week, it’s a boon to independent booksellers (small, non-chain bookstores). It’ll be even more of a boon as time goes on.

The change is also great for self-published writers (indie writers) who do a print edition as well as an e-book edition. In fact, the news for those indie writers is fantastic. The news will have no impact at all on indie writers who do e-books only, except that it might convince them to start putting their titles into paper as well.

The change will have a leveling effect on books sold through traditional publishers. They’re probably not even aware that this change has occurred, and they certainly don’t know what it means for them. I only stumbled on this change through an odd set of circumstances that I’ll try to explain over the next few blog posts.

However, for the very big traditionally published writers, like James Patterson and Nora Roberts, this change will show up as a negative in their royalty statements. They will lose market share, and will not know why. In fact, they already are losing market share, and the smart ones are worried about it. That’s one of the reasons Patterson believes the entire industry is in trouble; until four years ago, if Patterson’s sales declined across the board, then industry sales were declining across the board. As I showed in part last week, that is no longer true.

It’s not just the statistics I pointed to last week that bear this out. It’s hidden in the reports from the various trade organizations that have come out this spring.

Frankly, I wouldn’t have understood what’s in those reports either if Dean and I hadn’t started Ella Distribution last year.

To understand what we saw and learned, you need to understand how individuals in the publishing industry work. Most people in publishing work in a vacuum. Editors don’t know what’s going on in their own publishing house let alone what’s going on with their writers or book distributors or bookstores.

Writers don’t just work in a vacuum. I’m beginning to think that most writers are vacuum-sealed. They seem to believe that watching what other writers are doing is more important than learning anything about business, career management, copyright, or how the publishing industry is changing. (Think of it like this: writers are like cats. They’re more interested in sniffing the butt of the cat standing in front of them on the freeway of life than they are in the truck barreling down on them at sixty miles per hour.)

Actual publishers pay more attention to what’s going on than editors or agents because publishers, theoretically, should understand marketing and sales. They generally understand marketing and sales to chain bookstores, but little else.

Bookstores understand what’s happening in their stores or in their towns. They also know what’s being published (maybe), but they’re as different from each other as possible. And bookstores generally do not share information with each other about important things, like how to handle accounts or deal with distributors.

It’s really rare for someone in the industry to understand all sections of the industry. Dean and I do because we’re writers first, we’ve owned publishing companies (and advised on others), we’ve owned book and comic stores, and we’ve worked directly with distributors throughout our entire careers, in all capacities. We’ve worked with distributors as store owners, as well as publishers of books and magazines. We’ve also owned companies that distribute things.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve begun to think we’re the only two people in the country who actually see the change on all levels, from writer to small publisher to large publisher to the bookstore itself. And, believe me, we will be sharing that knowledge. I started with last week’s blog and have a hunch I’ll be continuing this in some form until early June.

Such a lead-in, right? A bit of a tease, in fact.

But the information is complicated, and I want you to come with me on this.

What has changed is this: Bookstores now have access to all published print books, whether they come from Createspace or from a big traditional publisher. Bookstores didn’t have access to all published print books before.

There are some caveats, of course. The first caveat is this: The indie writer must put her book into Createspace’s extended distribution program. (Lightning Source has something similar, but I’m not as familiar with it.) The second caveat is this: the bookstore must have a preferred account through its primary distributor.

If both of those things are in place—the writer has her print-on-demand book in an extended distribution program through the POD company, and the bookstore has a good relationship with its primary distributor, then any bookstore can find that book with no help from the writer at all.

Got that? The writer has to do nothing, and still her book will end up in the bookstore’s system.

I’ve emphasized all of these words for a reason, and now I’m going to have to explain those reasons.

In the solid (Midwestern-road) past of book selling, a bookstore heard about a book through publishers’ catalogues, some press on the bigger books, and through the book’s availability in the distribution system. (Distributors had their own catalogues, too.) The bookseller also found out about upcoming books through industry trade publications, like Publishers Weekly for trade or commercial books, Locus Magazine for science fiction books, Romantic Times (which was what it was called back then) for romance books, and various slick magazines for mainstream books. Mystery books had the hardest time penetrating the market because actual trade publications didn’t exist. Those that did, like Mystery Scene (which Pulphouse published back in the early 1990s) came out quarterly, which was damn near useless when books only remained on the shelf for a few weeks.

Booksellers would then preorder the book or order the existing book (if they found out within a few weeks of publication) from a distributor or (rarely) the publisher.

Indie or self-published books had no place in this world because bookstores could not order those books at a discount. And buying books out of the back of some author’s car felt too much like drug dealing for many booksellers. The writers who did so often had the same sleaze-ball reputation as a drug dealer.

For eighty years now, bookstores have run on a strange system, one that almost no other business enjoys. If a bookstore fills its store with inventory from publishers, the bookstore can return that inventory for full credit if the books don’t sell.

Imagine your local grocery store trying to do that with, say, bananas. Nope. Doesn’t happen. Nor could I return any artwork or framing materials that didn’t sell back when I owned a frame shop and art gallery in the early 1980s. It just isn’t possible.

For years, publishers have tried to rescind this practice, called the “returns policy.” It was devastating to publishers. They had to produce two books to sell one, because for decades, returns ran at a minimum of 50%. A book that sold one book for every two produced was considered a success. Think about that for a moment.

Publishers couldn’t talk to other publishers about changing the returns policy because that would be collusion to impact the market in a favorable way toward publishers. Collusion like that is illegal in the United States. Bookstores would have complained and publishers would have either had to change the policy back or would have faced all kinds of legal repercussions.

Publishers were trapped by a policy put into place long before anyone currently working in publishing was born.

Small publishers coped by offering good discounts with no returns. Unfortunately, that policy kept small publishers small, because most booksellers refused to do business with them. And the bookstores wouldn’t buy a self-published book from the author, because not only was there no guarantee of quality but the bookseller was stuck with that book forever and ever.

The whole stuck-with thing is how self-publishing developed a stigma. Before returns became part of the system in the 1930s, self-published books were common. Mark Twain self-published. Virginia Wolf self-published. Benjamin Franklin was the king of self-publishers. The difference was that back then there were fewer bookstores, and those bookstores operated like all other businesses: if they bought something, they were stuck with it, unless it sold to a customer.

The returns policy stigmatized anyone who couldn’t offer returns. But returns were costly and dangerous to a business. When our company, Pulphouse Publishing, changed its returns policy in early 1992, that decision was one of a handful that sent the company out of business. We went from a debt-free corporation to a quarter of a million dollars in debt in less than a year.

The self-publishing stigma started going away with the rise of e-books. Readers found books they liked and didn’t care who published them. The problem with self-publishing remained only with print books and primarily in the book distribution system itself.

Until a year or so ago, an  indie writer or a small publisher could only offer credit and returns (like the big guys) by banding together in smaller distribution companies. Those distribution companies they demanded exclusivity. A writer distributed through them had to only deal with them.

Quite frankly, booksellers hate those companies because they don’t give credit easily and they limit returns. (They were also extremely hard for the small publishers to deal with, which was why Pulphouse set up its own distribution system.)

In early 2011, I was the Guest of Honor at Chattacon in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There, I talked with several book dealers, including some old friends, about the difficulty they were having getting my indie published print titles. The booksellers wanted good discounts, and they wanted returns, which I knew that we couldn’t offer.

The bookstores couldn’t order print titles by indie-published writers because those books weren’t in the traditional systems, and had no real hope of getting there. Bookstores also did not want to order direct from the publishers. Too much hassle.

So bookstores needed something new.

Dean and I pursued the “something new” throughout 2011 and into 2012, by researching, as well as talking to book dealers, bookstore owners, and a wide variety of people. We set up Ella Distribution with the terms the book dealers said they would like—a 50% discount for 10 books (not all the same title)—and even with no returns, that would beat the major distributors like Ingrams or Baker & Taylor.

So, if a bookseller wanted three different books from me, two Fiction Rivers, a book from Dean, and books from other big names who were now self-publishing their work, the bookseller could get 50%. At the time, the bookseller could only get 5% on indie=published titles from the major distributors, also with no returns.

Booksellers also wanted the ability to pre-order books, so the books would be in their stores by the publication date. We decided to add that to Ella’s repertoire.

We set Ella up, we hired one of the best people in the country to run it, we made the website live and—nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. We talked to booksellers. They promised to place an order down the road. Which was weird, because they had been clamoring for Ella just a few short months before. In fact, the booksellers who helped us design Ella weren’t placing orders with the company either. They were making excuses not to order.

Never in our lifetimes have Dean and I started a business in response to a known demand and gotten no response at all. Never.

We tweaked the site. We got more big names in. And then we published Fiction River. There was a great demand for Fiction River. We have more subscriptions than we expected by factors of 10, in both electronic and print editions. Bookstores claimed they wanted the first issue right away.

But they didn’t order.

Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds debuted on Tuesday, April 23. We published that pub date everywhere.

On Sunday, April 19, I was putting up my Free Fiction for that Monday. I went on Barnes & Noble’s website to get a link, and saw that Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds was already on the site. I expected that. We had released the e-book a few days ahead so that on April 23, the e-book would be live everywhere.

What I didn’t expect to see was the print book. After all, B&N had not placed a preorder with Ella.

Yet there was Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds the print edition, offered for sale at the proper price. I clicked on the link, and the page said the book would be available in 1-3 weeks. Now, anyone who has done print books through extended distribution on Createspace knows that such listings appear on Amazon  right away. It takes a few days for the Amazon listing to state that the book ships quickly.

In other words, I expected to see such a listing on Amazon but not on B&N. I thought that odd, and decided to follow up on it.

On Tuesday morning, April 23, I clicked on the B&N listing. The listing stated that the book would ship in one to two days.

A series of mental bells went off. I immediately knew what this meant. It meant that B&N already had the book in its warehouse on Sunday. B&N just followed our company-stated publication date, and didn’t make the book officially available until Tuesday.

How had the book gotten to the warehouse so fast? We had put the book into Createspace early enough so that we could ship the subscription copies early and Ella  could ship those preorders that never happened.

And somehow, B&N got the books at the same time as Ella. So did other bookstores.

They had preordered, just not through Ella. Dean and I had thought that impossible until we saw proof of it.

We investigated, and discovered this:

Earlier this year, Baker & Taylor changed its policies in regard to self-published titles. Instead of segregating them to a different part of their website (as if all POD books smelled bad), B&T mixed the books into the general population. Then, B&T changed its discount policy on POD books. Now, POD books qualify for the hassle-free returns policy. Certain bookstores—those with good credit, who ordered a lot of copies through B&T—qualify for as much as a 45% discount on any POD title. These gold-plated bookstores can get another 6% discount off their bill if they pay within 30 days.

And the bookstore can return one copy for the full price if that copy doesn’t sell. Back in the day (say, just a few years ago) distributors did not allow single-copy returns. The bookseller had to return at least five of that title to get the full-price return payment.

This is not a policy offered to all bookstores. But this policy is not offered to all bookstores on titles from big New York publishers either. Distributors look at bookstores the way any other business looks at its clients. Distributors rank bookstores according to credit and volume. If a bookseller pays his bill and does a lot of business through a distributor, that bookseller gets better discounts through that distributor than a bookseller who pays his bill and only does a tiny amount of business through that distributor.

It makes sense, from a business perspective.

In the past, POD titles were 5% no return no matter who the bookseller was. Now on B&T,  POD titles are 45% full return plus for select bookstores.

Ingrams, afraid of losing business, immediately followed B&T’s lead. Both distributors offer preorders the moment the POD goes live with Createspace—if, of course, the distributor believes there’s a demand for the book.

With both major distributors now offering titles by indie writers and small presses at the same discounts as regular publishers (if the bookstore meets certain incentives), Ella had no reason to exist.

On April 29, we shut Ella Distribution down. We all have mixed emotions about it, of course. The staff did a fantastic job and built a fantastic website. They did everything right. So did we.

But the business model, viable in November of 2012, wasn’t viable in February of 2013, about the time Ella’s website went live.

Booksellers, even our friends, didn’t tell us that the sands had shifted because those booksellers figured they were the only ones who didn’t need Ella. Writers didn’t see it. Big publishing didn’t see it.

Dean and I didn’t see it either. We both blog. We do our best to keep up with the industry. We spent ten days searching for information on this and finding nothing.

As we got ready to close Ella, the staff told us it was no surprise to them. Our tech people told us that they saw lots of hits on the website, increasing all the time, but no orders. The staff had no idea why this was happening, just that it was. They too knew that something was fundamentally wrong. (Did I tell you these people were great?)

Their comments sent shockwaves through me. I got pissed at myself. I wondered again what I had missed.

I stayed up all night on April 29^th, researching even more. And I finally found part of what I was looking for, buried in a Statshot report from the American Association of Publishers. The report, based on information from approximately 1,200 publishers. The AAP relies heavily on information from distributors of trade publishers (i.e. B&T and Ingrams, etc.). I had read this on Publishers Marketplace when it was actual news. The item said:

In adult books, gross shipments to retailers actually declined by one percent, but returns came down by $318 million (with over half of the inventory savings on mass market returns). On a dollar basis, returns comprised 27 percent of gross print sales. That’s the greater efficiency of digital and online sales at work, seen in the positive earnings reports at many publishers.

When I  initially read that, I took “the greater efficiency of digital and online sales at work” to mean that more books sold through online bookstores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Customers expected those books to arrive in a slower fashion than they would out of a brick-and-mortar store.

What that phrase actually means is that booksellers have changed their ordering habits. Some are learning this on their own, but others are learning it through the American Booksellers Associations various programs, particularly something called The Winter Institute (which I will discuss more thoroughly in a future blog.)

Booksellers no longer order ten copies of a book that they think might sell. They order one, and put it face-out on the shelf. When that book sells, they order another which arrives from the distributor within one or two days.

Booksellers are learning how to run a leaner business. This cuts down on big orders (and we’ll discuss the implications of that in future blogs), but it also cuts down on returns. Returns, which had stabilized at 50% or more, were by the end of 2012, down to 27%. That’s huge, people. That’s an amazing shift.

That report, by the way, which was the only mention of returns and the shift that we were just beginning to understand, came out on April 11. In other words, we had missed nothing. And our decision to shut down Ella was a combination of being informed, having the best people, trying to start up a company right in the middle of this change, and having access to all kinds of information we wouldn’t normally have.

By the way, as I searched for that AAP report again tonight, I found more information on the changes going on in the industry. BookStats released its report on 2012 this week.

BookStats uses different methodology to report book sales. Here’s how Publishers Marketplace explains the methodology:

The BookStats methodology takes real data collected from approximately 1,400 publishers, and uses a series of calculations and hypotheses to posit extrapolations for roughly 59,000 active publishers (the overwhelming majority of which are very small). Consistent with previous years, only about 60 percent of the BookStats data is actual reported data — the rest (some $11 billion worth) is modeled from those reports.

I want you to note the numbers. BookStats extrapolates on 59,000 publishers are doing based on the activity of 1400 publishers. This is a very different measure than the actual numbers coming out of the 1200 publishers for AAP. (In other words, this system compares to the way movie grosses, and Nielsen ratings, and all of those other measures of entertainment are calculated. Not real efficient, but it’s what we’ve got.)

Here’s the quote I want you to see, from Publishers Marketplace’s report on BookStats:

In the AAP data, as we extrapolated, it was clear that the adult trade grew by roughly the gross revenues of the Fifty Shades Trilogy, and the children’s/YA business grew by just a little more ($30 million, or 2 percent) than the gross revenues of the Hunger Games trilogy — leaving the rest of the business flat. But the BookStats models posit that all the non-reporting publishers grew by about $550 million (or 7 percent); and thus that they grew in ways that most of the publishers who report to the AAP did not. Either this is a success story for small and lesser-known publishers, or it is yet another reason to question the BookStats models.

Since the AAP method did not count POD books, books by independent publishers, or books from most of the small press—indeed, did not count books sold by 57,800 other publishers (that PM knows of)—I believe this success story for the other publishers is at least as likely as a flaw in BookStats’ model.

BookStats at least tries to count what the rest of us are doing.

All of this might change next year, now that distributors like B&T have made it possible for indie books to sell side by side with books from traditional publishers.

I’ve given you a lot of numbers here, and shown you in detail how the sands are shifting. But here’s the thing I want you to take from this article:

It is now not only possible, but likely that an indie book with good word-of-mouth will sell as well or better than a book with the same word of mouth published by traditional publishers. Why? Because indie books won’t go out of print quickly. They don’t have limited press runs (see Dean’s post from last week), and they don’t have useless stock sitting in warehouses.

Indie writers, indie books, indie publishers now have the same access to bookstores that traditional publishers do.

The playing field has just leveled.

In the next few weeks, I’ll talk about how this will impact traditional writers and publishers, but I’ll also answer the question all of you are preparing to type into my comments section: How do you get word-of-mouth going on your book so that a bookstore wants to order your book through B&T or Ingrams?

I’ll answer that and so much more in the next few weeks.

I don’t distribute this blog through traditional channels. It’s published here and nowhere else. I put this up for free so that you can have the information, but I do need to have these words pay at least a little bit toward my writing income.

So, if you’ve learned something or are getting something from this blog, please leave a tip on the way out. Thanks!

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“The Business Rusch: Shifting Sands” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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When a vicious attacker leaves Nicole Walker for dead, she fights against the odds to survive. And to succeed, she must remember—the attack, the attacker, even her own desire to live. Her mind wants to flit away and escape the horrors of the attack. Flitting away means death. But remembering might mean an even worse fate. Originally written for a tribute volume to Edgar Allen Poe, this horrifying and moving story takes inspiration from Poe’s lesser-known story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget.”

“Flitting Away” by multiple Edgar-Award nominee Kristine Kathryn Rusch will be free on this site for one week only. The story is available for $2.99 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and in other e-bookstores.

Flitting Away

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“This is an ordinary, although an atrocious, instance of crime. There is nothing particularly outré about it.”

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”

i

In the end, it was his hands she vowed to remember—if, indeed, she would be able to remember anything. His hands—reaching, grabbing, pinching, pulling, clutching her neck so tightly, she couldn’t pry them free. She’d read somewhere that she shouldn’t struggle, that she had to let him think she was dead.

But not struggling was dying. Her body fought on its own, her own hands tugging his fingers, trying to pull them away, while her feet kicked at nothing.

He was everywhere and nowhere, his legs not where they should be, his hands on her throat, but ripping her clothes too, and his face too close. She should have been remembering his face, sweat-covered, eyes too bright—avid—his mouth slightly open, sending onion breath across her skin.

He was strong—too strong—and in the end, blackness dotting her vision, her chest burning for air, her neck hurting so badly that she wondered if he’d broken it, in that last moment of consciousness, she realized she’d been doing it wrong.

She should have been kneed him in the balls, shoved her hands into his stomach, gouged his eyes. Instead, she held his wrist as he killed her, and she knew if she survived this, she would have nightmares about this moment forever.

God, she thought as she slipped into the darkness. I wanted it to mean something.

But even in that moment—the moment just before death, when all humans were supposed to achieve perfect clarity—she wasn’t sure if she had been thinking of her death or her life.

ii

She was only thirty. She had never really thought about her death before, at least not consciously. Oh, maybe fleetingly, when she’d stepped off a curb and a car, coming around the corner, had to swerve to miss her. She’d put a hand to her rapidly beating heart and think, That was close.

And then she’d finish crossing the street, the incident forgotten the moment her shoe touched the other curb.

She was a cautious woman, though. She always told friends when she would arrive someplace and she rarely missed. If she was going to be late, she called ahead.

Before she moved to New York City, she took a self-defense class, and after she arrived, she took a course on urban living which focused on survival tactics for dangerous situations.

The door on her apartment had five locks, and the building had a state-of-the-art security system.

Which was why it was odd that she was here, now, with a man’s hands on her throat and her life squeezed out of her.

Although she was having trouble defining here. She wasn’t far from home near her favorite jogging trail by the Hudson. It had gotten dark early, although it was never really dark in the city. Usually she saw half a dozen other joggers, but on this night she’d seen none.

Not that it mattered. She had been with Bryan.

Bryan.

Her mind flitted away from contemplation of him. Instead, she worried about her definition of “here.” Since she could no longer feel his hands around her throat, no longer felt the urge to fight.

Instead, she was floating above the path, looking at the water which reflected a thousand street lights, and seemed murky all the same.

She had read somewhere—oh, she had read countless things: the mark of someone who really had no life—that during severe trauma the mind separated from the body, leaving a feeling of dislocation.

Only she didn’t feel dislocated. She felt lost.

She made herself go back to her last real thought—at least the last one she could remember: that she was a cautious woman. Which made it sadder, then, that she was here, dying, at the hands of the man she had chosen to keep her safe.

Jogging partners, she’d said to him. That’s all.

He lived just down the hall in her building. She’d seen him dozens of times before she talked to him, wearing a suit and tie or an NYPD T-shirt with well-loved blue jeans. He’d looked safe enough.

She’d even Googled him, and found nothing. Then she used a service—one of those $50 find-everything-in-the-public-records services—and made sure he didn’t have a restraining order or some kind of criminal past.

He had a degree from Johns Hopkins. He was an attorney for God’s sake. He had been married once, divorced now, no children—his ex having relocated to Nebraska.

Clean. Spotless. Safe.

Until he choked the life out of her.

She blinked, made herself float down, saw the body—her body—crumpled on the path. He was trying to drag her, but it wasn’t working. Finally he used those muscles of his, the ones she’d admired so in his NYPD T-shirt, and picked her up.

Then he tossed her into the river.

iii

The cold greasy water brought her back into herself. She sank, already breathless from the way he had crushed her neck.

Think.

Think.

Think.

Let out one small bubble of air and follow it upwards.

She did, surfacing, splashing, suddenly afraid he was there, looking for her. What could he do? He didn’t have a gun and it was too far for him to try to get her.

She didn’t look up, didn’t want to see him.

She tried to yell for help and couldn’t—only a strange, painful wheeze came from her throat. She tried to remember from the jogs where the land met the river, and she couldn’t. She never really looked, never really noticed.

Her breath whistled. It was shallow, barely enough to survive on.

He could be waiting at that spot where the land met the river. He could get her.

She rolled on her back so she could float, listening to her breath whistle, deciding that was reassuring enough. As long as she heard the rasp, felt the burn, she was still alive.

The river had eddies and currents and they would take her away from here.

She didn’t know where or how, but away.

Somewhere safe.

iv

Of course, there was nowhere safe. Not really.

The cold was making her teeth chatter. She had to get out soon, but she couldn’t—not yet. She just looked up at the night sky. Or what she could see of the night sky, hidden as it was by the lights of the city.

Once upon a time, people came to the edge of the river to stargaze.

Long ago and far away.

The city’d been dangerous then, too. She’d read about it. She’d studied the entire place before she came. She was afraid of it, but she figured a woman had to face her fears or they would overtake her.

Make her into someone she was not.

Her first memory of this place was the news coverage of the Central Park Jogger—a woman who had been jogging alone (shouldn’t have done that, the newsmen said) through a dangerous part of the Park (she should have known it wasn’t safe, the newsmen said) when four boys attacked her, raped her, and beat her nearly to death.

At least, they thought it was four boys. Then. She had a vague memory that later someone proved it wasn’t those boys, but she wasn’t sure.

It didn’t matter, really.

Because the only thing that separated the Central Park Jogger from all the other victims of rapings and beatings that year was that she was some kind of upscale investment banker or doctor or something—the kind of woman who shouldn’t have gotten hurt. The kind that should have been left alone.

Like her.

Only a stranger didn’t assault her.

Bryan did.

Bryan.

Her mind flitted away.

The chances are that you will get threatened, her urban living instructor said. Be the strong one. Do not threaten in return. Walk away. Laugh. Pretend you have a friend nearby. If none of that works, then give the mugger your purse. If he wants more, fight. Fight with everything you have. Fight to the death if you have to. He won’t fight that hard. You’re the one with something at stake.

She had fought. She had fought and she had done it wrong. Forgotten all her training in her wish to take a breath.

Like now.

Rasp in.

Whistle out.

And float.

Float away…

v

“Christ on a crutch.”

A voice above her, male. She tried to hide, but couldn’t move. Her body—she couldn’t feel it. Numb? Gone? Had she separated out of it again?

No. That whistle. That rasp. Still in it.

“She’s alive.”

“Call 911.” Another voice. Also male.

God, a gang of them. In the river? No. She heard rustling, not like clothing, but like feet in sand or dirt. Then a car not far away, horns even farther away.

The city, going on.

Three beeps, and the second male, voice moving away from her. “Yeah. Look, I found a woman…”

Her eyes were gummed shut. It hurt to swallow. That was the only pain she felt, in her throat. And it smelled. Fish and rot and oil.

Hands touching her. Moving her. Wrapping her in something.

This time, she wouldn’t go without a fight. She flattened her hand, jerked it upwards, trying to hit him with the heel.

“Jesus, lady, I’m just trying to help.”

The exertion made her cough. Try to cough. Wish she could cough. She tasted blood.

That hand, that hand of hers that could move. She had to will it to pry her own eyes open.

The man above her wasn’t Bryan. He was too old. His hair was gray. He had bloodshot blue eyes and a drinker’s nose.

“Who done this to you, hon?” he said gently. “Who done this?”

Her lips formed “Bryan,” but she couldn’t say the word. No sound emerged except the whistle. Then she tried to cough again, blood trickling down her throat.

She was choking, choking on her own blood.

He put a hand behind her back and she pushed at him, but weakly, no strength at all. And no feeling in her limbs. They were like rubber. Toy limbs.

“I’m helping, I’m helping,” he said. “You gotta breathe, hon. Relax, okay? Relax. You’re gonna be fine.”

It was a lie. One of those kind lies other people told you when you were not going to be fine, not ever going to be fine.

“What’re you doing?” The second guy came back. He was clutching a cell phone in his right hand. He was beefy, made even beefier by the cable-knit sweater he wore over work pants and heavy boots. “They said not to touch her.”

“Like I know that,” the first guy said. “You were the one talking to them. She’s choking here. I didn’t take that CPR crap at the office. Did you? You gotta clear the passageways, right? Make sure she can breathe?”

“She’s breathing,” the second guy said. But he sounded doubtful.

She felt doubtful. The whistling had stopped. The rasping too. And she could feel that trickle of blood gathering deep inside.

She wanted them to help and she didn’t want them to help and she wanted to run and she wanted to tell them to watch out for Bryan, he could be here, anyone could be here, there was nowhere safe, but she couldn’t find the words, she couldn’t find the air, she couldn’t make a sound.

Noise scares them, her self defense teacher said. Screaming or a whistle or a loud “What the fuck are you doing?” It’ll startle them, make them stop, even for a moment. Then you can get away. Noise is your biggest ally.

Noise. She couldn’t make any.

“She’s crying,” the first guy said. “Hon, you’ll be okay. Honest. You’ll be fine.”

“You wrapped her in your coat.” The second guy sounded accusing, but he crouched, put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “They said you shouldn’t touch her. Crime scene, you know.”

She shook her head. The crime scene wasn’t here, she wanted to say. Upriver. Or was it down? How long had she floated? How far had she come?

“Shut up about the crime scene.” The first guy glared at his buddy. “Can’t you see she’s scared?”

“Shit, I’m scared,” the second guy said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

To him? She looked at him. He was crouched beside her, so big that he could have broken Bryan in half. Nothing had happened to him. Nothing except the inconvenience of calling 911.

“Who do you think she is?” the second guy asked.

“Can you tell us who you are, hon?” the first guy asked. “Are there people we should call?”

People. Yesterday she would have said Call Bryan. He’s got all the numbers. He was the only one in the building who did because she trusted him. She trusted him and believed in him and when she’d told him—

Her mind flitted away.

And suddenly, there were EMTs and stretchers and lights. From inside the ambulance, the siren sounded like a buzzer—less disturbing, she supposed.

The men were gone—the first guy and the second guy (she never learned their names)—and her mouth hurt. She had a vague memory of someone trying to put a tube down her throat, but it didn’t work and they’d cut a hole.

But she could breathe now at least, even though she didn’t feel air through her nostrils. She reached up, tried to touch her throat and one of the EMTs—a woman, thank god, a woman—caught her hand and put it down again.

“She’s conscious.”

“Let’s keep her that way until we get to the hospital. Let them decide how to handle this.”

How to handle what? She couldn’t ask. Her mouth felt odd. Her nose, breathless. And yet she was breathing. Lots of air through her aching chest.

She was shivering too. Cold and prickly as the numbness in her limbs was easing.

“You’re going to be all right,” the woman EMT said, and there was that lie again. “We’re taking you somewhere safe.”

The second lie, worse than the first. There was nowhere safe.

Didn’t they know that?

vi

They whisked her inside—industrial greens and blues, florescent lights and the sound of cart wheels on tile, but no smells. There should have been smells, dozens of them, and she couldn’t identify any.

As they took her into one of those so-called rooms—really, a space separated from another space by an inadequate curtain—a nurse came up beside her, clipboard in hand.

“I know you can’t talk, sweetheart,” she said in a gentle voice.

Can’t talk? She didn’t know that. Not for sure. But she had suspected it. Just like she suspected a lot of things. Like the reason she couldn’t feel her feet, the reason she couldn’t stop shivering, the reason those men had looked on her with such incredible pity.

“But,” the nurse was saying, “can you write down your name for me, maybe an address? Maybe even the name of a family member or a friend?”

She nodded and someone propped up the back of the bed. It was hard to grip the pen, her fingers wouldn’t bend—they were a bluish gray color, something she’d never seen on her own fingers before.

She saw the space for name and pressed the pen against it, thinking, it’s right there, right there her name, everyone remembers their name, right?

And the only name she could recall, the only name was Bryan.

Bryan.

Her mind tried to flit and she held it, just for a moment.

If she could remember Bryan, she could remember his address, where he lived, right? That would help, at least.

She slipped the pen down, wrote down an address in a shaky hand, scratched out the apartment number, then went back to the name.

Name.

Bryan.

And then she was gone.

vii

Maybe years maybe months maybe hours later, she opened her eyes—no longer gummed—and smelled (smelled!) disinfectant and the faint odor of tobacco mixed with perfume. Two women stood over her, official looking, identifying themselves as NYPD.

They told her they’d already done a kit (rape kit?) and had taken what they could for evidence. They explained all kinds of things that she didn’t really want to listen to—skin beneath her fingernails, fingerprints on her neck, a footprint imprinted on one thigh.

They called her Miss Walker. Nicole Walker. That was it. That was her name. She remembered now.

Nicole Walker, originally from Poughkeepsie, moved to a one-bedroom paid for by her salary as an accountant (with some help from her parents) while she wrote her little stories and plays.

Her head was restrained by something plastic. The plastic thing was what smelled of disinfectant. There was tape alongside her mouth, and a tube inside it that the tape held in place. The shaking had stopped, but her entire body hurt.

They’d found her. From the apartment address?

“Who did this to you?” the nearest woman asked. She was forty-something, with frown lines and gray roots on black hair, a color that didn’t suit her.

“We know you can’t talk,” the other woman said. “We have this.”

She took a white board, set it beneath Nicole’s left hand. Not her right. Why not her right? Most people were right-handed, right? That’s what they should have done.

She tried to lean forward, to see her right hand, and couldn’t. She couldn’t move her upper body at all.

“They don’t want you moving much,” said the first woman. Her voice was sympathetic. Her eyes were dead.

How many times had she seen something like this? How many times could a person see this without losing empathy, without losing the ability to feel at all?

“Just try to write,” said the second woman. “I know it’s hard.”

The pen was fat—a marker. She could feel the coolness of the white board against her left palm, the fat pen stuck between her fingers. She could just see its end, but she couldn’t see the board at all.

“Who did this?” the first woman asked again. “Do you know?”

Her mind wanted to flit. But it couldn’t. It didn’t dare. If they found her apartment, then they’d find Bryan and they’d think he was a friend. The only one she talked to in the building. The only one with her emergency numbers. The one her friends were supposed to call if she had gone missing.

She wrote:

B  R  Y  A  N

“Bryan hurt you?” the first woman asked.

Nicole nodded—or tried to.

“Okay, okay. Don’t try to move,” the first woman said as the second woman asked, “Are you sure?”

She wrote:

Y E S

But she wasn’t sure if she had written that over the word “Bryan” or not. She didn’t care. They seemed to understand.

“Bryan who?” the second woman asked.

And, before she could catch it, Nicole’s brain flitted—this time to the water, and Bryan’s voice:

What the fuck did you just say?

And when she came back, the women were gone. She would have thought she had imagined them, except the room smelled faintly of Magic Marker.

vii

It took six surgeries to repair her neck. She was lucky, the doctors said. The attack hadn’t damaged her spine.

But her voice box was gone. Really and truly gone. They couldn’t repair it. She got one of those electronic voices that chain smokers got, and she was told she should be grateful.

Grateful. Grateful that she had survived.

The water alone would have killed most people, one of the doctors had told her. You had presence of mind. But if she had had presence of mind, she would have fought back properly.

Grateful. Grateful that she had friends who offered to care for her after her last surgery.

But she couldn’t face them, not every day, not waiting on her in a way that she would never, ever be able to pay back.

Grateful. Grateful that she still had parents who were willing to take her in, even though she had privately vowed never to return to that podunk town, that claustrophobic house.

She spent most of her days on their couch—a leather reclining number that had replaced the soft 1980s high-back that she’d stayed on most of her childhood.

She watched the big screen television, got to know Oprah and Ellen and half a dozen soaps. Her father ordered movie channels for her and watched with her, never saying much. He hadn’t said much since he first saw her, in that hospital bed, her head strapped into place so she wouldn’t damage her neck any farther.

She still wore a brace. She might have to wear it for the rest of her life. Jogging was out of the question, even if she wanted to do it again. Movement was difficult. Talking embarrassed her. Eating was hard.

Yet she should be grateful.

And in some ways, she was.

Grateful she didn’t have to return to that apartment.

Grateful she didn’t have to face him—at least not yet. Maybe not ever.

The detectives had been blunt: It’s a tough case. It’s your word against his. The river destroyed most of the evidence. There were no witnesses to the attack, and to make matters worse, you were friends before it happened. He’s a well-respected young attorney with no priors. You’re….

An accountant, she had finished for the detective, but she had known what the detective meant.

You’re a young woman, a dreamer, someone who had moved to the city hoping to become someone else.

Well, that worked, hadn’t it? She was someone else now, someone she never wanted to be, a physically handicapped woman with so many medical bills she’d never be able to pay them. She might be able to go back to work, when she could safely sit in a chair hunched over numbers or work on a computer without straining her back.

But she had worked long enough, hard enough, to know that her very appearance would make getting a new job difficult. Who wanted an accountant who sounded like a machine? Particularly if the accountant had to deal with collections.

Her life, the one she had known, was over. She had to start again. When she could. When Ellen and Oprah and the soaps stopped being compelling.

When she allowed herself to think.

When she allowed herself to remember.

viii

She had pressed charges. And there had been some evidence, however minor. His DNA (damaged) under her fingernails, scratches on his face and wrist. He had said they had come from a night of rough sex. She, of course, denied it.

Then there was his handprint on her throat. His hand, reproduced in bruises, on her skin. Without fingerprints, without much more than size and shape.

The bruise on her thigh from a size 13 men’s shoe.

And that was all. That was the extent of the physical evidence.

Aside from the crime scene photos—meaning her body as it had washed up—and the sympathy she would elicit in a jury.

At least, that was what the young female prosecutor was telling her. The woman had driven all the way to Poughkeepsie to visit her, looking like a lost Manhattanite in the wilds.

Her skirt was too short, her makeup too heavy, her hair so stylish that people probably noticed it as she drove by. Her voice was lovely when she wanted it to be, and Nicole found herself watching the woman’s throat, the Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as she spoke.

Nicole sat in her father’s chair, wearing new sweats that her mother had found, sweats large enough to fit around the brace that ran down her entire torso.

She knew how she looked, even now, months later. The bruises had faded, except around the surgical scars, but no one saw those since they were wrapped in gauze. The brace, the gauze around her throat, the stupid electronic voice box, and the fact that she still couldn’t walk unaided made her into some kind of freak.

People didn’t meet her gaze, not even the prosecutor—Janet? Janice? Joann?—Nicole couldn’t remember and she didn’t really try. She just waited until the woman looked at her, actually looked at her, instead of dryly reciting facts about a case that until today had just been a possible problem on paper.

“There are some hints in his past,” JadeJaneJoyce said to her now, “but they’re probably inadmissible. We’d have to get former girlfriends to testify and almost all of them have disappeared.”

That, Nicole would have said once, was almost as good as a confession. But she didn’t. She now knew better than to use that flat electronic voice for all but the most important sentences.

“So I’m here to walk you through that night, to see what you do remember. If we can get the full story now, we might be able to find more evidence, or maybe a witness or two. Can you do that? Can you walk through the crime with me?”

Nicole clenched her fingers against the armrests. She didn’t remember much. Just what she had forced herself to remember—his hands, reaching, grabbing, pinching, pulling, clutching her neck so tightly she couldn’t pry them free. That knowledge that she was dying, that she was contributing to her own death by fighting him wrong, and being unable to stop that automatic reaction—the panic that came from not being able to breathe, not being able to think.

“The doctors say I have partial traumatic amnesia.” She wasn’t used to the electronic voice either. In her memory, her own voice had been as musical—more musical—than JoyJillJolene’s. “I remember the attack. I remember Bryan’s face. I remember falling into the river. I don’t remember much else.”

Because her mind still flitted away from it. She didn’t pass out any longer or lose time, but she did find herself contemplating the pattern on the couch or an ad on television every single time she tried to remember the events leading up to the attack.

“All we need to know,” JocastaJerriJanna said to her, “is what set him off. All we’ve been able to gather is that you were on a routine jog with him, something you’d done a dozen times, and then he was attacking you.”

His voice, filled with fury: What the fuck did you just say?

And no time. No time to respond.

His hands—reaching, grabbing, pinching, pulling, clutching—

Her mind flitted away.

“Nicole?” JeanJenniferJodi said to her. “Are you all right?”

No, of course she wasn’t. She was wearing a brace for god’s sake, speaking with an electronic voice, clutching her father’s chair because she no longer had the wherewithal to have her own chair.

But she needed to be grateful. Grateful, because, as her mother had said, women had been attacked on that spot for centuries (think of it, her mother had said. Centuries. There are reports of dead girls in the river since New York was New Amsterdam), and those girls had all died. But modern medicine had saved her. Modern medicine and her own damn gumption, her father had said with something like pride. Gumption. In other words, she was too stubborn to die.

“Nicole?” JosieJackieJune said.

Nicole nodded. The fewer words the better. The nod meant: I’m fine. Then she added, “I’ll try,” in that horrible new voice of hers.

I’ll try.

And for the first time, she would.

ix

It took concentration not to flit. Concentration and a willingness to pay attention. What was it that made her change channels, set down a book, close the newspaper? What made her walk away from her mother or shut off the radio? What made her look away?

 Of course, there was nowhere safe. Not really.

That thought brought her back to the river and the cold, smelly water, oily against her skin.

Nowhere safe.

Why had she cared about safe? At that moment, when she was dying, what made her think of safety?

She was here, dying, at the hands of the man she had chosen to keep her safe.

Safe. She had thought Bryan was safe. She had researched him, observed him, learned all she could about him—although not as much as JuneJamieJade because then she would have seen the pattern of the missing girlfriends, the ones who fled.

The ex who had moved all the way to Nebraska.

What had Nicole said to him that night? They were jogging. She could remember that—or maybe she was remembering another trail, another jog. Under the lights, the river sparkling, the trail opening around them.

She felt safe because Bryan was with her. She wasn’t alone like the Central Park Jogger, like all those other women—the ones attacked throughout the centuries. She wasn’t alone, and she knew how to defend herself, and she was young and strong and she felt safe.

And then his voice, filled with fury: What the fuck did you just say?

What had she said?

She had researched him—not because she wanted to date him. She didn’t. She liked him, but not that way. He was nice, but not—

Her mind flitted.

Nice, but not—

Flitting.

She made herself breathe. Focus.

Nice, but not someone she wanted to date. She’d said that up front. The day she first asked him to jog with her.

I’m not looking for a boyfriend. All I want is a friend.

I understand, he said with a smile. His smile really was lovely. Warm and sympathetic.

Which’ll make him hell in front of a jury, the prosecutor—Judith, her name was Judith. Judith Melman—said. He’ll smile and they’ll love him and they’ll think how can such a bright, reasonable, attractive man hurt this woman? She must have misremembered. In the trauma, she must have confused him with someone else.

But Nicole hadn’t confused him with anyone else. The therapist, the one the hospital sent to talk with her with the amnesia became clear, said that the memories she had—what few she had—were real. The key was recovering the others in her own time.

The others, the therapist had said, were somehow harder to accept than the attack itself.

Because he was safe. He had been safe.

Her mind started to flit, and she held it, willed it in place.

She trusted him. Believed in him.

They had been jogging, talking about a case of his, the first real win on his own. Then he’d put a hand on her arm—lightly, just a touch, really, friend to friend—and he had said,

How about dinner on Friday?

A celebration? she asked, looking at the lights. Like diamonds floating on the blackness of the river. A thousand diamonds.

Yes, he said.

With friends? she asked, happy to met his friends, finally. People outside her own narrow circle.

With friend, he said, emphasizing the last word.

It took her a minute. She felt a little cold. A date?

Yes.

Didn’t he remember their conversations? Why did men always do this, transform something fun into something awkward?

Thank you, she said, but no. I’m not interested—

In dating, she was going to say. I’m not interested in dating anyone right now. It’s not you. It’s that I’d like to establish myself first, and then maybe…

But she didn’t get to any of it. His light touch turned into a grip, his genial expression into a scowl, his voice into something filled with fury.

What the fuck did you just say?

She responded calmly to a man she trusted, a man she considered her friend. I said no.

He slammed her against a tree, so fast she didn’t have time to catch herself. Then his hands—reaching, grabbing, pinching, pulling, clutching—

And before she had a moment to think, to reflect, to respond, she was dying.

Dying.

And if it had been even twenty years earlier, she would have. She would have died.

So she was grateful, grateful, grateful that she had survived.

x

In the end, she didn’t testify. She sat in the court, behind the prosecution—not Judith, but the senior prosecutor, a man named Rutherford—and acted as an exhibit of what one man’s fury could do.

The other women spoke, the ones they could find, the ones they promised to protect.

Their stories were the same.

All I said was no…

and then his hands were on my throat…

he looked so mad, I thought he would kill me…

but some woman [man] [kid] screamed…

and he let go…

He let go.

But he hadn’t let go of Nicole. He had squeezed until he thought her dead, and then he had the presence of mind to toss her in the river.

To hide the evidence, Rutherford said.

Rutherford said other things—or brought in people to say them for him—like

It’s a pathology peculiar to men, similar to stalking…maybe he did stalk, although he’s bright enough to know that stalking is now a crime…the word ‘no’ from a woman he’s attracted to is a trigger…

like

He’s a particularly smart offender. He knows better than to leave evidence in his wake…

like

If you set him free, it’s only a matter of time before he does this again. And the next woman will die. Guaranteed.

Guaranteed.

xi

She didn’t look at him throughout the whole trial, not even at the end, when the jury came back with some lesser charge. Assault? Second-degree?

She couldn’t remember. She didn’t want to remember.

She no longer wanted to think about him.

She needed to be grateful.

Grateful she could go back to her couch and not think. Flit through the channels, watch Ellen and Oprah and the soaps, and concentrate on getting better.

If there was such a thing as better in a world where she could no longer trust, no longer feel safe.

And then she chided herself:

She couldn’t expect safe. No one could.

Safety was an illusion, like the diamonds on the river, sparkling in the distance, hiding something cold and greasy and terribly, terribly dark.

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Somehow I managed a lot of non-FR reading this month as well. I spent the entire month reading a mainstream novel that received accolades from everywhere. The New York Times called it one of the top 100 books of 2012; NPR called it a literary miracle. (Not kidding.) I figured it would be up my alley since it deals with Hollywood and the writer is an acclaimed mystery writer.

Honestly, I was on the fence about recommending the book, which is why I’ve given you a few clues above. It’s beautifully written, has great characters, and tremendous settings. The voice is spectacular. If it had been a short story, I would have recommended in a heartbeat. But it was a novel, and it took me a month to read. In the middle, I read Fiction River manuscripts, other novels, a few short story collections, and a lot of essays.

In other words, the novel didn’t do what I personally believe that novels should do. It didn’t carry me from one word to the next, demanding all of my attention. It caught my attention like a handsome but vapid man. At first I was fascinated by the novel’s artistry and beauty, but I really wish the author had told me a story. And that’s why I’m not recommending it. Beautiful writing, great voice, marvelous settings only take me so far as a reader. Had the book been longer than 300 pages, I would have quit. But I didn’t. I finished it. And, now, as I write this a week later, I’m having trouble remembering everything but the writing. Not a good thing. 

The other reading I did, except for the research reading, was mostly wonderful. I’m sharing the great non-Fiction River stuff below.

April, 2013

Bronstein, Phil, “The Shooter,” Esquire, March, 2013. Phil Bronstein is the last of the famous newspaper men. He is a celebrity journalist of the old school, like Woodward and Bernstein, a manly man who broke stories then married an actress (whom he later divorced) while running a major newspaper. I saw his name and wondered what he’d write about for Esquire.

He got an exclusive from the Navy Seal who actually shot Bin Laden. I believe this account more than I believe “Mark Owen” primarily because of the fact that this guy wouldn’t reveal his name. And while the stuff on the Bin Laden raid is interesting, what’s sad and heartbreaking and wrong is that this Seal—like so many others—left before he hit retirement age, so he is without a safety net. Bronstein spends as much time, or maybe more, on the fact that one of our elite warriors (several of them, in fact) have no income, no insurance, and very little help from the government they worked for, if they left the service before they were eligible for retirement.

Read this. Think about some of the points brought up here. This country is weird sometimes, and conflicted, and real people pay for that conflicted weirdness. Here’s one.

(And the writing is great, natch.)

Colapinto, John, “Giving Voice,” The New Yorker, March 4, 2013. Probably the most fascinating article I’ve read all year. Colapinto profiles Steven Zeitels, a surgeon who specializes in throat surgeries for cancer patients and high-end musicians. He’s the guy who operated on Adele, and he’s the one who has been trying to revive Julie Andrews’s voice (it’s not really possible).

When I was a kid, people who got cancers of the throat had their voice box removed and had to speak through some little device.  A few surgeries still resulted in that as much as fifteen years ago, but new techniques, some pioneered by Zeitels, have done away with that option for the most part. Until I read this, it hadn’t even crossed my mental landscape that folks who had received mechanical voice boxes because of throat cancers had pretty much disappeared. I thought throat cancers were just down because of better cancer treatments. That’s some of it, but much of it is surgeons like Zeitels.

I have no hand-eye coordination, so to read about someone who can use teeny tiny instruments to make exceptionally minute movements in side a patient’s immobilized throat and restore something that might have been lost, well, that sounds just like a miracle to me. Read this and marvel at the world we’re living in.

Frank, Thomas, “All That You Can Be,” Oregon Quarterly, Spring 2013. When someone dies, there are a million things you should do, like notify the alumni association of that person’s university that he is no more. Well, we are behind on those little things in regards to our friend Bill Trojan, so we’re still getting the University of Oregon alumni magazine, Oregon Quarterly. I think the spring issue is the first one I’ve ever read. It’s really good. I read Dean’s University of Idaho magazine and well, it’s on par with Beloit College’s (which we also get because of me). Those two, together, take me about five minutes to read. Oregon’s had some great articles in this issue, well-written and interesting.

The first one, written by Thomas Frank, is about Brigadier General Tammy Smith, an Oregon grad, who became the first gay general officer to serve openly in the United States military. This piece is a short biography, and it’s fascinating. The article does focus more on her sexual preference and gender than it does on her actual accomplishments, and that’s its only flaw. After all, not every officer becomes a brigadier general. She’s had a fantastic career, and I would have loved to have heard more about it.

But as the first (and so far only) female editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I can tell you that a lot of people focus on the “first” stuff and not the stuff that actually qualified you for the job.

Still, this piece is worth reading, just so that you can find out more about an amazing human being.

Henderson, Bonnie, “Big Wave, Small World,” Oregon Quarterly, Spring, 2013. One fascinating thing about reading the U of O’s alumni magazine is that the articles are based in the state I live in, not the state I used to live in (Wisconsin), so in some ways they’re more relevant to me now.

This article is about the Japanese dock that floated up on a Newport beach last spring. The dock came from the Japanese tsunami in 2011. That tsunami also hit here, but we were lucky to have a low tide at the time or the damage would have been far worse. (The beach communities had damage, just not as much as we could have and clearly not as much as Japan.

This article traces the dock’s history, how it got loosed from its moorings, and its last sighting before it arrived here. The article deals with several Japanese families and the impact the earthquake/tsunami had on them, and what has become of the dock since it arrived—as well as the impact it had on the locals on the Coast. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. Very well done.

Heidenry, Margaret, “When The Spec Script Was King,” Vanity Fair, March 2013. Fascinating article on the rise and fall (and rise?) of the spec script, the script written on speculation in Hollywood. In the 1990s, such scripts could and did sell for millions. By this century, the sales all but dried up. Heidenry believes the change was because of technology, the merging of studios into only a few corporate entities, and the need to make tent-pole movies instead of smaller films. Plus a lot of the previous decade’s spec scripts either never got made or got made into flops, so the willingness to invest went down.

If you want to see the cycle of the entertainment industry (and the impact of technological disruption), read this piece.

James, Eloisa, The Duke Is Mine, Avon, 2012. I had a down day where I couldn’t read with an editorial eye, and I couldn’t write. So I read an Eloisa James title I had saved up for this exact kind of occasion. The book was perfect for that. Just wonderfully fun and light. Inadvertently, it re-engaged my brain as well. Let me explain why.

James is doing a series of fairy-tale-based Regency romances. They’re nothing like my Grayson fairy-tale novels, except that James’s novels are light, fluffy fun, just like mine are intended to be. How can you go wrong with chapter titles like “‘Turdy-fancy-nasty-paty-lousy-fartical-rogue!’”?

The Duke Is Mine is, nominally, a retelling of The Princess and the Pea, but it is much more than that. We have hints of Ben Jonson, Black Adder, Forest Gump, and, yes, Hans Christian Andersen. Sometimes things pass by in a line or two, and if you miss them, you miss them. But my slowly engaged brain caught them—like a possible hint as to whom Sherlock Holmes’s parents actually were. Fun, fun, fun.

The plot is surprisingly tense: Olivia Lytton has been engaged since childhood to the Duke of Canterwick, who is—unusual, to say the least. Against his father’s wishes, he goes off to war, leaving Olivia to care for his dog Lucy (whom he loves above all else), and, everyone assumes, to die. By the time the duke leaves the stage, we love him, even though he’s not the hero of the novel. Well, that’s not true. He is the traditional hero of an adventure novel (or, perhaps, an untraditional man in the role of hero), but he is not our romance hero.

That’s the Duke of Sconce (yes, Sconce), and he is a mathematical genius who really has no use for  human beings. Theoretically, he’s about to become engaged to Olivia’s sister Georgiana, and we all know how that will turn out. Or rather, we don’t exactly, which is always what makes romances work.

I loved all of the characters here, including Lucy the dog, Sconce’s hideous mother (who has a real reason for her hideousness), the two Dukes, and Olivia. Wonderfully done. One of the best romance novels I’ve read this year. (Although, I gotta tell you that just before it, I read two short stories for Fiction River’s Christmas Ghosts volume that are absolutely amazing. But I’ll save that for the volume itself.)

Lizza, Ryan, “House of Pain: Eric Cantor and the Republicans,” The New Yorker, March 4, 2013. First, let me say that I don’t allow political discussions in the comments section of my blog. That always makes me hesitate before recommending an article that’s purely about politics. But I’ve done it in the past, and I’ll do it here, with little editorial comment as well.

I found Lizza’s profile of Eric Cantor fascinating. Cantor often receives two-dimensional treatment in the media (on both sides, right and left), and so he has become a rather dyspeptic cypher to me. The profile lifted the veil and told me many things I didn’t know, like the fact that Cantor’s wife is a liberal Democrat.

As is always the case in politics—and in life—people are never what you expect them to be from first glance. Cantor’s a fascinating man, and he’s well portrayed here. If you’re at all curious about an indepth piece about one of our nation’s most influential politicians, you should read this.

Nagata, Linda, The Red: First Light, Mythic Island Press, Kindle version, March, 2013.  Linda sent me an advance copy of this book, which I wasn’t able to start immediately because of Fiction River. Right now, because of what I’m writing, I’m gravitating toward science fiction and literary fiction  in my reading. I love Linda’s writing anyway, so this book nagged me to read it right away.

Right away turned out to be later than I had hoped. But dang Linda, she wrote a near-future sf thriller that’s so compelling, I couldn’t put the thing down. Excellent, well-imagined, great characters, fast-moving, great writing, everything I want in my science fiction (in my fiction really) and rarely get. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

It’s the first in a series, but it doesn’t leave you hanging. This part of the story ends. And then, when you finish the last words, you can breathe again. Because if you’re anything like me, you’ll be holding your breath to the very final sentence.

Owen, David, “Hands Across America: Why Purell is Everywhere,” The New Yorker, March 4, 2013. I thought I’d glance at this one, and move on, but I got stuck deep in germs, hand lotion, soap, and the rise of a business. Those of you who come to this site regularly know I’m a sucker for business articles, and this is an extremely good one.

Honestly, from the title, I thought this would be a fluff piece, very pro-Purell. Instead, it’s about hand-washing and the passing of germs and whether or not these solutions are good, helpful, or just in the way. Lots to think about here, from both a mystery and a science fiction perspective (writer first!) as well as from a health perspective. Read this. Then go wash your hands.

Reed, Robert, “Bonds,” Solaris Rising 2, edited by Ian Whates, Solaris, 2013. An oddly told story about a mad genius who comes up with a fascinating way to understand human interactions. The sf idea here is so cool that I exclaimed out loud when Bob explained it. The story, hard science fiction, told dispassionately at first, becomes more and more personal as the piece goes on. Fantastic technique, fantastic idea, and fantastic story. It’s worth the price of the entire volume in my opinion.

Roberts, Nora, Whiskey Beach, Putnam, 2013. I’ve been buying my Nora Roberts books carefully these days, reading the cover copy and trying to decide if they were for me. After decades of good reads, either I was getting tired or she was. When I first read about Whiskey Beach, I thought it was something she would do very, very well. I had thought that about a previous book and had been extremely disappointed, so I picked this up with great trepidation.

I needn’t have worried. Roberts is in top form here. The romance is good, the suspense works, the plot makes sense, the setting is good, and the characters are all strong (with one exception). I blew through this book like a good wind. It’s very well done, and I  highly recommend it.

Schwartz, Todd, “The Trouble For Harry,” Oregon Quarterly, Spring, 2013. A fascinating article from the point of view of a 91-year-old Oregon graduate who was taken from the university and put in one of the internment camps in World War Two. It was a shameful time in our history, and it still resonates. But Harry Fukuda is a fascinating man, and he did not let that experience defeat him. In fact, he believes that it took him on a path he never would have walked, a path that brought him his livelihood, his wife, and his family. Fascinating perspective, wonderful man. Read this.

Williamson, Neil, “Pearl in the Shell,” Solaris Rising 2, edited by Ian Whates, Solaris, 2013.  Making copyright interesting is a tough thing to do, but Williamson manages it here.  The world, filled with avatars and digital downloads and “shells” instead of handheld phones and devices, has also succumbed to corporate thing when it comes to who owns what. Music is tightly defined worldwide. Williamson’s story, about a group trying to break through with something new, finds the musical underbelly, and plays it for all its worth. Truly marvelous.

Wondrich, David, “Regarding This ‘Brooklyn’ Everyone Keeps Talking About,” Esquire, March 2013. Wondrich usually writes about bars, bartenders, and alcoholic beverages. I sometimes read his stuff, but not as often as he and Esquire would probably like. This, though, this is a marvelous essay on all the changes that have occurred in Brooklyn the last thirty years. It’s the best kind of personal essay, the kind that brings you into one person’s life and yet makes his experiences relevant to all of us. And it gives you a contemporary history of Brooklyn. Worth reading.

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The ad, taken out by mega-bestselling writer James Patterson, appeared in PW, The New York Times Book Review, and Kirkus. It asks, “Who Will Save Our Books?” and it calls for impassioned editorials urging the Federal Government and everyone else to save our bookstores and libraries.

According to the accompanying PW article, Patterson believes the entire publishing industry is in trouble. He says that “everyone” can chip in to fix it. He did the ads to start a dialogue about the future of the book business, and ways to save it.

He says that publishers have to stop complaining and start doing. Then he adds,

The problem continues with media coverage, as Patterson said the same article about the book business being in trouble–with little information beyond that and little mention of possible solutions–is being written over and over. “That article is not worth running,” he said. “The New York Times needs to wake the fuck up.”

I do agree with his last point: The New York Times needs to wake up. But really, that’s beside the point. The industry is changing, and Patterson sees only one corner of it. He’s seeing it from the lofty position of being one of the biggest bestsellers in the world, and he doesn’t realize that looking down from the 87^th floor gives you a wide, but often inaccurate, view of what’s happening on the street.

If you follow the above link to PW’s article on the Patterson ad, you’ll note that it quotes Patterson entirely, and adds no other analysis. Patterson, you see, is not just a big bestseller, but he’s a huge supporter of literacy. He’s donated hundreds of thousands of books to the troops, and he launched a great kid’s reading promotion site called ReadKiddoRead which at the moment, unfortunately, is also running Patterson’s ad.

PW, which is following most industry trends, isn’t about to point out that, with this ad, Patterson stepped in it. Not because they just made money off him for the ad. Not because he’s going to piss off the Times or because he’s wrong about the fact that the dialogue is inaccurate. But because his conclusions are wrong from the limited data he’s getting, and PW  knows it.

Fact: The Number of Independent Bookstores has grown steadily since 2009. Look at the accompanying chart from the American Booksellers Association.  The number of independent bookstores has grown from 1,401 to 1,567 in three  years. But that’s not the interesting part of the chart. The interesting part is the location number. Yeah, the ABA counts only 166 new bookstores (only!), but the number of bookstore locations has increased by 249. That means the indies are expanding. They’re making money. They’re doing well.

Realize too, that the ABA doesn’t count all retail book locations. If a coffee shop sells books, but calls itself a coffee shop, it’s not a bookstore. It doesn’t count. And not every bookseller signs up with the American Booksellers Association. According to this somewhat pessimistic article , there were 10,800 bookstores in the United States as of October of 2012. That number includes chain stores as well as indies. 10,800 bookstores. Not places—like your grocery store—that carry books. And realize that when we’re talking about bookstores, we’re talking brick-and-mortar stores that specialize in paper books. We’re not talking about e-bookstores.

 Get the difference here? There are a lot, a lot, a lot of book venues, and they’re growing.

Fact: Independent Bookstores have become players again. Sales at independent bookstores count for 10% of the market. Sales at Barnes & Noble count for 20% and Amazon for 29%.  If sales continue the way they’re going, independent booksellers will capture even more of the market.

Sales at independent bookstores rose 8% in 2012 over 2011, while sales at Barnes & Noble were in the words of one writer, “tepid.” This growth prompted Wendy Welch, co-owner of Tales of the Lonesome Pine in Virginia and author of the 2012 memoir The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, to declare to The Christian Science Monitor that “2012 was the year of the bookstore.”

In the same article, Texan Steve Bercu , owner of BookPeople and a founder of the Austin Independent Business Alliance, says, “We had the best year in store history in 2012. It was the third best year in a row. We’re up 12 percent so far for 2013.”

Fact: E-books haven’t killed the indies. In fact, indies can now profit from e-book sales. How, you might ask? Well, in August of 2012, Kobo partnered with the American Booksellers Association to help indies sell e-books. This is from the press release:

Booksellers will be able to offer a total experience for their customers including a full line of eReaders, eReading accessories, and ebooks from Kobo’s catalog of nearly 3 million titles. ABA members will share in the revenue on every sale.  The program includes valuable training, in-store merchandising, marketing, sales, and logistics solutions to help independents be successful. ABA members will also be able to offer ebooks directly to their customers online.

The important part here is “valuable training, in-store merchandising, marketing, sales, and logistics solutions.” During the fall of 2012, participating booksellers closed their stores for a day or two or sent staff to a local Kobo workshop class. Participating retailers include large stores like Powell’s and small ones like Sheldon’s North by Northwest books.

If you’re wondering how the e-book part of this works, Galley Cat has a helpful little article here, explaining it all.

The press release states that Kobo expected 400 booksellers to sign on, but the last statistic I saw had 450 retailers already participating in the program. Here’s the list of participating bookstores in the United States. I didn’t count, but it might be more than 450 now.

Honestly, if you’re an indie writer or a hybrid writer and your book is not on Kobo, then you’re missing a huge growing market, not just internationally, but in the States as well.

This is why Sheldon handed me the PW with two fingers, as if someone had pooped on the magazine. He wanted to me to express my opinion of the ad since, as a friend, he knew without asking that I thought it unfortunate. I won’t say it was stupid, though, because, as I said, Patterson’s beliefs also come from statistics.

You need to understand a few things about a big bestseller’s career before you can understand why Patterson believes the entire industry is in trouble.

James Patterson’s first bestseller hit the shelves in 1993. The first movie based on one of his bestsellers, Kiss The Girls, appeared in 1997. When the big distribution collapse hit the industry right around that time, Patterson’s sales increased, unlike the sales of 90% of established authors.

Why?

A brief history—very brief, because we’re covering a lot here. In 1993, when Patterson’s first book came out, there were thousands of small book distributers scattered around the country. They were regional and they understood their region as well as you understand your hometown.

Toward the middle of the decade, large grocery store chains became major players in the book industry. Safeway, Albertsons, and others had large book sections, and they bought a lot of books. Corporate at the various grocery stores decided that it disliked dealing with hundreds of tiny invoices per month and declared that it would only buy from a handful of independent distributers. Those distributers got to “compete” for the business.

The problem was that only a few distributers got the bulk of the business right at the same time that chain bookstores worked to drive out the independents. In 1997, there were 12, 363 bookstores around the country. Because of the actions of the big chains, 1,000 independents closed between 2000 and 2007. We’re regaining bookstores (see above), but the effect of these losses was cumulative on the people who distributed to bookstores. The independent distributers went out of business first.

Chain bookstores had national in-house buyers, not regional distributers. The remaining business belonged to places like the independents (which were closing) and big non-bookstore chains like groceries. When those businesses demanded that they would work only with a handful of distributors, the distributors who won that lottery had to scramble. No longer could they sell the books of Oregon writers to Oregon readers. They had to sell national books to a national chain.

The problem was that these distributors did not know which books would sell nationally, so they punted. They only ordered bestsellers—and that included Patterson.

Indeed, if you look at all of Patterson’s book sales, the bulk of them occurred after the collapse of the distribution system. He’s one of the guys who benefitted from the shrinking book market.

Of course, he doesn’t know that or if he does, I’m sure he doesn’t realize his success occurred in part because he was already on the bestseller list at the time of the collapse. That he continued to have success when many other bestsellers didn’t is a tribute to his storytelling skills. But sales figures he enjoyed were partially inflated by the collapse of the regional market.

Now, look at the statistics for the last few years. Independent bookstores are back, and they have 10% of the market—and that percentage is growing. They also order differently than the chain bookstores and the other chains like Costco, Wal-Mart, and the grocery stores.

Local bookstores order according to the needs of their clientele. Sheldon, who used to own the very famous Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles (and he “retired” to Lincoln City), specializes in mystery books and books by local authors.

According to ABA head Oren Teicher, the buy-local movement is one of the reasons independent bookstores are growing. The Christian Science Monitor article paraphrases him this way:

Independent bookstores are what urbanists call “third places,” like farmers’ markets, that add to a community’s sense of identity. And like farmers’ markets, some customers come for the atmosphere, not the prices.

What this means for writers like Patterson is that their sales are declining. These sales would have declined even if the indie-publishing revolution hadn’t happened. Centralized ordering only exists in a few chains now that Borders has vanished, and even then, the numbers are down. Barnes & Noble made news this year when it announced that it was going to increase the number of titles it carried in its store by de-emphasizing the Nook. B&N had tried to carry fewer book titles on site in previous years and add all kinds of other products, almost destroying its brand.

There are other reasons Patterson’s numbers are going down. There are fewer display slots for mass market paperbacks. Publishers are trying to get readers to go to e-books for the cheap option by decreasing mass market altogether. And print runs have changed, which Dean Wesley Smith explains in a blog post from earlier this week.

I’ll discuss all of this in depth next week and probably the week after, but here’s the upshot.

Not only are the sales figures for bestsellers declining across the board, but their income is as well. Publishers aren’t paying advances in such large numbers, but even if they were, the royalty payments have declined. Some of that is because ebooks have a different payment structure, but some of it is the leveling of the playing field.

Readers have a finite budget for books. There are readers, like my husband, who adore James Patterson’s books. There are other readers who picked up the latest Patterson because nothing else looked interesting. We all do that with books; our tastes vary (and let’s not discuss our tastes in the comments, okay?) and we sometimes buy books to read on a flight or while we’re waiting in a hospital waiting room because it’s the only book of its type in the gift shop or airport bookstore, not because the author is a favorite.

With the rise of e-books, that person waiting for a flight doesn’t need to buy the next Patterson. She can download whatever book she wants right there in the airport and happily read it while jetting across country—even if that book is self-published by the author.

Those choices cut into sales of bestsellers. They also cut into sales of traditional publishers.

At the moment, all methods of counting paper book sales across the United States only count traditionally published books. This will change in the next six months. Again, I’ll deal with that in future posts. But for the short term, what writers like James Patterson are seeing is this: their sales figures have gone down. Reports in PW showing industry print statistics also show a decline in print sales for the big bestsellers.

Traditional publishers are whining more than usual because the industry is changing under their feet and they’re struggling to keep up. I had to laugh at Mike Shatzkin’s piece today  in which he discussed how the industry needs to grow its marketshare, and he decided the only way to figure that out was to ignore the successful new kids on the block who were using technology to their advantage, and to talk to the old-timers.

Yep. That’s how you grow a business. Talk to the people who are struggling to find a clue.

Which is what Patterson has been doing. He’s been talking to bookstore owners who are friends of his, talking to the heads of publishing houses, and talking to other bestselling writers. Patterson is a very, very, very smart guy. He understands business better than most writers ever will.

But what he doesn’t realize is that his information is corrupted.

The old-time booksellers are leaving the business. They’re closing their stores because running a bookstore the way that you did in 1995 no longer works. From The Christian Science Monitor:

Today’s [bookstore] owners often have researched the business and worked in other stores before they started putting up shelves. [Daniel] Goldin, for example, worked as a buyer for Schwartz Books and bought his storefront location from the former owners when the local chain closed in 2009 after 82 years.

In another encouraging sign, John Mutter, editor in chief of Shelf Awareness, publisher of two industry newsletters, sees more young owners than he did five years ago, when industry events “were a sea of gray hair,” he says.

These new people understand social media, technology, and how to use things like Kobo’s program. They order books differently, and they operate the stores differently. They also are new, and probably not the people that James Patterson consulted. Mike Shatzkin certainly won’t talk with them either, to the detriment of the folks at Digital Book World.

Other bestsellers believe that book reading is declining. Anyone who has read Scott Turow’s misguided posts for the Author’s Guild knows that. Patterson’s ad was in direct response to Turow. Patterson wants to do something to save an industry that, from the perspective of the People At The Top, is dying.

And for them, it is. A revolution is sweeping the book industry. Dean and I learned some lessons about that in April, which I’ll be sharing in the next few weeks.

Disruptive change like the kind that the book industry is going through will provide new players, new people who will rise to the top. They’ll do it in ways that would not have worked in the old system.

Here’s the confusing part: the old system will continue to work, just not at the numbers that it saw when everything consolidated at the beginning of this century.

Right now, mass market bestsellers can hit the New York Times extended list with anything from 17,000 sales to 30,000 sales. The numbers at the top of the list are much lower than they were in the past as well.

There are several reasons for this:

1) There are fewer outlets for mass market sales. Even the grocery chains, which precipitated the distribution crisis, carry fewer books in the store, and many of those books are trade paperbacks and hardcovers, not mass-market paperbacks.

2) The big publishers want readers to buy the ebook as the cheap edition, and some heavy readers are doing just that. But more importantly, the big publishers are deliberately publishing fewer mass market paperbacks to drive readers to e-books. (Forgetting, of course, that the bulk of mass market readers can’t afford a dedicated e-reader or may not even have a credit card so that they can shop online.)

3) Independent booksellers (10% of the market!) don’t always carry bestsellers, figuring that the chains can offer those books at better discounts. So 10% of the market ignores certain types of books in favor of niche books.

4) And of course, the readers themselves, faced with their own limited budgets and a plethora of choices aren’t always buying bestsellers when the books come out, figuring those books will be easy to find years from now, when a midlist book might not.

What’s the upshot of this besides the fact that Patterson’s ad did him no credit? It’s that book sales are growing in a healthy way. And if your book is in print, then you will have the opportunity to sell your book in a variety of venues, including chain stores. I’ll deal with that indepth in the next few weeks.

The growth in independent booksellers, the rise of Kobo which allows ebooks into local bookstores, and the growth of the book market is fantastic news for writers.

Our industry doesn’t need a bailout. The dialogue that Patterson calls for can and should continue. But it should include the small booksellers, the independently published writers, and readers themselves.

Oh, wait! We are having that discussion. We’re just not doing it on the pages of The New York Times, which is, after all, the company paper in a company town.

And if Patterson had asked me if he could put his ad on my blog, I would have told him that he could not. Not because I disagreed with it, but because I don’t take ads here.

This business blog is entirely funded by the readers—and I intend to keep it that way.

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“The Business Rusch: The Year of the Bookstore” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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The other fiction piece is a free story every Friday. Some stories will be from Fiction River, others from different WMG Publications. The story from last Friday is one of my Grayson stories, The Charming Way. There will be a new story this Friday–and no, I don’t know what it will be, nor do I know if I’ll remember to post something about it. So set yourself up on their RSS Feed or be sure to check on Friday. Like the free fiction here, the stories will be up for one week only.

For more free fiction, you can read my novelette, “Echea,” in the new Galaxy’s Edge magazine, edited by Mike Resnick. It’s online or you can subscribe.

Finally, for more traditional choices, you can find three brand new stories from me. The first, in Asimov’s June issue, is “Skylight,” a story related to my DeLake novels. It’s space opera with a twist. The second is a time travel story called “When Thomas Jefferson Dined Alone,” in a wonderful anthology called Solaris Rising 2, edited by Ian Whates. I’ve been slowly reading through the anthology and have several stories to recommend from it. The third story is one that might have gotten lost in all the Fiction River excitement. I have a story in Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds called “Shadow Side.” It’s one of my Oregon stories, set in the same world as my novel Fantasy Life, with a character familiar to those of you who’ve read “The Women of Whale Rock,” and some of the other stories in that series. If you’re on the fence about picking up Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds, here’s a review that might change your mind.

Lots to read, some of it free. Enjoy!

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“Tribute,” by World Fantasy Award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free in its entirety on this site for one week only. It’s also available for $2.99 from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and in other e-bookstores.

The free story will be available for one week only. If you missed this one, click on the links above. There’s another free story lurking somewhere around the site. Track the story down, read, and enjoy!

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I get very focused at the end of a book, and I speed up because I want to finish and move to the next project. I have a lot of next projects. I have three short stories due in the next two weeks. I need to go over a first draft of a different novel, and add a few things that I thought of later. Sometimes I leave novels to “cool” and then the subconscious tosses in the missing elements. Since I usually write out of order, this habit generally works to my advantage.

I’m leaving Street Justice to cool while I finish up those tasks. And as I’m doing those, I’ll also write at least two more blog posts for the Business Rusch, several smaller items that WMG needs, and maybe a mystery story (since the three I owe are science fiction (2) and romance (1), and I’d like to get to this great mystery idea that’s been hanging fire for weeks now).

Why am I burdening you with all of this? For two reasons. First, I planned to write a long and involved post tonight about the Patterson ad, royalty statements, and book distribution. In fact, I started it in the middle of the night Monday when I couldn’t sleep. But I’m tired enough that I worry I wouldn’t do my best work on the blog, so I’m going to put it off until next week.

The other reason? Some of you know that for the last 10 days or so of April, Dean was writing a novel from start to finish. In fact, he was writing a novel and blogging about it at the same time.

We’re always writing, and we’re usually writing novels at the same time, but it’s rare for us both to be going at top speed at the same time. Generally, one of us serves as back-up for the other, making sure the other person eats properly, gets up from the desk enough, and gets enough sleep.

We couldn’t really watch each other’s backs this time, and it led to some interesting things that I didn’t quite realize until today.

Today, I grabbed the battered and scratched grocery list that had been sitting on the dining room table for weeks, and headed to the grocery store. Usually I do the shopping and the cooking because I have so many food allergies that it’s just easier (and less time consuming) for me to handle this stuff.

I go once a week, grab enough to last, replenish what we used up, and bring it all home. Dean carries his weight in other ways. He does the dishes if I cook, and he handles repairs/light bulbs/etc.

For the past two weeks, maybe three, I didn’t go to the store. I ran out of time. I also ran out of time to cook. Fortunately, I cook too much food most of the time and freeze the suitable leftovers. In March, I actually had to buy more food storage containers because we hadn’t been eating anything frozen. I wondered if our eating habits had changed.

Au contraire. I did not realize I was storing up for April.

All of last week, we ate what I had stored. We also ate through our extras. We almost ran out of tea, which, believe me, almost never happens in my house. (Some wag at the grocery store today looked in my cart at the four boxes of cereal and said, “Wow. Someone in your house likes Raisin Bran.” I didn’t tell him I was stocking back up.)

Getting extra food and freezing leftovers aren’t habits that came from my Depression-era parents (even though Mother did try to instill in me the virtues of using everything, a lesson I still ignore). These habits come from decades of freelancing.

Back in the early days, I learned to buy in bulk because checks came irregularly. I could get through the lean times with extra boxes of cereal and lots of frozen homemade food.

Later, though, those same habits became important in a two-writer household for months like the one we just went through. We don’t have a housekeeper or a secretary. We have to keep track of things ourselves and can’t farm it out to an assistant. (I suppose we could afford one, but that person would be lurking in my home and breathing my air, and at some point, I would just have to kill him. No, I’m not the most rational person when I’m working. I’m a writer. Why would you expect otherwise?)

Without an assistant, Dean and I muddle through. Most of the time, even a two-novel finish isn’t as complicated as last week because, on top of the dual writing sessions, we also had to handle some heavy-duty business stuff that took hours out of our days. Despite my vow to eat healthier in 2013, a vow I’ve mostly kept, I ate too many lunches from Burger King because I’d run out of everything easy to fix in the house, and I knew if I went to the grocery store, I’d lose too much writing time, a fact borne out today, when I lost two hours in the aisles at Safeway.

The frozen meals do help though. We eat less crap when we have frozen homemade food. And it’s something we’ve done for years. We have a lot of habits that have simply become ingrained, habits I didn’t entirely realize others lacked until Dean’s blog this past week.

If you haven’t read the blog, you should, and you should read the comments too, because in the middle of that novel, Dean did a lot of mythbusting.

One myth in particular stood out for me. Most writers seemed to believe that you had to spend a large chunk of time at the computer to write anything of value.

That can’t be farther from the truth. In fact, large chunks of time at the computer harm a writer. They rarely help one.

I’ve always wondered how so many writers develop carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive stress injuries from their writing. When Dean and I teach, we always stress that a writer needs to have her workplace properly set up. I blogged about that early in The Freelancer’s Survival Guide.  Your workspace should be set up for your body style, not for someone else’s. I also tell writers to get up every hour or so.

I learned this one quickly. I am incredibly restless—so restless, in fact, that when a doctor ordered me to stay off my feet after I broke a bone in my left foot, I found it nearly impossible to take that advice. I was used to getting up every twenty minutes or so to go do something. I had no idea I was that restless until that particular injury.

But I also trained my body to move. I did so with tea and water. Before each writing session, I drink a little water. Then I bring a cup of tea with me into the office, and sip as I work. Eventually, my body demands that I get up and after a while, I can no longer ignore that command—even if my characters are all about to die in icky horrible ways. Even if I have just gotten a great idea and need to get it all down now. Even if I have finally figured out that missing piece to the plot puzzle. I still get up, and walk to the bathroom, then have another drink of water, maybe make another cup of tea, and head back, shaking my arms a little as I do so, making sure I stretch a bit, and avoiding repetitive stress injury.

I only had one such injury, and I got that in the late 1980s, when I worked as a secretary. I sat at a desk set up for someone seven inches taller than me, and eventually, I paid for that. It didn’t matter how many times I got up. I still got hurt, and vowed never again.

Dean gets up every hour or so as well. The fact that we both do this has led to another habit. We learned to write in small increments. We often write two hundred words in fifteen minutes, then get up and do something else. On Sundays, before our weekly writer lunch, I can usually manage only about twenty minutes of actual writing before we leave. I generally get 600-800 words done in that time, mostly because I know I will lose most of my afternoon to socializing.

What these short bursts mean is that we write a lot more than  most people. If I waited for long stretches of time to write, I’d still be finishing Street Justice. I had several hours to work yesterday, but no time on Monday, five hours in snatches on Sunday, a long stretch on Saturday, and four stolen nonconsecutive hours on Friday.  If I look back at April, which was a busy month for business and other things that had nothing to do with writing, I see only ten days with long stretches of time. I write most of Street Justice in April. I’d only be about a hundred pages in if I wrote like most of the commenters on Dean’s blog.

As readers of the blog learned, Dean writes that way as well. He writes a bit, does something else, then writes some more. He gets thousands of words done per day by doing that.

So do I.

The other thing we both do is we have a dedicated writing computer. I gave a live interview online a few years ago, and got to see the running comments from others on the message board. They made fun of me as a Luddite for making certain that my writing computer did not have e-mail or Twitter or any wireless connectivity. I don’t have a phone in my office either or a television or my iPad. No novels except my own. Research books are all the way across the room, out of easy grasp.

No distractions. None.

When I sit at this desk, I write. I do nothing else. Because I’m so firm about this, I know that the moment I sit down I am going to work. The habit becomes reality. I’m already thinking of the next scene as I walk through the office door. I review a little, and then start typing. And I do that until my timer goes off or nature calls.

Yes, I set a timer. If I only have a half an hour for writing, I set the timer for 25 minutes. Why 25 minutes? Because that way, I can finish my thought or the scene or make notes for the next writing session.

It’s a habit I learned when I was training myself to write.

I used to think starting was hard. Then I realized that I was just easily distracted. I took away all of my distractions, and set an obnoxious alarm across the room. Then I vowed not to move from my writing desk until that damn alarm went off.

I’m easily bored. Without books nearby or television or even a radio, I had a choice: I could either sit and stare into space or I could write something. I ended up writing something. And after weeks of this, I could ditch the alarm.

Now I use a timer just to make sure I’m not late to whatever appointment I have. (And those of you who know me, stop laughing. Yes, I know I’m still late at times.)

The physical habits feed the writing. If I hadn’t been getting up every hour or so for the last three decades, I would no longer be a writer. I’d be in traction.

If I believed I needed large chunks of time to write, I would have written maybe an eighth of what I’ve written over those three decades.

If I hadn’t figured out how to manage real world things, like grocery shopping and cooking, I wouldn’t finish novels as quickly.

Dean and I didn’t eat poorly last week, but we didn’t eat well either. I managed to get some exercise, although not as much as usual. If one of us had been finishing a novel instead of both of us, that person probably would have eaten better and gotten more time for exercise.

But we were keeping the household together kinda and managing pretty well. Just like we would have if we lived alone or the other person was out of town.

The habits kept us fed, kept us producing words regularly, and kept us injury free.

We’re both tired tonight, which is why I’m going to roust him from his office now. We’re going to go do something relaxing.

But we’ll both be back at it tomorrow.

Because writing is our job, and we treat it that way. Even down to the little things, the smallest of habits.

Writing demystified. That’s what Dean was doing last week.

Which is why I urge you to all go read his posts on that novel.

Me? I have to get rid of some tea, post this blog, and go do something fun—whatever that may be.

I have some major blog posts coming up, and now that I’m not doing a research intensive book, I might be able to do them. I appreciate all of the comments, e-mails, and links you’ve sent me. I also appreciate the donations. They’re essential. They make sure this blog is a paying venture, just like the rest of my writing work. The moment the blog ceases to fund itself, I will use this time for fiction.

Or naps. Right now, naps sound really good…

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“The Business Rusch: Habits” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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