Po(sey) Sessions

My whole life my father owned his own business and it was it's own kind of annoyance. He could come pick me up from school when I was sick as long as he didn't have a meeting. But he couldn't go with me to visit family on Thanksgiving. I remember thinking to myself, he is the boss, he can do whatever he wants. But know I own  my own business and I understand all the things I never did when I was younger. Getting an hour or two off in the middle of the day is easy. Asking your staff to work the day after Thanksgiving is hard. I work at the bookstore 6 days a week. I love being there, but the days start to run together. I can no longer remember who was present for which conversation and I tell one person the same thing 4 times and another never hears wind of something I am planning. This is what it means to be a grown up. It is official. In the past year I have left childish things behind and I am officially a big person. Today was a great week in the store. Lots of ...

Today when I was in the bookstore a book on the shelf caught my eye. The first reason it caught my eye was that it looked like it was in the wrong section. I saw it in Fiction and Literature and I was wondering if it may belong in Mystery & Action or Science Fiction & Fantasy. One of the many, many things I have learned since buying a bookstore is that more often than not you can tell the genre of the book by the look of the cover. There are always outliers, but certain colors and fonts lend themselves to different places in the bookstore. The first give away with this book was the title, Harm. The second give away was the color scheme. And the third thing was that I was pretty sure I knew the name Aldiss before. Another thing I have noticed about books is all the ways that the book itself is marketed. There are so many elements that go into the packaging and branding of book. But understanding on an intellectual level is different from really experiencing. For over a de...

I have been working on a blog post to mark, in part, my triumphant return to blogging. But it is being more challenging the originally expected. I have been working on the the top ten books that have influenced me. I think it could be easy to throw a list together, but I don't think I could really do an honest defendable very quickly. So I decided I want to do more than list some books on Facebook, I wanted to try and defend it. As you may have guessed, this was probably a mistake. I am determined to both stick with it and not let it hold me back! The timing could not be better for me to do a salon post as interim. It has been occuring to me more and more how many things have changed for me and how much time has passed since I was blogging regularly. I have been exploring all the things that drew me to blogging in the first place and found that I am having a deep desire to reconnect with some of those things. I especially want to reconnect with what blogging does for me and not...

I sat down to write a blog post the other day and I COULD NOT REMEMBER my password. That is when you know it has been too long! Well, as you can see I got it figured out. This is just a quick post to say "Hi" and let you know that I am hoping to be blogging a little bit more. Expect to see new items about the bookstore and my dystopian research. I remember all the times I hated myself for having a blog because I couldn't find the content to update it. But over the past few months living without the blog has felt like living without one of my arms. Now if only I can actually stick to sitting down and actually writing. Figuring out the password was step one.

One of the problems of owning a bookstore is being surrounded by books but never having time to read. I am very adamant with the people in my life that they DO have time to read, they just fool themselves into thinking that they don't. Therefore it is my solemn duty to follow my own advice. Hypocrites are so tacky. And/or human (you decide). So I have been trying to read for at least ten minutes 4-5 nights a week before bed. Do you want to know what happened? I actually found more time to read and started reading in other slow moments! Ah, the power of making room to read in your life. My favorite part about reading is sharing authors I love with new people and I have whole new platform for doing that. It is funny how sometimes I get in a great conversation with a customer and they leave and I scold myself remembering that I didn't even bring up Cindy Pon one time. Right now I am obsessed with a new author. Her name is Lindsey Leavitt and I may want to try and ...

I have owned a bookstore for three months. Wait, let me try that again. I have OWNED A BOOKSTORE for three months. Me, an owner. Living my dream for one quarter of a year and let me tell you, it has been amazing. There are hard days and good days and tired days and magical days. But what am I doing now? How am I celebrating bookstore ownership? I am on vacation! I am huddled away in some deep dark hole resting and thinking about every nuance of change that has come in the past few months. Running away like this for the moment is a luxury. I am still in partnership with the previous owner and I can feel a certain sense of confidence in leaving the store in his extremely capable hands. I have been wanting to blog about this experience as a way to share it with others and gain perspective for myself, but there just doesn't seem to be enough time in the day to deal with everything that needs to be dealt and sleep anywhere near enough. This is all, of course, part of what I signed u...

I have owned a bookstore for one month and nine days. It is 10:09 PM and I am in the basement of the store. I wasn't lying when I said this is my home now. Tonight was our first annual Lit Fest! Hopefully I will post more about that later. I can't have another post get high jacked because I have promised you pictures! My pet project! I love children's and young adult books. I have made this section all my own. This picture of the store represents my proudest contribution to the bookstore. Kids and literacy have been a passion of mine for over a decade now. I have been able to explore this passion from all different angles. Now I have a new opportunity.  Sharing books with the youth of my community is one of the greatest gifts I have ever been given. In just a number of weeks since this picture was taken the section has grown and evolved even more. I am realizing now the print I am making on this space and store after I realize how quickly this picture has become out...