A friend emailed an article about B. Dalton closing the only bookstore in Laredo, Texas, one of the largest cities in the U.S. at 250,000. Here's my email to him:

Scott responded to this development with "buy books online at Amazon." So we talked about why bookstores are good (for browsing) but for some of us not as important as the library. A large city without a library is a tragedy. And what is a library going to be in the future now that Amazon and the Internet are here? Boston's Cushing Academy apparently has decided to no longer acquire or "service" books; everything will be online. The Cushing decision is mentioned in this article on the future of reading in the Duke Magazine titled "The End of Civilization as We Know It?" Very interesting discussion. I tend to worry as the novelist does. I like to see the physicality of books on shelves and to respect the work of authorship. Collective authorship, as Wikipedia and other initiatives rely upon, has its drawbacks. I also worry about literacy, as defined by the Duke English professor. She sounded cautiously optimistic that "professional readers" will always be necessary, but I asked Scott why professional reading ability and "Internet savvy" have to be mutually exclusive, and I fear that either people will ignorantly make them exclusive by not promoting the type of reading she mentions or callously dismiss the importance of professional reading.

I have a personal stake in this, obviously. While I wait for responses from traditional gatekeepers to publishing (it's been three months since I submitted 50 pages to two literary agents and three weeks since I queried a new set of agents), I ponder the revolution underway in how and what people read and how they choose what they read. The old questions from agents and publishers have been: who is your reader for this novel? where would this novel be shelved? While traditional publishing is still operating, and in my opinion still the best way to succeed as a novelist, I find myself wondering if the chaotic publishing scene is one of opportunity for those who have the wherewithal and the savvy to act (and I don't know whether I have either). Is the digital revolution in reading an opportunity or a demise? Can I publish myself and be read or will I just get lost in the deluge? Will traditional editors even matter to a less-literate reading population that doesn't buy books?

An old grad school friend who recently found me on Facebook (which I joined because novelists are supposed to be social-media literate) confessed to me that he hasn't read more than a few pages, and none "linearly" in years. He buys books (good for those selling books) and dips into them to sample their language, but he doesn't really care about the narrative arc or the totality of the story. This astounds and terrifies me. He's highly literate and cares about language, but he's the reason that cell phone "novels" are being written (they are very popular in Japan). No one wants to spend time on an extended story (see the comment in the Duke article by the Time book reviewer, Lev Grossman, about literary instant gratification).

In the future, I worry that not only will "professional reading" as defined by the Duke professor be a dying art, but that the kind of writing necessary for a novel or even a complex piece of non-fiction will be impossible if the cognitive skills necessary for them are traded for those developed and strengthened by surfing the Net. I fear that we are moving to a world where the diagnosis of ADHD will disappear because the "normal" population will lack the ability to focus on more than a few sentences at a time, making coherent and extended arguments impossible. Then again, maybe the average person has never had much ability to do so and maybe serial and oral storytelling will make a comeback. As I read A Thousand and One Nights, I envision that these short tales are perfect for our modern sensibilities. Yet the overriding framework, the guidance of a master storyteller who creates a meta-story that synthesizes and shapes a narrative, is absent.

After reading a friend's status update on Facebook, I am inspired to try to write a haiku a day for the next year. I love haiku, even if I have been mired down in the overly simplistic 5-7-5 rhyme scheme taught to American elementary school children. I don't have the stamina, skill, or personality to master poetry, but I envision that I just might learn to write haiku that, taken over the course of a year, encapsulate my life in fleeting, vivid imagery. Like poignant snapshots in words, if I'm at all successful. I'm looking forward to this little challenge that I've set myself. Let's see whether a short line of poetry is more than I can manage daily ....

I haven't made much progress on my third novel, but I've written a sizeable chunk. The extensive outline and character biographies I wrote before returning to my first novel made it a lot easier to move to my next project, but I still find it hard to get momentum going this time of year. While I can understand why some novelists never have children, I have new respect for those who can navigate family and work responsibilities, especially if novel writing doesn't pay the bills.

Another reason it's hard to keep going is my bewilderment and worry about the state of publishing. Agents and other publishing professionals advise would-be authors to familiarize themselves with the business as much as they can and I've tracked a few key blogs for months now. I don't think that novels are going away, but everything is so chaotic and up in the air that I can't decide if it's a good time to get into the business or whether the best thing to do is cut bait and run. Tough to swallow after years of working on my novels, but I always knew publishing was a long shot.

I've spent too much time going through my old music collection and sorting through a few newer albums on LaLa to find a few somewhat appropriate songs for An Ordinary Drowning, Grounding Magic, and my latest WIP, Weebles Wobble. It'll be interesting to see whether I can use my own soundtrack to write and revise my books.

Now you can see the latest books that I've read and reviewed on GoodReads without going to my GoodReads page. (And, yes, I am a Twilight mom.) I've also added a photo link to my Facebook page. Even better, I've linked to my shared items on GoogleReader. I'm following several publishing-related (e.g., agents, editors, and marketing people) blogs. These are extremely informative.

Last night I posted to my online critique group a draft of my sequel to An Ordinary Drowning, titled (for now) Grounding Magic. I've now rewritten my original novel Grounded (approximately 180,000 words) into two completely different standalone novels. I estimate that I've generated three quarters of a million words on my literary retelling of The Little Mermaid and its imagined happily ever after.

I plan to begin the next novel, titled Weebles Wobble, in the next few days. I've outlined this novel and written a hundred pages, but of course I've learned a lot in writing Grounding Magic so I think that the outline will change so much as to be invalid. I wish that I'd quit reinventing the wheel!

Well, after six weeks, I finally got word that I'd made into the top 2,000 entries (10,000 were possible, but I don't know if Amazon received that many) based upon my "pitch" (which I took to mean my query sans biographical info). However, I didn't advance to the quarterfinals, which were decided by a different set of judges, Amazon Vine Reviewers, who read the first 5,000 words of my novel.

I've been promised the reviews from the Vine Reviewers, but so far, zilch. I don't know why those reviews wouldn't have come simultaneously with the rejection, if they existed to provide a basis for that rejection.

In reading the Amazon entrants' discussion threads, I've learned that the Vine Reviews aren't necessarily the deciding factor for advancing (scuttlebut has it that some reviewers are rather surprised that excerpts they rated poorly advanced). So it's hard to know how to judge the feedback I'll get.

As anyone who's read my fiction in rough draft can attest, I need a lot of time to polish my writing, so I won't be blathering much.

Monday is the first time I'll be sending out my new pitch, excerpt, and manuscript for An Ordinary Drowning. I'm entering the new-and-improved manuscript into the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) contest. It would be invaluable to my chances of snagging an agent if I could manage to get a Publisher's Weekly review. Or perhaps it would be even more invaluable to me to learn sooner rather than later that my over-wrought, self-important schlock belongs in the recycling bin.