Author: JamieKate
•5:42 PM

Yes, Book Graveyard. No, not The Graveyard Book (although that is also an interesting topic). Book Graveyard. Have you witnessed this anomaly lately? I have. And it is not pretty. In fact, it made me want to cry.

Do you know what the Book Graveyard is? The Used Book Store. Stop'N'Swap Book Nook. Bert and Ernie's Book Emporium (BEBE). Buks 4 Cheap.

I went to one two weeks ago to purchase some gifts for Christmas (actually, my family went and I came along because I'm complacent) and the image of the torn, smelly, stained piles upon piles of sad, lonely books made my heart swell. I wanted to take them all home and make friends with them and tell them they're loved. If you're not a bibliophile, imagine the feeling one acquires upon entering an animal shelter (although, that also happens to me in the animal shelter...poor aminals). Those poor things! They hadn't been good enough for someone to keep. And what few books people were buying were not the sad ones. The one-time author books with the frayed spines and rippling pages. Those were the ones I melted for.

Yes, I'm weird.

The Used Book Store has turned up in my thoughts again and again, especially as I revise my book and look towards the future. I will be published one day. There is no other option. I am a writer. I will become an author. My problem will be not letting my poor baby/babies end up in the Book Graveyard. And though that place was a terrible, awful place (although I have no argument with the establishment itself - I just can't personally force myself to enter it), it has incited my particular resolve to make my book as good as possible. I want my book to be somebody's favorite - the one they read over and over again until the pages are dog-eared to extinction and there are food stains in every chapter (depending on the cleanliness of my readers, of course). I cannot let mine be the lonely one. It will not be abandoned and alone, buried beneath stacks of others. I will rescue it. I will increase the tension in each scene. I will improve my chapter breaks. I will eliminate useless words. I will prevail.

In closing: I am way too dramatic for my own good.
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