Sad news...

The best comic book store in the Puget Sound region, Wonderworld, has announced that they will be closing their doors forever at the end of January. There's just not enough of a market for gaming, comics, and anime' these days, at least not enough to sustain a large store with departments for each of these. Dave says that his store is "Moving to the internet," but without the ability to touch and feel and assess the merchandise, that just will not be the same. There was something magnificent about the place.

I guess I share some of the blame. After my comic book collection was ruined after a flood I gave up collecting, and I haven't been buying nearly as much as I did in my youth. For that matter, I haven't bought that much anime from them recently because, well, I can watch the stuff when it comes out in Japan and I don't need the English dubs.

Still, as his wife told me, "At least now he'll have some time off."

For the next two weeks, all his figures are half-off, and the graphic novels are 20% off (I think she told me that because I was ogling a $35 copy of Robot), and I imagine there are similar deals in the gaming sections. Come help Dave with his moving fees.

Writing: Trust the reader's imagination

I've just spent the afternoon proofreading The Free Worlds, the first of a couple of stories with a futanari setting in the Journal Entries, and one of the things I did was hunt down every ellipse, m-dash and italicization, and kill most of them. I did this because of an experience I had about a year ago. I had read the entire Vorkosigan Saga in e-book format and absolutely adored them. They were justifiably famous for their content, style, and humor.

I then re-read them, this time in paper, and was disappointed. The e-format had disposed of a great many things that had been in the print edition, most notable of which was Bujold's excessive use of italics for emphasis. I felt as if Bujold was trying too hard in some cases to make a literary exercise into a cinematic one, giving the actors in my imagination more stage direction and less freedom. Believe me, Miles needs his freedom for self-expression!

I have become much more rigorous in my use of any such writer's tricks, and much stronger in my assumption that the reader can be trusted to know what's going on if I write well enough. I have given up trying to draw pictures with ellipses, dashes, italics, and boldface, and turned to crafting scenes with words instead.