Posts Tagged ‘Oak Park’
Writing the future in Oak Park
I just wanted to mention that there are still a few slots available for a workshop that I’m teaching tomorrow—modestly titled “Writing Science Fiction that Sells”—at the house of my friend Mary Anne Mohanraj in Oak Park, Illinois. Here’s the full description:
Saturday January 26
332 Wisconsin Avenue, Oak Park, IL
9:00-10:30am: Writing Science Fiction that Sells
Science fiction offers a thriving audience for short stories, but it can be hard for beginners to break into professional markets, and even established writers can have trouble making consistent sales. We’ll discuss strategies for writing stories that are compelling from the very first page, based on the principles of effective characterization, plot structure, and worldbuilding, with examples drawn from a wide range of authors and publications. During the class, Alec will plot out the opening of an original SF story, based on ideas generated by participants. Members will also have the option of submitting a short story for critique.
Cost: $50. Registration Max: 15
You can register for the event here. If you use the coupon code “12345,” you can get twenty percent off the registration fee. Hope to see some of you there!
A word from your author
With only four days remaining until the release of City of Exiles, my vast promotional machine is kicking into something resembling high gear. If you’re in the Chicago area today, I’ll be appearing at a local authors event at the Oak Park Public Library at 2pm, where advance copies of the new novel will be on sale. And if you can’t make it, you can at least enjoy this promotional video, which I recorded last summer and is finally available online. Looking at it now, I’m more amused by it than anything else, both by the fact that they cut half an hour of material down to just over a minute—probably wisely—and by the enormous microphone clipped to my shirt. But if you’ve been dying to see me in action, here’s your chance.
The story of a library
Over the years, my life has evolved in surprising ways, but one constant has always been the lack of shelf space. Even when I was growing up, books tended to accumulate in strange places, and nearly all of my shelves were stacked two books deep. (I inherited this tendency from my parents, who I’m convinced moved countless boxes of books from one house to another without unpacking them for at least twenty years.) College was even worse, with the single bookcase allotted to each dorm room barely covering my required reading, much less the countless other volumes I picked up at used bookshops and thrift stores along the way. And the ensuing series of fairly small New York apartments didn’t leave me a lot of space, either. As a result, I’ve spent most of the last fifteen years fighting a losing war between the physical amount of shelving available and my own acquisitive nature.
Things took a turn for the better last fall, when my wife and I moved to Oak Park. After years of renting, we finally owned a house of our own, which meant I could start to think seriously about building a permanent home library—and I’d have an entire room for my office and study. Almost from the day we moved in, then, I was dreaming of a workspace filled, gloriously, with bookshelves. This had to wait for almost six months, however, as other home improvement projects took priority—sanding floors, replastering walls, repainting the dining room and kitchen—and as travel and other obligations ate up much of our time. As a result, the library remained a gleam in the eye, even as my books ended up stacked in toppling ziggurats, swallowing up much of the floor and making it all but impossible to find any particular title when I needed it.
At last, however, the moment came. And I’m proud to say that as of this Friday, for the first time ever, I don’t just have a bunch of books: I have a library. The shelves, installed by Crooked Oak of Chicago, are gorgeous, and they perfectly match what I wanted: shelves on all four walls, reaching nearly to the ceiling, with just enough room for a desk, chair, and window seat. The shelves are a nice, dense cherrywood laminate that goes beautifully with the room’s vintage details—the house dates from 1907—and they’ve been painstakingly installed to account for the uneven floors. The result gives me plenty of room for the thousand or so books that I’ve retained over the years, along with such miscellaneous items as my recently acquired Replogle Globe. In fact, I now have more shelf space than I have books to fill it, which is decidedly strange—I’m not used to feeling that I don’t have enough books.
The really novel luxury is being able to look around at my personal library at a glance, without any books hiding in stacks or second layers. It gives me a snapshot of what I know and don’t know and, indirectly, of who I am—because a library, more than anything else, is a self-portrait, and casting my eyes around this room is like taking a tour of my own life, from the shelf of classics in Latin and Greek to the books on Duchamp to the long row of Peanuts collections. I’ve even begun doing something I’ve never done before, which is to arrange the books roughly by subject, while still keeping a healthy amount of disorder. And I’ve been left what feels, above all else, like a place where a writer can really get some work done. In short, I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time here. And it will never be nearly enough.
A writer’s house in Oak Park
So it’s been a hectic couple of days, but the move went fine, and now my wife and I are slowly settling into our new home. It’s a strange feeling, walking around a house that you know only slightly, but where you expect to spend much of your life for many years to come. And while I’m still adjusting to the new space, and trying to recover the comfortable habits that were lost in the transition—I’m not someone who adapts well to a change in routine—I’m very happy with where things stand.
Since this is primarily a blog about writing, among other things, I don’t expect to be talking much about the house, although I may try to chronicle the slow evolution of my home office, which currently consists of little more than a laptop and a mountain of boxes. (I’m posting these pictures today mostly to break up my streak of quotes from bearded writers, with a third on its way tomorrow.) If you’re curious, though, my wife intends to post periodic updates on her own blog, endearingly titled Oak Perk. (I came up with the name.) And if you stop by to say hello, please let her know that I sent you.
Hello house, goodbye novel
Yesterday, exactly nine months after I began work on my second novel, I delivered the final draft of City of Exiles to my publisher. If my experience on The Icon Thief is any indication, I expect that I’ll need to do at least one more round of rewrites, along with the inevitable copyediting and proofreading, but for now, the novel is finally done. I’d love to stop and celebrate, but as it turns out, we’re also moving to our new house today. No rest for the weary, it seems, but I’m looking forward to relocating to Oak Park, as well as finding a place to put my thirty boxes of books. Hopefully I’ll be checking in tomorrow around the usual time, but if not, you’ll know why.
A novelist moves to Oak Park
Today my wife and I closed on our first house, a beautiful single-family home in historic Oak Park, Illinois. My original goal, after realizing that we were really going to move, was to become the greatest novelist Oak Park ever produced, which I soon discovered might be difficult, if only on account of this guy. The greatest living novelist, perhaps? Unfortunately, that requires catching up to the extraordinary Chris Ware, perhaps our best living novelist, period, which I’m not sure even I can do. So I might need to settle for being the best novelist on my side of the block. If that. Still, I’m pretty excited.
New copy, new cover, new house!
As The Icon Thief inches ever closer to publication, with its release date now less than seven months away, the pieces of the marketing package are slowly falling into place. Here, for instance, is a detail of the back cover, which my editor sent me last week:
Note the bad line break in Duchamp’s last name, which my editor promises to fix. Other than that, I couldn’t be happier, especially with the copy itself, which does a nice job of condensing a ridiculously complex plot into a few short sentences. Even more gratifying is my author bio, which will appear on the inside back cover:
To my mind, the most exciting thing about this bio, aside from Brian Kinyon’s wonderful (and very flattering) author photo, is the last sentence, which slightly anticipates the fact that my wife and I are indeed moving to Oak Park, Illinois at the end of next month, into a beautiful old house built in 1907. Which, as it happens, is exactly when my next novel is due. It’s going to be an interesting six weeks…