Convoluted Strings of Two-dollar Words

 Ten years ago, almost to the day, a university press published a novel I had written in fits and starts over the previous four years. The editor of the press marveled about the advent of publishing-on-demand and how he submitted an electronic copy to a printer and it stayed that way until physical copies were needed. Always a late adopter of new technology, that sounded like science fiction to me. What I didn’t know then was that paper books of any kind were already in many ways a quaint throwback. The very first time I heard about electronic books was in the mid 1990s. A professor at a small regional university told me how soon all books would be in electronic format, like on a computer screen. He said he appreciated how converting text to digital format would open new horizons, especially in making scholarly works more widely available than our usual system of interlibrary loan, but he also said after a pause, frown, and a bit of a moan, “But I just like the way books feel.” He ...

Writers, or at least the ones that produce fiction and poetry, tend to be odd folks. Some are reclusive, and were it not for social media and blogs they'd have no interaction aside from angry communication with agents and editors. Others are social to the extreme. They attend every possible conference, festival, and book reading. One of my favorites, both for his work and for his downright charming personality, tells hilarious stories about writers. Jerry Craven, press director for a couple of East Texas presses as well as a widely published novelist and poet and semi-retired English professor, fits somewhere in the middle of the writer's spectrum of social engagement, but his stories about fellow writers are unparalleled. A recent favorite involves a writer who attended the Texas Book Festival in Austin. The festival has been around for less than twenty years, but for authors and bibliophiles alike it's an event like no other in the Lone Star State. For many writers, ...