I’m Not a Professional Bookseller But I Kinda Was Last Week

I used to work in a bookstore back in the 1990s. It was a Bookstop and I enjoyed many days during my tenure as a professional seller of books.

In the late 2000s, I started a blog and began writing reviews of books I had. This included all the crime and mystery books I was introduced to as I started to see just how broad and deep the genre was. In the written word, I go into great detail about the authors’ style, the plots they developed, and how much I enjoyed the book. As an aside, I rarely write about a book I don’t like so if I’m reviewing it, chances are all but certain I loved it.

I received lots of comments over the years. Many agreed with my take while other thanked me for letting their authors know about a book that they could add to their To Be Read pile. It always made me feel good to connect readers with books.

But there’s something special about doing it in person.

Last Sunday, my church had their occasional book fair. These are all used books, most in boxes used to deliver reams of paper, and they run gamut of genres and styles. The folks who are in charge of laying out the books are readers themselves. They collect certain authors—James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci, Clive Cussler—in the same box or rolling cart while other authors are collected by genre.

An older lady and I had struck up a conversation about mystery books. She already had a small pile she was moving around. Since we were standing right next to the Picoult box, I pointed out that my wife has read all of those books. She thanked me and we parted.

With my interest in cozy mysteries now—thanks Murder by the Book—I was delighted to see one of the rolling carts featured just those books. I happily knelt and started to read the titles. Having just finished my first Leslie Meier book, Back to School Murder, I was hoping I would find one of the Lucy Stone novels.

Well, I found one and only one: Back to School Murder. Seriously? I want a different book, something I hadn’t read. But then a lightbulb went off in my head. I grabbed the book and went back to the older lady. She had selected one of the Picoult titles as it was on top of her stack. I literally put Meier’s book in her hands and started to explain the story, the series, and how I had literally just finished reading it the prior week. The lady smiled, seemed pleased that Meier’s catalog was twenty-eight books deep, and added the novel to the top of her stack. She thanked me and I hustled back to the sanctuary to sit in with the orchestra for the second service.

That smile was worth me not finding a Meier book. That smile told me Leslie Meier just might have a new reader.

Telling people about books is a lifelong joy to me. Telling them in person is even better.

Give Small Businesses a Chance

Do you absolutely, positively have to have a brand-new book the day it is published?

Okay, for some, yes you do. I remember the Harry Potter years when folks would line up to buy a book at midnight. Ditto for many of the best-selling authors I’ve read over the decades.

But for many of us, our To Be Read pile is so huge that even if we did rush out to a bookstore on publication day, that new book might first find a place on the TBR stack vs. in our hands (even if its place is in the prime position of Next Book.

Note that so far in this example, I’ve been talking about going to a physical bookstore. What about ordering a book and having it delivered?

Well, there’s the obvious option: Amazon. If you really wanted to pre-order and book and have it delivered on publication day, Amazon would most likely make that happen for you. The other online book sellers could also fulfill your request and you’d have that brand-new book in your hands the day of release.

You can have whatever opinion you want on the omnivorous nature of Amazon. I think it’s a great service, and I use it as a writer and a consumer. But as an indie author, I’m aware that there are other options.

So when, Discipline is Destiny, the latest book from Ryan Holiday was announced, I was all in. Even though I’ve not read them all, I plan to read all of Holiday’s books. They are really good and chock full of great, thought-provoking advice.

In the days leading up to the book’s publication, Holiday went on social media and let folks know that if they per-ordered the book—from any vendor—you would receive some bonus content. It was in that moment I opted to order direct from Holiday’s website, The Daily Stoic. Why not? I would be supporting a small business. 

When I placed my order, I received a confirmation email with the following.

"PS: We appreciate your order and want to remind you that we're a small shop. We use local manufacturers and family-run businesses as our partners here in America. While this means we can feel good about everything we make, it sometimes means that products take a bit longer than expected and creates the occasional logistical issue. We don't have a massive supply chain or a massive team of people working 24/7. It's just us...doing our best...just like you. Thank you and enjoy!"

I have enjoyed the book. It’s the new book so there was high demand. Ultimately it took about ten days, but those days were spent finishing another book I was already reading (Back to School Murder) so I didn’t mind at all. And I helped a small business.

So, as our attention turns to Christmas shopping, I would like to encourage everyone to support as many small businesses as possible.

My First Visit to Tinker’s Cove Will Not Be the Last

The books of Leslie Meier first popped onto my radar in 2020 when John McDougall of Murder by the Book here in Houston binge read them. But I didn’t read any. Last fall when I searched for a mystery to read during the Halloween season, I saw her name again. Didn’t bite. Even when John selected Easter Bunny Murder earlier this year as part of Murder by the Book’s excellent subscription service [There are 3 options; have a look], I still didn’t start a Meier book.

But I have now.

I’m a seasonal reader. When it’s summer, I want a summer-type book. Ditto for the holidays, so when September rolled around, I got to think “I bet Leslie Meier has a Labor Day book.” Well, she doesn’t, but she’s got the next best thing as illustrated by the title: Back to School Murder.

A Great Marketing Hook

Starting in 1991 (!) with Mistletoe Murder, nearly every book in the Lucy Stone series revolves around a holiday. Chances are pretty good that you could go through and entire year’s worth of holidays and there’d be a Lucy Stone mystery ready for you. It’s a great marketing strategy and I wonder if Meier had that in mind from the jump or if it was an organic process.

A Delightfully Real Protagonist

Lucy Stone is her amateur detective, but that’s not all she is. In Back to School Murder—published in 1997, it’s the fourth book in the series—she is a forty-year-old woman, wife, and mother of four kids whose ages range from younger high school to toddler. Her husband, Bill, is a carpenter who specializes in restorations.

As the story opens, Lucy is filling in (for a friend who is helping her mom with chemo) as a reporter for The Pennysaver, a weekly publication for the small town of Tinker’s Cove. Up until the reporter gig, she is a stay-at-home mom who finds herself at a crossroad of life: is being a mom and wife all there is? The reporter job gives her a glimpse of a life beyond the home and one she puts to good use when a bomb goes off in the school.

Yeah, I’ll admit that for a book published in 1991, a bomb in a school struck close to home as I was reading in 2022. But the bomb was only a part of the story. It turns out that one of the teachers, Carol Crane, is seen rescuing a handicapped boy who somehow was not evacuated with the rest of the children. And it’s just in time, for no sooner did all the bystanders see Carol running out of the building that the windows are shattered.

Imagine Lucy’s surprise, however, when a few days later—and after a contentious school board meeting in which Carol stepped on a few toes—the news comes in that Carol was murdered in her bed. Now, Lucy the reporter starts to work on the tribute for the paper…and things don’t add up.

A Murder in the Middle of Real Life

Well, like every good amateur sleuth, Lucy starts to look for more information, sifting through new clues, trying to find out more about Carol and her past. But here’s a key aspect of this book: Lucy does all of this around her real life. There were chunks of this book where Meier just followed Lucy in her night school class or dealing with sick children, the mystery not even top of Lucy’s mind.

Turns out, I rather enjoyed that aspect of the story. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Lucy Stone is a fun protagonist, a real person, not some super detective or stalwart police officer. She does what most of us would like to think we’d do: keep asking questions. Partly it’s to protect her community, but it’s also to find the truth. I liked it when she was just a mom taking care of the kids. I liked it when she gossiped with her friends. I liked it when real life interfered with her tracking down the killer.

In fact, I liked this story so much that I’m already looking for the next holiday so I can return to Tinker’s Cove. And with 28 books, I’ll have many happy visits.

Funny History Realization

As an aside, I had to laugh when Lucy’s editor hand carried a floppy disk to the printers so the weekly issue of the Pennysaver could be published. What mad me laugh was my own realization of just how far we’ve come since 1991. When I read a book from the 1940s, for examples, I intrinsically know that there are no cellphones or internet or computers. But somehow, with the somewhat modern setting of this 1991 mystery, I had forgotten that the internet barely existed in that year. And yeah, you couldn’t just email a file to the printer.

My how times have changed. 

Cozy College

It's been awhile since I wrote about my enrollment in Cozy College. Start here, then keep going here.

The Surprising Depth of Ted Lasso

I expected the laughs. I kind of expected some drama. I did not expect the characters and their relationships.

The wife and I finally watched both seasons of Ted Lasso, the Jason Sudeikis-fronted program on Apple TV. From the outside, it looked like just a sitcom about an American football coach brought over to England to coach a soccer team with the end goal being to drive said team into the ground. This being the plan of team owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) as a get-back to her ex-husband who left her for a younger woman and loved the team.

That might serve as the how-it-started part, but that’s nowhere near where it ended up. By the end of the 22 episodes to date, what we got was a show that could make you crane your ear at the TV to make sure you got the joke a character said in an off-hand manner and then next moment have you mute with emotion, with tears likely rimming your eyes.

Each character has a moment to shine, usually in multiple episodes. With Lasso himself, I expected a overly optimistic, shuck kind of guy where nothing much phases him. That’s certainly Lasso’s exterior, but on more than one occasion, Sudeikis lays bare the coach and reveals him to be a man who hides much behind his veneer of happiness.

That’s not to say his joy isn’t contagious. It was fun to watch his outlook on life wash over all the people in which he comes into contact, ultimately making them better people. Or more real, if you want to get down with the truth of this show.

There are so many things you could say about each character and after I watched the last episode, I got on the internet to read some.

Pro Tip: Never go on the internet when you are catching up on an existing show unless you want spoilers. I learned that lesson long ago and now I watch all my TV shows without my phone in my hand. Well, unless I’m watching the live broadcast of SyFy’s Resident Alien because the cast live tweets and they are hilarious and engaging. (But even then, I put the phone down during the show itself.)

But as much as I enjoyed each character’s moments in the spotlight, what I really appreciated was the depth of their relationships with each other. How great is team owner Rebecca and model/publicist Keeley Jones (Juno Temple). On screen, it’s like their sisters who only discovered each other in adulthood. Unlike other shows where these two might be pitted against each other for, say, to get the same guy, Keeley and Rebecca come to really love each other. They bolster each other when one is feeling down and there’s nary a mean things said between. Super refreshing.

The group of guys surrounding Lasso are also great to see on camera. Dubbed the Diamond Dogs, they consist of Lasso, assistant coach Beard (yup, the character’s real name and not just because actor Brendan Hunt sports facial hair), Director of Football Operations Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift), and Nathan Shelley (Nick Mohammed), the guy who went from being a kit manager to an assistant coach. They also keep things together between them and, most importantly, allow themselves to be vulnerable with each other.

By the end of the second season, I found myself thinking about the show over and over while mowing the lawn or commuting to work. The stories, the characters, the depth just stayed with me. Like I wrote about in a review of Resident Alien a few weeks ago, I’m just glad there are shows like Ted Lasso that demonstrate you can have a light and funny show while still delivering the depth and nuance you might only think exists in dramas.

There's a reason so many people respond to this show. 

I Finally Saw Clerks III

What did you expect from Kevin Smith, a man living on borrowed time?

Back in the summer of 2019, I set out to watch every Kevin Smith film leading up to the release of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. It was a fantastic experience where I wrote about the movies as I watched them, watched no trailers ahead of seeing the film (leading to a shocker in Jersey Girl), and then ranked my favorite films, performances, and scenes.

Being the pop culture geek that I am, folks are surprised to learn that I only started watching Smith’s films 2019. Up until then, he was only a podcaster (and that only since 2012). So I’m watching all of these films as a guy in his early fifties rather than the younger person I was had I watched these movies in real time. As a result, they strike me differently (just look at my favorite Smith film), yet I suspect Clerks III will affect many of Smith’s fans in a poignant way.

Where We Left Off

At the end of Clerks II (2006), Dante (Brian O'Hallaran) and Randel (Jeff Anderson) had steered their lives full circle and purchased the Quick Stop convenience store, the setting of Clerks. Dante finally realized he loved Becky (Rosario Dawson) and opted to stay with her, especially since she is pregnant with his child. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” quipped Randal as the camera panned back, shifted to black and white, to the wonderful Soul Asylum song, “Misery.”

Little did we know how much misery was in store for our pair of clerks.

Spoilers from here on out.

Where We Pick Up

Just like the first two films, Dante opens the Quick Stop, complete with gum in the padlock. The warm feelings you get from seeing this family setting are immediately doused with water when you see an obituary on the counter: Becky, Dante’s fiancée from Clerks II, died. Not only that, but she died in 2006, the year the film was released. What the hell? What about the happy ending we got at the end of II?

Well, there was an ending to that movie, but life went on. And life can throw you curveballs, something Smith himself knows all too well. Back in 2018, after the first of two shows, Smith experienced a heart attack, a widow-maker, the kind of heart attack only 20% of people survive. Smith survived and changed his life, his diet, and his vision of life. He’s living on borrowed time, he says, something that Randal comes around to as well as he survives a similar heart attack.

Unlike Smith (who had an established body of work by 2018), Randal laments what he’s made of his life. “You saved my life,” he tells Dante. “I just wish I had a life worth saving.” These two friends—hetero life mates—love each other (in a total hetero way) and Randal gets the idea to make a movie about the life of a clerk at a convenience store. Naturally, he centers the movie on himself, and he uses all of his experiences (i.e., the events of Clerks and Clerks II) as grist for his mill. Then, just like Smith did in real life, the process of making a movie commences.

Making the Movie Within the Movie

There are lots of in-jokes and familiar nods and winks back to earlier Clerks films and other Smith movies during the middle part of Clerks III. I probably missed a few but I got the gist of them all. They’re all fun Easter eggs for long-time fans.

The Heart of the Story, Part 1: Dante and Becky

It’s one thing to see Becky’s obituary on the counter. It’s quite another when you see Dante heading through a graveyard and you know exactly what’s about to happen. But I guarantee you might not be prepared for the emotional reaction to the ‘talking to a tombstone’ scene, especially when Dante talks with Becky’s spirit. It is here we learn the true cause of Becky’s death: a drunk driver. Dante tells Becky he’s stuck, that he can’t go on in life, but she tries to redirect him. She tries to get him to understand that he’s still living, that he still has a chance to do anything he wants. It is simultaneously heartbreaking and inspirational, and Brian O’Hallaran does some great acting here, the kind of acting that comes from living with a character for nearly thirty years. Sure, it’s only been three movies, but O’Hallaran is pretty much synonymous with Dante for me and a lot of other people.

Dante and Becky have three total scenes together and you get banged over the head with one of Smith’s central themes: life throws you curve balls. You can let them knock you off course, but if you don’t reset, you will wallow in misery, despair, and melancholy. Up until the events of this movie, that’s where Dante’s been for sixteen years.

The Heart of the Story, Part 2: Dante and Randal

I wrote in my review of Clerks II about the surprise I felt when I saw how Smith broadened and deepened the relationship between Dante and Randal. This pair of decades-long friends truly love and care for each other. In this movie, you see it on Dante’s face when Randal is rushed to the hospital. You see it on Randal’s face later on in the movie, but that doesn’t mean they don’t bare their souls to each other. Randal had a fantastic scene in Clerks II, so it’s Dante’s turn in Clerks III.

Brian O’Hallaran and Jeff Anderson might not get a lot of attention in the acting community but they both knocked it out of the park in this movie. Randal turned his speech from Clerks on its head with his new outlook on life, but it’s Dante’s monologue in the Quick Stop that resonates. It is raw, laying bare the agony he’s endured in the years since Becky died. He had his happily ever after but it was ripped away. When Randal counters with “I almost died,” Dante retorts with “Some of us did die.” O’Hallaran delivers these lines as if he endured Dante’s life personally. This scene will find a place on the list of my all-time favorite Smith scenes, but I wasn’t expecting what happened next.

Dante falls victim to a heart attack.

Now, you might roll your eyes at that, but it was foreshadowed earlier in the film. And it compelled Randal to reexamine the type of movie he was making. He realized Dante, not Randal himself, who was the star of the film. He quickly re-cut the movie on his computer and showed it to a bedridden Dante. Then, you see all the old scenes from Clerks, but you also see a present-day Dante in a movie theater watching the movie, a wistful smile on his face. A hand reaches out and takes his. It’s Becky. And it’s then you realize that if Becky and Dante are holding hands, Dante himself is dying.

And he does. There are a lot of good last lines in movies, but for Dante, his final words are incredibly poignant. When Becky asks if he wants to stay and watch the rest of the movie, he replies with utter calmness and pride: “I trust the director.”

The Overturning of a Famous Quote

I’m not sure how many of the folks in my theater were crying when Dante died, but I sure was. Heck, my voice broke a couple of times when I later told my wife the events of the story. Yes, I cry at a lot of things, but these movies and these characters, even over just three years, have come to represent something. I think lots of fiftysomething folks, guys especially, find pieces of themselves in the lives of Dante and Randal.

But leave it to Kevin Smith to take one of his most famous quotes and change it. A running gag in Clerks was that Dante came into work on his day off. To just about everyone, he kept lamenting that “I’m not supposed to be here today.”

Now, in Clerks III, at Dante’s funeral, it’s Randal looking down at his friend’s coffin for the last time and he laments that he [Dante] isn’t even supposed to be here [at his own funeral] today.

That’s a fantastic piece of storytelling.

The Closing Voiceover

As the credits rolled to the deep baritone voice of John Gorka singing “I’m from New Jersey,” the music faded out and Smith returned. He talked about how immensely happy he was to have made this third clerks film and to the career he’s had. But he goes on to reveal a little bit of a scene that didn’t make the movie. It was a voiceover of a 90-year-old Randal Graves reflecting on his own life and all the movies he made after his celebrated debut, “Clerk.” “I always thought that jobs would have been great if it weren’t for the f*cking customers. But as it turns out, these jobs are great because of the f*cking customers.” Smith return and sums it all up. “He [Randal] means it, and so do I. Thank you to everybody who ever walked through that door of that store and made me think ‘Somebody ought to put this in a f*cking movie.’ Somebody did. Thank you.”

Thank you, Kevin Smith, for making movies like this. I may have been super late to the party, but I’m so glad I joined.

The Verdict

Clerks III is a good film with some outstanding moments that should resonate with its audience long after the credits fade to black. It still has some cringe-worthy moments, but none like the donkey stuff in Clerks II. But it is utterly fascinating to watch this film (actually all three Clerks films) about two characters at different stages of their lives by a filmmaker in those same stages. It’s not quick like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (in which he filmed an actor over a decade actually growing up) but it’s in the same spirit.

The Ranking

Back in 2019, right before I actually watched Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, I ranked all the films. After Reboot, I ended up putting it at number 4. I have honestly only seen Reboot one time—during the tour when Kevin and Jay were on hand to take questions—so I’ll have to go back and watch it again. But Clerks III is going to be side-by-side with Reboot. Both deal with getting older and becoming more sentimental, but in different ways. I might give the edge to Clerks III for its ultimately inspirational theme that no matter how old you are, it's never too late to try something new.

In terms of scenes, the Dante and Randal fight and subsequent Dante monologue in the Quick Stop is one of the best written by Smith and acted by O'Hallaran and Anderson. Dante’s scene with Becky at her gravesite is also right up there. And the short moment at end, with Dante and Becky, also ranks as one of the best moments and lines in all of Smith’s films.

Getting Through The Writer’s Drought

Remember back on Memorial Day when I wrote a post about The Great Summer Writing Season? I said that in the 97 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day 2022, if you keep up a decent writing habit, you can get a book written or a number of short stories.

How’d you do?

Better than me, I hope, because I failed. Badly.

And the thing is, I’m not sure why, but there were a number of factors, the primary one is the change in the house. My son moved out of the house in July, heading out for his junior year in college. I was not prepared for the emotional wallop that event delivered. In the days and weeks before he moved out in late July, our family centered on being together and a series of Lasts. In the days and weeks since, we’ve experienced a series of Firsts. All of those things churned through the emotions and the end result was a shift of focus.

Then there was the reading (and listening) of books, comics (and audiobooks). I don’t know about you but I have seasons (not the best word but I’ll go with it) with my reading. I’m always reading something but sometimes, the desire to read more and more things consumes my attention. Couple that with the limited amount of time I have to write and/or read and as the summer progressed, I found myself opting to open a book a read in those precious minutes before work rather than writing. The thing was, I didn’t mind.

The reading material was not all fiction or comics either. I ended up on a run of self-help, creativity books. Having read the first Steven Pressfield creativity book, The War of Art, I kept going with Turning Pro and Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be. Both short volumes had great nuggets that subtly began to shift some of the ground beneath my feet and started edging me to getting back into a writing habit. I mean, the title of that third book pretty much says it, right?

But it was the concepts and philosophy behind James Clear’s Atomic Habits that really did the trick. I’m a latecomer to Clear’s book but I picked it up in July and began reading it, annotating it, and compiling my own set of notes and takeaways from this excellent book. I highly recommend it (a couple of folks in my office are now reading it). It’s kind of put some guidelines around this new life my wife and I find ourselves in: empty nesters. It’s a big change, to be sure.

One of the crucial ideas Clear makes, um, clear, is that to start a habit, you have to make it easy. If you leave the dental floss out on the counter next to your toothbrush, then you’ll be more likely to floss when you brush. If you have a desire to become more physically fit, start with something so easy—like one push up—that the barrier is basically nonexistent.

This applies to writing as well. And, truth be told, I pretty much wrote the same thing back in May, but somewhere along the summer of 2022, I forgot it. That is write whatever you can in the time you have per day. Don’t get hung up on striving for a certain word count—at least if you are getting back into the habit.

That’s where I am now: getting back into the habit. I have a project I’m actively working so that’s a nice on ramp to the writer’s superhighway and I’m taking it.

I hope your summer writing season was productive, but here’s an important thing to understand: if it wasn’t, that’s okay. We can’t always be on all the time. Droughts happen. I’ve been through a few myself and I’ve come to learn that they will pass. It’s better to just get through them—enjoying whatever it is that’s taking you away from writing—so you can be supercharged on the other side and hit the writing with a renewed sense of optimism and excitement.

What Do You Do With Your Book Annotations?

I write in my books.

There, I said it. Ever since I can remember, I read my school books with pens or pencils or highlighters to mark passages and help me learn them for exams or papers. Heck, I’d often read magazines with a ballpoint pen and underlining special lines of text or ripping out pages that had recipes.

As I started writing and publishing in earnest, I eventually started reading fiction with a pencil in my had. For this, it’s almost always pencil. I actually like the sound and feel of a pencil scraping across the pages and I’m underlining a particular good turn of phrase.

I have also been known to markup books as I break them down and try to figure out why, say, Dan Brown’s prose seems so effortless or how a Clive Cussler novel was structured. It’s like homework, but, you know, fun homework.

When ebooks popped into my life, I kept up the practice. What’s nice about the Kindle Paperwhite is that you can go into your own account via a browser and see your annotations and, most importantly, copy and paste them into a word file.

Why? So I can have my own personal reference notes for anything I read.

But for those of you who write in your books, what do you do about all those annotations? I recently finished a trio of similarly themed books: two by Steven Pressfield (Turning Pro and Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be) and Atomic Habits by James Clear. All three of these books are fantastic and are chock full of great action items.

I marked up Clear’s book a LOT. I bought the physical copy of all three of these books and now it’s time for my next step of archiving my annotations.

I dictate my notes and passages from the book into a text file via my iPhone.

I strictly use a text file on the phone mainly because I don’t want to mess with formatting. I just want the words. Later, I’ll copy the plain text into a word file and apply some formatting like chapter headings and sub-headings. Since Clear uses a few charts and diagrams, I’ll also likely snap photos and insert them into the word file.

That might sound like a lot of effort, but I find that (a) I don’t mind and (b), it enables me to digest the content at least three times. The first is when I read it. The second is when I dictate the text, and the third is when I format it. And, yes, old-fashioned person that I am, I will also likely print it out and keep it in the book. I also keep the digital copy in a Dropbox file so that I can access the content wherever and whenever I am.

Anybody else do something like this?

The Surprising Humanity of Resident Alien

I really enjoy being surprised by stories and characters.

I started watching the TV show Castle because of the premise and Nathan Fillion, but over time realized that Stana Katic’s Beckett was a deeply emotional character that arguably had the biggest character arc of the entire series. John Scalzi’s novel Redshirts was advertised as a Star Trek parody but ended up delivering an emotional ending so vivid that on the day I finished the story, I couldn’t even talk through the ending to my wife without breaking down.

Add to this list the TV show Resident Alien on the Syfy Channel (still dislike that styling). Billed as a starring vehicle for Alan Tudyk, Resident Alien follows Tudyk’s alien character as he crashes in a small Colorado today. He assumes the physical form of the town doctor—Harry Vanderspeigle, a human who does not survive—and attempts to go about his mission to destroy all humans. In the process, however, he meets and interacts with the residents of Patience, Colorado, and learns what it means to be human and all the messiness therein.

Let’s be honest: Tudyk is a gifted actor who can make you laugh so hard you’ll stomach will ache. A great example of this is the movie “Death at a Funeral,” the original British version. Here, Tudyk’s Harry has an odd way to “smiling,” a childlike wonder at the world, a love of “Law and Order,” and a penchant of saying exactly what he’s thinking without any nuance. In every episode, there will be moments that will definitely make you laugh out loud.

A show like this might need someone of Tudyk’s caliber to get it greenlit, but the supporting cast is what makes the difference, and in Resident Alien, the cast is wonderfully just…normal. And human.

Sara Tomko plays Asta Twelvetrees, a Native American nurse who works with Tudyk’s Henry very close. She’s a town native—nearly all the characters are, a trait that plays into the interactions—who gave up her daughter when she got pregnant in high school, the father being a pretty abusive guy. That decision haunts Asta as it would anyone, which is especially hard when the daughter is now in high school herself.

Asta’s best friend, D’Arcy Bloom (Alice Wetterlund), owns the town bar after a skiing accident at the Olympics derailed her career. She’s a borderline alcoholic who so often makes the wrong decisions that you basically think her lot in life is already cast. She thinks that, too, so when she interacts with everyone, there’s general assumption D’Arcy will just always choose wrong.

Sheriff Mike Thompson (Corey Reynolds) and Deputy Liv Baker (Elizabeth Bowen) provide a steady dose of comedy (just in case you think I’m only zeroing in on the everyday drama). Mike’s a veteran cop from Washington, DC, who left the big city for the small town after his partner was killed. He often doesn’t have the right ideas but hides that fact behind over-the-top bluster. Liv is basically ignored by Mike even though she has her brain in the police game and is often correct about the central mystery of the story: what really happened to the real Harry and why are the government officials snooping around. Bowen deadpan delivery, laced with a real-world resignation that she knows she’s too good for the department but doesn’t know how or where to move.

The mayor is a young Ben Hawthorne (Levi Fiehler), a slight man who likes to make candles and takes a backseat in nearly everything and from everyone, especially his more dominant wife, Kate (Meredith Garretson). He dated D’Arcy when they were in school together and Kate sometimes wonders if there’s still a spark.

There a pair of child actors work mentioning as well. Judah Prehn plays Max Hawthorne, the only child of the mayor and his wife. He and his best friend, Sahar, (Gracelyn Awad Rinke) can see Tudyk’s true alien form. Initially they’re scared but soon some to realize they can get things just by threatening Henry.

This may seem like a lot but the story lines are woven pretty well. There is the overarching story of Tudyk’s true mission and which humans ultimately come to know the truth. That’s almost always played for laughs and the laughs are full and genuine.

But it’s the small moments that makes this show rise above others and shine, and this week’s episode was a great example. Asta did a thing that tormented her so Harry used his alien ability and wiped her memory of the incident. The ripple effect meant she missed not only that memory but other things as well, things that hurt others. It was then that Asta told Harry that everything humans experienced, the good as well as the bad, is equally important. For Harry, he’d just as well just be happy, yet that’s not always possible.

D’Arcy’s actions the past few episodes, relationship-wise, were like walking on thin ice. Would she keep making the bad decision and self-sabotaging her life? That’s what she’s always done and there was a moment in this week’s episode when she fell back into the same habit. She had a moment of reflection and made her choice.

Lastly, there was a recurring theme of death, specifically end-of-life. Henry doesn’t understand it and wants to just have it happen away from him. But as a doctor, he needed to be with a dying man who told Henry how good his long life was and how ready he was to see his deceased wife.

Within the span of about ten minutes of the episode, I went from laughing and literally holding my sides to wiping away the sting of tears.

That’s the kind of show Resident Alien is because that’s the way life is. This is a great show and I highly recommend it.

A High School Reunion and a Murder: Girl Most Likely by Max Allan Collins

Last week, I mentioned a new way to consume a story, via a Kindle ebook and its corresponding audiobook. The book in question was Girl Most Likely by Max Allan Collins. Well, I’ve finished the novel and here is the promised review.

The lead character is Krista Larson, a twenty-eight-year-old who serves as the police chief for Galena, Illinois, a small, Midwestern tourist town. This makes her simultaneously the youngest police chief in the country and the youngest female chief. As we’re told throughout the novel, her department consists only of a dozen people, herself included.

Her father, Keith, was also a cop, but one from a larger town across the river. They live together now in the wake of her mom’s passing. They have a good relationship, nothing like the oil-and-water relationships you see on TV or in other books.

Speaking of TV, Collins intentionally set out to write “an American variation of the [Kurt] Wallander novels, and such Nordic TV mini-series as The Bridge, the Killing, and (again) Wallander.” Being a fan of those programs myself, that was pretty much all it took for me to download the ebook and audiobook and start reading.

There’s a certain style of mystery—mostly thrillers, I guess—where there’s running on page one or a murder on page one and that sets the entire tale in motion. That’s here in this book, too, but via a fun writerly quirk: all the times the killer in on stage, Collins writes those scenes in second person, that is, from the killer’s point of view. It serves more the one purses. The obvious one is that you get a peek inside the killer’s mind, what drives the killer to kill. The other obvious thing is that Collins hides the identity of the killer. By the time a reader reaches the end of the novel and know who did, it’s fun to return to those chapters and see how the veteran writer spooled out the clues.

Other than the opening chapter, the bulk of the novel sets the stage via its characters and surrounding environment. It’s a day-to-day life of Krista and her friends as they prepare to attend their ten year high school reunion. We get nice portraits of the folks who never left small town life as well as those who return from bigger cities. As the title of the book indicates, there is one character—Astrid Lund—who is the girl most likely to succeed, and boy has she. Astrid (a nice nod to the Nordic) has blossomed into a stunner who works in TV broadcast news up in Chicago. She broke up more than one relationship back in high school and her presence at the reunion threatens those same people. Most everyone reacts to her in one way or another. She’s like the sun: her gravity either pushes or pulls all her classmates.

What I found particularly fun is how Collins weaves the characters in and out of the story in such a way that you almost wonder if you are merely reading a traditional drama rather than a murder mystery. You kind of have an idea of who is going to be killed, but you still wonder when it'll happen, but when it does, it's visceral. Three people end up dead in this story, so this small town police chief ends up having a triple murder investigation. She draws on her father’s experience as a homicide detective while keeping the investigation local and not calling in the state police.

As a writer, describing a character is always a challenge. How much do you give? How to you give it? Do you do it every time a character walks on stage? Collins does it nearly every time, but he usually dispatches the description in a sentence or two. Interestingly, he goes a step further and details their voice, usually in the form of a musical notation: his baritone, her soprano. Being a musician like Collins, I dug that and, frankly, it never even occurred to me to do that.

Like the BBC shows that inspired Collins to write this story, this is a full-on police procedural. Krista and her dad ask lots of questions and follow leads. You definitely have to be in a mood for this kind of story, and it’s where I have an issue with the sub-title: A thriller. I don’t consider this a thriller at all. Sure, there is the ending, but when I think thriller, I think lots of running and shooting and more running and reading so fast that you quickly start to turn the pages or increase the narration speed. Girl Most Likely moves forward in a determined manner where you know you’re being given some red herrings and try and decipher the clues before the characters.

I enjoyed Girl Most Likely quite a bit. It was exactly the type of story I wanted and it easily met my expectations. In fact, I liked it so much that I already downloaded both the ebook and audiobook of Girl Can’t Help It, the second novel featuring Krista Larson. And, since I enjoy reading “seasonally,” I was pleased to note Girl Can’t Help It takes place around Labor Day. I’ll give you zero guesses when I start the book.

A New Standard to Consume a Story?

Have y’all tried this?

Last month, veteran author Max Allan Collins offered a pair of books for $0.99 each, Girl Most Likely and Girl Can’t Help It. They feature Krista Larson, a twenty-eight-year-old woman who serves as police chief for a small Midwestern tourist town. Yes, this makes her the youngest such chief in the nation, but she’s able to draw on her father’s multi-decade career when a murder of a former classmate during a high school reunion lands in her jurisdiction.

In a blog entry, Collins discussed the two books, the inspiration behind the tales, and a peek into the business of writing. But what got me was that these two stories are his take on Nordic noir, “an American variation on the Wallander novels, and such Nordic TV mini-series as The Bridge, The Killing, and (again) Wallander.” Well, that’s pretty much all it took for me to head over to Amazon and drop a buck and buy the ebook.

But then I got a prompt: for an additional $1.98, I could purchase the audio version of Girl Most Likely. I’m already an Audible subscriber and I’m an avid user of my local public library and the audiobooks it has. I have read/listened to the same audiobook before, back in 2007 when I read all the Harry Potter books in a row. Back then, I found the paperbacks from used bookstores and checked out the audiobooks from the library. I’d listen during my daily commutes, flip pages in the book at night and read, and the next morning, fast-forward the audiobook to match where I stopped reading the night before.

But I was curious: I had never purchased an ebook and audiobook with the promise that everything would be synced. I gave it a go.

I started with the ebook and read a few pages on my Kindle Paperwhite. Then I clicked over to my Audible app. Hmmm, the book wasn’t there. That’s weird. Where was it?

So I checked the Kindle app on my iPhone and viola! There’s the audio. It’s toggled when you tap to bring up the table of contents. 

If you tap on the title at the bottom, the screen flips and you get a basic audiobook look and feel.

Probably the coolest thing is if you start the audio while still having the ebook on the screen, the app highlights text as the audio goes along.

Oh, and when I picked up my Paperwhite later that first day, I get a message: “Want to sync to where the audio stopped?” Yes. Boom!

This is a great way to consume a story. I could easily see this dual format become a preferred way some people to “read” books, although from a business perspective, I would image you’d get the ebook for a buck after you purchased the audiobook at full price.

A note about the audiobook: this is not some AI voice stumbling through onscreen text. This is the actual audio narration by Dan John Miller. It’s a win-win.

And the story itself? Well, I’ll review it when I’m done but I’m really digging it.

The Empty Nest Phase Begins

I experienced a momentous event last week: my son moved out of the house. 

On Wednesday, my twenty-year-old son into his first apartment to continue his education in audio engineering. He’s an only child and this is the only house in which he’s lived, so I know it’s a big deal for him. But it’s also a big deal for my wife and I.

Because of Covid, he stayed home after high school and got all his basic courses out of the way, so my wife and I got two bonus years, a fact we cherished. We got two extra years many parents don’t get. They came at a terrible, pandemic-induced cost, but we three got them nonetheless.

As New Year’s Day 2022 dawned, we three knew this was going to be The Year. We had to find him a new school to attend and we did. Thankfully, it’s across Houston…you know, so an hour of driving. But it’s only an hour. We drove home after meeting with his professors with the certainty that this was where he wanted to go to school.

But he didn’t want to commute across town every day. So that left the obvious alternative.

We knew Move Out Day was coming for months, but it was on some ambiguous date. Then suddenly the date crystalized and we prepared: movers hired, boxes packed, and last moments here at the house with him as a resident. One of the things he and I did was a nightly walk where we’d talk about music or the future or moving out or anything.

Move Out Day arrived and most of the day was filled with work: staying out of the movers’ way, unpacking boxes, setting up his stuff in his new place, a trip to the grocery store, and the first meal in his apartment.

The busyness of work was therapeutic, but it was not without emotions. Little by little, his stuff was unpacked and arranged. I broke down boxes and carried them to the car. But there there were little moments that shocked the tears right out of my eyes, like when I opened his box of clothes and his smell permeated my nose. He caught me then, actually, when I didn’t respond to something he said. I just shrugged, smiled, and kept hanging up his clothes.

Then my wife and I had to leave, and nothing prepares you for that moment…or the moment you come home to your house and see and feel his absence. The next day, Thursday, was the first day of the new phase of our lives: waking, working, eating, and living in our house without our son with us.

I know this new normal will become easier, that we’ll smile at a memory of his time here and not tear up, but these first days are all about the waves of emotions that are triggered at the slightest stray thought or vacant chair.

As parents, we intellectually know our children are bound for adulthood, for moving out and making their own mark on the world just like we did. But when that moment comes, it knocks your breath away. It’s incredible how emotions work, how you can simultaneously have your heart swell with pride that he is moving on but also have that very same heart contain an empty space because of his absence that’ll never truly be filled again.

So I wanted to share this moment with everyone because it is the one all-consuming thing of this week. Besides, since I’ve been writing these columns for thirteen years, I feel like we’ve come to know each other.

I’ve started reading about how parents deal with the empty nest. I know there are some readers who have already dealt with this transition and new phase of life so I’d love to learn about those experiences.