Day 1: A Complaint-Free Day?

Writing a blog entry that accurately reports what happened during the day could be construed by a strict referee as "complaining." So I'll be extremely careful to give you the full flavor of the day's events, but I won't be "complaining."

I'm invoking the free speech rule and the no-intent rule. In reporting to you, I have no intent to complain.

To be sure, it is the unintentional complaint that will get you every time. Part of the experiment is to monitor how often you inadvertently find yourself in complaint mode. Simply putting a stop to the "vertent" ones ought to be simpler. But if your instinct is to complain, it's hard to know when your resolve will falter.

I had expected to be on guard all day, measuring my responses to every stimulus in order to avoid complaining, criticizing, or gossiping. In fact, much time passed during this first day where I didn't even think about the experiment. To me, that constitutes a dangerous risk. From everything I've read, this is not supposed to be easy. After one week, Will Bowen, the man who started this experiment in the summer of 2006 (and a man who pastors a church) had been unable to get his personal best down to fewer than five complaints a day. At that point, he was averaging 12 complaints a day, and it took him until September of 2006 to successfully complete 21 straight days without complaining.

It seems that ignorance breeds confidence. If you knew how hard it would be to master a new skill, whether it be skiing, yodeling, or stopping the complaining in your life, you might not even try.

It seems that I'm "supposed" to catch myself complaining multiple times each day. Day 1, then, would be measured as an anomaly if I'm doing this thing right.

So, here's the report:

At five this morning, the next door neighbor with the oversize diesel truck fires it up and revs it outside our open window...no complaint.

At nine, while stepping across Silver Street, a car came racing through the intersection without even slowing down at the flashing red light, coming very close to putting an end to the experiment forever...no complaint, although the cars all around me registered their displeasure by leaning on their horns.

At ten, the manager of one of the city's political campaigns asked me "How's business?" I responded, "Slow." I then explained to him the experiment we are conducting and asked him if that sounded like a complaint. "Of course not," he said. "You were just answering a question."

By noon, I had been asked about how satisfied with the subscription fruit and vegetable, community supported agriculture, family farm program we are nearing the end of. I told my interrogator that the Web site was not the program's strong point, in that they often don't update the "menu" of produce each week until it's too late to plan a home menu, but then the questioner was explicity asking me the details of how it works. This questioner is a foodie who knew that this was Day 1, so I asked her to keep me honest by asking "Was that a complaint?" She assured me it wasn't.

By one, I discovered that one of my suppliers had failed to deliver some urgently needed books. For this supplier, this happens often enough that I didn't even consider voicing a complaint.

At 3:30, my newest employee's mom called to inform me that her daughter would be late for her first day at work...again, no complaint.

To be sure, I did have a few close calls where we had to go to the replay for a mandatory review. I scolded myself three times during the day for being fumble-fingered on the keyboard. One rather light-hearted "damn," one whispered "fudge," and one soft-breathed traditional Anglo-Saxon curse word that can be quite offensive when used in anger. But they weren't used in anger and they were directed at my own clumsiness.

And finally, near the end of the day, while sharing the events of the day with my spouse, I told her that conducting training can be harder than it looks, that it can be exhausting. Although she assured me that this did not qualify as a complaint, it doesn't matter, because she had left the building and never even heard me say those words.

I avoided complaining several times where I might normally have done so. Whenever there was a doubt, I asked someone within earshot whether what I said was a complaint or sounded like one and always received a response of "no."

Signing off at 9 p.m.

Tuesday: The Gimmick

Keep those comments coming. Help me make it through Day 2. And if you're in the store or see me on the street, feel free to check on my progress.

Book Focus: Parenting Teens

Tricia Goyer, a minister from Kalispell, Montana, is releasing a book this summer based on what she calls "Life Plotting." It's called My Life, Unscripted, and it may serve you well if you're a parent of a pre-adolescent or teen girl.


From personal experience, Goyer knows the perils of rushing through life without a "script" to work from, and in this book she tries to help parents guide their daughters by "teaching them to have a plan of attack before temptation or hardship come."


Goyer would LOVE to have you write a sample script from your teen years and post it along with information about this book! It could be where you make a good choice ... or a not so good one. Then share brief how God's Word helps you as you script YOUR life!


Feel free to tell your stories, whether you worked from a script or merely "improv-ed" those dramatic, emotional teen years, and we'll pass them on to the author, who will be doing a national "blog tour" this summer.

The Blooker Prize: Any Local Contenders?

LONDON - A former U.S. machine gunner’s irreverent memoir about his year fighting in Iraq has won the second annual prize for the best book based on a blog.

“My War: Killing Time in Iraq,” by Colby Buzzell was to receive the $10,000 Blooker prize on Monday, beating out 110 entries from 15 countries...more

Johnson Agonistes

Every author goes through a unique process in bringing his or her book to fruition. Keeping a novel on track is perhaps the most difficult. Plot points may come easily, but the writing lags. An author may be a tremendous writer, but a horrible juggler of the plot points that constitute a narrative. For most, it is a solitary undertaking and, lacking the resources to fact check, proof, and edit can make writing a novel the hardest of professions.

This weekend we are honored to host the book launch for a debut novel and its author, Robin L. Johnson. His book, James Christens, is set in Louisville, but I hope that it's not set in any kind of Louisville you are familiar with.

I won't give away a lot of the story, but here's a brief description. The metro police are stymied by a baffling series of unsolved killings. After years of investigation, they still have not been able to stop the terror of a serial murderer. It's not for a lack of clues - in fact, each crime scene is overloaded with evidence of a truly twisted mind. And yet, still no arrests.

Famed criminologist Robert Brampton is called in. The supremely confident Brampton approaches each case the same way - with assurance that his analytical techniques will unearth the killer. And the local task force finds itself now being directed by a dispassionate sleuth whose "rules" for solving a crime don't always rub the locals the right way.

I have to tell you, the killings in this novel rival those of Thomas Harris's character, Hannibal Lecter. But unlike in Red Dragon or Silence of the Lambs, this book takes us much more deeply into the backstory of the killer. I'll let you be the judge as to whether Johnson intends you to empathize with the killer, but then I doubt you'll be anything but terrified by everything you read. It's a good read.

We first encountered Robin in 2005. The story of how he reached this point is pretty interesting. Over the course of several months, Robin released chapters of James Christens by blogging it. That's right. Many of our early readers were privileged to read parts of this book more than two years ago.

Johnson used the interactive nature of the Internet to refine his storytelling and engage the reader in a way few authors are able to. One of the engaging methods he used was to run an online contest for readers who could solve plot-driven puzzles as each "chapter" was released. He buried a capsule of prizes somewhere in this very region, a capsule that could only be found by solving the puzzles. Because readers logged in from all 24 time zones, Robin ran a virtual contest for people around the world who couldn't possibly come to Inditucky to search.

The much-missed Bill Kenney, the Georgetown blogger and polymath who passed away last year, was the grand prize winner, but that's the least part of the story. Bill's encouragement and feedback were, as Robin tells it, an important part of Robin's progression from story idea to finished book.

Please consider joining us on Saturday, March 31, at 4 p.m. Robin will sign and discuss his book during a book launch party at Destinations Booksellers.

Sunday Notebook

It’s not the world’s biggest surprise, but we’ve had exactly zero responses to last Sunday’s request for suggestions for the top five American novels. You may recall we’ve been asked to participate in an American Booksellers Association survey for an upcoming PBS documentary on the subject. We’d love to have your thoughts. Go here for the questions. Sorry, though, we have no responses to share with you this week as we had promised.

Sundays we try to talk about something other than specific books. BookExpo America is coming up May 30 through June 4. If any of you would be interested in representing us at this annual convention of the publishing and bookselling world, please contact us right away. We can credential you and give you some rudimentary prep, but we can’t pay your way. By the way, historian/author and two-time National Book Award-winner David McCullough will be the keynote speaker on Wednesday, May 30 in advance of a series of walking tours by Brooklyn authors.

The U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter books will be doing a promotion with independent booksellers across the country called “Independent Muggles for Harry Potter.” Beginning on April 17, Scholastic will release the first of seven questions for debate. The final question comes July 7, with the book releasing two weeks later at midnight on July 21. There’s still time to reserve your first-day copy. Call us. Our price is $19.01 ($34.99 list), and we have a limited number of the deluxe ($65) editions on a first-come, first-served basis. Still no word on the audio release. First printing of the book? Just 12 million copies.

Are you a blogger yourself? If you aren’t, you could be. We’re planning a workshop on blogging for this spring. Registration is limited to ten for this first workshop. We’re working with at least two bloggers to turn their online ouvre into a perfect-bound book, in association with Flood Crest Press. It’s a great way to write fiction or nonfiction. Call or e-mail the store if you’d be interested in the workshop.

A.H. – As we work on your “guru” book, I think we should blog chapters before we go to press. Then we’ll submit the book as an entry in the Blooker Prize competition. (A “blook” is a book that results from a successful blog.)

Hey, you’re online already. Take a minute to discover my friend Ruthanne Wolfe’s niece as she goes on casting calls in Hollywood this season. Go to www.imdb.com and type in “Traci Ann Wolfe” into the search window. Learn more about this stunning actress and follow her career. Ruthanne and husband John Gonder are great friends of the store and I thank her for alerting us to her relative’s success.

Retail sales at bookstores were down in January for the seventh straight month. Compared to January of 2006, this year’s sales were down about 1 percent.

Colleague Arlene Lynes of Woodstock, Ill., reports that her bookshop was cited as one of the notable features that enabled that city to be named one of the Dozen Distinctive Destinations of 2007 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Lynes told Bookselling This Week that she regards the town council’s recent decision to allocate $64,000 to promote tourism in the downtown business area as a reason to feel tremendous optimism for the future of Woodstock’s local businesses. Woodstock is 45 miles from Chicago. Arlene’s store, Read Between the Lynes, has been in business for 20 months, slightly fewer than our own.

Book Sense is a joint marketing program for the independent bookstores in the American Booksellers Association. In addition to the Book Sense Bestseller List, which now appears in The Tribune and The Evening News, we publish a series of specific genre bestseller lists. You can take a look at these here. We are a reporting store, of course, and typically we carry almost all of those books.

Previously on the marquee!
Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel ISBN 9780743284974
Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle In American Politics by Earl Black and Merle Black ISBN 9780743262064
Dog Years: A Memoir by Mark Doty ISBN 9780061171000
The Sacred Bones by Michael Byrnes ISBN 9780061146077
God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now by John Dominic Crossan ISBN 9780060843236
The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts by Shinta Cho ISBN 9780916291525