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I was in an Meijer’s grocery story in Michigan, about a year ago, taking the time to explore the aisles and be “not in the van” for an hour or so. Kara was doing some solo browsing of her own. It was some private time for both of us—something we need, every now and then, when circumstances (such as rain or other inclement weather) have us cooped up for too long. 

I have this thing for grocery stores. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but they bring me great comfort. And especially stores like the one we were exploring, which was more of a big box store chain, I guess (albeit one I’d never heard of prior to that visit). In addition to food and groceries the place sold just about anything you can imagine—tools, camping supplies, electronics, and best of all, books. In fact, there were at least four aisles of books, including tables where titles were stacked and displayed.

At that point in our #vanlife journey, we hadn’t had much opportunity to visit bookstores, thanks to pandemic restrictions. And this was heartbreaking, because there was a time where I visited bookstores nearly every day of my life, browsing the titles, sitting with a cup of coffee to read or write, soaking in the inspiration and ambience, the sheer psychic energy that comes with being surrounded by the works of other authors. 

I missed it. Sorely. I’m so very grateful to have it back.

In addition to my weird passion for grocery stores, I’m particularly fond of the book sections. This may be due to the fact that I grew up in Wild Peach, Texas, where bookstores were nonexistent, and even public libraries were hard to come by.

It’s not that there weren’t any—Lake Jackson had a Hastings, and there was a wonderful used bookstore called The Book Rack that formed my mental template for used book stores. And in the Brazos Mall there was, of course, a B. Dalton and a Walden Books (God rest their souls). Brazoria, West Columbia, and Sweeny all had public libraries, of course—the closest to where I lived. But all of these options were only available to those who had motorized transport.

if I couldn’t ride my bike to it, then it didn’t exist. And besides, I didn’t have any money.

So the only real exposure I had to books, outside of a school setting, was when we went to the grocery story, or to a Walmart, or even better, when we went to a Sam’s Club. And in these places I would move as quietly and reverently as if I were in church, picking up paperbacks, reading their covers, opening them to read a few pages from the front. Heaven. 

I’d say that a full 90% of the books I owned from the ages of 0 to 16 came from grocery stores. After I got a driver’s license and access to a car, I also gained access to book stores and libraries that were out of bike range. My collection expanded to include things that weren’t necessarily on a bestseller’s list.

But I’ll confess... even then, I still bought a lot of my books from Walmart. Old habits die hard.

I’ve gotten off the path a little here. But the point is, when we were stretching our legs a little in that Meijer’s in Michigan, and when I stumbled onto their fairly impressive book section, it was like traveling back in time. It felt, just a little, like going home again.

The whole van life thing makes owning paperbacks a little impractical. There’s just no space for them. Of course, the RV life in general has this issue. Which is why so many people buy a book, or borrow one from the laundry at an RV park, read it, and then pass it on (such as putting it in the laundry at another RV park). With the rise of Little Neighborhood Libraries, this kind of buy/borrow-read-donate thing is going mainstream. People seem to love donating their books for someone else to enjoy.

Giving away books, though, has always been tough for me. I’m better at it now, but it was rough going for awhile there. Which, I guess, is one reason why reading ebooks has been such a great advance in my life. Not only does it save space while we travel, I can always have a book on hand to read, without having to wait until we can find a place that sells them, and I never have to worry over giving the books away. 

Ebooks have lots of great advantages. I love them.

Still... there really is something magical about holding a paperback in your hands, smelling the pages, seeing your progress as whatever slip of receipt or Post-It Note or candy wrapper you’re using as a bookmark travels from front cover to back cover. 

I love paperbacks, too.

All of these things—feelings and emotions, nostalgia, and the sheer excitement of being in a place that sold books, after most of a year of isolation—all of these things must surely have contributed to me picking up a copy of Camino Island, by John Grisham.

I’ve read Grisham’s work before. Classics, by now. The man is a heavy influence on me as a writer, with books like The Firm and The Pelican Brief and A Time to Kill. I’ve read a lot of his work over the years. But something about Camino Island felt different right from the start. 

For one thing, there’s that cover. It looks like a romance novel, if I’m being honest. Like something Nicholas Sparks would write.  And even though I’m not much of a beach fan, there is something inviting about the scene of a wooden walkway terminating at a line of sand, ocean, and sky. 

But the thing that hooked me was the description, which promised a tale of intrigue regarding a  set of stolen, rare manuscripts that end up in the hands of a bookstore owner who has his fingers on the pulse of publishing. 

The first part of the book is a heist story, which is always appealing. The rest is a hunt for the stolen manuscripts that feels like a spy novel. 

The characters are intriguing and appealing—to the point of having me fantasizing about life as a bookstore owner in the Florida Keys. Bruce Cable, said bookstore owner, isn’t even the primary protagonist of the first novel, and yet his demeanor and style and history make him someone you absolutely want to know. 

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And in the sequel, Camino Winds, Bruce is the primary protagonist, and we get to follow along and know him better, which feels like scratching an itch left by the first book. 

The fact that these books provide a kind of deep dive look into some of the nuances of the traditional publishing world, at least in terms of the authors and the booksellers, makes them all the more appealing to me. It’s a bit like seeing that world from the inside, alongside Grisham himself, in a way that typically feels inaccessible. 

Grisham expresses an unfavorable view of self published authors, in the first novel, but I don’t even mind. I still felt right at home, sitting at the dinner table with Bruce Cable and his eclectic collection of quirky, broken author friends, gossiping and backbiting, teasing each other mercilessly about books past and books not-yet-present.

The plots of these two books are filled with intrigue and danger of the kind one only finds when a great deal of money is involved. And Grisham has managed to weave tales that have so many side paths and turns, you get that “heist story” vibe throughout. Even the more mundane elements of the story feel exotic and enticing. 

I read the first book as a paperback, taking great pleasure in lounging in one of our camp chairs under the awning of our van, as we moved about the country. From lakeside in Holland, Michigan, to the foot of the Black Mountains in South Dakota and the Rockies in Colorado, to the long and mournful plains of Wyoming, and finally back in my home state of Texas (just in time for an historic bout of winter weather), I read and enjoyed Camino Island as a new old favorite. 

And upon finishing that first book, I immediately bought the second book, Camino Winds, this time as an ebook, and read it as the polar vortex swept through Texas, knocking out power and damn near freezing us all to death. 

If I never hear the phrase “unprecedented times” ever again, I will be astonishingly grateful.

Reading a book about the aftermath of a hurricane while bundling up next to a fireplace in a dark room, trying to keep my frozen appendages warm, is kind of head trip. But it did make the book all the more memorable. And again, another “old favorite.”

These books are wonderfully adventurous. And if you happen to be interested in the world of writing and publishing, they’re a playful treat you’re sure to love. 

I’ll be rereading both, in the future, and I look forward to more in the series. 

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YOU ARE READING SIDE NOTES

Side Notes is an extension of my Notes at the End, which are author’s notes that appear at the end of every one of my novels. If you like these posts, you’ll love the books. 

If you’d like to support me (and see more posts like this) you can do me two favors: First, peruse my catalog of books and find something you’d like to read; and second, join my mailing list to become part of an amazing community of readers and friends I interact with regularly. Thank you for your support!

I was jotting something about this in the Moleskine this morning, and I wanted to record it here:

• Our sense of the pace of time is a function of our emotions.

• Emotional discipline is the key to changing your personal reality.

• Control your emotions and you are free.

I’ve been reading Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, and this morning’s chapter (Law 35: Master the Art of Timing) gave me further insight into our perception of time, and the relationship between the pace of time, in our experience, and our emotional state. 

This is why we tend to be impatient when we are young, and tend to have more patience as we mature. Maturity is essentially another term for emotional discipline.

I’m finding that emotion turns out to be the key to practically everything. If we are emotionally disciplined, we are in control of our response to external events. Which means we control how we perceive reality and how we behave. Controlling emotion empowers us.

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Controlling emotion is a foundational principle across a variety of disciplines and philosophies and spiritual practices. Christ told us to control our emotions (“fear not,” “worry for nothing”). Stoicism tells us to be emotionally disciplined. Even practitioners of the Law of Attraction tell us that our emotions are the key to knowing what we are thinking, and that controlling our emotions (experiencing joy instead of fear or worry) allows us to manifest what we want. 

I think all of this is true. And it isn’t magic.

Emotional discipline does influence our perception of time. If we are emotionally disciplined, time will seem to slow down for us, which means we have more of a chance of discovering opportunities and resources we might have overlooked. Slowing time, even if it’s just in our perception of it, give us more space to think.

Emotional discipline makes us more diplomatic as well. Our reaction to others, and to the events that occur in our lives, is tempered by our emotional maturity. If we are emotionally disciplined, we control our response. We choose how we respond, rather than reacting by default. And default reaction is the fastest way to start making mistakes and building up regrets. 

Our emotions really do signal what we are thinking—whether our thoughts are serving us or working against us. If we are thinking negative thoughts, we’ll feel bad. If we are thinking positive thoughts, we’ll feel good. No matter where you stand on the topic of things like “law of attraction,” you have to realize that feeling bad means your chances of making bad decision will increase, and feeling good means you’ll increase the chances of good decisions. 

Think about diet and exercise. If you dread going to the gym, if you have a visceral reaction to eating leafy greens, if the idea of drinking water turns your stomach, you won’t do those things. 

On the other hand, if you can get yourself excited about going to the gym, listening to some energizing music or using the time to listen to audiobooks, you’ll improve your chances of going. If you can get yourself to enjoy the texture and taste of leafy greens, you’ll eat them more often. If you learn to appreciate good, pure, filtered water, maybe on a hot day or after a workout, you’ll come to crave it and drink more of it. 

All of these outcomes are a result of your emotional state. You can see that, right?

Once you realize the role that emotion plays in every aspect of your life, you start seeing that emotional discipline is self discipline. And self discipline is freedom.

Control your emotions and you will shape your life into what you want it to be.

 Let your emotions control you, and you get whatever you get.

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YOU ARE READING SIDE NOTES

Side Notes is an extension of my Notes at the End, which are author’s notes that appear at the end of every one of my novels. If you like these posts, you’ll love the books. 

If you’d like to support me (and see more posts like this) you can do me two favors: First, peruse my catalog of books and find something you’d like to read; and second, join my mailing list to become part of an amazing community of readers and friends I interact with regularly. Thank you for your support!

Lately I’ve upped my reading game.

I’ve always been a reader. Back in the early days, when I was doing homework with my dad, he once got on to me for sitting with the reading primer I’d brought home from school, silently scanning the pages.

“You need to read your school book, son,” he said.

“I’m reading to myself,” I replied,.

WIth a tolerant smile he said, “You have to read it out loud.”

I proceeded to read the text aloud without so much as a stumble, going through the book at a steady pace until I’d gotten to the end. Not one flaw. Not one pause to ask questions about vocabulary.

Dad never made me read aloud again. And I probably took all the wrong lessons from the whole encounter. Even then, I had a strong ego—something I’ve struggled with all my life, apparently.

Reading started becoming something more than schoolwork for me at around that time, I think. It’s hard to know—I didn’t exactly keep a journal yet, and nobody in my family kept up with things like “Kevin’s first novel reading.” Is it weird that I chastise myself for not keeping records at age four or whatever? Damn. your lack of foresight, young Kevin!

But I do know that at that age I was set to devour any book that came my way. Which was mostly short, fun little tomes like the books of Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume—two authors I was forever confusing for each other. But the books I now realize had the biggest impact on me, at that age, were those in Donald J. Sobol’s “Encyclopedia Brown” series.

I didn’t just devour these books—I savored them. I studied them. I returned to them over and over, re-reading before it was cool.

I’ve joked before, but I think there may be some kernel of truth to it—Dan Kotler is basically Encyclopedia Brown all grown up.

In fact, a few years ago when I was asked to contribute a middle-grade story for a promotion aimed at young readers, I wrote my own version of Encyclopedia Brown. Alex Kotler, boy detective, was the nephew of the famed Dan Kotler of my archaeological thrillers. He was smart, got into trouble a lot, and most importantly would solve any case for just a buck. Inflation has driven up the 25-cent rate from Encyclopedia’s days.

That story is more or less my homage to Sobol’s books. And it’s kind of a shame that I haven’t written any sequels to it. Maybe someday…

Later in my adolescence I would read a ton of interesting books that would become part of the inner pantheon of influences on my writing career. Some I can remember vividly as stories, but not as titles. Or I can vaguely remember the titles, but not close enough to go find the books. It’s frustrating.

For example, there’s a book that I think was titled “The Magician of 34th Street,” which frames the world as having recently rediscovered magic. The protagonist isn’t as proficient in magic as others, but in his childhood he was obsessed with street magicians. So he learned coin tricks, card tricks, and other illusions. I don’t recall what the plot of the book was, but this idea, and the character, stuck with me.

Another is a story of a young boy and a white dragon. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of this book, but the memory I have of it involves a scene: The dragon and the boy are in an immense, white desert, and the boy is being snow blinded. It was the first time I’d ever encountered the term or the concept, and again, it stuck with me.

If you happen to know about either of these books, I will be eternally grateful for leads. I’ve been hunting forever.

All through that era, I read things that inspired a sort of playfulness in me. They were books that encouraged me to mimic them, and I did. I wrote stories of my own, usually vaguely plagiarized tales where I replaced the names of the characters I loved with my own name, and the names of friends. But the stories themselves were original—sort of an early version of fan fiction, I’d guess. And lest you think that all my work was derivative at the time, I did also write original short stories of my own. I still have a lot of them, in fact. Maybe sometime soon I’ll dig them out, spruce them up, and see what has legs to release publicly. Could be fun.

But back to reading.

It was in ninth grade when reading became something more than just a passive, happy pastime, and instead morphed into something that would shape my life and destiny.

I was in the high school library with the rest of my ninth grade English class, milling about the aisles in search of a book to read during the testing period. That was our assignment—”Find something to read after you’ve finished your tests.” Standardized testing has always been an inefficient use of time, and so it’s been a time-honored tradition to give students something better to do than sleep with their faces planted on their desks.

Give them a book, to use as a pillow.

I was no book-sleeper, though. I loved reading. Except…

Reading on command was never my thing. I read books because I wanted to read books. But tell me to read a book, and I rebelled. That ego coming to the surface again.

So though I loved reading, I was being kind of a snot that day, in the library. I was goofing around rather than seriously scouring the shelves for something that might catch my attention. And it wasn’t going unnoticed.

The librarian knew her task. She was to usher each of us to something engaging, so that we would stay quiet and occupied between exams. So when she saw me goofing off, she cornered me, asking what I liked to read.

I had no idea how to describe what I liked to read. Genre wasn’t something I”d ever put much thought into. I liked stories about people, that was all I know. I liked stories with good characters, dealing with interesting scenarios, and coming out on top despite all odds.

I likely didn’t have that much articulation in mind, at the time. But that’s what I liked. It’s still what I like.

So, put on the spot, I uttered the only genre that I knew for sure was a genre. “I like science fiction.”

Her eyes lit up. She gestured, and I followed. And we arrived at a tall spinner rack crammed full of paperback novels.

She fished one out and handed it to me.

The first thing I remember noticing as the yellow spaceship.

I felt a sort of groan inside, but held the book, looking from it to her and back again.

Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card.

The exchange from there was mostly about how much I’d love the book, when I read it. And I nodded along, agreeing that it “looked interesting,” yellow spaceship and all. In reality, it looked like it was going to be boring, but by this time I was out of options. The period was ending, and we’d all be herded out. I needed something to read, and by this point in my life Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was not going to cut it. So I checked out the boring, yellow spaceship book, and went on my way.

The next day was testing.

I have always been a fast test taker. Mostly because standardized tests are a joke that show nothing about the student, and waste tons of tax payers dollars. They shift the attention from actually teaching to just doing the thing that keeps money in the districts coffers, and all students get left behind.

But I digress…

I took my tests fast, and finished early. So I found myself with a couple of hours to kill.

Since I wasn’t going to be allowed to sleep, I took out Boring Yellow Spaceship and started reading.

I’m not going to give you much of a blow-by-blow with this, but let’s just say that over the next two hours, I was down one book.

Boring Yellow Spaceship suddenly became Ender’s Game. And not only did I now have to rush to the library to find more books by Mr. Card, I’d also discovered two new things about myself:

1. I was a fan of Orson Scott Card, and particularly of his Ender books.

2. I wanted to be a novelist!

That first realizing had a more immediate impact than the second, at first. I spent the next several years reading anything and everything Card wrote. I read everything he’d produced since Ender’s Game, and bought every new book the instant it came out. And I went looking for everything else I could find by him, including old magazine articles from his days in the gaming industry. I even read stuff that looked way more boring than Boring Yellow Spaceship. If Card wrote the recipe on the back of a soup can, I bought that soup can and read it multiple times.

I was obsessed. I was a fan. I still am.

But the second realization was the game changer.

I wanted to write stories the way Card wrote stories. And I started telling everyone who would listen that this was the work of my life.

I can be a little hard on myself sometimes. I have this sort of eye-rolling thing in my head, when I talk about my dreams and my career. No matter how successful I am at this stuff, there’s still that part of me that thinks, “Yeah, right. Poser.” I imagine that writing is something I “only recently started doing,” despite literally doing it my entire adult life, and much of my adolescent years.

The truth, when I can admit it, is that I was writing and telling people that I was going to be a writer as far back as ninth grade. And before that, I wrote “books” and short stories, dictated into tape recorders, and spun tall tales verbally my whole, tiny life.

I always wanted to be a writer. I always was a writer.

Ender’s Game made me want to be an author. It made me want to be a novelist. It made me want to write stories in longford, and share them with a willing and eager audience.

Which, over time, was exactly what happened.

My writing journey has been a little different than that of Card and other authors I admired. But it got me to here, this point in my life. It got me to who and what and where I am. I’m grateful.

It all started with reading.

So lately, I’ve amped up my reading. I’d gotten to a point where I was only reading dry, non-fiction books, and only in the early morning, part of getting ready for my day. It had gotten to the point where I’d picked up and. started hundreds of books without finishing them—something Young Kevin would never have tolerated. It would have driven him mad… MAD I TELL YOU.

I’d let the reading slip. And, I have to say, I was suffering for it.

Reading is inspiration. It’s also training. That adage that “writers are readers,” as much as I always seemed to hate it, is true. I rebelled against it because, like I said, I never liked being told that I had to read. But ego and arrogance aside, it’s true and good advice. Writers really are readers. And when we don’t read, the writing suffers.

But reading, like all aspects of my life, has changed a bit, since those early, halcyon days of Cleary and Blume. Not just what I read, but how I read has changed.

Kara and I have been in the van for months now. We’ve traveled the country, and we’ve enjoyed it. Loved it. There’s a lot to be said for travel—it truly is, as Mark Twain said, “fatal to prejudice.” But when you’re traveling full time in a space that’s smaller than most American master closets, carrying a lot of books is kind of not gonna happen.

Thank God for modern technology.

Thanks to ebooks, and devices like my Kindle, and apps on my smartphone, I can carry a vast library of books with me at all times. In fact, though I do sometimes yearn for a good paperback, my Kindle has become the top way I read books. I carry it with me everywhere. And when I don’t, I read from my phone.

I’ve made “constant reading” a part of my daily life.

Because it’s fuel. Because it’s training. Because reading, it turns out, rewires our brains and gives us more neural pathways to work with. Reading literally makes us smarter, better humans.

When 2021 started, I had 174 ebooks on my Kindle that I had either started and not finished, or had not read at all. That’s out of the thousands of books I have read, but it’s still a number too big to bear. I have felt a weight from those unread books. They have burdened me.

So I decided I would read them. All of them. This year.

And I’m off to a roaring start. As of today, I’ve read nine of those books, and have three more nearly complete. I read most of those in the first nine days of the month, so I’ve had some slippage since then. When we got back on the road, there were things that took up more of my time and mental bandwidth, so my reading slowed. But it never stopped.

Right now I’m reading a non-fiction book for an hour in the morning, listening to a book of any genre I want while I make coffee and whenever I take walks, and I read fiction for an hour or more each evening, to help me wind down. On days like yesterday, when we’re relaxing and taking a break, I’ll read for several hours, sometimes finishing a book in one sitting. I’ve only done that a couple of times since January 1st, but they’re good days.

All of this reading is having an impact, too. I’m finding my thinking is clearer, more highly structured. I’ve found my focus is improving. I’m able to stay on something longer without looking for distractions.

My dreams are becoming stranger but more pronounced and exciting. They’re becoming more detailed and ordered.

I’m starting to see certain aspects of the world from a different perspective, rather than falling back into the same mental potholes I’ve always had. That’s a good consequence of reading—you are literally letting someone else’s thoughts take up space in your head. You are getting insight from another mind. We could all use that, right now. Identifying with the “other.”

Just like way back in ninth grade, when Ender’s Game and Orson Scott Card ignited something within me, something that fired me up and changed how I thought, and altered the direction of my life, amping up my reading is giving me new purpose. It’s giving me new resources. It’s giving me a new life.

I’m not going to goad you to go and start reading more. You should, but I won’t push you. It’s a personal choice.

All I can say is that reading, and really focusing on reading widely and broadly, has change and improved my life. And I think it could do the same for you. And I want it to.

And of course… you could always read my books to start.

I’m not above shameless plugs.