Reinstate the First Draft
by James Roland
B. Daltons are the worst kind of bookstore, growing in the damp and dim corners of shopping malls, wedged between an Orange Julius and that $10.00 For Everything shop that disappears and reappears so often I think it’s being run by gypsies.
The entrance to a B. Dalton is filled with an assault of book racks that trip you up like barbed-wire beach debris on D-Day. First there is the rack of movie novelizations and tie-in companion guides. This is followed by low tables covered with the latest chick-lit and a spattering of machine gun fire. The occasional tracer reveals random Oprah club choices that are left stranded when the 13-year-old girl who was reading them left for her fourth ear-piercing appointment at Claire’s. Then comes the latest in modern non-fiction (poorly disguised self-help manuals) and the first barrage of mortars.
I fought bravely the last time I met a B. Dalton in battle; I barely survived by finding a misplaced Joss Whedon comic and drinking ditch water for three days until I could crawl out of the rice paddy under cover of night.
I think often of those books (or ‘Charlie’ as we sometimes call them on ‘the front’). And I think of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of writers out there who should be getting published instead of Dan Brown and Clive Cussler. At our house alone, when we host a poetry and prose reading every month, we’ve had a number of monstrously talented writers read for the first time with shaky voices, pushing their glasses up each time they slid down with sweat. Some are polished, others are still in the rough, but all of them have a heart, an inherent talent for following a story, and each one of them tries harder than any of the airport paperback variety.
Except for Stephen King; to him we bow.
I’m thinking about launching an assault. None of this picketing or boycotting garbage . . . let’s gather all the unloved and unpublished and launch an aerial, land, and water assault against B. Daltons. Sniper teams can slink through the ceiling for optimum firing positions while we drive a tank right through the food court and send frogmen in via the fountain (any pillaging of local clearance racks will be prosecuted by the government).
After the carnage we’ll rendezvous at Weinerschnitzel for a bite to eat and await deployment to Borders.
