Caught Beside the Mudslide

In case you have missed our social media posts, a mudslide fell onto part of the Town and Country shopping center where Booknotes is located.  The major impact occurred sometime around 1:00 am Thursday, February 21, although some rocks had fallen and were in the process of being cleared earlier in the night.  It crashed into the back of the section where CosmoProf is located.  Mud seeped into and through the store, oozing out of their doors.  The impact knocked down part of the access way to the upstairs apartments, making access to them almost impossible.  Mud surged into the heat pumps and duct work of some units.  The electricity was cut off to many units to make sure there were no secondary problems.  The mud blocked the drainage ditch behind the center, forcing the need for pumps and hoses to be brought in to help drain the ditch.  Unfortunately, the C + R Office Supply storeroom was the best location for these hoses.  Their doors have had to be kept open as the hoses sucked the excess water from behind the center, splashing it into the parking lot.  We were allowed to turn the electricity back on around 1:30 pm that Thursday.  We had been closed all of that day.  We are open, but with some distractions.  In case something else happens, we had rearranged some of our products to offer some protection.  Some of the books and furniture have also be moved to aid in this.  The parking lot was covered with muddy water from both CosmoProf and the storeroom for the time being as the clean up continues.  The parking is basically back to normal, but it will be tougher to get to it at times with the support vehicles for the clean up crews taking up spots.   We would like to thank all of our customers and friends for your support in this troubled time.

Since I first wrote this, the store is mostly back to normal.  A few small details remain to be done, but the store seems to be alright.  The carpeting still needs to be cleaned a little better, as there has been a lot of dried mud tracked in.  Our heat pump is on the roof and wasn't damaged during slide.  The odds of another slide have decreased, but it still is possible.  There had been minor events over the years, but nothing of this magnitude.  The drainage ditch is mostly clear.  Hopefully, the frogs weren't too severely hurt by this, although many might have been forcibly relocated with all the mud.  They had already started to wake up in the days leading up to the slide, but who knows how the slide and the return to cooler temperatures will affect them.  Water from the ditch didn't enter the store this time around, although it had come close in the past.  I could still use your help in getting the store in better shape.  So, think of Booknotes in my troubled times.

Feeling So Wrong, Doing the Write Thing

First, my apologies for mangling the OneRepublic lyric.  I really do like that song, but that is not what this post is about.  As I have mentioned before, I am currently taking some online graduate school classes.  One of my classes this semester is an advanced fiction writing workshop.  Part of the class is to upload a new work of fiction and have the others in. the class help evaluate it, both in terms of plot/story and in basic grammar.  Last week, I went over the first batch of stories, and they were overall fairly depressing.  Four of the five stories had death as a major theme.  In some strange coincidence, I read the stories in an order of increasing depressing traits.  The first story dealt with a single father losing his job.  They got more morbid after that.  A woman dealing with the death of her dog form her teenage years.  A woman thinking about her missing abusive former boyfriend.  An officer informing families about their deceased members in the military.  Finally, the story that ends with a woman shot by her ex, in a bungled murder-suicide attempt.  She survived, but her didn't.  Oh, and it is told from the point of view of the woman's pet dog.  I felt down the entire week after reading these stories.  Fortunately, I read one per day, to space them out and make sure I had time for other things. I am not sure I could have handled reading all of them in one day, as well as critiquing them.  Yesterday, I started the second batch of stories.  I have barely given them the once-over, but I noticed that one might have to deal with the aftermath of a school shooting.  Okay, this will be happy.  My story will be in the final batch.  On the plus side, that means I will only have to go over three stories instead of five that week.  It also means I will have to wait another week before my relatively less dramatic story gets a going over.  By comparison, it isn't that bad.  Although I haven't mentioned it yet, it is the planned first chapter of a longer work.  It is different from the one I am currently writing in my literary blog.  In this story, a teenage boy has just found out that he will be spending a few weeks with his mother at her parents' house to help out the boy's grandmother recover from a fall.  He doesn't want to go, as it will spoil the plans he and his mother had already laid out for him.  He is blaming his father, although he really isn't the one causing the problem.  In the rest of the book, the boy will find out about many things that he has been wrong about, not the least is himself. I might post that chapter sometime, possibly after its first workshop.  I just hope I get to read some more uplifting works. While fiction needs some sort of conflict to work, it doesn't have to be so morbid.

You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover, Not

So, after a bad week, I have finally gotten to the final week of this puzzle series.  As mentioned previously, the theme for this week is books.  Unlike last year's puzzle (click here to check it out), this time around I will be focusing on some of last year's  biggest titles.  Furthermore, I have increased the total number of clues, partially due to the fact that I am a book store owner (at least for the next few weeks).  There's also the shear amount of possible title to go through.  During the average week, only three to five movies are opened in wider release, eight to ten new series debut across all platforms, and twenty to twenty-five major artists have new albums, with an average of eight to twelve singles debuting on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.  In contrast, over forty new hardcover books are published each week, fiction and nonfiction.  Add in children's titles, and the numbers increase.  If you include original paperback books, then the totals skyrocket.  New books clearly outpace other media.  Therefore, more clues.  For example, if the clue was Pre-teen Educational Center:  Created for the Performance of Heavy Metal Music, your answer would be Middle School:  Born to Rock, the latest children's title by James Patterson with Chris Tibbets (due out Monday, February 18).  See how many you can identify.  It's a mix of fiction and non-fiction,with a few children's books.  (Hint:  I've read five of them, and reviewed them on the Booknotes Facebook page.). Answers appear at the bottom of the page.

1. Devoid of Light yet from the Absence of Life
2. Ferrous Auric Metal
3. Informed about through Tutoring
4. Non-daylight Passings
5. Unintentional Victorious Ones
6. Offspring Comprised from Plasmic Fluids/Osseous Materials
7. Bramble Fruit Pastry Originally from Vienna Homicide
8. Fractured Reflective Glass Surface
9. Subterranean Location for Petrified Remains
10. Said Person's Ocular Organs Are Trained towards That One
11. Contorted Predator's Mark
12. One Particular Misaligned Ascender Appliance
13. One Greater Loyalty towards Some Value
14. Difficult Problems of Brother of Artemis:  Puzzling Diverting Pathways Aflame
15. Daylight Period of Minor Changes
16. One Not of the Rest of Us
17. Disruption of Fluid Motility
18. Small Home near Large Expanse of Salt Water
19. That Adult Female as Opposed to This One
20. Group Dedicated to Nefarious Purposes, Specifically Calcified Human Remains
21. Herpetological Similarity of the Legless Variety
22. Tenebrous Manifestations the Perambulate
23. Utter Disgust
24. Unlit Oceanic Movements Increasing
25. Chronological Dimension's Newly Installed Being
26. Plasma Dedicated Rite
27. Gloomy Religiously Special Twilight Period
28. Journal Entries from One Young Weakling: Period of Snow Evaporation or Emotional Release
29. Each Particular Inhalation
30. Atlas Entry for Sunlit Hours
31. Period of Defining Moments
32. Left Exposed to the Elements
33. Process of Changing to Present Condition
34. Energetic Expression of Heat with Liquid Associated with Life
35. Obverse Side of a Coin Equates to That Person's Victory
36. Controller for That Male's Future
37. Incredibly Vast Pathway with Redemptive Quality as Destination
38. Worldwide in Scope

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ANSWERS

1. Dark in Death by J. D. Robb
2. Iron Gold by Pierce Brown
3. Educated by Tara Westover
4. Night Moves by Jonathan Kellerman
5. Accidental Heroes by Danielle Steel
6. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
7. Raspberry Danish Murder by Joanne Fluke
8. Shattered Mirror by Iris Johansen
9. Cave of Bones by Anne Hillerman
10. I've Got My Eyes on You by Mary Higgins Clark
11. Twisted Prey by John Sanford
12. The Crooked Staircase by Dean Koontz
13. A Higher Loyalty by James Commey
14. The Trials of Apollo:  The Burning Maze by Rick Riordan
15. Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk
16. The Outsider by Stephen King
17. Turbulence by Stuart Woods
18. Cottage by the Sea by Debbie Macomber
19. The Other Woman by Daniel Silva
20. A Conspiracy of Bones by Kathy Reichs
21. Serpentine by Laurel K. Hamilton
22. Walking Shadows by Faye Kellerman
23. Contempt by Ken Starr
24. Dark Tide Rising by Anne Perry
25. Time's Convert by Deborah Harkness
26. Blood Communion by Anne Rice
27. Dark Sacred Night by Micheal Connelly
28. Diary of a Wimpy Kid:  The Meltdown by Jeff Kinney
29. Every Breathe by Nicholas Sparks
30. A Map of Days by Ransom Riggs
31. The Reckoning by John Grisham
32. Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
33. Becoming by Michelle Obama
34. Fire and Blood by George R. R. Martin
35. Heads You Win by Jeffrey Archer
36. Master of His Fate by Barbara Taylor Bradford
37. Long Road to Mercy by David Baldacci
38. Pandemic by Robin Cook

In and Out of Kilter

For those expecting the last in the series of puzzles I have been posting, I'm sorry to say that you are out of luck.  I just ran out of time to come up with the puzzle this week, and still have time to post it.  The research would have taken about an hour, and I just didn't have that sort of time this week.  Actually, I forgot about having to do the research until I ran out of time.  In fact, the last week or so, my entire life has been about 10% off.  That might not seem like much, but the effects are compounded with each little action going of the rails.  I am about a day or two behind on my social media postings, even more so for some for Booknotes.  I am having a difficult time catching up on my school work.  I thought things would be easier only taking two classes this semester, especially since I wouldn't be reading a novel a week, or so.  While there is less reading, there is a lot more writing.  I will just barely finish my first fiction submission sometime tonight, and it will probably be a page or two shorter than I expected.  I find myself having to rework some of my answers for my syntax class.  I just don't have the right equipment to create the necessary diagrams all the time.   My gaming has been off too.  I am usually a 65-70% player in Golf Clash.  This past week, I am under 50%.  Many of my moves are just off enough so that I lose, or I make the wrong decisions against other players, some of them worse than me.  I can't even tell how behind I am on some of my recreational activities.  Although since I don't go out, there really isn't much of an excuse for that.  As an aside, why doesn't anyone ask me to go out with them, you know, just to do something?  I feel clumsier than normal.  I had to cut back on the weight, again, on my exercises.  It's getting hard to progress in anything.  I seem to be backsliding even more than usual.  It isn't just I had a birthday in the past week.  One doesn't expect that much of a falloff that quickly, just after a few days.  I don't know what is happening, but I hope to get out of soon, because this downfall is starting to drive me crazy!  
I just looked over my post, and I noticed that I had unintentionally used every letter of the alphabet.  Weird.