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It doesn’t have to be The Big Deal from a NYC publisher.

It doesn’t have to be a mantle of awards or Kindle sales.

But the validation you aim for has to work for you — and it has to keep you working at 5 a.m. when you’re wondering why the hell you set the alarm clock and then you remember that you wanted to get up and have a fresh look at that motel room scene because you were so tired last night but it’s the only time the house is quiet and the only time you can write and so what if you went through seven cups of coffee yesterday because it’s not like seven cups of coffee has ever killed anyone but damn it to all hell you’re really going to have to get up if you want to rework that scene because it’s almost there and it’s so close and you think you know what it needs because while you slept your brain told you That Thing that you needed but now you’re starting to forget what it is so you’ll get up and you’ll run downstairs and you’ll start typing because that’s what you do after all because it doesn’t matter if you get an email from a publisher or a call from your agent because what you do is you get up at frackin five damn o’clock in the morning because this isn’t about anyone else it’s about you and your story and then you start writing and it flows and the pieces fall together and hot damn now we’re going to town and how fantastic and glorious is it when all the pieces start falling together and everything starts to fit and make sense because that is why we do this. Because that is your validation. That is all you need.

– Do Some Damage: Validation: Forbidding Mourning

So apparently, penmonkey Chuck Wendig just passed five thousand followers over there on the Twitters, and to mark the occasion, he’s holding a contest. Entering is simple — you just have to write a story in three sentences.

I have written a piece for one of his Flash Fiction challenges before, and there have been a couple more since that I’ve meant to write something for, but just couldn’t find the time to scratch out a measly thousand words.

But three sentences? Yeah, I think I can take time out of my busy schedule to sit down and knock three sentences together.

Here’s my entry, in its entirety:

It took me weeks of searching, but I finally found the girl from the “MISSING” posters, the girl with the sky blue eyes and the blond hair as soft as sunlight, and rescued her from her kidnappers. “My father has money,” she tells me, “he’d make you rich if you’ll just take me home,” but I just know someday, she’ll learn to like it here. I read the posters very carefully, and they just said she was missing — they never said I had to give her back.

You should go check out other people’s entries, too, at his post: The Big Five Triple-Oh. People are doing some pretty clever stuff.

First they came for the record stores,
and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t sing and make albums.

Then they came for the bookstores
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

– (with all apologies to Martin Niemöller)

I live in a world without video stores. I was thinking about that this morning.

I mean, it’s not literally true — I do see the occasional Hollywood Video or Blockbuster still hanging on in out-of-the way strip malls like lonely ghosts, usually with forlorn “Clearance Sale” signs in their windows. I usually kind of just — look away, the way you might if you saw someone you used to know holding a cardboard sign asking for spare change.

But it is effectively true. The video stores are gone. They’re definitely gone from my social landscape, at least. I used to go to video stores with my friends, half-a-dozen of us or more at a time, browsing the shelves and laughing and bringing each other the things we found — “Oh my God, have you seen this? We have to get this.” We’d make serendipitous finds, movies we never would have heard of if we hadn’t just randomly tripped across them — like the night we watched “Revengers Tragedy,” which had somehow been misfiled in the horror section. We’d talk to strangers sometimes about movies they’d seen and loved, trade recommendations.

We still watch movies, me and my friends. We watch DVDs from Netflix, or watch something they have on Instant Streaming. Other nights, as a desperate measure of last resort, we might pick one of the handful of recent releases available in a Redbox machine.

And you know what? It’s just not as much fun.

Now, we do, thank heavens, still have what is arguably the world’s best video store right here in Seattle, Scarecrow Video, with its nearly 100,000 films. I do still go there with my friends, although not as often as I might like. Most movie nights, convenience wins out.

I miss video stores. I do worry, sometimes, that someday I’m going to miss bookstores the same way.

A lot of people will try to tell you that the publishing industry can’t take lessons from the movie industry, or the music industry, because people don’t consume books the same way they consume songs and films. To them I would say — do not fucking kid yourselves. The point, here, is that all of those industries have been turned upside-down and inside-out by the immediate gratification factor of electronic delivery. The exact same thing is happening to publishing. The Kindle is as disruptive as the iPod was, Amazon just as disruptive as Netflix. We might not be able to employ exactly the same strategies that those industries have to try to survive, but now that we’ve seen their houses get blown down, we’d damn well better strap ourselves down and prepare for the storm. Because everything that’s happened so far is just the first few raindrops from the downpour that’s coming.

I do believe that the independent, passionate bookstores will still survive. For example, I feel sure that Powell’s Books down in Portland will survive, one way or another, just as independent video stores like Scarecrow are surviving. Powell’s is somewhere else I go to with my friends sometimes, because we feel like it’s worth the three-hour drive. In a way, I like this world better — a world where the art we love is being sold to us by the people who love it, too, not by big faceless corporate chains who look at all these books and songs and movies as just items on a balance sheet.

The world is my bookstore now. When I’m out with friends, and someone recommends a book to me, I can pull out my phone, order it, and have it automatically and wirelessly sent to my Kindle for me to start reading when I get home. I love that, it’s like magic — accio biblos! — and I wouldn’t give it up.

But I hope the time never comes when I’m fondly and sadly remembering the days when I used to wander around in real bookstores with my friends, saying, “Oh my God, have you read this? You have to get this.”

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