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Month: February 2020

A Literary Retreat

Published by Crawford on February 19, 2020
Sylvia Beach Hotel, Newport, Oregon

This past weekend, my lovely wife NancyAnne and I got to spend time at one of our favorite places anywhere: the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon. We went here on our honeymoon, and have returned on or about every Valentine’s Day ever since.

The hotel is named after Sylvia Beach, who owned and operated the famous Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris between the World Wars. Ms. Beach was a literary titan, well-regarded in Left Bank literary circles. She published James Joyce’s Ulysses and Ernest Hemingway’s Three Stories and Ten Poems.

The hotel itself is a four-story wood frame building situated on a cliff overlooking the beach. It dates back to 1907, where it is one of the last remaining examples of the tourist building boom in Newport. It is located in the hip-n-funky Nye Beach neighborhood, home of many cool shops, restaurants and bookstores.

As a literary-themed hotel, all of the rooms are named and decorated after famous authors: we’ve stayed in the Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Ernest Hemingway and Colette rooms. There are also more whimsical rooms suitable for kids and families, including the Dr. Seuss, J.K. Rowling and Jules Verne rooms.

The J.K. Rowling room

This year, we lucked out and managed to book three nights in our favorite room: the Mark Twain. This is definitely our favorite room for a variety of reasons: big, uber-comfortable bed, superlative ocean view, a fireplace and a claw-foot tub with a writing shelf to allow for cranking out a few pages while bathing.

The Mark Twain room

Also, there’s a wonderful library on the top floor overlooking the beach that runs the length of the building. The view is fantastic, it’s scattered about with comfy chairs, and every night the hotel provides a cauldron of mulled wine. Also, there’s a great restaurant called Tables of Contents (nyuk). Breakfast for all guests, and the evenings they serve wonderful four-course meals. It’s group seating, so you will in all likelihood end up having to make engage in the Lost Art of Conversation with a stranger. (Unless you end up to a non-responsive software engineer from Hillsboro, like I did.)

So what did we do? We read. A lot. The hotel i conducive to that: no TV, no phones, no WiFi. No problem. Besides, no one goes to the Oregon coast in February with reasonable expectations of spending a lot of time outdoors. Saturday it rained all day, but we were more than content to stay in the room and read, and feed wood into the fireplace. It was wonderful to curl up by the fire and read while listening to the spack-spack of the winter rain on the windowpane.

Sunday, it cleared up a bit, and we wandered around the Nye Beach neighborhood, checking out new places and old favorites. We also went down to the Bayfront area, which is a really interesting combination of working fishing port and seaside tourist area. We came back to a stunning sunset:

Sunset from the Sylvia Beach Hotel

As always, this was an excellent getaway, and we are thankful to the people at the SBH for being so gracious and running such an excellent literary hotel.

Junior High Hell

Published by Crawford on February 13, 2020

Remember junior high? Didn’t it suck? I mean really, really suck? Sure it did.

A few months ago I had a dream wherein I woke up back in eight grade , but with all of my adult experiences and memories. I spent the bulk of the dream figuring our what how the hell I was going to survive.

It was terrifying.

Normally, I don’t remember dreams at all. The few that stick with me past the alarm clock rarely make it past breakfast. But this dream – whoa! – it sizzled in my consciousness for several days. Finally, just to extirpate the sumbitch, I started writing it down. It took a while to find its legs, and by the time it was all through, it had clocked in at something like 22,000 words. That is a real bastard of a word count, as it is much too long to be a short story, but not nearly enough to qualify as a novel. Instead, it’s in the dreaded literary limbo of “novella.” Ugh.

At first, I thought that if I shaved it down to about 10K words, I’d at least have a shot at shopping around as a short story. Then I thought, fuck it. I didn’t want to shop it around as anything, to be truthful. Trying to get anything in print involves having to deal with rejection emails from the likes of Southeast Montana State Literary Review and Anime Blog. To heck with that; if nobody’s gonna read it, then they can not read it on this blog, and I am thus saved the time sucking up to land-grant literati.

Still, at it’s current length it’s a bit much to read in one go, so I thought I’d chop it up into three short-story-sized pieces and post them one at a time. That way, I could post some content while still engaging in the requisite turd-polishing for the rest of the story.

No doubt I will act the wiseacre later on as I post the other pieces of the story, called “Reset.” Without further bloviation, here’s the first part:

Reset – Part 1 of 3

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Cover of Jackrabbit, new John Dillinger novel
Buy on Amazon

Are You Local?

Published by Crawford on February 1, 2020
Jackrabbit on the shelf at Belmont Books

It’s the small victories that sometimes keep you going. After a long and lackluster effort to get Jackrabbit in a brick and mortar store – I finally did! At first, I had been put off with the lack of success I’d had at local bigshot indie bookstores like Powell’s and Annie Blooms…uh, Arnie Bang’s, I finally started looking at other places closer to home.

So I bopped on into my most local of bookstores, Belmont Books. Joe, the proprietor, was extremely friendly and bought a copy on the spot. I groused about some of the difficulties I’d had and he scoffed that he could undercut Amazon AND Powell’s. That’s the attitude!

Better yet, he paid 60% up front, in cash – which lasted me all of four blocks, where I spent it in the Plaid Pantry on lottery tickets and junk food. So kudos to Joe and Belmont Books for walking the walk when it comes to supporting local authors. If you’re in Portland, pay ’em a visit at 3415 SE Belmont St., PDX.

Cover of Jackrabbit, new John Dillinger novel