1 | Cathy C. Hall Writes

I am a BIG fan of books, and naturally, bookstores and libraries as well. And so this delightful post over at Tara Lazar’s blog about Save the Bookstore 2012 caught my eye. And immediately, I knew two things.

Thing One, I needed to dash over to the Facebook page so that I could join with Kelly Sonnack and nearly 2,000 other folks in this noble cause. So I clicked on the Join button, and now I just need to decide which bookstore I shall take my business to on June 16th. I’d like to save an indie bookstore in my own little corner of the world, but I’m afraid that ship has sailed. (Or the indie bookstores have all closed their doors, to skip the metaphor.)

I live in a HUGE county in the metro Atlanta area, and though we have a ton of brick and mortar bookstores, they are all of the chain variety. Nothing wrong with that. Except chain bookstores tend to be too big to support your medium-to-small author events. I suppose a chain bookstore might throw a big booksigning party or two–but I’ve yet to see one.

And the chain bookstores are a tad impersonal. I go to the same insert-chain-bookstore-name-here about twice a month, and rarely see the same people working there. So there are no customer relationships beyond, “Have a nice day.”

But there are a couple swell indie bookstores in counties on either side of me–and I desperately want them to not just stay open, but to thrive! So I’m thinking a drive to one of them on Save the Bookstore Day, June 16th, might be the perfect way to celebrate.

So…hold on a sec. I had two things, didn’t I? Oh! And Thing Two, I needed to spread the word about Save the Bookstore Day.

And I just did.

So I grabbed the Beneficent Mr. Hall and said, “They have telescopes set up for Venus transiting the sun. We need to be ready to go in 20 minutes.”

Now, honestly, the man was sitting at his desk, peacefully doing whatever it is he does at his desk. He knew about the whole Venus transit deal, but up until that moment, I hadn’t exactly gotten around to discussing the adventure I’d planned. So I suspect he was a little surprised to learn that he was driving 30 minutes to a park on the other side of the county (we live in a rather large county–the entire state of Rhode Island could fit inside Gwinnett) at suppertime, to look through a telescope to see a black dot on the sun. But he’s always had a soft spot for space stuff, so it was all systems go.

Then Youngest Junior Hall called to say he was on the way home, and what were we having for supper?

“Oh,” I said. “Ummmm…we’re sort of leaving in about 12 minutes to watch Venus transit the sun.”

“I’ll catch it next time,” he said. Well, he’s a business major, so he has a good excuse. Then I explained that though it was possible he might catch it the next time, the odds were not exactly in his favor. And he said, “Okay, I’m coming, too.”

And he did. Then we sat around, waiting for the clouds to move, and they did. So we milled about, wearing cardboard sunglasses made especially for viewing the sun, and we peered through telescopes, and we saw Venus transit the sun. And it was awesome.

Which is a long way of saying that when a great opportunity comes around, something that might help you become a better writer, grab it. Maybe it’s an author coming to town to speak, or a conference that’s only 2 hours away, or a contest where you can win a critique. Grab it!

Because you never know when an opportunity will come ’round again.