Cleanup, etc.

Spent much of yesterday afternoon and evening embarking on phase 1 of the cleanup project: go through my boxes of old papers, dispose of as many of them as I can bear to part with.

I've been taking notes along the way (if a paper has one funny line on it, better to store that electronically and dispose of the paper), and at some point will write up my observations. For now, I'll just mention that I got rid of about a foot-high stack of paper. Unfortunately, I kept at least twice that much. I'll have to do a second pass at some point—if I ever get through the first pass.

Today, lunch with Arthur, followed by workshop (nobody had a story, so we just chatted), followed by dinner and bookstore-wandering with Susan. I found vol. 7 of the complete Sturgeon stories in paperback, which makes me totally mystified as to the fate of vol. 6 (titled Baby Is Three). As far as I can tell, the hardcover version came out in 1999, and no softcover version was ever released—Amazon and Powell's have no record of the softcover version, the publisher's website likewise has no record of that version, and I've never seen it. But the person behind the Cody's information desk said that their system showed it at a price of $19, which is definitely the softcover price, but that they didn't have any in stock. Baffling.

Although Cody's is a great bookstore—they had all sorts of cool small-press stuff in their sf section, for example, including books published by Golden Gryphon and Small Beer Press—the person I spoke with at the information desk was fairly clueless. Partly my fault for apparently not enunciating clearly enough or speaking loudly enough, but she didn't seem nearly as knowledgeable about anything as all of the other store workers I saw interacting with customers did. I eventually recalled the first rule of interacting with customer service people: as soon as it becomes clear that they can't or won't help you, or that they aren't going to be able to understand your question, end the conversation as quickly as possible. Sometimes it's appropriate to escalate, but in this case the answer almost certainly really was that they just didn't have the books I was looking for, so the fact that no real communication was going on was irrelevant.

Anyway. Came home, chatted with Kam for a bit, sat down to do some editing but ran out of time, as it's now time to head off to a late showing of Firefly.

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