Holiday prep and discoveries…

I actually got 3,100 words written today before heading off to do other tasks. It’s another issue of The Secrets. Those end up amounting to around 75,000 words a year. I always enjoy doing them because I have to think about the process of writing and make sense of it. I often surprise myself with some of the ideas I use as examples. I keep thinking, “Oh, I have a place I can use that.”

After that I made some gifts for the holidays and consolidated them for packing. I dropped one off and got rave reviews on it, so I’m feeling good about that. The effort is worth it and the experience was fun.

The most fun of the day, however, came in searching for reading material to stuff onto the e-reader. There are a number of classic authors whose work I like, areas of interest I have, and apparently tons of resources available online for supplying out of print work, as well as free books from publishers (usually the first book in a series). I got to combine two favorite activities: shopping and getting things for free. Can’t beat that.

The truly cool thing is that I remembered to look for work by Jacques Futrelle. Futrelle created The Thinking Machine, Professor Augustus S. F. X Van Dusen in a series of mystery stories that ran from 1905 to 1912, when Futrelle died on the Titanic. I first read some of the mystery stories in a Scholastic edition that collected three or four of them, including the first, The Problem of Cell 13. Ever since my reading that book I’ve been intrigued with the idea of collecting the stories and in more recent years of using The Thinking Machine in a story, since all of Futrelle’s work is in public domain.

Today, while searching around, I discovered The Jacques Futrelle Home Page. It was set up by his grandchildren and contains the text of every Thinking Machine story (as nearly as I can tell). Actually, there is one novel that isn’t on that page, but is at Project Gutenberg, titled The Diamond Master.

I know that reading the stories now won’t bring me the same delight they did as a child. The style of writing that was popular then and what’s popular now are different. This doesn’t mean the stories won’t be good and interesting. They will, if for no other reason than they are letting me complete a picture of a character that intrigued me greatly. I’ve had this experience reading the Mr. Tutt stories by Arthur Train, and Boston Blackie stories and even the tales of Sherlock Holmes. I can read them for the mystery, but I also read them to see how they were written. I want to see how other authors did things, so I can learn to do them even better.

One thing I urge upon everyone who gets an ebook reader over the holidays: if you know the book is old, look around for a free edition. Save yourself some money and spend it on authors who are writing today. Old works are in Public Domain. This means they belong to you, not people who put them in collections by cutting and pasting text. While I don’t begrudge folks putting those collections together the right to make money, I really hate the idea of folks selling you something you already own. If you use the resources on the net, you can find plenty of very good stuff (and research material) for free; and free is never a bad thing.