The Little Old Weird Shop Down The Alley, There

July 3

So for quite some time I’ve been wanting to add my own contribution to the Mysterious Little Shop subgenre. You know what I mean-- a shop that shows up down a dark alley, or in a previously empty lot. The door’s always open, and the stuff is just the best... though when you try to return it, the shop is almost always gone. The proprietor is always strange, in some way, and he acts as if he knows a lot more than you do, because he does.

The idea’s ubiquitous-- in my studies (heh) it’s cropped up practically as often as the Campbellian elements of the Hero’s mythic journey. Terry Pratchett’s had a couple books involving the shop (I like the one where it’s a musical instrument shop-- that’s inspired), even going so far as to postulate the origins of such places; Jim Blaylock’s written about it; Harlan Ellison had a nice turn on the idea once; Jim Morrow had a particularly twisted version of the shop in This Is The Way The World Ends; even Bruce Sterling did a story about it. And, hell, it was featured in every third episode of the Twilight Zone, seems like. I like the idea, the supernatural reduced to commerce, and I’m fascinated by lists of interesting objects, with all their resonances and associations. And yet...

I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel-- let’s face it, the idea’s been done, in it’s obvious permutations and many of it’s more off-kilter variations. Still, it’s something that stuck in my mind for a while... Last year, after Clarion, I labored for weeks on a story that wound up at over 15,000 words-- unfinished, really cool, and totally without direction. The thing was floundering, and I finally gave up on it. The idea for that story was based on my own personal mistrust of the notion that things can provide happiness, that stuff can make your life richer. It’s a concept that’s thrived for a long time in America, and the backlash has been present for a while, too-- "The things you own own you" and so on. So I wanted to write about a magic shop, called "Antiquities and Tangibles," that dealt in material things. Magical, extraordinary things, but still just stuff. The story was about a woman who comes in looking for happiness-- not a thing that will make her happy, but the state of happiness itself. This desire annoys and intrigues the proprietor of the shop, and he attempts various methods of giving her happiness. My theme, if that’s not too grandiose a word, was that happiness a) cannot be provided through purely external means, and b) is conditional, dictated by circumstances, and that (Snoopy aside) a state of perpetual healthy happiness is neither possible nor even, really, desirable.

There was some bitchin stuff in that story-- I called it my "Happiness story." I read a lot about what happiness and joy and contentment and those things are, from philosophical and biological and other viewpoints, and it was fascinating, and the story just wouldn’t end or come together and so I gave up. I didn’t know how to finish it. If I ever do, I’ll finish it... because I do like the protagonist, and her (conditionally) doomed quest for true, conscious Happiness.

So that story fizzled away, but the idea of the little magic shop, and my desire to twist that old trope... and on Saturday I started writing a little something, about a supercilious sort of guy, a touch sinister, messing with this woman’s head at a party. And when I sat down yesterday, Sunday, to see if there was any more to the two pages I’d written... it turned into a Little Magic Shop story, but one from an unusual viewpoint, with unusual merchandise, and as far as I know with an at least mostly original approach and resolution.

It’s not about happiness, but it is about avariciousness, and materialism and conscience and generosity and the fact that people are more than their quirks and qualities added together, and I like it very much. And the story, called "Straight Trade," is only 3500 words long, which is quite short for me. I don’t think it’ll need much revision, but I’ll look at in a week or so when I’m feeling more objective. So I’m happy. I didn’t cover all the points I’d attempted to discuss in "Antiquities and Tangibles" but I covered some important things, and I’m satisfied. Those other notions and obsessions will wait for future stories.

Just a little update into my writing life... I did once upon a time intend this as a writing-related journal...

Happy fourth. And for those of you who are not American, happy... Tuesday?