Daily Archives: 15 December 2007

Uncommon Careers

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I’ve been thinking a lot that characters in fiction either have very high-profile or very low-profile careers, and they’re generally pretty generic, so that if they need to plausibly have a lot (or very little) of money, the author can arrange that. You see lawyers, for example, but do you ever see a mesothelioma lawyer ? I never have.

This, then, is my list of five careers I’ve love to see explored in fiction (and not by characters only in one or two scenes):

  1. Voice-over actor. Cartoons or commercials. Either works.
  2. Improvisational comedian. I’ve played with the idea, but never really took it anywhere.
  3. Hand model. Because I can just see the “so what do you do?” scene.
  4. Sommelier. We see restaurateurs and wait-staff all the time. We rarely see the guy who picks the wines.
  5. Cab driver. They’re always incidental characters. They shouldn’t be.

What careers would you like to see in fiction.

Basking

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It’s been cold today here in the DFW metroplex, and while our winters are nothing compared to winter in places like Minnesota and Ohio, for us it’s been a brutal day, made worse by wicked wind. I do not usually have a problem with cold weather, so long as I can be home, wrapped in a blanket with a good book, sipping tea.

Today, I was out shopping. Not fun, especially at this time of year.

Where I wanted to be was on a deck chair by the pool at one of those Condo Hotels where you own the space, but there’s still maid service and food service. I’ve visited such places (mainly near La Paz), and they are wonderful. My parents almost bought one, but decided to build instead. That’s fine too.

I have the book.
I have the blanket.
Give me some warm weather, please, so I can get back to the important task of basking.

Wanted: A Local Bookstore

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Could someone tell the local real estate franchise folks that we need to update the shopping in Grand Prairie? I mean, we have a lovely Target in the same shopping center as Home Depot and Starbucks, but it’s really lacking a bookstore.

Oh, I know, there’s a Borders and a Barnes and Nobel just up the road in Arlington, and another Barnes and Nobel in Cedar Hill, but honestly, you should not have to leave your town to browse through shelves of books. Amazon.com is great, but it’s not the same. There is a special kind of romance in browsing through stacks of books, in picking things up because they seem interesting, in feeling the weight of pages.

My summer job during my freshman year of college was in a bookstore/cafe.
I think I never completely left it behind.