Almost Unwritten

I've been sitting with a tab for this blog open for a couple hours now. It doesn't help that about 3 of those hours consisted of me passing out at the computer. I should really get a proper sleeping schedule. I just like the night too much to really give it up.

Anyway, I guess you can say I was tired. I don't really sleep that well to start. It doesn't help matters that I only feel compelled to do things at the wee hours of the morning. Still, I actually need to get up for work early tomorrow. It's Wednesday, so that means new comics will be out. I have to get in early to prep them and pull all the books our subscribers request. See, at my store, and most stores, there is a service where the store will hold comics that a customer will buy on a regular basis. I call these customers "Subs".

For the most part the whole thing is mainly just time consuming. I am thankfully gifted with a pretty good memory, so it doesn't require me to scan every book every time I look at a subs file. You have to understand that it's not like only 20 or so books come out in a week. On average, my store gets around 70 to 80 different titles. That's just for one week. That's not counting the number of titles people get every month.

For our service, we require a minimum of 5 books for the subscription service. It pretty much has to be worth our while to spend time making sure the customer gets their stuff. Plenty of people want stuff held till they show, but most times it's only a book or two. Having a ton of bags with names behind the counter with only a book or two each can get quite cumbersome.

The only good thing about tomorrow is that it isn't that big of a week, so it should go pretty quick. For starters, I usually pull my personal books first. Hell, I work there, so I call dibs. I also get a fairly large quantity of titles thanks to a generous discount. Looking over all the titles for the first time, with a fresh set of eyes, allows me to kick-start short term memory. If I get the book, I have a better retention of that knowledge.

Looking at the list I made for tomorrow, I think I am only looking forward to one book: Unwritten #9. The premise of the book is to basically take Harry Potter, stick him as a person in the real world that just happens to share the characters name, and toss in a ton of literary references. It's very well done, and the first collection should be available. Sadly, we don't have it at the store at the moment because our distributor was kind enough to short (read as didn't send) all of our copies of it. Go them.

Of course, there will be plenty of things that I will read through the week. It's just that I am extremely far behind on a lot of books I collect. Hell, I have been getting Hellblazer since before issue 100 (it's now past 260) and I don't think I have read that book in about 5 or 6 years. It is the longest book I have consistently picked up though.