PowellsBooks.Blog

Somewhere around 1987, I and my best friend Michael took a train trip around the U.S. before we headed off to college. We visited relatives back East, saw a show in NYC, and spent a couple days at Disney World. And, I remember vividly, stopped at a rather cool bookstore in downtown Portland while we were there on a layover. That was the first I'd ever heard of Powell's, but the memory stuck with me , and over the years I've become more and more aware of its status as one of the finest independent bookstores in the country. I always hear about great, geeky folks like Wil Wheaton or John Hodgman visiting for a signing, and I picture the place in my head.

Last year, when my first book came out, my parents (who are retired) were on an RV trip to the Northwest and stopped by Powell's. My dad, ever impish, went looking for my book, and cheerfully found it on a shelf with a special recommendation note on it by one of the store's staff. He ...

This last Tuesday, my third book in 18 months launched. It's been an amazing year and a half, and I still find it strange to call myself an author, let alone being able to add "New York Times Bestselling." It's like getting knighted, or being Prince: You have this title to put in front of your name for the rest of your life, and you can never give it back. It's just a bit surreal.

As is launch day. It's surreal because it's a rather disconnected experience. All the work I did on the book was over months ago, and it's been in the hands of the publisher to finally assemble, put through the printing process, and do all the magical sales stuff that gets copies into your local bookstores on a given day. I wrote and delivered 50,000-odd words, and then sent it off to be finished like the teenage daughter of a middle-class Victorian family. And while I've moved onto things like kitchen renovations and planning for the holidays, people I've never met have been adding value to my work doing their own day job responsibilities. How ...

I am not an educator. I am not a scientist. I'm hardly what you could call an expert in anything. What I know about is being a geek (technology, gaming, obscure references to cult movies), and being a dad, a husband, and an engineer.

And yet, stories like this make me sad and nervous:

Teachers Have Little Time to Teach Science, Study Shows

Intense pressure to meet accountability goals in mathematics and English is limiting time for science, and teachers and schools do not have the infrastructure support needed to consistently provide students with quality science learning opportunities. Forty percent of elementary teachers say they spend just 60 minutes or less teaching science each week. Just one-third of elementary teachers say they feel prepared to teach science, but 85 percent of teachers say they have not received any professional development in science during the last three years. And while nine in ten principals say science education is very important and should start early, less than half of principals (44%) believe it is likely that a student would receive high-quality science instruction in his or her

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If there was ever a sign that the geekpocalypse is nigh, it's the list of new books coming out today.

Obviously I'm here on the Powell's blog this week because my new book is hitting the shelves (I'm sure there's a link somewhere on this page to find it), but there's more.

Geek culture is in the mainstream (well, maybe dipping its toes on the shore of the mainstream), and many of us poor sods who had our d20s stolen by jocks in high school now have books . It's starting to feel like maybe we weren't as isolated and alone as we thought, and, better than that, there are a lot of us with interesting things to say.

So separate from my own endeavors, I'd like to point you towards two other deep geek culture tomes coming out today.

The first is The Nerdist Way by Chris Hardwick. Chris is one of the best interviewers ...

Being a geek, and being a dad, my love for Halloween surpasses any other holiday. While I still give the non-denominational Winter-solstice-adjacent gift-giving celebration its due props atop the annual list of reasons we get to not go to work, Halloween still wins my heart (and yes, I know it's not a holiday that people get off from work; that doesn't mean I don't take it off).

As geeks, we love to play dress-up. No cheaply-made costumes from spooky-themed pop-up stores inhabiting the lifeless carcasses of that former Borders down the street for us, no way! Especially for the con-going cosplay crowd, All Hallows Eve is a time to shine, a time to pull out all the stops.

Indeed, because we're not at a con with 99,999 other people, we can build costumes that work better in un-crowds. Like Transformers that actually transform. Or things that drip.

Even better, because we'll likely be partying with our "own kind," we can take the challenge to create one of those "oh my gods, that's great!" costumes. Maybe you can put together a really accurate Battlestar Galactic (TOS) uniform. Crossover-costumes seem to be ...