Alas, poor Hastings. I knew it well.

Well, that is that. The other shoe had dropped and the fat lady has taken the stage. Hastings Entertainment, the entertainment superstore chain so prevalent in mid-sized cities in Texas and throughout the mid- and southwest, is to be liquidated by October 31 after a bankruptcy auction attracted only bidders interested in carving up the corpse.

I'm in something of a depressed mood today--mostly for reasons you folks wouldn't get or would find absurd--but the demise of Hastings is a significant contributor. There's nothing about this that I don't find depressing:

Bidding on the beleaguered company in a Delaware bankruptcy court ended Wednesday afternoon, and according to the agency agreement an “everything must go” sale, which ends Oct. 31 at the latest, will be the end of the Amarillo retail chain’s story.

Hilco Merchant Resources LLC and Gordon Brothers Retail Partners LLC, two financial consultation and management companies, bought the company in a contractual joint venture.

The documents say that these companies, which will oversee the liquidation, will be authorized to advertise the move as a "store closing," "sale on everything," "going out of business" sale.

Here's the deal: Hastings was the first bookstore I ever went into that wasn't based in a shopping mall and named Waldenbooks or B.Dalton. Compared to those, Hastings was huge. They had books! They had music! They had movies! Aisles that seemed to go on forever! Realize that I grew up in a small Texas town that only ever had one bookstore--open for about three weeks total, if I recall correctly--and my reading matter was wholly dependent upon the local library, semi-annual trips to "big city" malls and the Science Fiction Book Club. Hastings was nirvana. Oh, sure, years later we got Borders and Barnes & Noble, but I always preferred Hastings when given the choice.

I'd known they were in trouble for some time. Around November 2009, with the Great Recession still raging, I was wandering the stacks in the San Marcos location and overhead an employee meeting going on in the back corner. The store manager was going over the store's losses the previous months, and I was staggered. The store was hemorrhaging tens of thousands of dollars a month. I was stunned--in fact, I eavesdropped a bit longer just to be certain I'd heard right. I'd heard right. I got a sinking feeling that this location wouldn't be long for the world, but I was proven wrong. A few years ago, they dramatically remodeled the store. Business seemed to pick up considerably. I thought they were finally in the clear.

To some extent, Hastings fell victim to the same forces that killed off the larger Borders. Pressure from Amazon and their pricing-at-a-loss strategy ate away at Hastings' book revenue. Digital downloads and streaming services wiped out the music side of things. Netflix and video-on-demand killed the video rental market. But I saw Hastings make changes. Movies and music were deemphasized. The chain added used books to its inventory, sort of a Half-Price Books hybrid. Gaming, pop culture and comics merchandise were added, and regular social events like gaming nights became part of the landscape. We saw people going and buying. It looked like the chain had carved out a new, specialty niche for itself.

Turns out it was too little, too late.

Over the years, as I've walked through the front doors, I've always looked at the "new arrivals" display with envy. I've seen many friends' names on those new books, and one day, I promised myself, my book would be there to greet customers as they entered the store. Last month, I actually contacted the Hastings stores in New Braunfels and San Marcos about scheduling a book signing the very day the chain filed for bankruptcy--which I learned of about 10 minutes after sending my email. I felt so terrible for the person at the other end who had to respond to my blissfully ignorant query. In a fit of selfishness, felt just a terrible for myself. I'd never achieve that goal of walking in and having my own book greet me. New Braunfels will now be without a book store of any sort. With the San Marcos location closing as well, the nearest option is Half Price Books, which is great in its own way, but not the same. To reach The Twig in San Antonio or BookPeople in Austin, I have to drive an hour in either direction--and that's if traffic cooperates.

To top it off, my kids are going to be very upset. I've raised them to view going to the bookstore as a thing to look forward to, and now that's gone. I don't know what I can do about it, other than be sad with them. Farewell, Hastings. You will be missed.

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The great flood of '15

Okay, so flooding sucks. Let's just get that out of the way. Before we bought the new house, we made a careful check to ensure it wasn't in any flood plains, which was prudent on our part. But we soon learned that our property is at the confluence of two drainages from higher ground. We're at the edge of the Texas Hill Country, with limestone outcroppings and shallow soil, so even a little rain can produce considerable runoff. A couple months after we moved in, we learned this as a heavy rain turned out front yard into a whitewater river. Unnerving at first, but we soon figured how things were. Our house is high, the yard broad and flat. It floods quickly but doesn't stand around long. The water drains quickly and everything returns to normal.

Except this past Friday. The forecast was for rain, at times heavy, but no severe weather. So The Wife leaves at 7:15 or so to take Bug to school, which is maybe half a mile away. Around 7:20 the skies just open up. Realize, I'm getting ready for work and am not aware of this, until The Wife starts screaming at 7:30 "JAYME COME HERE!"

I double-time it to the garage door, baffled as to what's going on, and am dumbfounded to see several inches of water in the garage, stuff floating hither and yon.

Here's a video of our front yard.

The big rush of water flowed across the end of the driveway and front yard, turning it into a whitewater river, as usual. But there was so much of it, so fast, that the secondary drainage that comes down from behind the house backed up and had nowhere to go, so it overtopped the limestones lining the driveway and took the path of least resistance--right into the open garage. Had the garage door been closed, it would've deflected down the driveway, no problem. But the door was open. Remember that we've only been in the house for a year, right? I spent the last 12 months or so building The Wife's photography studio (good news--the fixes I made prevented all but a tiny water leak from penetrating the studio, and I know how to fix that as well) rather than my office/library. The upshot of this is that I still had many boxes of books stored in the garage, along with some old toys, various minor keepsakes, drywall, insulation, power tools and various things used in the construction of the studio and office/library. Water is not a good mix with this stuff.

Fortunately, only four boxes at the bottom of the stacks got soaked. And some of the books at the top of the wet boxes escaped unscathed. But I did lose some books. I went through the "Well, maybe I can dry them out..." thought process, but no, they were too soaked and already swelling. Some were sticking together. I didn't lose anything irreplaceable--like my autographed Jack Williamson novels, for example. I lost two autographed Neil Gaiman books, none of the Sandman collections, thank goodness, but as odds are low I'll ever get close enough for him to sign anything again, I took a razor blade and sliced out the autographed pages. I also lost several James Bond books, a Greg Egan, The Essential Ellison, both volumes of Maus and a number of old-school anthologies. I've had a lot of these for decades. The biggest hit I took was my Steven Gould collection--Jumper, Helm, Wildside, Blind Waves... pretty much everything apart from Jumper: Griffin's Story, which almost didn't count. Fortunately, I can replace all of those, and I see Unka Stevie often enough that replacing the signatures shouldn't be too onerous.

Several people have remarked at how I've been able to keep this in perspective. Do I hate losing books? Of course I do. I valued some of these highly, and some of the non-genre books lost are not easily acquired, if not outright rare. I'm annoyed. I'm disappointed. But I saw all the books in boxes that didn't get ruined and realize how lucky I am. I spent all day Friday and part of Saturday running the Texas State University media relations office from home, because 1) I was flooded in, and even if I wasn't 2) San Marcos was pretty much flooded out. Areas of the university took some flood damage. Classes were cancelled for two days. Areas of San Marcos that suffered severe flooding back in June were hit again. Swaths of New Braunfels near the rivers--and even away from the rivers--got hit with some seriously high water. People lost homes and cars and RVs and a few people died. San Marcos got more than 15 inches of rain in the span of a few hours. As near as I can figure, we got close to 9 inches at the house in about 90 minutes. Not even the National Weather Service saw this coming, until maybe 30 minutes before it hit.

I had some good fortune come my way in recent weeks, with the potential for more on the horizon. So I'm not fixating on the loss here like I might have at some other time. I'm counting my self lucky, and budgeting for replacements over the coming year. That's more than many others can do.

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New Delaney? AND Straczynski!?

I don't review nearly as many books these days as I did, say, 10 years ago, but every so often publishers send me advance review copies of this novel or the other. Most of the time they simply fail to grab my attention. Most of the time. Look what arrived in my mailbox today:

HOLY MOLEY! How did I not know this was happening? From the cover sheet:

The eagerly-awaited, far-future sequel to the groundbreaking series teams Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author Samuel R. Delaney with visionary talent J. Michael Straczynski for an unprecedented, mind-bending adventure. Set 700 years after the Shadow War, telepathy has grown ubiquitous throughout the Interstellar Alliance. But when a mental plague infects the very language of telepathy that unites the disparate worlds and alien species, it is up to a small band of uninfected Narn to uncover the truth before the galaxy is consumed!"

Knowing Delaney's track record, I'll wager this is more than just a simple space opera. Wow!

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