Dave’s science fiction bookstore in Berkeley, The Other Change of Hobbit, is moving to a new location (at 3264 Adeline, two blocks south of the Ashby BART station and a couple doors down from The Vault restaurant). They’ve been in their current location for 17 years and have accumulated a ton of stuff that now has to be moved. Of course, being an independent bookstore nowadays, this all has to be done on a shoestring, but quite a few regular customers have pitched in and helped. I’ve been helping mostly with the setup in the new space, figuring out how to arrange the bookcases and bolting them to the walls and so on. I worked through the last two weekends on the move and I’ll probably work through this one, too.

The store is currently open just 5 pm to 7 pm. Four cases of new releases and eight cases of paperbacks are now stocked. The new store has twice the sales floor space but a small fraction of the storage space, and a lot of stuff that has been in boxes in the basement for years is going to be going out on the sales floor as we get more cases up. Our goal is to be open full days tomorrow and Sunday, and then a grand opening next weekend.

Meanwhile, I’ve been bushed. I’m starting on a new play, my first spoken play in quite a long time, and I’m eager to work on that but I’ve had very little time for it. After the move is over I may take a few days off work and focus on that. I’ve got an outline and good first drafts of scenes two and three and a part of scene one, which I’ve written in small chunks of time here and there, but that’s less than half the first act, and there will be three.