The Only Twenty-Four-Hour Bookstore in New York Author's Note
J2 RPS AU
NC-17
Author's Note
Master post
Art
This story exists because of tumblr.
Fucking tumblr.
Last year I saw a post about opening an all-hours bookstore, so people who'd just finished a book and needed the next one in the series could get it, and if you happened to be awake and in need of a nice soothing place to go, there'd be a calming bookstore open for you. And I just thought that was the best idea. I'm not sure what possessed me to go from "I wish there was one of those where I lived" to "that should be a story", but I did, and here we are.
I picked New York because, well, I live in Boston, and while I'm a lot more familiar with it - my third bigbang, The Not-So-Secret Interior Life of the Scientific Moose, is set partly in my neighborhood - it's not a twenty-four-hour town. New York is. Besides, if I needed to do any location research, it's only four hours on the bus (or five and a half the time I took leave of my senses and drove).
I made two trips to scout locations, altho I spent part of the first trip wandering around the new World Trade Center and getting lost in Chelsea. The second trip was more useful, partly because I actually made it to Brooklyn, partly because I got a better look at the dog run in Union Square Park, partly because I more or less figured out where the bookstore is, and partly because I paid attention to the parking signs on the each side of the street, so I'd know if it was at all possible for a car to jump the curb and plow into the front of a store.
The idea for that, by the way, comes from the time a woman put her SUV in drive rather than reverse, hit the gas, and managed to drive over the curb, onto the sidewalk, and straight into the front of a bookstore not far from my house. This was before Kickstarter, so the owners of the bookstore couldn't crowd-fund new windows, but nowadays it's definitely a thing that bookstores do. Owners (or potential owners) use crowd-funding to help with moving costs (St Mark's Bookshop), start-up costs (Astoria Bookshop), even refilling coffers emptied due to circumstances beyond one's control (Books of Wonder). Borderland Books in San Francisco initiated a successful sponsorship program to keep the lights on. I don't think crowd-funding is a sustainable business model in the long term, but for things like one-time construction costs, it can work and work well.
The story Jared tells Jensen about the Sacred Cod is true. It was first hung in the Massachusetts State House in 1784 as a reminder of how important cod fishing was to the state's economy. It was codnapped by college students in 1933 as a prank. The state police were brought in to find it and an anonymous tip finally led to its discovery. Likewise, the story Jensen tells Jared about the scotch distillery that was thought up by two guys in bed is apparently true, altho dear-tiger who shared it with me couldn't remember the name of the distillery, and no longer has access to the book where she learned it.
(At one point I briefly considered making Jensen take Jared on a two-day vacation to Boston, but it didn't fit in the fic. But they were going to go to the State House to see the Sacred Cod in the, er, flesh.)
Gangsters' Hill bourbon does not actually exist. Widow Jane is however a real Brooklyn distillery that makes whiskey, bourbon, and rum, and Suntory Hibiki is an actual (and actually expensive) Japanese whiskey.
Neil Gaiman did indeed write "George R R Martin is not your bitch" in his blog, in response to A Song of Ice and Fire fans complaining that GRRM was taking too long to finish the next book. I think it's a good thing for fans to remember, just in general, altho I totally understand why people might want the next book in a series sooner rather than later. I myself have never read ASoIaF, nor do I watch A Game of Thrones. I went to Wikipedia every time I had to type Daenerys' name, to make sure I was spelling it right. That's also where I saw the dragonscale dress that Osric tries to reproduce for Halloween. (I blame real!Osric's Ariel the Mermaid cosplay for fic!Osric's Halloween costume. It was the wig that did it. And I had to pay homage to his fondness for cosplay, just in general.)
Of all the books and authors mentioned in the fic, the only one I've read myself is More Powerful Than Dynamite, by Thai Jones, which is about John D Rockefeller, Jr, and anarchists in New York in 1914. I bought Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts in an attempt to train myself out of my fear of horror stories, but I still haven't read any of it. I guess even short horror is too long.
McNally Jackson is a large independent bookstore in Soho. I've never been, but from the pictures it looks really nice. Before my first location scouting trip I found a couple of articles about independent bookstores I could possibly check out, and I think I made it to one of them. (Three Lives & Co, which is on West 10th Street. It wasn't even open.) The Catholic school down the street, whose students Kim asks to help decorate the plywood standing in for the bookstore's broken front window, is Our Lady of Pompeii School, and I found Rocco's (source of Kim and Jared's late-night coffee and pastries) on a googlemap of the neighborhood. I've never actually been. The great barbecue place down the street from Two Brothers is Hometown Bar-B-Que, and I haven't been there either. The Fairway is a grocery store.
Unusually for my bigbangs, this one contains cameos of completely fictional characters. (And dogs, since as far as I know, Mark Sheppard does not own a pair of spoiled pugs named after British politicians.) If you recognize the punk guy with the blue star tattooed on the back of his hand, or the two guys who come to the bookstore rather than ride the ferry, or the doctor from Milwaukee who appears in the collection of Holocaust survivor essays, I'll send you cookies.
(I don't know of any collections of survivors' memoirs that the Shoah Foundation might have published, but the Foundation itself is a real thing.)
Ten points (and also possibly cookies) if you know what it means to hog the stone in the last end, and what this says about Mike. Internet high-fives if you recognize Osric's "I, myself, am strange and unusual".
Two Brothers' house rules were kindofsortof cribbed from the Kane song "The House Rules". Everybody sings and drinks and laughs and gets high. :D I have no idea where I picked up "Did anyone lose a hand? Because I found this one on my ass", but if it sounds familiar to you, please tell me where you read it. I like to give credit where credit is due, and it made me giggle enough to remember it.
If you read my bigbang last year, you might recognize the memoir about the American writer who went to Paris with his painter boyfriend at the end of the nineteenth century. :D I still don't know what the title is, but the subtitle is A Writer's Years in Paris with the Painter of his Dreams.
My favorite Easter egg is probably Philippe, the excited little boy in the Captain America hoodie. His dad's name is Cole, which makes him... Philippe, son of Cole. :D (He's not Captain America, he's Captain America's biggest fan.) (You may feel free to facepalm at my dorkery. God knows I do.)
Things about the fic that you would not know from reading: Danneel originally came to New York to be a model-model, but altho that didn't work out, the agency liked her hands. We will ignore for the purposes of this story that working behind a bar is probably exceptionally incompatible with hand modeling. Genevieve is a former PhD candidate in math who essentially burned out on the misogyny and sexism in STEM fields. She tutors on the side. Jared originally had Harley as well as Sadie, until Harley got too old to climb stairs and Jared's brother drove out from Texas to retrieve him. Yvette Nicole Brown, who is a fan of "The Walking Dead" the TV show in real life, is a fan of The Walking Dead the comic book in the fic, and Jared has spent some quality time trying to figure out what else she might like. So far he's sold her on 30 Days of Night. He couldn't convince her to keep reading Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy, altho he tried, he really tried. The bookstore is a wifi dead spot, because Jared got sick of people using their phones to see if his books were cheaper on Amazon. The Ginger Girl who lives near the store and conducted her own fundraising among the other girls to help out the Kickstarter is Christina Hendricks, and Shaun White is the lone Ginger Guy.
The photography studio and darkroom in Queens where Jensen rents space was originally (and probably inaccurately) based on Artisan's Asylum in Somerville, MA, which I think is more of a maker space and less of an arty space. I always meant to visit for a tour, but never did. Way back in March I met a girl at my local comic shop - I don't remember what we were talking about but at one point it involved hot shirtless men - and it turned out that she was a photography student and her thing was black and white architecture shots, and after an hour or however long we chatted, as she was walking out the door, I stopped her and said "I'm writing this story and one of the main characters is a photographer in his spare time and can I email you and ask you a bunch of questions?" And she said yes and gave me her email. And eventually I got up the nerve to email her. And she never answered. :( But it felt like fate, that I was planning on writing a scene of Jensen in the darkroom, and I know nothing about developing photos, and here was this photographer! A resource right in front of my face! A fangirl, even! As you can tell, I never did write that scene, so I didn't need to do research for it, but still, for an hour I felt like the gods of fanfic were shining down on my head.
St Vincent's Hospital, where the Sams work, used to be on Seventh Avenue and went bankrupt in 2010 (which I discovered when I was trying to figure out where exactly it was). I needed them to work close enough to the bookstore to visit it during breaks, so I handwaved St Vincent's back into existence. If you happen to be a former or current New Yorker who got to that part and thought "Someone is wrong on the internet!" rest assured that I know, and I'm being wrong on purpose.
Jensen and Chris live somewhere in the square made by Carroll, Columbia, Sackett, and Clinton Streets in Brooklyn, which I think is either Carroll Gardens or Cobble Hill, and if this wasn't fiction, a two-bedroom rental in that neighborhood would most likely be out of their price range.
Two Brothers is on Van Dyke Street at the corner of Van Brunt, and The Moose and Mayhem is on Bleeker Street between Carmine and Morton.
It's a number of blocks from The Moose and Mayhem to Union Square Park, where the dog run is. By the time Jared and Sadie get there, she's probably marked about five different spots on the sidewalk.
You may be able to tell that I've never been to a bar in Brooklyn, let alone one that had line-dancing. I'm profoundly glad petite-madame didn't make any art of the bar, because I have no helpful reference pics to send her. I have better visual reference for The Moose and Mayhem, altho the bookstore in my head is bigger than I think a bookstore in the West Village would normally be.
There's a book called Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers, which came about when a Harvard student from Queens printed out hundreds of blank maps of Manhattan and walked the length of Broadway, handing them out and asking people to map their version of the city. Because Two Brothers was originally going to be uptown somewhere, I was going to do that for Jared and Jensen. But then the bar moved to Brooklyn, and Jared's life happens in a very small circle, and I decided it wasn't worth it. If you have any Manhattan memories, you can download a blank map from the web site and make your own. (It's possible Jared has. It's also possible his map is very hard to read.)
This is, more or less, the story I wanted to tell, set in the place I wanted to tell it. It isn't a love letter to New York, altho it wasn't intended to be, and it isn't quite a love letter to bookstores I've known, altho my love for books and bookstores is definitely in there. But it is a love story. Look, it's me. They're always love stories.
NC-17
Author's Note
Master post
Art
This story exists because of tumblr.
Fucking tumblr.
Last year I saw a post about opening an all-hours bookstore, so people who'd just finished a book and needed the next one in the series could get it, and if you happened to be awake and in need of a nice soothing place to go, there'd be a calming bookstore open for you. And I just thought that was the best idea. I'm not sure what possessed me to go from "I wish there was one of those where I lived" to "that should be a story", but I did, and here we are.
I picked New York because, well, I live in Boston, and while I'm a lot more familiar with it - my third bigbang, The Not-So-Secret Interior Life of the Scientific Moose, is set partly in my neighborhood - it's not a twenty-four-hour town. New York is. Besides, if I needed to do any location research, it's only four hours on the bus (or five and a half the time I took leave of my senses and drove).
I made two trips to scout locations, altho I spent part of the first trip wandering around the new World Trade Center and getting lost in Chelsea. The second trip was more useful, partly because I actually made it to Brooklyn, partly because I got a better look at the dog run in Union Square Park, partly because I more or less figured out where the bookstore is, and partly because I paid attention to the parking signs on the each side of the street, so I'd know if it was at all possible for a car to jump the curb and plow into the front of a store.
The idea for that, by the way, comes from the time a woman put her SUV in drive rather than reverse, hit the gas, and managed to drive over the curb, onto the sidewalk, and straight into the front of a bookstore not far from my house. This was before Kickstarter, so the owners of the bookstore couldn't crowd-fund new windows, but nowadays it's definitely a thing that bookstores do. Owners (or potential owners) use crowd-funding to help with moving costs (St Mark's Bookshop), start-up costs (Astoria Bookshop), even refilling coffers emptied due to circumstances beyond one's control (Books of Wonder). Borderland Books in San Francisco initiated a successful sponsorship program to keep the lights on. I don't think crowd-funding is a sustainable business model in the long term, but for things like one-time construction costs, it can work and work well.
The story Jared tells Jensen about the Sacred Cod is true. It was first hung in the Massachusetts State House in 1784 as a reminder of how important cod fishing was to the state's economy. It was codnapped by college students in 1933 as a prank. The state police were brought in to find it and an anonymous tip finally led to its discovery. Likewise, the story Jensen tells Jared about the scotch distillery that was thought up by two guys in bed is apparently true, altho dear-tiger who shared it with me couldn't remember the name of the distillery, and no longer has access to the book where she learned it.
(At one point I briefly considered making Jensen take Jared on a two-day vacation to Boston, but it didn't fit in the fic. But they were going to go to the State House to see the Sacred Cod in the, er, flesh.)
Gangsters' Hill bourbon does not actually exist. Widow Jane is however a real Brooklyn distillery that makes whiskey, bourbon, and rum, and Suntory Hibiki is an actual (and actually expensive) Japanese whiskey.
Neil Gaiman did indeed write "George R R Martin is not your bitch" in his blog, in response to A Song of Ice and Fire fans complaining that GRRM was taking too long to finish the next book. I think it's a good thing for fans to remember, just in general, altho I totally understand why people might want the next book in a series sooner rather than later. I myself have never read ASoIaF, nor do I watch A Game of Thrones. I went to Wikipedia every time I had to type Daenerys' name, to make sure I was spelling it right. That's also where I saw the dragonscale dress that Osric tries to reproduce for Halloween. (I blame real!Osric's Ariel the Mermaid cosplay for fic!Osric's Halloween costume. It was the wig that did it. And I had to pay homage to his fondness for cosplay, just in general.)
Of all the books and authors mentioned in the fic, the only one I've read myself is More Powerful Than Dynamite, by Thai Jones, which is about John D Rockefeller, Jr, and anarchists in New York in 1914. I bought Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts in an attempt to train myself out of my fear of horror stories, but I still haven't read any of it. I guess even short horror is too long.
McNally Jackson is a large independent bookstore in Soho. I've never been, but from the pictures it looks really nice. Before my first location scouting trip I found a couple of articles about independent bookstores I could possibly check out, and I think I made it to one of them. (Three Lives & Co, which is on West 10th Street. It wasn't even open.) The Catholic school down the street, whose students Kim asks to help decorate the plywood standing in for the bookstore's broken front window, is Our Lady of Pompeii School, and I found Rocco's (source of Kim and Jared's late-night coffee and pastries) on a googlemap of the neighborhood. I've never actually been. The great barbecue place down the street from Two Brothers is Hometown Bar-B-Que, and I haven't been there either. The Fairway is a grocery store.
Unusually for my bigbangs, this one contains cameos of completely fictional characters. (And dogs, since as far as I know, Mark Sheppard does not own a pair of spoiled pugs named after British politicians.) If you recognize the punk guy with the blue star tattooed on the back of his hand, or the two guys who come to the bookstore rather than ride the ferry, or the doctor from Milwaukee who appears in the collection of Holocaust survivor essays, I'll send you cookies.
(I don't know of any collections of survivors' memoirs that the Shoah Foundation might have published, but the Foundation itself is a real thing.)
Ten points (and also possibly cookies) if you know what it means to hog the stone in the last end, and what this says about Mike. Internet high-fives if you recognize Osric's "I, myself, am strange and unusual".
Two Brothers' house rules were kindofsortof cribbed from the Kane song "The House Rules". Everybody sings and drinks and laughs and gets high. :D I have no idea where I picked up "Did anyone lose a hand? Because I found this one on my ass", but if it sounds familiar to you, please tell me where you read it. I like to give credit where credit is due, and it made me giggle enough to remember it.
If you read my bigbang last year, you might recognize the memoir about the American writer who went to Paris with his painter boyfriend at the end of the nineteenth century. :D I still don't know what the title is, but the subtitle is A Writer's Years in Paris with the Painter of his Dreams.
My favorite Easter egg is probably Philippe, the excited little boy in the Captain America hoodie. His dad's name is Cole, which makes him... Philippe, son of Cole. :D (He's not Captain America, he's Captain America's biggest fan.) (You may feel free to facepalm at my dorkery. God knows I do.)
Things about the fic that you would not know from reading: Danneel originally came to New York to be a model-model, but altho that didn't work out, the agency liked her hands. We will ignore for the purposes of this story that working behind a bar is probably exceptionally incompatible with hand modeling. Genevieve is a former PhD candidate in math who essentially burned out on the misogyny and sexism in STEM fields. She tutors on the side. Jared originally had Harley as well as Sadie, until Harley got too old to climb stairs and Jared's brother drove out from Texas to retrieve him. Yvette Nicole Brown, who is a fan of "The Walking Dead" the TV show in real life, is a fan of The Walking Dead the comic book in the fic, and Jared has spent some quality time trying to figure out what else she might like. So far he's sold her on 30 Days of Night. He couldn't convince her to keep reading Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy, altho he tried, he really tried. The bookstore is a wifi dead spot, because Jared got sick of people using their phones to see if his books were cheaper on Amazon. The Ginger Girl who lives near the store and conducted her own fundraising among the other girls to help out the Kickstarter is Christina Hendricks, and Shaun White is the lone Ginger Guy.
The photography studio and darkroom in Queens where Jensen rents space was originally (and probably inaccurately) based on Artisan's Asylum in Somerville, MA, which I think is more of a maker space and less of an arty space. I always meant to visit for a tour, but never did. Way back in March I met a girl at my local comic shop - I don't remember what we were talking about but at one point it involved hot shirtless men - and it turned out that she was a photography student and her thing was black and white architecture shots, and after an hour or however long we chatted, as she was walking out the door, I stopped her and said "I'm writing this story and one of the main characters is a photographer in his spare time and can I email you and ask you a bunch of questions?" And she said yes and gave me her email. And eventually I got up the nerve to email her. And she never answered. :( But it felt like fate, that I was planning on writing a scene of Jensen in the darkroom, and I know nothing about developing photos, and here was this photographer! A resource right in front of my face! A fangirl, even! As you can tell, I never did write that scene, so I didn't need to do research for it, but still, for an hour I felt like the gods of fanfic were shining down on my head.
St Vincent's Hospital, where the Sams work, used to be on Seventh Avenue and went bankrupt in 2010 (which I discovered when I was trying to figure out where exactly it was). I needed them to work close enough to the bookstore to visit it during breaks, so I handwaved St Vincent's back into existence. If you happen to be a former or current New Yorker who got to that part and thought "Someone is wrong on the internet!" rest assured that I know, and I'm being wrong on purpose.
Jensen and Chris live somewhere in the square made by Carroll, Columbia, Sackett, and Clinton Streets in Brooklyn, which I think is either Carroll Gardens or Cobble Hill, and if this wasn't fiction, a two-bedroom rental in that neighborhood would most likely be out of their price range.
Two Brothers is on Van Dyke Street at the corner of Van Brunt, and The Moose and Mayhem is on Bleeker Street between Carmine and Morton.
It's a number of blocks from The Moose and Mayhem to Union Square Park, where the dog run is. By the time Jared and Sadie get there, she's probably marked about five different spots on the sidewalk.
You may be able to tell that I've never been to a bar in Brooklyn, let alone one that had line-dancing. I'm profoundly glad petite-madame didn't make any art of the bar, because I have no helpful reference pics to send her. I have better visual reference for The Moose and Mayhem, altho the bookstore in my head is bigger than I think a bookstore in the West Village would normally be.
There's a book called Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers, which came about when a Harvard student from Queens printed out hundreds of blank maps of Manhattan and walked the length of Broadway, handing them out and asking people to map their version of the city. Because Two Brothers was originally going to be uptown somewhere, I was going to do that for Jared and Jensen. But then the bar moved to Brooklyn, and Jared's life happens in a very small circle, and I decided it wasn't worth it. If you have any Manhattan memories, you can download a blank map from the web site and make your own. (It's possible Jared has. It's also possible his map is very hard to read.)
This is, more or less, the story I wanted to tell, set in the place I wanted to tell it. It isn't a love letter to New York, altho it wasn't intended to be, and it isn't quite a love letter to bookstores I've known, altho my love for books and bookstores is definitely in there. But it is a love story. Look, it's me. They're always love stories.