Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: geeky
  • Music: Evil Dead, "Cabin in the Woods."

Buy Indie Day!

In addition to all today's other awesome features, today is Buy Indie Day, a day to focus on making purchases from all your lovely local independent shops. It's always important to shop at your local stores—it's good for the local economy, as well as often being good for the industry as a whole—but it's even more important in these trying economic times. Remember, the local store you pass up in favor of Amazon today is the local store that isn't there tomorrow.

What's that? You don't have any local independent shops? Well, have no fear! There are, as always, options.

If you're looking for reading material, and you don't have a local bookstore, Berkeley's Other Change of Hobbit and San Francisco's Borderlands Books both do mail order and fill special requests. These are my local stores, and I love them dearly. Plus, they have cats to feed. You wouldn't want to let the kitties go hungry, would you? Think of the kitties! (Two major advantages of the independent bookstore: they often have cats, and they often have bathrooms. If you don't think this is an advantage, you've never needed to pee while in downtown San Francisco.)

If you're looking for some exotic new musical strains to delight your eardrums and confuse your iTunes categories, I can recommend some fun things. Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, for example, provide some truly awesome offerings, ranging from hysterical parody (Aliens Ate My Homework, Retro Rocket Science) to serious and thoughtful original work (Manhattan Sleeps, Moebius Street). I recommend them hugely, and not just because Jeff was the engineer on my latest album. My beloved Vixy and Tony have a rockin' album of their own—I'm even on it!—and I can't really recommend Thirteen highly enough. And of course, there's SJ Tucker, whose works are mythic and tangled and complex and funny and altogether lovely.

What bits of independent awesome do you know about and want to share? Stores? Musicians? Comic book artists? Share, and enlighten the world!
Tags: good things, support local bookstores
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  • 12 comments

jenk

May 1 2009, 22:40:20 UTC 8 years ago

Aside from music that's already listed:

Marian Call's stuff is jazzy geeky cool.

SJ Tucker has CDs and Lost Girl Pirate Academy t-shirts for sale.

Tricky Pixie hasn't finished their studio album yet but their live CD is available.

Gaia Consort has MP3s available for free plus CDs and TShirts for sale if you want to support the band...(they're changing their name to Bone Poets Orchestra, so you'll see both names on the site, but BPO doesn't have an album yet.)

Alexander James Adams sells his stuff by paypal- and mail-order (info here) - though since he's off in Oklahoma for most of May I have *no* idea how quickly people will get orders.

seanan_mcguire

May 2 2009, 17:22:47 UTC 8 years ago

I had actually already linked to Sooj—thanks for the links! Very cool.