Three hundred fifty mystery writers and fans are invading the Intercontinental Hotel outside O’Hare Airport in Chicago today.

It’s the 13th year the gang has congregated . . . to talk about the craft of writing and the business of being published, hoist a brew with friends, and pass out some well-earned honors.

I’ll be there, a part of the big show twice today . . . at 1 p.m. in an author chat and at 2 p.m. on a panel talking with writers who are polishing their craft about how best they can nail the ending of their novels.

I’m in fine company . . . William Kent Krueger, Raymond Benson, Kathleen Ernst, and Libby Fischer Hellmann, our panel moderator.

David Morrell is the big gun at this convention. He’s one of our top thriller writers in the business. Morrell broke in with his book, First Blood, in 1972.

The lead character in First Blood?

Rambo.

Here’s the link so you can see what else is going on: http://www.loveismurder.net/home.html

If you’re in the Chicago metro area today, tomorrow, or Sunday, come on by.

Orfordville’s library – Orfordville is a whoop and two hollers west of where I live here in southern Wisconsin – is little more than a two-story broom closet in the old city hall building.

Twelve hundred square feet of space.

Pity if you’re in a wheelchair or on a walker. You can’t get to much of it.

The library board has been planning a new and much larger library for more years than most people can remember. They’ve bought some ground, but they have to raise $600,000 . . . well, $460,000 because they do have $140,000 in the bank.

Seven-year-old Benjamin Jackson stepped forward a couple weeks ago to give everyone a push. That’s Benjamin in the picture.

He pledged $2 a week from his allowance to the building fund.

“The whole reason I’m doing this is because I love to read,” he told his fellow second graders at Footville Elementary, in the kickoff of a campaign called Benjamin’s Library Cup.

He asked his classmates to do what he’s doing.

With the help of library director Sarah Strunz, Benjamin’s Cup has gone online and worldwide as www.BenjaminsLibraryCup.org

If you like libraries as Benjamin does and as I and my fellow mystery writers do, go online and pledge or give. Help Benjamin and the residents of Orfordville get a new library.

Tomorrow: Love is Murder

I read in bed.

You can see where this is going.

I’m holding up my 909-page copy of James Michener’s Centennial. I’m reading along and reading along, enjoying the adventures and hardships of Levi and Elly Zendt as they settle in Colorado . . . and I’m getting tired.

It’s late, late, and later.

My eyes close.

My book comes forward and slaps me in the face.

Hard.

Really hard.

Our e-reader, yes, will and does come down in my face when I fall asleep while reading, but with a feather’s touch, not the slam of a 5-pound hammer.

As bad, a real book may slip to the side, fall to the floor, and I lose my place.

I have to flip around, reread a half-dozen pages or more before I find where I left off when I fell asleep.

With a touch, the e-reader opens to the last page I read.

I really like that.

Tomorrow: One boy’s effort to get a new library

“What do we need at home so we can use our Nook to buy ebooks?” Marge and I asked our Nook class instructor.

“A wireless connection. Wi-Fi,” he said. “Do you have that?”

No.

I bring my internet connection into a 2-Wire, and then I’ve hardwired the 2-Wire to our computers . . . so no one can hijack our connection.

“You need to get a wireless router,” our instructor said.

So I bought one, the one recommended by the department head at Best Buy, and I bought a Geek to install it. It took days for me to connect the 2-Wire and open all the necessary accounts and set up the email and get everything working together, something a Geek could have done in an hour, maybe less.

I wasn’t going to shoot up a day or more again to install a wireless router.

I did tell our Geek I was concerned about security.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll give you a password it will take them 14 years to crack.”

So we are now wireless at our residence . . . wireless to internet, wireless to computers, wireless to printer, wireless to our e-reader, but not wireless to our television set. Our TV does not have a built-in wireless connection, so no Netflix.

However, we can watch movies on our computers or our Nook – our daughter-in-law watches movies on her iPad – if we change internet providers and get one that has a fast enough download speed to handle movies.

That’s gonna be a hassle. Maybe we’ll do that next month.

Here’s what I know so far, for what we paid for our Nook, for our wireless router, and for our Geek, all so we can be modern, 21st century people, we could have bought more than 400 quality books at the used-book sales we frequent.

Hmm.

Tomorrow: An e-reader won’t slap you in the face

Me!

I have an e-reader.

A Nook.

Actually, I purchased it for Marge, but she lets me use it.

We had to go to class, to learn how to use our Nook . . . of course.

A tragic/comic evening.

We arrived at the store late. My fault.

The Nook professional asked us whether we had registered our machine.

We hadn’t.

“Let me do that for you,” she said.

And she did. And opened an account for us at the Nook store, so we could buy an ebook.

We wanted one, so we could practice with our new e-reader.

All this made us later to class. When we arrived at the table area, we found 40 other book enthusiasts who had received color Nooks for Christmas tapping away at their screens under the tutelage of two Nook specialists.

By now all these souls were advanced users asking sophisticated questions about the intricacies of online searches and using their Nooks for email and how to make notes in the ebooks they were reading and retrieve those notes.

What Marge and I wanted to know was how do we turn this thing on?

Then how do we get a book?

Turning on our Nook, that was easy. Getting a book, not.

All these other 40 Nookers had monopolized the store’s Wi-Fi, so we couldn’t get on.

And when we could get on, it was slow, slow, sloooow bringing up a screen.

We finally did get a screen and began perusing the selections in the mystery field.

Bang, we lost our screen, then our connection. I touched something I shouldn’t have on the Nook. Shame on me.

The class eventually adjourned, and we still hadn’t bought a book.

As the student ranks thinned out, increasing the capacity of the Wi-Fi connection, we got back online . . . and Marge selected a three-volume boxed set by J.R. Rain. We didn’t know who he was, but the description of the books sounded like they would be pretty good reads. And the books were cheap – $2.99 for the three of them.

We hit the download button . . . and waited and waited and waaaited.

“How long does this take?” we asked our instructor.

“About 45 seconds,” he said.

“We’ve been downloading for 20 minutes.”

“Oops,” he said. “You’d better go down to the Nook kiosk and see our expert.”

We did.

She was busy with a customer who was having a computer problem, but worked us in.

When she couldn’t speed up the download, she made a series of calls around the store and then to the Nook help line, to get help. After 20 minutes of frustration, she junked the store’s Wi-Fi connection and did the forbidden.

She got an AT&T connection.

And bought the Rain books for us. She also ordered a free book, too, and – zip – in less than a minute all four books were on our Nook.

We could now read an ebook!

We now were modern.

Well, almost.

That story tomorrow.

Tomorrow: We go Wi-Fi at home

Paul Gilbertson wanted to be a writer of children’s books.

He lives not too far from me, up the road in DeForest, Wisconsin.

Four years ago, Gilbertson went to New York, to attend a book expo, hoping he might connect with a publisher who would help him launch his career.

While there, he saw a collection of drawings made by children that depicted their feelings about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Maybe, Gilbertson thought, books could ease children’s fears in a time of crisis.

So he launched a nonprofit to do that, REACT – Reading Enjoyment Affects Childhood Happiness.

In the first year, he put 350 backpacks filled with books for children of all ages into the squad cars and ambulances in Dane County with the instruction that, when you find a child in crisis, give that child a book.

The police departments loved the program.

Says Gilbertson, “We want children to see the officer as a friend rather than someone to be feared.”

Service clubs have now come onboard to be the local sponsors for REACT, securing books and supplying them to the police departments in their communities.

Today, the program is in 350 towns and cities in Wisconsin and nearby states.

Gilbertson’s goal is make REACT a nationwide outreach to kids in crisis.

For writers and teachers and police officers – all those of us who love books and work with kids – this is one mighty fine good-news story.

Nothing must be scarier for a child than to see his or her parent being arrested by the police and carted off to jail.

Here in my town, the members of the Optimist club decided they could do something to ease that trauma, to ease that fright. They stocked our police department’s 18 patrol cars with backpacks filled with books for children of all ages.

Now when an officer has to arrest an adult and there’s a terrified child there, he/she can give the child a book.

There’s something magic and reassuring about having a book. We all know it. We’ve seen it with our children, and those of us who are teachers in the lower grades see it every day in our classrooms.

Tomorrow: The man who started this books-for-kids-in-crisis project

Who of us hasn’t checked out a book from our neighborhood library and – uhm – forgotten to renew it?

We find the book under a pile of papers. It’s a couple days overdue. We return it, pay the fine, and life goes on.

Howard Severson checked out the book “Seaplane Solo” from the Amador County, California, Public Library in 1936.

He was 24 at the time and a newly wed. He and Hazel Navlet had eloped.

They kept their marriage a secret from their families for six months, until Howard could afford to give up his job at a used car lot in Amador City and move to Sacramento where Hazel lived.

In all the turmoil of the time, he forgot about the book.

It surfaced in 2010 when a neighbor, Laurie Gibson, was boxing up Hazel’s things – Howard had died four years earlier – for a garage sale.

Laurie asked Hazel, what do you want to do with the book?

Return it, she said. “I’ll pay the fine. It’s the right thing to do.”

The fine was no small thing for the 95-year-old, $2,701.

Head librarian Laura Einstadter was amazed when she read the letter from Laurie, telling about the book’s discovery and Hazel’s willingness to pay the overdue fee.

She accepted the book – was glad to get it back – but refused the money.

“I don’t want people to think we’d make her pay,” Einstadter said.

For those of us who are library boosters and users, this was a good-news story.

Hazel could have walked out of the Amador County Library and celebrated with a latte, but she felt she still had an obligation – a debt – so she made a donation to the library.

Tomorrow: Books for kids

Every year, it seems, a fine horse story comes out, either as a book or a movie.

Last year, released after Christmas in time for this year’s Oscar race, it was Steven Spielberg’s movie “War Horse” . . . based on Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel of the same name.

No, the film script was based more on the 2007 stage adaptation of “War Horse” rather than the book. I’ll tell you that story next week when I share my review of “War Horse”.

The fine horse story in my community a while back centered on riding instructor Melissa Walnoha giving her 2,000-pound Percheron, Jack, to the Madison Police Department for service in that city’s mounted patrol.

The key word here is ‘giving’.

Walnoha wouldn’t take a dime.

“I see this as another leg in the journey of Jack’s life,” she said.

The big horse, at age 9, is about as gentle as they come, comfortable in crowds . . . and he’s tall, five-foot-six at the shoulders.

That makes him an ideal mount for a police officer who has to be able to see everything when he’s working crowd control at an event like the Halloween party on State Street. That party draws thousands of UW students.

Crowds tend to calm down around horses, the mounted patrol officers say.

“So many people come up to us and say it’s nice to see them,” said one office. “Just the presence of large furry animals, people settle down.”

Jack and his new career made possible by the generosity of his owner, that’s a real good-news story.

Tomorrow: A library book overdue for 74 years

My good wife hinted that I ought to clear off my desk before Christmas guests arrived.

When I attacked the pile, I found all sorts of good stuff I just couldn’t throw away, newspaper clippings and story notes scribbled on envelopes that I had saved for blog posts.

Last year, 255 other ideas for posts made it onto my blog.

Still, there was that stack.

Here’s one from my hometown paper: E-BOOKS KINDLE LIBRARY.

If your neighborhood library is like mine here in way south Wisconsin, it bought a lot of e-books just before Christmas. My library, $5,000 worth.

Why?

Because across the country several million people gave someone in their family a Kindle, a Nook, an i-Pad, or other brand of tablet computer for Christmas on which they can read . . . books!

A lot of those people with new e-readers are library patrons, so they headed to their local libraries to download some novels – popular novels, of course – and they sure didn’t want to be placed on long waiting lists.

“We want to keep our patrons,” says Carol Kuntzelman, our librarian in charge of acquisitions.

This year, my library will buy even more e-books because e-book readership will continue to rise.

Additionally, this year our state’s library program will buy a million dollars worth of new books, movies, and audio books. The bulk will be e-books that library patrons anywhere in Wisconsin can download and read.

“I’m not saying that print is going to completely go away anytime soon,” says Kuntzelman, but “we think this (the downloadable) is the future.”

Tomorrow: One special horse story