Ready For Launch: Creve Coeur Bookseller Gets Taste Of An Author's Life

owner Robin Tidwell is used to selling books. Now, she's getting into the world of writing them.

Tidwell's first book is, "Reduced", published by Rocking Horse, a thriller set locally in St. Louis in a world where a biological agent is about to be tested. "Post-apocalyptic novel or prescience? Reduced is a world where mankind's worst enemy is itself, and survival seems an impossible, distant hope that is buoyed and sustained only by the unexpected love of a child," is how the book is described by one writer.

Tidwell said the idea came in part after a dream she had, with a vision of a woman shooting up a convenience store. Tidwell went back to bed without writing anything down but said she still remembered it when she woke up. "Eighty thousand words later," she said at a Friday party celebrating the book's launch, "the end," she deadpanned.

The experience of being a novelist is forcing the bookseller to look at the distribution chain in a different light.

"As a bookstore owner, I'm not a fan of amzaon, they undercut us big-time, but as an author, they do help me get my book out there, very economically," Tidwell said.

She's already working on a sequel that Tidwell says will answer who the "bad guys" in the original may or may not be.

Stay tuned.