I picture hundreds of mothers, their kids in tow, already crying and screaming, cold and uncomfortable, standing outside a Mall or whatever store they decide to start with, shifting from leg to leg, their breath coming out in rapid, ragged puffs of white. The crowd thickens and the sound increases to a near deafening roar, until finally, a clock somewhere show’s oh-seven-hundred and the flood gates open. Chaos reigns as men, women and children vie for discounted goods, the last of this or that, the prestige of being home early with all Christmas shopping done, in one fell swoop.

Personally, I would have thought the internet would have put an end to all that. For me, it did. I’m pretty sure it can for you as well.

Anyway, every year, I write about a post about the best gifts to get for writers, who are, by far, the most troublesome and difficult group to buy gifts for. I see no reason to change the pattern quite yet.

So without further delay, here are this year’s top five gifts for writers:

1. Gift Cards
I know, it feels like a cop-out. But the simple fact is that music, movies, video games, even larger ticker electronics are so intensely personal, that the recipient will appreciate the insight that brought you to this choice.

2. Reference Books
As always, an excellent collection of desktop reference books makes the list. In addition to a Dictionary of Theories and a Medical Dictionary/Anatomy guide, let’s add a Dictionary of Astronomy (good every year, since science keeps updating itself, and we wouldn’t want to seem left behind) and a World Mythology Reference.

3. Livescribe  Pulse Smartpen
This particular technological gadget has been on my radar for some time. Essentially it’s a pen that allows direct download of whatever you’ve written or recorded aurally. Pretty nifty huh? It almost completely replaces the need for the writer’s handy notebook. There are two draw backs however – it requires special paper (yes, the technology isn’t that good yet), which comes in many forms, but makes you beholden to LiveScribe for refills, essentially, forever. The second draw back might be an imagined one – but I see a man standing up in a board room, saying “Hold on everyone, my Smartpen just ran out of battery.”

4. Magazine Subscriptions
Artistic types, especially writers, require continuous input, stimulation of the senses to jar ideas, to get the juices flowing. Magazines are perfect for this. Not just publishing industry magazines, but many others – design, photography, fashion, economics, science. These are monthly blasts of ideas and concepts delivered right to the writer’s doorstep!

5. Desk “Gear”
Desk gear includes everything from the desk itself to storage shelves or a new chair. Of course, I’d recommend asking before replacing your writer’s beloved chair with a new one, but there are about a dozen other desk top appliances and accoutrements that can be given to the writer who supposedly has it all. This is also an excellent opportunity to delve into the personal preferences of your giftee. Candles, desktop water fountains and other relaxation items are good choices. Take snoop around your writer’s desk and see what’s missing, what’s old. Are they still using a wired-ball mouse? Go get them a wireless optical mouse! 

Take some of the hassle out of holiday shopping this year. At least for one person on your list, you’ve got it covered. 

Anyway, my friends and family always wonder what to get me for Xmas, because, as a writer, I tend to have many diverse interests, and my personal library has recently been officially upgraded to “vast.”

My film and DVD collection is exquisite, featuring the best and worst films of the since the medium was invented.  I’ve got a good pair of boots, and I just picked up some new wipers for the auto. Aside from a Roomba Vacuum Robot, what else do I really need?

Exactly the dilemma the friends and family of many other writers struggle with. So, as an unabashed capitalist, a collector of things technologically unique and everyone’s target market, I thought I’d write out some tips and advice for the giving of gifts to the writers in your life.

Know the writer

You have to be careful. Just like when you’re artificially inseminating sharks or performing a tonsillectomy on a crocodile, you have to be careful when buying a gift for a writer. When I graduated college, I would have loved a blazing yellow and black copy of “the idiots guide to being published.” Now, I would find that book wholly and completely insulting. I would accept the gift graciously, and subtly point the giver to several of my published articles, film reviews and short stories.

At my age, I find solid, tangible reference books to be much more valuable. One of the writer’s greatest threats is “not getting it right” (because there’s always some snot-nosed slack-jawed arm chair critic who will take the time to explain to you how you didn’t accurately represent the hockey-goalie on the back of the bus in the scene where your protagonist gets dumped via text message). It is for this reason that it’s important for authors to have a wealth of resources at their finger tips.

Facts are the basis of Fiction

There are always the basics: Dictionary and Thesaurus. But most writers work online anyhow, and have access to a myriad of Dictionaries and Thesauri that blow anything you could buy them out of the water. So then you’ve got to get tricky clever when buying references for writers.

One of the greatest gifts I received was a “Dictionary of Theories.” This impressive tome sorts all known theories by topic, by alpha, with a brief description of the crack pot who first wrote them down and what the hell they meant. This was an excellent addition to my battery of references books. I also have a “Dictionary of Superstitions,” and a dictionary of philosophy, both excellent additions to my reference set.

Language
While every writer secretly dreams of being as pretentious as the New Yorker or Playboy will allow, as they struggle to hack out columns and blogs and splots and crazzles for the local paper, their buddy from college and that dude who’s “got a great idea,” they’ve got to write slow. Easy words, quick sentences. Brief, digestible bits. Writing to be understood is a far cry from writing for the sheer pleasure of it.

However, when the hacking is done and they retreat to their intellectual tower of (insert sexy descriptor here – mine is hewn from a mighty rock that fell from the sky, shot through with silver and a strange alien material glowing a soft royal purple, its innards lined with every curiosity and mental accoutrement I can conjure), they want to slip into that hot steaming bath of pretentiousness. Nothing gets writers more excited than writing words and things very few understand. And when those rare few “get it, got it, and know it’s good,” well, the English lexicon lacks the words to describe the feeling.

Nothing says pretentious like slipping in a term from a foreign language. You’re thinking, “dammit, et tu, Eric?”  Or maybe you were thinking “C’est la vie.” One of my favorite desktop references is my Latin/English Dictionary. Dropping in an exempli gratia here and there takes the pretentious cake, and I feel better about life every time I do it. Language dictionaries that seem to gel well with the written workings of a mildly mad mind are: French, Italian, Latin, Greek and only occasionally Russian. Swahili is just a bit too esoteric to flow on the page, no?

Quality Maps and Charts are another must have for writers. An up-to-date world map with political economic, religious and topographic information is worth a pound of gold or ten pounds of gingerbread cookies. A periodic table is useful, as well as a measure conversion chart. And for the sci-fi writer in your life, if you can find the elusive and rare “starship scale wall poster” you’ve made their light-year.

Gadgets and Gadflys

Gadgets are a slippery slope for writer’s gifts. Sure, everyone wants an iPhone. But would I rather have an iPhone or a Kindle? Ah… now the true dilemma becomes clear. Personally, I’ll need both, eventually. However, I also consider both to be rather short lived fads. Sorry Amazon, I love ya, but you do realize that the iPhone will doubtless be offering the same content plus be able to playback HD porn in times of emergency?

The Kindle of course, for those of you not so focused on pornography or the ability to access some anytime anywhere, is a mobile library device. It’s about the slickest thing I’ve ever seen (next to, of course, the iPhone). Sony offers a competing product, and the ins and outs of each product are too extensive to discuss here. Suffice to say, I vote against these products as gifts for writers, unless you are sure of their technological capabilities. I know one writer who struggles to check his email. Do you really think Amazon’s library of 10,000+ digital books are going to work for him?

Another common writer gift is the personal voice recorder. Those little MP3 recording dealies, they run on a pair of triple-A’s and can record 80 hours of audio. This is a student’s gift, great for recording that lecture on high-energy physics that you’re just too hung-over to focus on. As for writers, well, I’ve got one of these things, and I feel like an ass taking voice notes. I don’t know what it is, but by the time I’ve got the thing out of my pocket and am recording, I the moment has changed so much, the feeling, the mood, they’re gone-daddy-gone, and I’m looking down the bar at the bartender, who can’t quite see the device, and he’s wondering if I’m talking to him, myself or one of the winged demons I’m obviously toting around on my shoulders, from one nickel-blick swamp dive to the next.

Where was I? Oh, if you have to go gadget, go gift certificate. The Blue Shirt Butchers at Best Buy are more than willing to bleep-bling up a card for you, and then your giftee writer can pick out their own particular overpriced digital poison.

The Ultimate Writer’s Gift

Magazine Subscriptions. Seriously. Look, writers love to read, right? They fixate on topics and obsess about concepts. They love pictures. Magazines are topical, timely, loaded with pictures and tightly written thinking-bits. The best part is, unless your beloved writer has mastered time travel (don’t scoff, I’ve been independent of time and space since sometime in 2002), there’s no way they can buy the issue you’ve purchased with your gift subscription or have read the article in advance.

Magazines come in every conceivable flavor, size, complexity, paper stock, color, shape, topic or usefulness. Topics range from “Rural Telecommunications” to Screenwriting. For starters, checkout Scientific American (all writers suffer from a brutal understanding of only what they understand – see my entry “write what you really know, not what you think you know” – coming soon). It’s a great learny mag. National Geographic is the flagship of learny periodicals, but there are literally magazines for every hobby, interest and obsession, from cats to tattoos, from the asinine to merely contemptuous, that a person could imagine. And most subscriptions cost next to nothing (don’t say I never did anything for you).

He drank scotch because he didn’t like beer. He drank Glenlivet because he didn’t know anything about scotch.

Of course, there’s always booze. A bottle of Laphroig or Macalllan’s will fill any author to bursting with soothing, liquid gold and holiday cheer. Find me a writer worth his or her ink who doesn’t love a good bender and I’ll find you a goddamned liar.