I Assure You I’m Still Here

Things got busy.

Things ARE busy.

Life is good.

More articulate post later, it’s early in the day and plates are spinning (as Jaime -er, Craig Wallwork- would say). Here is a pictorial illustration of some of What I’ve Been Up To.

 

LIFE!!

Menacing Hedge (Fiction Editor Furiosa)

Noir at the Bar, St. Louis in April with Jon Ashley , Scott Phillips, Jed Ayres, Greg Barth, Tim L. Williams & Joe Schwartz (look at me, bein’ the Only Girl – REPRESENT!)

“Gutted: Beautiful Horror” from Crytal Lake Publishing drops June 24th!!

‘Daddy’s Dyin, Who’s Got the Will?’ opens at The Portsmouth Little Theatre on Friday May 20th. Go to www.pltlive.com for tickets!

Allow Me to Buy Your Love with Free Books in Honor of Sunshine!

Last night I discovered two things:

1. Goodreads has an author stats page thingie

2. LOTS of people have Radium Girls marked on their “To Read” shelves.

So! The only thing to do is come up with a plan to gently shove Radium Girls over to allllll the “Currently Reading” shelves. Summer is coming. There’s no reason my glowing green baby shouldn’t be on your tablet or in your tote bag, ready and waiting when you reach for some good words.

In honor of so many well-intentioned readers, and the upcoming One Year Birthday of Radium Girls, I talked to my lovely friend and publisher Mike Gonzalez, and…

Here’s the Plan

From May 5th through June 5th we shall hand out e-books like candy. As a show of good faith and even better intentions, all you need to do is TAG ME in a photo of ANY OTHER copy of a paper publication I’ve been in that you already have in your possession. Doesn’t matter where – post in the comments here, or tag me or Thunderdome Press on Facebook, or Twitter: @mandajoon (me) or @monkeywright (Mike Gonzalez) or @ThunderDomeMag (the Press), or on Instagram: @mandajoon (me). I don’t care if it’s actually even a pic of you with RG, we’ll still collect your email address and give you an ebook to pass on to someone else!

Here’s the List

Post a pic of ANY of the following with a tag:

Exigencies

Burnt Tongues

Radium Girls

The Booked. Anthology

Cipher Sisters

LA1K

cutaway

Warmed and Bound

And! When that giveaway is over it’ll officially be my birthday and we’ll give away some paperbacks, too! And and! There will be a 4-day Free Radium Girls for Kindle weekend. I want these stories in your hands!

Last year when we were getting Radium Girls together I really didn’t want to do any…um, well, promotional work, so I didn’t blurb-hunt or really advertise or whatever, but since the release I’ve gotten a lot of cool reviews and whatnot, so I’ve collected that and shall put it here, in a “Don’t Take My Word for It” section:

Praise for Radium Girls:

“These stories glow in the dark.”
– Craig Clevenger, author of The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria

“I loved it, that’s for damned sure. Radium Girls is a great book.”
– Benjamin Whitmer, author of Pike and Cry Father

“Her work exists in the rarified air only found at high altitudes…Gowin unfolds a series of portraits of exquisitely flawed and powerful characters.”
– Kelly Boyker, author of Zoonosis, editor of Menacing Hedge

“Gowin is the tornado, lifting the flotsam of society and spinning it around and around until it lands just south of Kansas where magic and colour are just beyond reach.”
– Craig Wallwork, author of The Sound of Loneliness and Quintessence of Dust

“Radium Girls puts beauty in places you probably shouldn’t find it and makes the reader question the norms they’ve come to accept.”
– Livius Nedin and Robb Olson, The Booked. Podcast

May your Spring and Summer be be full of sunshine and words. Thanks for letting me be a part of it!

Spring!

Death Takes a Holiday

‘Trotlines’ in Menacing Hedge, Spring 2012

the Apocalypse is probably not going to be nearly as exciting as we hope. even if there ARE zombies.

my take on that:

http://menacinghedge.com/spring2012/entry-gowin.php

also, Menacing Hedge is awesome in general. You can download the whole Spring Issue for Kindle/Nook etc. check out this cover:

Menacing Hedge Spring 2012

 

 

frozen easter

LIBRARY.

TUESDAY.

STORYGROUP EASTER PARTY.

pouring rain, clothes soaked and drying too slowly in the 50degree indoor temperature. adam is soooo shy, and at barely 3 he has a crush on the tallest, oldest, loudest girl in the group. she’s like phillip on SNL that mike myers used to play, except with long curly brown hair and a huge smile.

the fiends have been released, they are storming  the room, baskets in hand, to find the eggs that have been hidden among the stacks. i must protect my head with my arms…..

and it begins!!

i think spring might finally be here. the sun shines, birds sing, cheshire cat eats the food eric slips out for her, nests are full, grass green..

snapshot: minnie mouse on the couch beside me seemngly holding a light saber, adam is playing with daddy in the bed “you be a kitty and i’ll be a LION!” or “you be a puppy and i’ll be lady gaga!” they laugh and i love morning. i have coffee and my hair is very glamour shots from restless sleep. socks don’t match. there’s a third of a banana somewhere, adam was holding it before he climbed in bed. note to self: track down banana.

adam has returned. “do all cars got mouths? do all cars got lights?”  a serious discussion in bed this morning while adam climbed daddy’s legs like a rollercoaster revealed: i would be C3Po. eric would be Obi Wan. the discussion changes but the result is always the same…

worked late with beth last night. we are knocking this storyline out! hope to have some finished pro-looking presentation stuff at the beginning of the week. we have characters, setting, main plot points (most of them), a sense of 3 acts, and a definite beginning and end (plus alternate ending!). we rock.

75  events the next couple weeks. that’s an exaggeration, but we have a wedding and a Bear Toons Show on saturday, storygroup easter party tuesday, reptile night at the library thursday, kenworth easter egg hunt saturday, mom church easter egg hunt following wednesday, eric tattoo saturday, easter service sunday… there’s more but i’m bored of it and adam is taking pictures of minnie.

happy spring!! we’ll be outside today!!

spring in fragments

in the pines (where the sun sometimes shines)

Day 3

2nd shift is a bitch to get used to. harder than i thought. the mornings are great, but adam is adjusting to daylight savings time and resenting the hell out of me for being not-daddy at bedtime, so it’s rough. strange and rough. i don’t have any sort of pattern yet. it feels like saturday morning then eric LEAVES.

no writing to speak of, but that will come. i’m cooking two things – one is for heather and the other is a more appropriate continuation for chapter4, bridget’s backstory is falling around her in bits and pieces and snatches of overheard conversation – i’m nearing a split that is not going to be nearly as complicated as i was trying to make it. forget the fancy tricks, i’m just going to tell the story and move things around if i feel like it once it’s out.

kiddo is singing lady gaga to ponyo. it’s 10:30. gah.

i nap with him, i’m spoiled siesta-wise. 

i dreamed i had sex with justin timberlake and got pregnant, and all of this was happening in sort of a 50’s-era surf movie, and he was very “i want a baby, i’ve been ready” (who knew??) and i was standing on a beach in a pink two-piece and had a really fabulous ponytail. i was 3 equal parts divided: “oh no! social mores, out of wedlock,  just one time and i’m pregnant, what a 50s PSA i am!”  and one third “i am fucked. is eric going to kill me, or is he going to be very joseph to my mary with this whole having justin timberlake’s baby thing?” and one third “what a bullseye. what a good-looking kid this will be. one night stand to lifetime of involvement, this won’t be bad.” i think i’m kind of a bad person in my dreams. anyway, i woke up during the sunset beach conversation feeling very weird about the whole thing as my 3 yr old was still asleep next to me…

the trees are budding, the birds are back, the grass is greening.

lonely.

love song for my (not that) faraway love:

dorothy parker (and then some)

“And sweet’s the air with curly smoke, From all my burning bridges.”

ooooooh, february has been HUGE. going into march with all this newness. my moods are five minute whirlwinds of euphoria turning to rage turning to despair turning to gratefulness turning to exasperation turning to overwhelmed turning to calm contentedness turning back to euphoria..

cutting a lot of fat from my life. by fat i mean people. i’m tired of humouring everyone. i’m not turning MEAN -as opposed to being mean, i am simply cutting ties and eliminating  room for complication and anger.

it feels good. 

today was eric’s first day back at his new job (sounds funny but it’s true). his forehead is so smooth as compared to 3 months ago he looks botoxed. there will be some second shift but a longer lifespan so that i can live with..

Martin Rath’s “Of the Dead”will be all over the German comicons this year, and my name is on that. in some small way i helped put that together, or at least, you know, helped dig up the acorn (substitute whatever analogy you like for that one). more info on that one as i get it, i’m gonna pimp the hell outta that zombie movie. it’s fucking awesome. oh, laverne, you make such a pretty corpse….

took my own author photo for the Book. set up the tripod outside the barn and clicked away with the timer. it makes it feel real.

tomorrow thundadome.com goes live with The Ides – i’ll post that link tomorrow, too!!

beth and i are talking with some others – The Others, that’s formal but personal, i like that – about putting together a zombie webzine. i think we can do it. more to come on that later, too…

this feels boastful and emotionally inadequate, i think it’s because i have green popsicle on the back of my left hand and am mainly calculating how long it will take for it to drip bewteen my fingers, and if i can finish this before it does – mainly i wanted to type this up fast to say hell yeah, 2011. i will work harder to deserve you.

it’s almost spring….

onward!!!

zombie stomper

i have danced many a dance and texted many a midnight text this week – i think 2011 is becoming just a bang-up year.

there’s this thing that makes me dance, and this other thing that makes me dance, and then there are people that make me dance, and then there’s that familiar foot-jiggle that’s beginning, the first sure sign of a writing jag. the jiggling foot makes me dance.

i’ll elaborate on the dance reasons later. of course all the dancing is done to Gaga because that’s what the little man wants. and at this point i’ve got the volume cranked and am belting “GONNA LOVE YOU WITH MY HANDS TIED!’  all by myself in the car.

i should probably be doing more to spread this around. depending on the rain/ice situation in the morning, little man and i may head to guhl’s and buy up some fabric for zombie monkeys and other homemade gifts for the list and also just because i have a new list of people that i just want to do SOMETHING to make them smile. i think for some monkeys i’ll do stuffing brains, and for tamer versions there can be dangling button eyes. this should be fun. mail is fun.

i got to talk to my sister for like a half hour last night which is a wonderful miracle in itself – 2 hours of regular-people talk at top speed with over-lapping and sentence-finishing equals a half hour for us, and makes me feel very firmly rooted on the same planet as that girl.

eric starts his new job on monday – seriously things are crazy happy good. and i don’t have the cloud with this. there seems no reason to be peering at the sky constantly for the very vague edges of the jar. don’t think it’s close, anywhere close at all.

that’s what happens when spring is close enough to taste. the rain stops hurting and “cold” becomes “invigorating” and all the old skins start to flake, and out we shimmy.

oh, the title. the zombie stompers. i was really happy about certain developments involving a project that uses words like “cover,” paperback,”  “printing” etc. and we can blame my impulses on barbie, whatever, but i thought that a riduculous and fabulous pair of shoes that i would keep forever would be an excellent way to commemorate my name in connection with the word “print.” enter the Limited Edition Glow In the Dark Zombie Stomper … or at least the wait list. someday, someday.

and how better to say goodnight? the cheshire cat is mewing sleepy happy under the house, the rain is drumming, and i have lovely photos of my son(sun) dressed in a tissue paper lady Gaga costume, and a shoe that will one day be mine.

i love the world.

birds

there were nuthatches on the birdfeeder when we woke. that’s the best thing i’ve seen in a long time…

things are coming awake. i’m coming awake. eric is coming awake. adam is… well, poor thing is benefiting from the end of hibernation.

job change on the horizon for mi esposo very soon, his eyes are bluer and he sleeps better as a result. and i sleep better as a result. and adam sleeps better as a result of the bluer eyes – if daddy is happy, adam is happy.

yesterday was library storytime, there was a valentine’s day party. i had my first taste of primal animal protectiveness when i left him in an entirely different room on a rug with 15 strange children. he is large. he is grown up. he attends storygroups. he gets valentines from little girls, in a little paper sack covered with stickers and his name written on it in magic marker. he gets approached by little girls from the group in mcdonald’s. little girls with blond hair dart from unknown places to tell my son hello.

seriously, at one point he didn’t have teeth, i swear.

birthday party on sunday. i forgot to send the invitations, i’ve been frantically soliciting RSVPs via email. looks like i squeaked by again, everyone seems to be coming.  what a fiasco the party will be- i hate this sort of thing. oh well. not about me.  adam will have an awesome time – there’s a “bouncy bean” so it’s bound to be a success.

taken some rejections, they sting less and less. my confidence grows. got a non-answer from a lady whose opinion meant more than the story rejection that came moments after her email, and i was able to read the rejection with a huge smile and a “what the hell do you know?”  attitude.

SPRING IS IN THE AIR, MOTHAFUCKAS!!!!

and on the heels of that horrible language, here are some photos adam took this week on his playskool camera: