Erin Passons's Blog, page 15

Woman Wakes Up In Her Apartment With a Headache...You Won't Believe What Happens Next!

...she takes a Tylenol.

Seriously aren't Buzzfeed headlines the worst? But it's not just Buzzfeed anymore though, is it? All online media seems to be copying this "make it as ambiguous as possible so they'll wanna click" crap. I suppose it's great marketing. I just wish I didn't fall for it so much.

By the way, my memoir, This Sick Little Heart of Mine, is out. It's basically about me losing my shit, destroying my marriage, and catfishing my ex-lover, who, if you read the book, you'd know he isn't worth a crank call, much less creating a fake Facebook account and going through all the shit I had to go through to keep up the deception. My publisher subtitled it, "A Memoir of Love Gone Wrong," which I think isn't really the best way to describe it. Maybe for marketing purposes it is, but it's way more than that. It's more about looking at the world around you and thinking, "Wait a minute. This isn't me. How did I end up here?" and then proceeding to knock it all down in the worst way possible before finding atonement in ways you never saw coming. Forgiving others is a POS transaction. Forgiving yourself is a re-baptism.

My second book, You'll Never Interview In This Town Again, is about the utter fucking ridiculousness a person goes through when interviewing for software jobs in Austin. If you live in Austin and you're in the tech community, you should read it. You should also pass it around to people who don't live in Austin, so they'll be discouraged from moving here. I am self-publishing it, not because I couldn't find a publisher (I didn't try) but because the relevancy of the story makes it important to publish it immediately. Even after a publisher accepts your book, you're still waiting a year or more for it to come out in bookstores. I couldn't wait that long. But YNIITTA is a Kindle-book only because I don't have the benjamins to print hardcopies (But hey, if you're reading this and you're looking to invest, hit me up. I might have a sweet proposition for you.).

If you write a blog that more than ten people visit a day, or a Twitter account that hundreds of non-robots follow, or you're a journalist or wannabe journalist- if you think you have any influence over the human race and their reading decisions, email me and I will send you a copy of my book for free. With the condition, of course, that you promote it or review it, and that you don't stick it on piratebay. BTW follow me on FB if you like, or be a fan of my Goodreads page and I'll love you forever. The only people who follow me on Goodreads are other writers who are always trying to get me to read their shit. It's so annoying. (Yeah, I'm a hypocrite. So what?)

What else? Oh, London and I had a goofy photo shoot the other night. See pictures below. She is so hilarious and beautiful and wonderful and magical. I'm a lucky mom. It's amazing how much I love that child.

Oh yeah, one last thing, can you comment in the Comments section just to let me know that someone is reading this? Even just a "hey" will do. I've been angry at myself lately for not writing more on my blog. But if there's no one listening, then maybe I'll just keep it limited to posting cool quotes I find on Pinterest.

"You'll Never Interview in This Town Again" Out Feb 23!

My Mama Likes My Book

You people need to listen to my Mama.

Go Ahead and Write a Review of TSLHOM

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Take a Little Biddy Piece of My Sick Heart, Baby

....you know you want it, if it makes you feel good!

Why I Hate Football And Other Half-Formulated Thoughts

This blog isn't what I wanted to it to be. I want to write more. Less pictures, more words. But  every minute of my day is spent writing in other places, hence my blog gets short-changed.

I started these little half-developed posts that I can't seem to finish, and I thought I might as well post them since I know I'm never going to finish them. Because I've gotten to the age where I can no longer convince myself that I have any self-discipline whatsoever. So here they are.

Oh btw before you start reading, did you know This Sick Little Heart of Mine is coming out in a few weeks? It's really good. I mean, really fucking good. And I hate everything I've ever written, so if I tell you it's good, trust me, honey. It's good. The photo above is of "Tori" and me. If you've read Sick Little Heart, the name will ring a bell, right? She doesn't really care if you know who she is. She's sort of pissed I changed her name in the book. But you know, legal concerns.

Okay back to the snippets...

Why I Hate FootballMy parents only had sex when my dad's team (the Mississippi State Bulldogs) beat their big rival, Ole Miss in football, which happened very rarely and usually around Thanksgiving. My brother (August 22), sister (August 25), and I (August 23) like to throw out this fact  when someone starts marveling over the close proximity of our birthdays.

It goes without saying that if you've ever been really loony tunes depressed like I have, at one point you're going to sob out the standard whine, "I wish I had never been born!"

And that's a good enough excuse, I think, for why I hate football. Because I'm an immature brat at heart. Because there will always be a sobby, depressed Doc Marten-clad teenager inside of me wishing her parents had just used birth control.

That's not the only reason I hate "grid iron" as my adopted country Australia likes to call it. It's also because my dad became a different person when the sport was on. My gentle, loving, doting paternal figure because a terse, angry, shitty old codger fat-bag whenever MSU lost (and MSU lost alot). My distaste may also have to do with years of lazily stretching out in the den chair reading a book when my equilibrium would suddenly be jerked off-balance by the eruption of loud clapping, cursing, or screaming of "GO TO HELL OLE MISS!"  October 12, 2014About 90 percent of the time, I’m a shitty mom. I’m the standard X-generationer parent sitting on the couch with my iPhone tweeting or looking at cat videos on YouTube while my kids are lounging nearby playing video games on their Wii or iPad or iPhone (the platform varies even when its function doesn't). Every once in a while, I’ll play Mario Kart 8 with them just to silence the voice in my head that says in six years when they’re teenagers, I’ll regret no longer having the chance to hit them with a sniper turtle or knock them off a world with a seemingly infinite number of banana peels. 
This weekend, however, excited over Austin’s climate dropping to an acceptable temperature of 88 degrees (hey, all things are relative), and further encouraged by my boyfriend’s revolutionary observation that the kids should probably experience sunlight now and then, I packed up the car, and London, Kaya, their stepdaddish figure, and I headed out to Marble Falls to experience the wonders of Sweet Berry Farm, the famous Texas attraction where white suburban families go to feel like illegal Mexican farm workers.

The kid-friendly attraction was in Marble Falls, a town about an hour outside of Austin. I knew immediately my antisocial boyfriend would love Marble Falls because there are no real people who live there. “I love this place,” he said as we drove down an empty street. “We should stop be there,” he said, pointing to a store with a “Closed since 1987” sign on the door.

"Sure," I agreed, my foot applying more pressure on the accelerator.

Sweet Berry Farm advertises a plethora of fun activities for children and their adult slaves. Face painting, pumpkin art, hay rides, horseback riding, and a tour through a 200-mile-wide maze made out of bales of hay and parents' lost dreams.

Once we entered the Hay Maze, I decided it would benefit us if we broke up in teams. I announced that London would be my partner. I chose her because I knew I could convince her in a matter of minutes to ditch the maze by enticing her with the nearby petting zoo. My ten-year-old daughter loved baby animals. She was fond of anything that could easily be bossed around.


Technically a PoetI’m attracted to that something new which is coming
Which isn’t your corporate calendar or your
Open working space or parking place where nearby

Hills like ghosts haunt every trace of cement shores
Your blue gun BMW buries with its face.
I’ve seen more hands swipe the screens of productivity
More times than I care to delete. If you’re half the team
Leader you say, maybe try working with your team
One day on remembering their children’s names.

I have a note in my car that says, “Please.”
Please, please, please, please…

I couldn’t bring myself to be specific,
Thinking maybe that something new
Is a road unwritten by code, and the days of churning nerd
Speak into English have found its place in Death Valley.
Maybe that something is a velvet blanket I flag across
My chest with not a drop of Dayquil in the sky. Four legs I run with,
Shouting at the top of my curser I AM A CREATIVE SOUL

I create! I create! I create! I CREATE!

I build images that won’t transpire,
That won’t expire after the next release—I can paint a sunset with just a
Parenthesis and you’ll get it. No need to formulate.
No need to assign a task. Soon I’ll shoot words you’ve only
Dreamed of dreaming and still you’ll know the length
Of my prose. I don’t need your machines or dry cleaning service.
Your over-priced health insurance. This something is new and
It’s gonna shine and I’m gonna tumble into its warm crusade and
Forget the free ice cream you failed to deliver or the lunch break
Baths you mentally take when the quarter ends and
The sky comes crashing down one ugly number at a time.
January Something, 2015I'm writing this very quickly, in the bathroom--the only place I can find peace away from Spongebob Squarepants and the occasional digital groan of a Mario Kart race car revving its engine. My son is home, my daughter is not. If someone were to enter the house not knowing this fact, the background noise would be a dead giveaway.

I noticed many of my friends and acquaintances want this year to be over. I suppose I am an exception in my opinion about this year. 2014 didn't always play fair, but I moved upward for the most part, so I have no complaints. After five years (holy cow, has it really been that long?) of massaging the sharpest of my pain into book form, I can finally take a breath. This baby will be born at the end of January. Also, Doug and I moved to a house with no cockroaches. London and Kaya started horseback riding, and they're really good at it. I was honored to see London perform in a prestigious Austin choir. She was awesome.
Objects in Motion: An Excerpt Her husband took a flight from Austin to Houston the night they found her. There were no connecting flights after five p.m. from to Oklahoma City. Royce didn’t think of that before he left. He approximated the closer he was to her, the better husband he would be, and although the Ramada Inn outside George Bush International was hardly any closer to Oklahoma City than his mansion in Tarrytown, he could still say, when she opened her eyes, “I came as fast as I could.”

I didn’t hear they had found her until a day later. By then, three days had passed since the tornadoes, and we had figured her dead. Her body had been in the eye—her soul, we thought, had scattered with the storm, lifted and ejected into the same air that killed her.

“Did you hear? They found Alicia,” Marcee Walker announced, barging into my office.

I closed my eyes, and thought, of course. They were meant to find her body eventually.

Marcee continued, “Royce is with her now.”

To bring the body home, I thought. “Where did they find her?” I asked, as if it made a bit of difference.

“In a field near the hospital. Pinned under a car,” Marcee said.

My eyes opened, my head tipping down and facing the desk. The contract I’d been reviewing before Marcee came barreling in was now blurred under the onslaught of unshed tears, but I knew the words by heart. Mr. Such and Such wanted custody of his two children. Provisions, alimony, retirement. Different divorces, all the same. But who cared? Alicia was dead.

I knew my chatty co-worker expected a sound bite from me, and I obliged her. “I hope she didn’t suffer,” I chose to say, even though the statement’s generic reverence planted a poison in my blood before I could say it, numbing my tongue with each standard-issue word.

“I’d imagine she did,” Marcee said. A heavy sigh escaped the brunette’s lips. She must have been over the moon, knowing she’d bearer of bad news. “I can’t last three hours without eating, much less three days,” she confided. Judging by the saddlebags over her black pants, I didn't doubt her. She continued, “There are worse fates, I suppose. Right? I mean, she could be dead.”

 I looked up. “She’s alive?”
 

Pre-Order This Sick Little Heart of Mine!

It's out, people...or at least, it's almost out. Click here and pre-order what critics are calling the best book of the new year!

The Oxford Comma is Important

The Upside of Anger

I love this quote. It was stuck to me while I was writing TSLHOM. It's sort of become its banner, the mantra of the pages found underneath.

Amen, Brother