Joshilyn Jackson's Blog, page 4

PINTERESTING

Hey, remember when I said I was going to blog more?

I meant COOK MORE.

I meant COOK MORE and also WRITE THE HELL OUT OF MY NOVEL.

I have been getting up at 4 am, 6 days a week, and writing for 8 – 10 hours, and then I can’t look at screens anymore. I read books on paper. I make out with my cat. I go to Ren Fairs. Most of all I COOK THINGS because I decided I like to cook things. (Lie) (I hate to cook things) (I deeply like to EAT THINGS, though, so I am learning to cook all the things I like at...

Syllogistically Speaking

Dogs are bad. Bagel is a dog. BAGEL IS BAD.

SO I was home for MAYBE 24 hours (Thursday and Friday), and NOW I am in Dahlonega, one of the settings in SOMEONE ELSE’S LOVE STORY, for their lit fest. March is crazy with lit fests and travel, so of COURSE March is when the book starts bursting at my seams, making sense in my head and trying to scramble out of my brains and onto a page.

So, imagine FRIDAY. I am in my office with MAYBE 4 hours before I have to leave for the litfest and 19 hours wort...

Cherry Flavored Retreatification

As you can probably guess from the silence + the jug of WEIRD LIQUOR, I have been on writing retreat; That is cherry moonshine, which made me feel very TILTED WORLDy. (That’s a reference to a novel about moonshiners called THE TILTED WORLD. I do NOT mean I drank it until I fell over, JUST TO BE CLEAR.)

The moonshine was FULL of these absolutely MURDEROUS looking cherries. They’d been soaking in what amounted to rubbing alcohol since time immemorial, and when we purchased this mason jar of liv...

Better Left Unsaid

This is from FASTER THAN KUDZU almost exactly ten years ago—-I wrote it in early March, 2004, and the picture is from that time, too.

Me in 2004. This was used on my first two books, gods and Between

Yesterday my friend Sara Gruen had to kill some people. Just a couple. But she liked ‘em.

At the same time, I was watching my people have sex in a bathroom.

Honestly? I might rather have been Sara. My novels always seem to get fraught with sex and violence, but it’s often more fun and usually eas...

Picking Pizzes

This is Oedipus, Maisy’s snowman. I named him Oedipus because he only had eyes for about five minutes. No worries. He did not become eyeless via a huge, regretful gesture after learning that the Snowqueen he just married was actually his mom. Oops, I forgot to warn you: that may have been a classic Greek SPOILER.

No, the moral of this Oedipus tale has little to do with hubris. It’s more like Do not have eyes made out of Cheerios in a yard so fraught with squirrels.

I also named him Oedipus bec...

Belated Romantic Twaddle, The Best/Worst Edition

Here was our worst Valentine’s day: I was a newish Mom. Sam was about to turn one, and he was eating a lot of solid food and weaning himself.

I’d had a year of zen-nursing hormones. While on that heady brain cocktail, I’d felt lush, lovely, generous, and magic. I lolled about, MAKING FOOD WITH MY BOUNTEOUS LOVELINESS. I exulted in my physicalness, my true animal self, looking at Scott all bright-eyed, my baby in my arms, saying, “I REALLY AM A MAMMAL! LOOK! I WAS A MAMMAL THE WHOLE TIME!” in...

Burnyng Bryte

Okay, so this is a cool thing that HC is doing. Debuts are kinda risky. Like, if I see Haven Kimmel (I am waiting. I am standing on tiptoe, peering at the Kimmel horizon, trying to see if anything is preparing to rise.) or Tom Franklin or Laura Lippman or Carolyn Parkhurst or Lee Child has a new book out…no brainer. I buy it and I read it, because their books always interest me and entertain me.

But debuts? You just do not know. And maybe this is why I have a soft spot for them. Last year I r...

Huff, Puff

From March, 2004

Today I am supposed to be working on line edits.

Did you know ELOCUTE is actually not a word? I mean, you can use elocution obviously, but you can’t make it act as a verb. If you put it into SPELL CHECK, spell check says you probably mean EELPOUT. Eel? Pout? Eelpout is a word?!?!? I was so happy to find the word eelpout I should have left it alone. I had to go look it up. It’s a stupid noun. Bah. I SO wanted it to be a VERB. “Veronica eelpouted her way through the last half o...

French, then Scott-ish

I just got a note from a French grad student who is writing a thesis paper on gods in Alabama. Or, as she called it — as ALL the French apparently call it—-The Day I Killed Jim. I went to look up the translator’s name and stumbled across this webpage. It is a French psychology webzine (as far as I can tell), and THE DAY I KILLED JIM is their recommended read.

YAY, but also Wha???? because look how google has translated the site’s menu. Kama Sutra, sure, that’s um, plenty psychological, and ju...

Retroactive Spankings Required

I find it VERY hard to post these retro posts with no commentary. Sometimes—say, NOW—I want apologize for my silly self that was, and SWEAR the 10 years later improved version of me is WISER and less of a DORK. It’s probably not true, though.

Look, here is the first real entry to FTK, from March, 2004:

I have converted to the south beach diet in an evangelical wild-eyed rabid fanatical way. I seriously want to print reams of poorly drawn tracts filled with bad grammar and threats of hell aimed...