Joshilyn Jackson's Blog, page 9

Edible Friends

an image of a nice friend I would like to eat with potatoes, from wikimediacommons

I am having mental illness about sourcing. As in, YES, I want to eat the chicken, but I also want to know the chicken was relatively happy up until he was killed and paired with dumplings to make ME relatively happy. And eating him DOES make me happy. Because:

Fluffy carbs + meat = yay.

That’s just math, ya’ll.

I am not having many issues about eating animals. I GET that some people become vegetarians because the...

In Which I Unrepentantly Slaughter Thousands

Well, not personally. But I stood by and watched.

The Murderous Hornet Man came, he saw, he murdered hornets. Look, in this picture, all those hornet are dead, dead, dead. He was very excited about his hornet-murdering product. It was a DUST. It had freeze-y properties. Or something. I was not excited about the dust.

I WAS very excited when I imagined a man in a bee suit thrashing around in my azaleas. I wanted him to wear a Bee Suit. To protect him, OF COURSE. But a little bit of me wanted h...

WARSPS! (Not a typo. I said Warsps. I meant Warsps.)

I am reading this REDDIT post about all the horrid things that some unethical funeral directors will tell you that you MUST do to and for bodies. Expensive, yicky, invasive things, and these sad poor destroyed mourning people pay for it all, thousands of dollars…

Me to Scott: Please don’t bury me at all, when I die. I don’t want a viewing, so I don’t need my mouth wired shut or my lids glued closed. I don’t want to be EMBALMED, even, because, UGH. Cremate my body. THE END.

Him: And do what with...

1 Donkey, 2 Dogs

Prospectors in what was then the "Pikes Peak" region (Public Domain image)

Okay, if you scroll down one entry, you will see that I am looking for the literary source of particular Donkey story I heard in a sermon, and ALSO discuss a CREEEEPYYYYYY quote from a Stephen King Novella surfacing on a local dessert menu.

File under Weird-encidence: Bridgette linked to a Prospector’s donkey story in an interview about gaming. Here is the whole original post, but I quote the relevant bit below.

There’s...

Desperately Seeking Donkey

Donkey

By Joanbanjo CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A long time ago, I heard a sermon, and the preacher told this story:

Once there was a little donkey who was owned by a Trader-Man. The two of them moved across the countryside, farm to farm, tiny town to tiny town. She carried all the goods he had for trading on her back. Seed corn and horse shoes, iron pots and bolts of cloth. It was all bundled into a mountainous pack stacked so high the top of it rose up taller than the Trader-Man’s tal...

I, Sustainable Unicorn

Let’s talk about this bag of Quinoa.

That, oh my beloveds, is not any old bag of Quinoa. It is the bag of Quinoa I bought two months ago, maybe more, when I decided to move from being a person who knows how to pronounce Quinoa to a person who actually OWNS some Quinoa.

It was a small step toward perfection, yes! To go from being aware a thing exists to OWNERSHIP of said thing. That Quinoa was not a grain. It was a statement of INTENT.

I bought it. I kept it. I looked at it and dreamed.

That lad...

Social Media-tors

Lord, I have SUCH crazy-eye in this photo. I look like a cannibal. Or at least a potential cannibal. A lady with cannibalistic aspirations.

“Hi! I am Crazy-Eye Jackson. I love hallucinogens, taxidermied possums, and travel. I hope to one day visit The Sierra Nevada and eat some people. Donner Party Tourism, ya’ll. I want to really live the history.”

Do you know these folks I am flirting with on Facebook in this picture? They are all three practically my neighbors. I like to go by their houses...

Why I Call You Best. Why You Are Beloved.

You guys always come through! I read the comments and emails, taking in all the ways you tweaked and restructured and added and reduced and revised, and I took slices of various of advice from this one and that one, stole a structure from another, cut some you said to cut, fluffed out things you said to fluff out, and got copy that made my pub house very happy.

Here are two of the nineteen TANGIBLE ways all your fresh eyes helped:

1) I realized my own word choices in the original made it sound...

A Dirty Look Behind the Scenes

I’m doing one of the weirder parts of my job today. I’m trying to write a SUMMARY or teaser—essentially jacket copy—for a long short story. It’s 20K words, so it is almost a novella. I wrote it. It is called MY OWN MIRACULOUS. Look to the right—you will see all the places where you can pre-order it. Which you should do, oh my Best Beloveds, immediately, because you like my other work; you will like this. It is very, very MINE, and I am proud of it.

An e-novella is a COOL concept—$1.99 and 20K...

Food in France

Do you remember this book? It was charming and entertaining, but also IRKSOME, because sometimes it fell into an unconsciously entitled tone that assumed SUCH luxurious wealthiness—-it felt a little GOOPy, if you know what I mean. You know GOOP?:

“For the perfect snack after my zen-yogatation-pilates class with my Swedish muscle-elongation-technician, I like to take Irish butter hand-milled by unfreckled virgins and lovingly touch the edge of the pat to the baby-tender rind of a truffle shav...