Let’s give the boy a hand. (I’m so sorry.)

in Random Crap

me: Dude. LOOK AT THIS.

Victor: What the fuck.

me: I was opening my mail and two totally different people sent me random stuff that made them think of me.

Victor: You’ve got weird readers.

me: I’VE GOT AMAZING READERS. But how weird is it that two random people sent two random gifts and they just so happen to fit together perfectly?

Victor: That’s not really the weirdest thing about this, but okay.

me: I’m gonna try it out on the cats.

Victor: Ew.

me: Not the handbook. The gloves.

Victor: Still confused.

me: They can wear them. Like tiny mad scientists with opposable thumbs!

Victor: Got it. Have fun bleeding to death.

****

hunter s tomcat wearing gloves like a badass
Once again, Victor is on the wrong side of history. Get this cat a lab coat, y’all. He’s got science to do.

Happy independent bookstore day!

in Random Crap

I was hoping that my first Independent Bookstore Day as an actual Independent Bookstore owner would be filled with tons of happy readers and me tiptoeing through Nowhere Bookshop, handing out stickers and recommending books and pouring drinks at the bar while Hailey does story time in the kids section while dressed in full Nimona regalia.

Instead today I’m home creating a display for the bookshop. We are open, but we’ve still never opened our doors. Our amazing book sellers still stock the shelves and answer the phones and recommend books and run outside in their masks to leave lovely bags of books on outdoor tables as curbside customers pull up. We ship books all over and make zoom meetings with authors and pick new and amazing books for the book club and then once a week we meet on zoom ourselves to celebrate the victories and talk about books and keep positive and excited.

We are so very lucky and grateful in that your support is keeping us running in spite of the pandemic. A lot of local bookstores are struggling. Some won’t come out of this and the book deserts may widen. So if you can today, find your local indie book shop and give them a little love. And if you can’t right now, that’s okay too. Maybe drop them a line telling them you care or send them an email thanking them for a book they recommended that you love. It makes a difference.

You can visit IndieBookstoreDay for lots of cool virtual events today, and if you’re looking for new book suggestions allow me be your virtual bookseller and recommend a few of my favorites.

Happy Independent Bookstore Day from everyone here at Nowhere…no matter how strange it may look this year.

Mural by Jennifer Khoshbin and Nanako Pastol

Hello, strangelings!

in Random Crap

If you’re a member of the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club (click here to join up if you aren’t) then you’ve already received this month’s book, Crossings by Alex Landragin and you should check your email because I’m doing a zoom with Alex next week and you’re invited. (And if you’re an honorary member or can’t make it we’ll post the video on the Nowhere youtube channel afterward.)

I’m opening up comments for discussion in case you prefer not to use the Fantastic Strangelings Facebook page but – as always – remember that there are no deadlines or rules so if you want to just lurk or come back in the future if you haven’t read it yet that is totally okay. The discussion posts stay open so you can pop in anytime you please.

AND…today I’m announcing September’s book, The Bone Shard Daughter, by Andrea Stewart.

A quick summary:

Introducing a major new voice in epic fantasy: in an empire controlled by bone shard magic, Lin, the former heir to the emperor, will fight to reclaim her magic and her place on the throne.

The emperor’s reign has lasted for decades, his mastery of bone shard magic powering the animal-like constructs that maintain law and order. But now his rule is failing, and revolution is sweeping across the Empire’s many islands.

Lin is the emperor’s daughter and spends her days trapped in a palace of locked doors and dark secrets. When her father refuses to recognise her as heir to the throne, she vows to prove her worth by mastering the forbidden art of bone shard magic.

Yet such power carries a great cost, and when the revolution reaches the gates of the palace, Lin must decide how far she is willing to go to claim her birthright – and save her people.

Y’all, I read this whole book in one day and it is so good. I fell so in love with one character that I threatened to burn the whole house down if anything happened to them. (Victor was concerned but no more than normal, really.) It is the first book in a trilogy, and usually I don’t read those until the whole series is out because I’m too impatient for delayed gratification but this book totally stands alone with a very satisfying end.

And I alway offer a bonus book suggestion each month for those of you who need much more than one book a month so for September let me recommend Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh (of Hyperbole and a Half). She’s back! I laughed and cried. (Small content warning: if you have suicidal ideation – me too, friend – then just make sure you’re in a good place when you read it.)

Happy reading!

PS. As alway, thank you for supporting Nowhere Bookshop. You are literally keeping us in business and we are so grateful. We still don’t have our doors open the public because we want to keep you and our team safe but we do have curbside pick-up and we ship all over.

I’m having a long-distance love affair with someone in your house.

in Random Crap

This morning I woke up with a tiny depression hangover so I tweeted that I was feeling a little out-of-sorts and to please send pictures of your pets and within minutes I was staring at thousands of sweet furry and feathered and scaly faces and then twitter was like, “You’re receiving a lot of notifications. Would you like to add a filter to limit responses?” and I was like, “STOP INTERFERING, TWITTER. I NEED THESE FACES” and then I looked at every single one and imagined scritching their foreheads and rubbing their bellies and whispering, “Who is a good one? It’s you. It’s so you” and then I thought that it’s sort of amazing that even when I’m feeling lonely or sad I’m still not alone and how wonderful it is that you’re okay with me having a long-distance love affair with your pets.

That was a very long run-on sentence but I can’t help it and if you need a pick-me-up I suggest going to see all the amazing responses to my tweet because it will make you smile in spite of yourself.

Also, I drew you something.

(Click to embiggen)

Technically this is just a small part of a much bigger piece that’s in You Are Here but it’s always nice to break the complicated ones up and experiment with different colors so feel free to print and color or use it as a fire-starter as needed. (My drawings always have words in them but this section doesn’t have text. The whole thing was a large collection of things I dreamed of over a week so the text is “This is the part where I write something clever, but my head is broken…so instead I drew you my dreams.”)

Thank you for being there for me. You keep me sane. Or at least close enough.

BROKEN (in the best possible way)

in Random Crap

So.

Big announcement.

I’ve been working for I-don’t-even-know-how-many-years on my next book because I wanted it to be perfect and finally it’s done. It has a title. It has a pub date. And? It has a cover.

Wanna see?

It’s about not just dealing with, but celebrating the strange and broken parts of our selves.

It won’t come out until next year but you can preorder it right here.

I hope you love it.

More to come…

You need a smile. And cocktail, probably. I can help with one of these things.

in Random Crap

Okay, yesterday I told you about that weird thing in my backyard that is humping and stealing my cantelopes and a bunch of you were like, “NUTRIA!” and that’s a good answer but I know nutrias and that’s not one. But then someone else (Didi) was like, “Sounds like a white-nosed coatimundi” and I looked it up and I think that is totally what it is. Most of them are in South Texas though, which makes me think that maybe this is an escaped pet and now I can’t chase it off because it’s hungry and apparently they fucking love melons. So now I think I’m part owner of an outdoor coatimundi or some sort of mutant squirrel that’s just having me on so I keep growing cantaloupes solely for his humping pleasure.

In other news, I’m still relying on instagram to make me smile on hard days and maybe you are too so today I’m sharing a few of my favorite posts of the week:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDd6cbHBhjU/
View this post on Instagram

Follow @saltihoe for more!!

A post shared by Follow me already 🙄 (@saltihoe) on

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDooWeSHm7w/

And now….time for the weekly wrap-up:

********

Shit I made in my shop (Named “EIGHT POUNDS OF UNCUT COCAINE” so that your credit card bill will be more interesting.):

Shit-you-may-or-may-not-want-to-see:

This week’s wrap-up is brought to you by Dylan Brody, who I super love in real life. Dylan wrote a book called Relatively Painless and I don’t have to describe it to you because I already blurbed it: “My only complaint is that I wanted more, which is a good complaint to have. It made me laugh and cry and then laugh again and then pee and then cry. Lots of fluids lost. But in a good way. A book to make you appreciate the tragically funny and beautiful horror of family.” Then the book was sold, then the publisher went out of business and it came back and then it got picked up and promised to a lot of people, but then there was a thing and a slowdown and a pandemic and some civil unrest in the city where the press was which meant that now the book won’t be out until December 1st and the publisher feels a bit bad about that, so if you pre-order Relatively Painless right here now, you’ll get a PDF of the whole thing now and then a signed one when it’s ready.  Plus, you can tell the publisher what you want Dylan to write in the book before they send it and he might write what you request. For real, you should read it. Click here. y’all.

MY BOOKS:


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Flourish in Progress: (T)hug Life: Part hood. Part good.

The Mack Files: Digesting life in bite-sized pieces through the lens of clichés, quotes & “truisms”.  Often irreverent, always honest.

Barking at the Moon: If your dog is your furry child, you will laugh out loud at Tracy Beckerman’s book about her family & a one-dog wrecking ball named Riley.

Wonder and Joy for the Wired and Tired: Feeling wired, tired, and stretched too thin? You’re not alone. Re-ignite your sense of childlike wonder, joy, and well-being with this enlightening and entertaining book by Dr. Pam Stephens Lehenbauer, well-being thought leader and author of the blog, Mother Nature’s Apprentice.

Stuff and Thangs from Xanaru: A mostly funny stuff about my quest for happiness through stories, art, friendship, Great Danes, one naked weirdo alien cat and indiscriminate swearing.

How the Hell Did I Not Know That?: Humorist Lucie Frost shares daily Instagram reels with learnings of the day—words, music, whatever–with plenty of laughs and all the curse words.

Beautiful Writers book: Writers! This coming-of-career memoir (w/ the BEST advice from celeb authors, real shit you haven’t heard) is life. A page-turning beach read doubling as how-to. #Magic

His Lies Did Not Erase Me: A collection of dark poetry by Stacie Ann Leininger

Vanilla Hour: A Love Story Across Time by Neer Ya is a literary novel spanning decades and cities, from Delhi to Tokyo to Goa, that follows Dr. Nandini Yadav, a geochemist and single mother, as a school reunion forces her to finally confront the buried secrets of a past love, trauma, and the man whose shadow lingers in her daughter’s smile.

Sunday Comics With Cooper and Fitz: A light-hearted comic strip about two sibling felines and their life with their adopted family: their relationship is complicated but hilarious, and navigating life with humans adds to the fun.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh: SO GOOD.