Paper Fruit

Two announcements re: A Pretty Mouth, my forthcoming debut!

First: I have an uncorrected advance .pdf and will send it out to interested reviewers. It would be super-cool to get some reviews/buzz going for this project, on Amazon (when the page goes up/book comes out, obvs) and around the Webs, so if you like, I dunno, Jeeves stories, Restoration class drama, Re-Animator, sword and sorcery, The Secret History, fops, or Victorian pornography, please consider reviewing the book!

Second: I’m super-happy to report that there’s already some amazing buzz going on around my little project, and my editor, Cameron, has compiled some a list of some of the blurbs on the LFP site. So far, Laird Barron, John Langan, Nick Mamatas, W.H. Pugmire, Nathan Long, Stephen Graham Jones, and several others have had some very kind things to say about A Pretty Mouth. A more complete list can be found via the link above, but here are some quick, fabulous, awesome soundbites:

“A Pretty Mouth is a fine and stylish collection that pays homage to the tradition of the weird while blazing its own sinister mark. Tanzer’s debut is as sharp and polished as any I’ve seen.”  —LAIRD BARRON, author of The Croning

“This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: when Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.” —STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES, author of Zombie Bake-Off

Tanzer is an ambitious writer, and she is talented enough for her ambition to matter.” —JOHN LANGAN, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies

This last weekend Jesse, Raechel, John and I all ran the Colorado Warrior Dash together! Warrior Dash is one of those obstacle-races that are becoming more and more popular (others include the Rugged Maniac, the Spartan Dash, the Tough Mudder, etc.), and those who sign up run and then climb over/under various obstacles, high-step through tires, leap over fire, and various other feats of strength and agility.

The aforementioned people are all very awesome/tolerant, and thus I managed to convince everyone to run the race as ponies from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I ran as my favorite pony, Rainbow Dash (I am nearly 31 and just typed that, YES I KNOW OK LEAVE ME ALONE), and Jesse went as his favorite pony, Pinkie Pie. John and Raechel, who aren’t, er, quite as enthusiastic about the show were, respectively, assigned Applejack and Twilight Sparkle.

I like to sew, sort of, so I took care of the sewing/customizing of everyone’s outfits, and I must say I am really proud of how they turned out out:

Check it out! Big ups to Raech for my and Jesse’s hair—she did all the bleaching and coloring, including the painstaking process that produced my spectacular rainbow mohawk. Now for some closer-ups. First, AJ and Pinkie:

Dash and Sparkle:

So! Yeah!

The race did get a bit muddy at the end (if you count having to swim through a pit of mud, under barbed wire, “a bit muddy”) but thankfully there were showers and we got the worst of it off before changing into warm dry clothes. The aftermath, drying on the hood of my car, is pretty epic:

Overall, Warrior Dash was a lot of fun. There was some unfortunate bottlenecking at times (the culvert crawl in particular was a nightmare; I think we were delayed 10 minutes to do what turned out to be the most un-fun obstacle in the entire race) and I felt some of the challenges were a bit repetitious. Even so, I had a great time and I’m glad I did it. I’m excited about checking out other obstacle races in the future, too—if I can overcome the recent flare-up in my ongoing knee issue. Boo to that, but yay to fun stuff (even if it induces said flare-ups …).

I’ve been sitting on this for a while, as a few elements were finalized—and some stuff may still change, of course—but I could not be happier about this:

Click to enlarge and bring up all the cool little details!

So, yeah. I love my publishing company! Many thanks to my editor Cameron Pierce and my cover designer Matthew Revert. Seriously, I don’t know if I could love this any more!

Oh man. October seems frighteningly close and yet so far away…

Dad passed away. I got there in time to say goodbye, and help Hospice as much as I could, and be there for my mom, who handled things like a champ … but that’s about it. He went into a coma the day after I arrived, and did not come out of it again.

His last conversation was with my mom, and I’m glad they were able to say a few last things to one another. And I’m glad he went peacefully in the end. He deserved it, after fighting an unwinnable battle for 30 months.

I miss him like hell. It was strange having so many family friends gathered together without Dad there. I don’t know if I’d ever felt an absence so keenly before. He was always so very present during gatherings like that, keeping people on schedule, teasing everyone and taking it in equal measure, laughing, telling stories, cooking amazing food, and handling any and all situations that required knowledge of which roads to drive on, what technology to use, or which cars to take. And he loved it. One of the speakers at his service remarked upon how much Dad enjoyed everything about life, citing as an example his enthusiasm over even the little things, like buying a new kind of light bulb. It’s so true, and it made me smile—as did hearing his former co-workers at the Tampa Courthouse giggling over my dad’s love of his pedometer (“I’ve gotten in 12,000 steps today!”) and always eating the same sandwich for lunch every day (“It’s good. Why change?). And I know Dad would have wanted us to be smiling. He loved to laugh, and to make people laugh, too.

I think it always surprised him to see how much he was loved by so many different kinds of people. Dad always thought of himself as being a gruff, matter-of-fact kind of person, the guy you’d go to when you wanted to hear how it really was. And we who loved him saw him as that, yes, but also as an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, a photographer, a brilliant financial and legal mind, a great appreciator of the natural world, a husband and a father, a mentor, and a friend. And that doesn’t even begin to cover it. He was the definition of unique. I loved him so much, and still do, and always will.