The Bloggess

I still don’t know what I’m doing with my art substack but I am very much enjoying it and somehow I have 9.9k subscribers, which is both shocking and weird. I also don’t know how you’re supposed to edit the preview image each week and that is why I think I just emailed 9.9k people what looks like a drawing of my cat’s butthole:

*sigh*

This is what you’re missing if you’re not subscribed. Also, I really need 100 more people to subscribe or 900 to unsubscribe because 9.9k feels like a weird number.

It’s totally free to subscribe but if you’re a paid subscriber you get access to extra posts and possibly weird gifts in the mail from me. Or if you don’t want to subscribe at all because you don’t want an email every week from me (no judgement, friend, especially after I just admitted to maybe sending cat buttholes) you can just go to the site and click on “”Let me see it first” at the bottom and you can see the full body drawing of my cat and not some weird p0rn preview that, again, I cannot apologize enough for.

We started Nowhere Bookshop at the end of 2019 when we sold our first book through the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club which we fulfilled in Elizabeth’s garage (with the help of spouses, kids and even our parents). By March of 2020 we were finally ready to open the actual remodeled (as remodeled as we could afford, at least) shop, which is exactly when covid hit and we were sure we’d go out of business. But our book club saved us (and is still saving us each month, please join!) and slowly the community realized we were there and would call us for books which we’d ring up and then leave outside and wave at people when they picked them up. It was a weird fucking time.

And then we were allowed to open but we wanted to protect our team and customers so we didn’t actually open to the public until July of 2021…three years ago today.

Any other time we’d have called it a GRAND OPENING and asked everyone to come but we were still wary of crowds so instead we held a series of what we called “Bland openings” designed to have people come visit but not all at once…which is exactly the opposite of how you’re supposed to do business.

We are a progressive, indie bookshop in Texas that closed its doors before it ever opened them and did everything the wrong way in a business sense, but the right way according to our hearts. And against all odds and with the incredible support of our community we’re somehow still here.

We have book club members all over the world. We have celebrity customers who drop by that I can’t name because we want to protect their privacy. We have local readers who visit so much that our baristas know their drinks and our booksellers immediately start gossiping with them about whatever book they last sold them. At least twice a month I’m surprised by someone in tears out of gratitude for having safe and lovely space that feels like home. I get to spend time with an amazing team and meet incredible authors and help grow the world in a way that encourages kindness and empathy and acceptance and growth. And it’s all because of you.

So to celebrate, I’m giving away 10 signed copies of my books! Just leave me a comment saying which book you want (Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Furiously Happy, You Are Here or Broken) and I’ll email you for your address if you win.

Thank you again for your help…whether you’re a member of one of our clubs, or you’ve visited the store, or shopped online, or shared it online, or even just left a kind comment…you helped us stay.

Here’s to the next three years.

It’s hard for me to type this because this weekend I took out my frustration on my garden (“garden” being a very generous word for my overgrown backyard) and vigorously ripped out weeds, tree roots and also the better part of two fingernails. Turns out that you’re supposed to use gloves. 

I pulled out the weeds that don’t flower and kept those that do and I know that’s not the way you’re supposed to do it, but I can’t stop myself.

I leave the dandelions. I protect the morning glories.  I ignore the spreading daisies, the buttercups, and the creeping bindweed. I know they will crowd out the asters. I know they wrap tightly around the yellow bells and if given the chance they will strangle the wild roses. But I can’t seem to judge one more worthy of thriving than the other.

I have made my own bed and it is filled with cheerful madness, and pretty, deadly things, and a ticking time-bomb of future floral battles, and angry looks from neighbors and I can’t seem to help myself.

I don’t know if this is something to be proud of, or a symptom of my mental illness…but it’s a very colorful one, at least. The buds that sprout in the cracks of the foundation…the flowers that bloom in spite of it all. They are tenacious and unrelenting in a world that wants them gone…and how can that not be something to learn from?

We should all be that insistent.

We should all be that unapologetically glorious.

In the last few years my parents have finally figured out texting, which is wonderful but also often baffling because it often lacks the context you might get from a normal conversation.

Example:

(I apologize if you are not familiar with a “gut pile” or why anyone would point a trail camera at one but in my father’s defense, we live in Texas. ALSO, DID YOU KNOW THERE ARE BEARS IN TEXAS? That’s a weird aside but someone just saw one not far from where I live and I had no idea we had bears. Wtf.)

Anyway, the text I got from my dad this weekend was no exception:

And yes, some might think an unexpected photograph of an old coffin would be a threat but I guess I sort of assumed that he was buying his coffin early at an estate sale because that seems like something he would do, but apparently he thought that I might want it, which is mortifying because what a weird thing to think about your kid and also because it’s exactly the kind of thing I would buy. He texted that I might not want it because he was warned that it was haunted, but that on the upside it’s solid mahogany and was just $350 was “only slightly-used one time and only during the daytime.” And while I admit that $350 is a pretty good price and “haunted” isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker for me, I was a little unsettled by the “only used once in the daylight” because…temperamental vampire? Zombies? Rehearsal resurrection?

And even more unsettling was his next texts:

“I fit in it.”

So I told Victor that my dad was fit-checking slightly-used coffins and he just stared at me and I was like, “Insane, right? But actually it’s a really good price considering it’s mahoga-” and then Victor noped right out of the room before I even finished my sentence and then Hailey was like, “What is wrong with you?” so I guess being thrifty skips a generation.

PS. He sent me another one showing me the inside but why are there scratches on the inside of the lid? I have more questions.

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Some of my favorite books of the year are coming out this month and you should definitely pick them up. The first is my pick for the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club and it’s Meg Shaffer’s The Lost Story.

Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, this wild and wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes—just in case.

Want a taste?

As boys, best friends Jeremy and Rafe went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived.

Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed missing persons’ investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.

Or if horror is more your style, check out my pick for the Nightmares from Nowhere Book Club, I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones (one of my favorite horror authors).

This is one of the most anticipated books of the summer for good reason and I’m thrilled to tell you that we’ll be hosting Stephen on July 18th at Nowhere! If you’re a member of the Nightmares bookclub check the email I sent you a few days ago to reserve an early free ticket to the event. If you’re not a member we opened up ticket sales a few minutes ago ( ticket price = the price of the book which you’ll get when you arrive) today and I suspect they’ll go fast.

Need more than one book to get you through the month? I got ya. Here are a few July books I recommend:

Nicked by M. T. Anderson –  Based on a bizarre but true quest to steal the mystical corpse of a long-dead saint, Nicked is a fantastical, genre-defying historical romp.

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle –  A nuanced and smart horror novel by one of my favorite weirdo authors.  A heart-pounding story about what it takes to succeed in a world that wants you dead.

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio – A year in the life of Catalina, a smart but vulnerable student at an elite college forced to navigate the world as one of the undocumented. 

Colored Television by Danzy Senna – A suspenseful dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity-industrial complex.

We currently have spots available in the Fantastic Strangelings and Nightmares from Nowhere book clubs if you want join the club. It literally keeps our shop in business and we can’t thank you enough. Come read with us, friend.