Thank you!

Hi Jezzies! My publisher just launched my first novel — a feminist retelling of The Phantom of the Opera! Here’s the trailer!

I actually really loved this film - primarily because the characterizations were so spot-on. Nightcrawler, in particular, was absolutely perfect. Silly, goofy, charming, religious, unintentionally creepy. That was worth the ticket price alone. I am sorry that they cut most of the mall scenes (in the UK anyway) but I…

Until very recently, I practiced no face-magic at all. Now I owe one tube of color pop black lipstick and one tube matte blue.

Alan Cumming did a wonderful job in that film (and sexually awakened teenage-me {I’m weird}) but this depiction is actually much closer to the way that Nightcrawler is in the comics. If you like 70's-80's Claremont-style X-Men then you’ll like this take on the character.

I’m in the UK and the film launched here today. This seems like as good a place as any to talk about it. I will say that they cut a lot of the mall scenes. This is probably because the film is nearly three hours long as it stands, but it doesn’t feel like it at all. The action is well-paced and the characterizations…

I fence with this guy. He’s one of those epeeists who doesnt move very much on the strip but who knows his stuff so well that he can hit an energetic young flea such as myself four times out of five - and I am a GOOD fencer. Every so often, at the club, he brings in a set of (dull) rapiers he made and we all go to…

I am jealous of your tattoo. But then, I sleep with a Bamf doll....

There’s a new retelling of the story coming out in June from a Welsh publisher.

Fantastic. I grew up in a children’s home in the South and this hit me viscerally. What’s that you’re feeling? Oh, nothing much. Just the eternal reverberations of a life without justice.

I saw that movie for the first time when I was seven. I’d just had my tonsils out and I was still tripping balls due to a bad reaction to anesthetics and pain-killers. I SAW the devil climb out of the television and into our living room. I haven’t gotten up the nerve to try watching it again since, but I suspect that…

I’ve survived several knife fights - just one of the added benefits of growing up in an orphanage - and you really do have to accept that your arms are going to get cut up pretty badly but that’s infinitely better than getting hit in the face or the throat. In a knife fight, reach is your friend, and so is distance.…

Well, I taught at a Texas university over five years ago and even then I was threatened by a gun-toting parent who was angry that I was teaching his daughter about ‘abortion’. I didn’t bother explaining that Swift was writing, in a very tounge-in-cheek way, about eating babies which had already been born and so, at…

I love those babies. I worked at a zoo for a while and while they can, indeed, ruin your day they generally like the people who bring the buckets of frozen rats.

Not really. Her hygiene probably wasn’t the best, but if the hair tie had one of those little metal clamps on it holding it together then this is actually pretty likely. Loads of very virulent bacteria are attracted to aluminum, copper and tin. If you live in a humid environment, and the metal scratches your skin,…

Thank you for your internet hugs. I needed that!

Thank you. I’m hoping some good can come from it.

I’m in the UK. It’s half-one in the morning and this is the third night in a row that I have had no sleep. I’m from America and my parents ‘surprised’ spouse-person and I with a flight ‘home’ for Christmas. I am dreading, just absolutely dreading, taking this trip because my childhood was not the best (my parents sent…

And in Galapagos humans evolve by simplifying into seal-like creatures, jettisoning about two-thirds of their brains. My God, that book fucked me up. In a very good way.

This is actually the reason that I started wearing perfume. While I was earning my PhD, I worked summers serving at a Sonic in Texas. In August it rains a lot. The mosquitoes came out in droves. You do not want to wear DEET while sweating profusely; it isn’t supposed to absorb through the skin, but I wound up getting…