Joshilyn Jackson's Blog

Here in Georgia, SPRING has sprung.

You: What are talking about? This is Ju—-

Me: LA LA LA WHAT I CANNOT HEAR YOU.

You: Summer is half ov—

Me: LOOK!!! A SQUIRREL. A SPRING SQUIRREL, SPRINGING. SHUT UP.

So it is spring, and now is that terrible time when we must do THE PURGING OF THE BOOKS. Here is a sample of just one shelf, and they are ALL this bad, and they are ALL over my house.

Books are my own personal tribbles. They sneak off behind the chifferobe in pairs and sneak back with sly, sl...

The end

Mommy,

The plan was, your letter would post in the night and be there for you first thing, Mother’s Day morning. Look, I missed it! This is how you know this letter is really from your daughter. I look at my letter to Jane, and I know you would never ever have forgotten your mother in law’s birthday or posted your own mother’s letter at the last second, scrambling with html to make the images not be weird at 6 am. We are different, you and I. You have a clock in your head and perfect manners...

Dear Jane,

I am a mother. SO. I know: I was not the girl a mother dreams of for her son.

I hope my Southern good manners will stretch to cover my worry should Sam one day bring home a tatty, googley-eyed, egocentric, mouthy object with a questionable sense of humor, especially if she is prone to fits of Irish temper and zoning out into imaginary universes in the middle of conversations. Let’s throw in un-domestic, undisciplined, unreasonable, unthoughtful, and with no clear grounding in sp...

We went for Lydia’s SHINE SHINE SHINE One Read even at Auburn. I did it last year. This is a GREAT event, and Chris and Ashley and the Friends are AWESOME. Look, Ashley always does an amazing book-specific display. Lydia’s lit up and featured a lot of WIGS and WIG HEADS.But while we were in Alabama ANYWAY, we rented a little cottage and stayed to write and soak up images in a nearby TINY town. I got three chapters drafted.

We drove over from Auburn, andthis is my face when I saw it: A movi...

Yesterday, touring Alabama after a morning well-spent writing, we had to stop for gas. I didn’t notice until the needle was in the red, and we were rocketing down a kudzu soaked two lane highway. My windshield was painted yellow from driving through so many plants in full-on orgy mode. A gratuitous number of plants, already, making more more more more more.

Lydia: Look! A gas station!

Me: Yes, but it is Tiger Themed. Creeps me out. I read Prince of Tides too many times. I look at that and I...

This is the actual lake where I am writing my actual book. It’s truly going now. I am finding the voice. It helps that it is 1982 here. Lydia says I am wrong. She says it is feels more pre-1978. Maybe, yeah. This is the American South where I came of age. It still exists.

There are meth houses with rusted metal Confederate flags planted in the yard. A BEWARE OF DOG sign advertises the inevitable pit bull. He is always chained to the porch. He has a pendulous ball sack and an alligator mouth....

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This is not the cabin where I will be murdered by sex cannibals.This is just a picture of a cabin by a lake that I found on Wikimedia Commons. However, it does look an awful lot LIKE the actual cabin where I will be murdered by sex cannibals. More on that in a minute.

First, I want to say that you guys are the best. THE BEST. That’s just a true fact of science.

Let me clarify, on the skunk thing. I am not SAD. I am not drooping. I am ridiculously blessed. My ears are still up and I am very…...

So you know the tale of An A Bunnies, circa 2008. And you know that here in 2015, just minutes before 12 people showed up at my house for dinner, Bagel-Dog discovered a skunk living under the garden shed and took a big blast of Smell right in his face.

Here is what you do not know: Between 2008 and 2010, Bagel enthusiastically caught and held 3 or maybe 4 more An A Bunnies. We would hear Ansley trumpeting out triumphant barkings, and we would run to the yard to see Bagel standing mystified...

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So yesterday I went out for lunch at a Mexican place in a strip mall. The kind with combo plates, you know? Like 1 burrito, 1 enchilada,1 taco with rice and beans, and the sodas come in big red nubbled transluscent plastic cups and they stealth calorie you to death with an endless chip basket. You have been to this place or its clone, I am sure.

The food is inexpensive and good, but NOT innovative or surprising in any way. You know the guacamole will come in a little fried corn basket made...