What Smack Said #26
Goodbye September, hellooooo spooky season! Plus some other stuff.
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Welcome to spooky season! Halloween is my favorite holiday and I've already started decorating a bit. (Not enough to pull stuff down from the attic, but that's for tomorrow.) I'll have some pictures in the next newsletter.
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There are a couple of updates regarding my social media habits, and the related habits of the Infinite TBR podcast I co-host, that are worth mentioning. I'm off 98% off Twitter, so that's not a good place to try to contact me anymore. Infinite TBR is also off Twitter and can be found on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/infinitetbrpodcast/. My personal account is here: https://www.instagram.com/what_smacksaid/. Anything not sent from either of those two accounts is
not me.
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I'm also on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/whatsmacksaid.bsky.social. The site is still in beta, and it looks and feels a lot like Twitter before the Nazis took over. And if you're interested in joining, you can reply to this email and I'll send you an invite code to join.
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I've continued painting book edges, most of which you can see on the Infinite TBR Instagram page. A few people have mentioned selling my efforts, but for now I'm just doing them for fun or for friends. If you want one, reach out! You can reply to any of these newsletters, and I only ask for the price of shipping it to you via media mail when I'm done.
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The above pics are (left) The Green Bone Saga, plus a bonus short story collection called
Jade Shards, by Fonda Lee. These are the first books I've painted that I didn't own and it was
super stressful, but I think I did a good job. The picture on the right is Holly Black's
The Stolen Heir.
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Last weekend, a local debut author named Leanne Shwartz had an event at the independent bookstore Mysterious Galaxy—with lots of pins, stickers, and other swag—and I painted her book before going to get it signed. Her book is a YA fantasy called
A Prayer for Vengeance, with an angry female lead who was turned to stone, and a gentle autistic artist who breaks her curse. I barely finished painting the book before her event, but I'm really pleased with out it turned out.
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I read a lot of weird stuff this month, but my favorite was a library book called
Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America's Cemetraries by Greg Melville. Melville has lived all over the U.S. and loves cemeteries the way I love books. He picks out sixteen of them with historical and/or philosophical and/or artistic value from colonial Jamestown to modern southern Californian cemeteries like Forest Lawn Cemetery, where celebrities like Lucille
Ball, Michael Jackson, and Walt Disney are buried.
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Melville examines cemeteries through a historical lens, yes, but he also contextualizes everything the way an archaeologist would. And he doesn't give anyone a pass for bad behavior: the original Mayflower colonists looted the graves of indigenous Wampanoag people because they were buried with grain and other food; some boot hill graveyards from days of the Wild West included Chinese immigrants, but not the 1,200 who died while building the transcontinental railroad; and to this day, the Black descendents of Thomas Jefferson are not allowed to be buried in the same graveyard as his white descendents. And that's just a tiny sampling.
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Alongside the parts of American history that never made it into any classroom I was part of, the whole books is full of absolutely fascinating tidbits. For example, prior to the American Civil War, most people died at home and were displayed at home during wakes or memorial services. But when viewings were shifted to funeral parlours, that room was rebranded as the "living room." Who knew??
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This has been What Smack Said, a monthly newsletter about books, fiction writing, and everything else. If you don't want to receive these emails, please use the link below to unsubscribe from this list. |
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