Launched by Little Ghosts

Drink your protein shakes and get your spooky on.

I HAVE BEEN LAUNCHED. 🚀👨‍🎤My very first authorly event! Little Ghosts welcomed me and made me warm drinks and listened to me rant about Things, and it was so great for at least one of us (me).

I wish I could have stayed in Toronto longer, but alas. The reading is done, the Q's A'd, and the carpal tunnel triggered.

I ended up being way more terrified than I'd expected to be, which surprised me; I'm usually pretty comfortable with public speaking. But then I realized that 1. I hadn't done it since 2018, and 2. that had been before 🏳️‍⚧️coming out. So, I had to do a lot of extra vocal coordination and gender calculus in addition to whipping up cogent answers. I was… cogent-adjacent. Naturally, I thought of much better answers to people's questions on the way home. And they were great questions, which made it all so much more tragical. Sorry. I am very bad at math. Future-me may post An Blog with less panic-stricken responses to said great questions.

Apart from the more pragmatic reasons for being more terrified, I just cared about this much more. Not that I didn't care about teaching or my own research. But there's a cozy rift between me and the material then. Even if it was my interpretation of something, it doesn't feel mine in the way Hereafter Lies does.

I am so fucking grateful my first event was at Little Ghosts. Just look! LOOK at that most precious little chalk scythe on the sign!?! The people were fantastic. They're still fantastic, actually, so you should probably stop in for a delightful beverage and a spooky book about it, maybe. You can get a signed copy of Hereafter Lies in their shop, corporeal or otherwise.

AND They've got a lot of very cool looking books out now from their own press. I'm excited for my 👁️🧠👁️ to heal enough to let me read the flip book I picked up: ROOTS RUN DEEP by J. Krawczyk and THE DILLO by Max Booth III. But yeah! Deeply twisted, very supportive, wicked cool bunch of folks. Chris and Phi are the real MVGs. 

I am so much wicked-cooler by proxy now.

During Event, a Real-life™️ person (Natalie, who I’m so sure is not supremely put off by this paragraph) wandered in on a carpet of sparkles and readerly excellence, heard my awkward man-boy reading, and bought a copy of Hereafter Lies about it #NotAllHeroesWearCapes.

When it was all done, I healed my fried vocal cords with bún riêu. Those noods were so good, it was...😎 únriêul. 🍅🦀🍜 (My sincerest apologies to Vietnam. That's just the perill-a dealing with a dad joke who wished upon a hormonal star and turned into a real boy. Oh, BROTHer. There I go again. 😘)

Thanks for keeping the world Queer and horrific, Little G. You shall haunt my heart forever. 🩵👻🩷

Read in Peace,

Elijah

P.S. That perilla pun lands much better when spoken, BTW. (Unlike the rest of me, which splats to the savannah of real-world interaction like a newborn giraffe.)

P.P.S. Bc the elision between "perilla" and "of," ya know? Like, peril of....perillav....whatever.

P.P.P.S. My parrot laughed.