Head On Fire

28/07/2024

Moments from PART 2! (Portrait Mode)

I want to give a very special shout out to .ancrum & who became fast friends yesterday. Our whole lunch table crew! y’all made me feel like I was sitting at the Cool Kids’ table for the first time in my life.

It was also fun to spot friends’ books in the wild who weren’t there but their presence was felt.

What a way to kick off my first year (pre-pub) as a YA Fantasy author.

Thanks again to & for inviting me. Let’s do it again next year!

28/07/2024

Moments of part 1 (because this app still won’t let me include landscape & portrait photos in the same post).

Yesterday I attended my first ever event AS AN AUTHOR! I moderated the Historically Correct panel, which talked about how real history informs YA fiction & nonfiction.

Most importantly I got to meet SO MANY authors and readers!

Thank you to for hosting and inviting me. Excited to do it again next year when it’s time for Verity Vox and the Curse of Foxfire to fly into readers’ hands!

Also y’all make sure you go support these tagged authors! Their books are brilliant, diverse, inclusive, intersectional, interesting, and MAGICAL!

23/07/2024

Roberta Blevins () left the MLM world in 2017 and spent all of her time since then educating the public on the dangers involved in joining these barely legal pyramid schemes.

She was a key witness in the case against LuLaRoe and was featured in the documentary LuLaRich which showcased how the billion dollar clothing company misled thousands of women.

These days Roberta educates people via her podcast and social media platform titled Life After MLM where she helps people unpack the history, legality, and real world harm of multi-level marketing.

Get the latest episode of Head On Fire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

22/07/2024

Been with her. Been about her. Been for her.

Excited to vote for Kamala Harris this fall.

21/07/2024

Literally my favorite movie.

16/07/2024

Some recent acquisitions. So many of y’all ask where I get clothes to fit. I’m 6’ 6” and literally just finding something to wear that has some level of personality is a whole beast.

I’ve been using StitchFix (with my own money…this isn’t sponsored…this whole order cost me just under $300) for the last couple of years and I’ve found they’re a great place for wardrobe staples. Good basics that I can wear to a dinner out, date night, a public appearance.

And. They. Fit.

Also I swear if I find the last pic on any weird sites I’m gonna be so… 🫠

12/07/2024

People read Young Adult books for all sorts of reasons. The pace. The more clear cut good versus bad. An escape from adult problems.

But that competes with the tension—conscious or unconscious—of wanting to see your lived experience reflected on the page.

And since adults have adult dollars, those desires are impacting the acquisition and publishing of books ostensibly meant for teenagers.

To frame it another way:

If you’re a person that usually reads Science Fiction, I think it’s important to remember that a different genre like Romance has different conventions. It’s important not to insist your predilections on a different genre.

If you are someone who switches back and forth between General Adult Fiction and Young Adult Fiction, it is important to remember that you are making a big switch between age groups. That comes with a change in mindset, outlook, and characterization.

Meet a given book, genre, or category on its own terms and you’ll have a much better experience.

09/07/2024

Clare Brown is a satirist and author of the new audiobook New Nigeria County. Her social media platform is famous for flipping gender and racial stereotypes while both educating and inviting her audience to laugh.

Get ‘Head On Fire’ everywhere you get your podcasts!

06/07/2024

This may be the most aggressively Texan thing I’ve ever posted.

Parent reveal in slide 9.

05/07/2024

Being smug and self-righteous isn’t the vibe.

02/07/2024

Pretty embarrassing that literally threw herself at my doorstep, but her new audiobook New Nigeria County is amazing so it makes up for it.

Still…pretty cringe. Cheugy even.

27/06/2024

10 years ago today.

This was our little wedding cake for our little wedding we slapped together in a matter of days because we didn’t know whether the right to get married would last for a few weeks, a few months, or forever.

Our marriage wasn’t legal in every state. We had to be careful about where/if we traveled.

We kept our marriage license with us anytime we went anywhere just in case.

It was 8 years together before we could get married. It was another year before that marriage was legal in all 50 states.

We have been up. We have been down. But we have fought to be together every step of the way.

25/06/2024

20/06/2024

I finally replaced our old, rusted, broken down patio set.

Now I’ll have the perfect view to watch the sun set on the longest day of the year.

Happy Summer Solstice everyone!

15/06/2024

I got the towel from who is, so far, the only person to ever send me anything to cover up with which means all y’all who make jokes about contributing to a “get this man a shirt” fund are just talk.

13/06/2024

Omg I’m obsessed! Thank you so much!

11/06/2024

Maggie Tokuda-Hall is a children’s and young adult author who writes stories that help kids of all types see themselves on the page as the main character.

She also writes books that help parents and kids have age appropriate conversations about the world we live in.

One of those books, Love In The Library, became the centerpoint for exposing a longtime issue with a major children’s publisher and book distributor about the practice of quietly asking authors to censor themselves in exchange for visibility and placement.

Maggie is also one of the founders of Authors Against Book Bans, an organization I’m proud to be a member of. We had a discussion about the importance of diverse books, the future of publishing, and mermaids.

Get the latest episode of ‘Head On Fire’ everywhere you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube!

09/06/2024

Good morning. I made you a mulberry pie from the tree that grows by my house. Want a piece? I have fresh whipped cream, too.

04/06/2024

I’m not calling out any one account. I’m not calling out any one business.

But if you are specifically celebrating in your store or on your platform, and the visible expression of that celebration looks like a rainbow colored stack of books that don’t include LGBTQ+ voices or stories I encourage you to rethink that.

I also encourage people telling q***r authors/readers that it is somehow wrong to call for representation in advertisements ostensibly about us and for us to interrogate why they feel it is ok to be complicit in this year’s collective societal erasure of q***r people from Pride.

03/06/2024

❤️🧡💛HAPPY PRIDE💚💙💜

In case it hasn’t been made explicitly clear:

Pride is, was, and always will be a protest.

It is also a celebration of our collective existence and call for our liberation.

There can be no justice or equity if that liberation leaves anyone behind.

If we serve the most oppressed of us the rest of us will also be served.

The LGBTQ+ community is and should be for all. We are all genders, gender expressions, colors, religions, backgrounds, disability, classes, and all other intersections of identity.

Where humans are, we are.

And we are magic.

02/06/2024

Y’all know I had to run out and find in the wild to get some of their Pride month marshmallows (and, like, half a dozen other flavors because I’m all the way obsessed with them).

We love putting money in the pockets of q***r owned small businesses.

28/05/2024

I’m a bit terrified of dementia.

I’m scared that one day I will look in the mirror and not know myself. I’m scared that the person I was and the life I lived will slip through both my fingers and the ridges of my brain, and I will simply be an old person who used to be this person. These fears aren’t entirely unfounded. Both of my grandmothers passed away after dealing with dementia or Alzheimer’s, and watching them lose their sense of self as my parents, uncles, and aunts all tried to hold on to their parent was heartbreaking. Memory is a powerful thing. The memories we hold and the memories others hold of us. Losing those in a way breaks that tenuous tie we have to one another. Our shared history. We’ve come up with loads of reasons to explain memory loss in recent years. A lot of people blame social media for destroying it without ever asking the bigger questions. What is memory? How does it work?

Dr. Althea Need Kaminske is a cognitive psychologist who teaches at the Indiana University school of medicine interested in the application of human memory research to educational settings. She also helps run The Learning Scientists, an international group of cognitive psychologists who engage in science communication about the science of learning. Her new book, The Psychology of Memory, came out earlier this month.

Get the latest episode of Head On Fire wherever you get your podcasts or find it on YouTube.

25/05/2024

Progress not perfection. I’m ✨almost✨ summer ready. Quick outdoor workout before the hail comes.

Yes, hail. Joy.

15/05/2024

Changing my last name to Frost.

Sorry, Jean.

Yes this was in stories, but I got my hair done and I look good today so it’s going on the timeline. Deal with it.

14/05/2024

Matthew Keith is a Barbie collector, photographer, and doll expert whose work has been featured in The Los Angeles Time, NewNowNext, and on a social media feed near you.

I sat down with him to talk about the history of Barbie, the commerce of collecting, the art inspired by and made in spite of her, and what these dolls mean to little q***r kids like us.

Get ‘Head On Fire’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

11/05/2024

Come visit Downton Abbey with me.

Some photos from our trip to the Downton exhibition in Skokie, IL for our anniversary last weekend. ?

07/05/2024

Happy pub day !

I can’t wait to take a bite out of but it looks like I have some competition.

07/05/2024

Hate gives bad taste and bad knees apparently.

05/05/2024

A poem for my husband on our 18th anniversary together from my upcoming third collection.

I know a lot of people stick to celebrating their wedding anniversary only, but we celebrate both because when we got together having both of our names on an apartment lease felt like the closest to legal marriage we’d ever see.

It’s also the only anniversary they can’t ever take from us no matter who is in office or what the Supreme Court decides to undo.

We are celebrating by taking a day trip to see the Downton Abbey exhibit and having a nice lunch because you all might think I look young but I am, indeed, Downton Abbey is A Big Part of My Personality years old.

02/05/2024

Either give us a very, VERY good reason or hire him back.

Give him Feige’s chair.

Magneto was right.