In August we are focusing on heroines. Women sometimes have a harder time finding role models in pop culture. Sure there are some great ones, but they are not as prevalent as male superheroes. Luckily we have people like Joss Whedon who know that girls need strong women to look up to and the with amazing films like Wonder Woman coming out on top, we are making great progress. So this month, we have been focusing on the strong women we admire. Since Courtney makes her clothes based on the heroes she admires much of the time, we discussed her motivations.
What defines a hero to you?
A true hero comes in dark when no one is looking and does what needs to be done.
Who is your favorite heroine and why?
My favorite heroine is Batgirl, Barbara Gordon. She is my favorite because she has no superpowers and must rely on her strength and wit to help her do the right thing. She is also flawed and still strives to do the right thing in spite of those flaws.
What inspires you about heroines?
Heroines show me that I do have the power to change the world, they are the people that I root for, that I try to be when I can in my everyday life.
How do you try and implement that in your designs?
I try and pull color schemes or general design shapes into the clothes I design. I like my clothes to be representative of the characters their designed after, but have it not be super obvious. My Batgirl dress is one of my favorite examples because the back was designed to be like a cape without being an obvious cape. That dress lends me the strength of Batgirl when I feel like I need it the most.
What future heroines do you have plans to create clothing around?
I think about a lot of different heroines when I design and I keep coming back to the ladies of Star Wars; Padme’s clothes are gorgeous and Princess Leia is such an iconic figure. I would really like to have a couple different designs from the both of them at some point. Gwen Poole is another character I keep coming back to because I’d really like to reclaim the color pink and show that you can be a total bad ass and wear pink.
If you want to be a heroine, or just dress like one, head over to the Etsy shop and check out the awesome deal on the fandom inspired tutus. Already marked down 25% for the month of August.
You can find Fandomly Fashionable on Facebook and Etsy.
I met Sarah a couple years ago at Geek Girl Con. My friend Abby was vending there and I was attending the con to help her and Sarah with their tables and check out the convention for the first time. Abby had told me a lot of great things about Sarah, all of which turned out to be true. Nerdy jewelry that is classy and unique is really hard to find. I think I only had a couple Supernatural necklaces before I met Sarah. Now on any given day, I’m usually wearing three of her pieces because they’re subtle and it’s the aesthetic I prefer. I used to wear other earrings, now you pretty much have to pry me out of my lightsaber earrings. I remember attempting to help her set up her table at Geek Girl Con that year. Every design had a name and I thought I kinda knew classic Nintendo, I do not. Sarah was incredibly patient and explained where it all went. One of the things I appreciate about her, is her genuine love for the things she makes. While I do not share her love of video games, I respect the hell out of it. She is one of my favorite people and she makes amazing jewelry, which is why I buy it and tell people all about it. I asked this talented lady some questions, here’s what she had to say:
C: When did you start making jewelry?
S: My aunt makes fine jewelry and whenever she came to visit us she would teach me how to make earrings, necklaces, and bracelets from scrap materials she had with her. That was when I moved to Orlando, so it would be about 13 years ago.
C: What was your inspiration behind starting your business?
S: A very good gamer friend of mine had started making pixel art with perler beads. I had never seen anything like it before and wished there was a way to make them smaller so I could have earrings of all my favorite pixelated video game characters. I bought some black, white, and seed beads at Michael’s and began experimenting with wire. The wire characters came out horrible haha! I still have them and all my early rejected creations. I remember Google searching to see if there was a way to securely connect beads together with string and that’s how I found near weaving.
C: What’s your favorite fandom?
S: I have so many favorite fandoms! I suppose if I had to choose one it would have to be one I spent the most time with and that would be the Elder Scrolls series. I beat Morrowind 3 times with 3 different characters with hundreds of hours on each one! I don’t even think I played WOW that much haha! I just loved the completely open world! I explored every inch of that map with all my characters. It was so bad that if something crappy happened in real life I would think, “that’s ok, I’ll just restart from my last save.. Oh wait..”.
C: What’s your favorite piece of jewelry that you’ve ever made?
S: I have favorite characters that I make into jewelry, but a piece of jewelry I am most proud of was my large Majora’s Mask! It was such a complicated piece with all those different shades of colors and with it’s funky shape. I was so happy with it once it was done.
C: Do you have a favorite convention you like to attend as a vendor?
S: My favorite conventions to attend as a vendor are always the smaller ones like Geek Girl Con, Portland Retro Gaming Expo, and recently I attended Norwescon for the first time. The staff is happy to have you there, so it’s a completely different feeling from something like Emerald City Comicon where you just feel like a number. Nothing against ECCC though! I still enjoy attending!
C: What’s the sweetest fan/buyer experience that you can remember?
S: My sweetest fan memory was of this little boy who must have been around 5 or 6. I don’t remember which convention I met him at, but I’ll never forget him! He came up to my table and started naming every single pixelated character and item I had out for sale and would explain where each one was from. His dad kept apologizing that he was talking so much, but I thought it was the cutest thing ever! On his third visit to my table I had found out from his dad that they’re starting him out with the older video game systems before he can play any of the new ones, haha! His favorite character was Yoshi, so I ended up giving him a Yoshi egg since I was sold out of baby Yoshis already.
C: We’re celebrating Star Wars month on the blog, who is your favorite Star Wars character?
S: There are so many star wars characters to choose from! I first watched star wars as a very young child with my dad. We had the trilogy on VHS and it was on quite often. I remember thinking the jawa were super freaking adorable and I loved their nonsense sounding language haha! Utini is my text message noise.
From one fangirl to another, this stuff is legit.
Sarah works full time as a baker and is the mama to 2 fur babies and 1 scaley baby. In her spare time she makes nerdy jewelry for pixelosis to sell on her Etsy shop or at multiple conventions. Her other hobbies include cake decorating, knitting, playing video games and collecting all things Cthulhu.
Full disclosure, I have been acquainted with the author of this book through the powers of the internet for many years. In fact I interviewed him for this blog. Though I haven’t read all of his work, I have read much of it. When it became an option to receive an ARC of his newest work, I jumped at the chance to delve into his mind again. This review is based on this book and I am not remotely motivated by bias, because honestly E would be more angry about a fake ass kissing review than an honest drag of this work.
Lei has it all. She is a profitable writer with a loving and supportive husband at home. She’s just wrapped a new novel and heads out for a run, blissfully unaware of how cruel life can be.
Belinda thinks she has it all. She is happy in a loving marriage to a successful man. When she awakens to a knock at the door, her life is about to fall apart in unimaginable ways.
Pain is a terrible force. A person never really knows who they are until they let pain guide their hand and make their choices. This is a story of two women and the true power of Pain.
Belinda’s husband has conned her, taken everything and left her homeless and penniless. When she heads out for her brothers house, wrapped in the turmoil created by his betrayal, she sees an opportunity to hurt someone as much as she is hurting. A jogger on the side of the road is an easy target, a little bump could be easily understood when someone is so distraught. How could she have known the person would bend down to tie her insanely bright yellow running shoe. When she sees the mangled body, the cold reality floods in and she drags the broken form into the woods.
Lei awakens from the excruciating pain to find a woman standing over her. She will never forget the words she says before she leaves her to die. Only able to move one leg, her ribs protruding from her chest and the awful sound it makes when she tries to breathe, Lei expects she will die. She is found though, and able to make the long recovery. The pain she endures will change her life forever though.
It is very hard to review this book without a massive amount of spoilers. I want to tell you the whole story, but you should read it yourself. Lorn has written an incredible book on the horrors of humanity with a monster that haunted my dreams every night this week. This is by far his best book I have read.
I loved Bay’s End and The Dastardly Bastard was a freaky trip, so these prepped me somewhat for a sort of return to Bay’s End ( Lorn’s fictional town which shows up in many of his books) and a couple of his characters from those stories. What I didn’t fully expect was how much his writing has evolved in this book. I was able to fully connect to the characters in this story in a way I hadn’t with his books in the past. Lorn has captured the devastation of both the perpetrator and the victim and how one act can alter a person forever and just how far the fallout can reach.
If you like a good scary story with real emotions, this is the book for you.
5 out of 5 stars.
You can preorder a limited edition signed hardcover of this book by following this link.
When deciding on the direction to take with this blog, the creators thought including interviews of interesting people would be enjoyable by us. Today will be our first interview and I chose to go with a person I know. He is an author of horror stories. The things he puts on paper evoke the baser nature of man. His words have given me nightmares and I believe someday the disturbing things his mind creates will be found on large screens to terrify teenagers pretending to be brave.
Fair warning, this interview does discuss adult topics which may make some individuals uncomfortable.
So, I am honored to introduce my friend, Edward Lorn
Click image to visit E’s blog
Domoni: “Good Morning! OK, let’s start with a silly question. What is your preferred nomenclature? Ed, Edward, Mr. Lorn or just E?
Edward: “My friends call me E. Keeps everything simple. No one ever knows if they can call me Ed, Eddie, Edward, or whatever, I just drop all the other useless letters and call me E. Then I can say cool things like, “Today’s message is brought to you in part by the letter E.”
D: “That’s a fun catch phrase. good way to embrace and also disturb a common childhood memory. Should set the tone nicely for the work you do. Thanks for taking time out of your day to talk with me. I am very excited to have the chance to go all official in this interview. We have been acquainted for quite a few years, and I have read many of your books, but I have never sat down and really talked about your writing with you. So, to get some of the clichés out of the way, how did you decide to be an author?“
E: “One of my first storyteller memories is when I was 6. First grade show and tell. I told the class my baby brother died over the weekend. I had the whole class sobbing by the end of the story. Of course, I’ve never had a baby brother, so when my teacher (Mrs. Kratz) called home to express her condolences, my mother was not happy. But that instance led to Mom buying me a Brother typewriter, a couple reams of paper, some ink and eraser tape. I’ve been writing in some way ever since. I started writing professionally on a dare. My wife told me I should submit something to a magazine (Spectacular Speculations, which is no longer in business) in 2011 and they bought it. I haven’t looked back since.”
D: “Sounds like your wife knows when and where to push you.”
E:“You are correct. She also keeps me grounded lest my head inflate and I float off somewhere.”
D: “That’s always good to have in life. So, is your family a big influence in everything you do or are they just the thing that keeps the dark noise at bay in your mind?”
E: “I’d say the writing keeps the darkness at bay. My family has more of a decompression role. They can tell when Dad’s gone too far into bleak territory, and then they swoop in to cheer me up. Chelle (my wife) is the best at that, mainly because it’s the end of the day when I need it the most. She’s always there to listen, but sometimes she’ll just talk and I’m able to relax and decompress by listening to her problems. My characters have a crap time of things in my stories, so it’s nice to sit and remember how good I have it by comparison. I think that’s the draw of disturbing literature period. No matter how bad it gets, at least it’s not as bad as what’s in the book.”
D: “I can absolutely understand that notion. Sometimes reading about someone having a crappy go of things makes a bad day easier to digest. The first book I read of yours was Bay’s End. I loved the book. Very much a coming of age in a real world. Though the story had some gruesome dark scenes, the unfortunate reality is that is an actual reality for some kids. How did you come up with the dark themes behind that one?”
E: “Oh, boy. This is a heavy one. I should prepare your readers for spoilers, though. This next bit deals with actual happenings that I fictionalized, so to describe the inspiration I have to semi-spoil the book. So… SPOILER ALERT!”
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E: “When I was a boy, about four years old, we had a family that lived three houses down and across the street from us. A father, mother, and twin boys. One of the boys had a learning disability. The summer I was to turn five, it came to light that their father had been molesting them and several other neighborhood kids. My sisters, who are 12 and 14 years older than myself, are rumored to have allowed this man to mess with them to keep me safe. Something to the effect of “You can do whatever you want to us, but leave our brother alone.” He was eventually arrested, but not before one of the girls on my street who was 12, came up pregnant. After he was released from jail months later (this was before the sex criminal registry) he’d come back to the block and park at the end, get out, and walk up and down the street waving at whoever happened to look out of their window or be in their yard. I heard about most of this after the fact, as I was so young, but I do remember the guy. I recall him being so damn normal. He didn’t look like a weirdo or freak or even halfway strange. He was just some dude. I’ve never confirmed with my sisters if the rumors about what they did to protect me was true. We don’t talk about him, for obvious reasons. I do know that they were molested by him, though. That much is accurate.”
D: “Wow, that’s a pretty intense situation and having read the book it is easy to see how you were able to catch that horror, without the strange aggrandizing that quite a few books that touch on such a subject seem to do. Though you held back no punches, you captured the small-town reaction well in my opinion.”
E: “Thank you. That book will always hold a strange place in my heart.”
D:“My favorite of your works is probably the short story World’s Greatest Dad. As a parent, it struck a hard blow to the heart. I loved the whole concept. How did you get the inspiration for the guiding mug?”
E: “A trip to Walmart inspired that one. It was around Father’s Day and they had the usual displays of dad gifts. I saw the end cap on the way in and didn’t pay it but a passing glance. When we came back up front to check out, I saw that someone had knocked over several mugs. They lay in pieces, and me being the weirdo I am, I starting toeing the pieces around, to see if I could form words while Chelle went and got someone to clean it up. I can’t even remember what I wrote, but one of the pieces said “World’s Gr” and another one said “attest Dad”. The E in “Greatest” had been chipped away completely. I thought to myself, “That’s how a kid might misspell it “Gratest” and the rest of the story kind just fell out of me when I got home. I’ve always been a fan of messages-from-beyond stories and that story remains one of my favorites to this day. My wife complains to this day that I couldn’t find a way to use only the words on the mug in the story. She doesn’t like that the mug’s messages use letters that shouldn’t be there.”
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D: “That’s a great way of showing how inspiration can come from the most mundane of things.”
E: “I’ve gotten inspiration from a toilet. I’m not picky where I find my muse. Ha!”
D: “I know you have a few things in the works, can you tell us anything about those?”
E: “Whew. How much time do you have? I have four novels done: PIG (a collab with author Craig Saunders), SLASHER LIVE (think The Running Man meets Friday the 13th), THE SOUND OF BROKEN RIBS (staying tight-lipped on that one), and a literary novel that’s not horror in the slightest entitled MONO & AGORA. Unfortunately, I have to remain quiet about the last one’s contents, too. I’m working on a hardcover deal with a major publisher but I cannot at this time announce anything. I have to wait on the contracts to be signed. But I am hoping to have at least two of those novels out in 2017. Keeping my fingers crossed, anyway. It’s been three years since my last full-length novel, and I was pumping them out two a year for a while there, so I’m anxious for people to read the new stuff.”
D: “Wow that is a full slate to keep your fans on pins and needles. You have published through companies as well as self-publishing, which do you prefer? Are there pros to self-publishing that you feel are beneficial over signing with a company?
E: “Most definitely. I think the biggest pro is the royalties. If you publish through Amazon, you get 70% of anything between $2.99 and $9.99. The only down side to self-publishing, really, is that, as of right now, you can’t get into the big chain stores unless you’re already selling thousands of copies, and even then, you need a distribution deal with one of the big publishers. I prefer indie because I have total control over the final product and I make the most off sales, but a publisher will get you into places you cannot reach on your own, and to me, right now, reaching new readers is an absolute must.”
D: “What advice would you have to authors looking to get their work out there?”
E: “The indie publishing movement is dying. Whether it be because booksellers are favoring the big publishers or indies have finally flooded the market with so much garbage that people are tired of reading unedited material I’m not 100% sure. But I would not suggest anyone take the indie route nowadays. Write your book, clean it up as much as you can, maybe even hire an editor, and start submitting to agents or small presses that don’t require solicitation. Honestly, though, an agent is the way to go, and a good agent is priceless. Find someone who will fight for you and not just your book. You’re gonna need someone in your corner because no one can do this by themselves. The old saying goes, “It takes a village to write a book, but it takes an agent to sell one.”
E: “Oh, and whatever you do, don’t give your novels away for free. I did that nonsense. I feel it hurt me over the long run. Maybe give away a short story, but never a full-length work. It teaches people not to value your work. I mean, why pay for anything when you know someone’s gonna give it away sooner or later?”
D: “I can see how that is true. I’ve been somewhat disenfranchised with quite a few indie authors lately. It seems to be a trend to churn out “Series” that would really just be better off as one book but seem to be stretching themselves out just for the sake of making more money off the next one. It makes it harder to trust the self-published books for quite a few people.
D: “You also run a blog that you post on daily. I have found some fairly profound opinion pieces on there quite a few times. Is it harder for you to express your emotions about the world we live in or to release your creations of fiction out to the public court of opinion?”
E: “This one is pretty simple for me. I stopped caring what other people thought a long time ago. My work and my opinion are for people who want to read them. If you don’t like the way I write, there’s absolutely nothing I can do to change that. If I change to make one person happy, I’d be betraying all the people who like me just the way I am. It’s a no-brainer where I’m concerned.”
D: “Knowing the type of stories you write, I assume you have had your share of bad reviews. Being a reviewer myself, I often read reviews and find it interesting the small things some people will focus on and it would make them hate the whole book based on one scene. Do you ever struggle with that and what would you like to say to those single-minded reviewers?”
E:“That’s a damn good question. The only time I’ve ever been upset by a review is with Bay’s End. I had a lady contact me personally about the filthy language the children speak in the book. She was also “mortified” (her word, not mine) by a scene where the boys watch an adult movie. She told me she was going to leave a one-star review, and she did, which I would never respond to, but I did email her back. I told her very plainly that I was more “mortified” by her acceptance of the child molestation in the book, seeing as how everything else seemed to bother her but that. It all seemed horrible to me; being upset at naughty words and consensual sex but having zero problem with child abuse.”
D: “changing direction, 2016 has been a brutal year for the creative community. As we speak the news that Carrie Fisher and Richard Adams passed this morning is filling news articles, newsfeeds and trending on twitter. What has hit you most personally?”
E:“David Bowie and Prince. I grew up listening to those guys and I will miss them terribly. I just hope Stephen King is in protective custody somewhere, because I’m not prepared for his passing.”
D: “Final question, you don’t just write, you also read a lot. What is your favorite novel that everyone should read?”
E: “Back to Stephen King. I wish everyone could make it through IT and see what I see in that book. That gargantuan novel is bottled childhood. It is the one novel I have reread more than five times and can still find something new.”
D: “Thanks for taking the time out of your day to indulge my questions.”
E: “This was big fun. Thanks for having me.
~~More about the author~~
Edward Lorn is a reader, writer, and content creator. He’s been writing for fun since the age of six, and writing professionally since 2011. He can be found haunting the halls of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Goodreads.
Edward Lorn lives in the southeast United States with his wife and two children. He is currently working on his next novel.
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Deep In The Crease 