Welcome to My Suburban Fantasy

I’ve been looking for work. Maybe you’ve never been a 54-year-old who hasn’t had fulltime employment in 20 years, so let me just tell you: It’s been fucking brutal. It’s like being a brand new adult on the job market except that I’m either wildly overqualified or lacking experience in particular digital tools that I could probably teach myself to use in a day. And then there are the gigs that seem like they’ve been designed specifically for me but there are already 50 applicants 2 hours after the job posting goes live. Also: A whole lot of writing gigs are teaching AI to write, which means that I’d have to calculate how to teach the AI how to take my job quickly enough that I don’t get fired but also slowly enough that I die before the AI can replace me. Have you ever been on Upwork? It’s basically eBay for work and it’s hellish. 

For the past few weeks I’ve been spending my mornings tweaking my resume and writing proposals for jobs I’m not going to get, steadily decreasing the amount I expect to get paid, and dying inside. In the afternoon, though, I give myself the little treat of working on personal projects that excite me and, lately, one activity that’s been exciting me is coming up with wackadoo concepts for paranormal romance novels set in the suburbs. 

This process has been a lot of fun, and a few of the characters have started to come alive for me as I imagine their stories. There’s Ellie Bonebrake, single mom, president of the Athletic Association Boosters for Sunnyview Consolidated School District, and leader of a werewolf pack. She’s keeping it together—barely—by color-coding everything. But her daughter’s vampire boyfriend and Ellie’s own attraction to an enigmatic AP History teacher are testing Ellie’s capacity to carry the mental load for her kid and her community. 

Billie Sheehan found her true calling in The Glens at Sterling Creek. As ruler of the home owner's association, she is empowered to impose order in a way she couldn't even imagine in the Fairy Court. When the broodingly attractive new owner of 13 Ravenwood surrounds his house with a wrought iron fence that’s a blatant violation of the HOA rules, he strikes the first blow in a war between Billie and a vampire king plotting to take over her suburban paradise. 

Finally, please allow me to introduce Maren Islay. After the theft of her sealskin left her stranded on dry land, Maren made a life for herself as a ruthless real estate developer who specializes in oceanfront properties. She’s about to close the deal that will finally set her free when Drake Blackwood swoops in with his own offer. Drake is absurdly wealthy and so beguiling that Maren—who is generally immune to what passes for charm among humans—struggles to resist him. Learning that Drake is a dragon in disguise explains everything. 

Do you vibe with overwhelmed werewolf Ellie? Are you ready to watch a showdown between an exiled fairy queen and a sexy stranger who breaks all the HOA rules? Or do you want to escape into the high-stakes, high-end world of luxury real estate and watch what happens when a selkie takes on a firebreather in a Tom Ford suit. Not sure? No problem. Check out excerpts from Alpha Mom, Fairy Queen of the HOA, and Sealing the Deal. Please tell me which story I should finish first in the comments.

This is a quote from an article in The New Republic entitled “How a Group of Michigan Parents Defeated Anti-Trans MAGA Activists.” It’s an article about my school district. I’m quoted in this article, and I am proud of what liberals and progressives have accomplished in this community. I have been an evangelist for getting involved in local politics for a while, and I sincerely believe that working at the community level is the most immediate way to create change. If that sounds boring, please know that this article also contains the phrase “MAGA-ified telenovela.” The Michigan Republican Party was a wild scene for a while, and my funky little city can boast its own occasionally national celebrity. 

Speaking of evangelists, James Dobson is dead. A friend commented “Focus on the Finally” on my celebratory FB post and that is why she won the internet that day. This is what I had to say on this occasion: 

Anyone who wants to understand what it was like to grow up Gen X should begin by trying to understand Ronald Reagan. (I’ve said this before, but Reagan walked so that Trump could run. “Unitary Executive Theory.” Look it up!)

And then there are dudes like James Dobson. If I look back, I feel like I regarded evangelicals as a joke—preachers worried about heavy metal and Satanism who showed up on cable when I was getting ready to watch Night Flight. Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart made themselves the butt of a lot of jokes by using their power to harm women. (These jokes are not funny.)

Dobson was playing a long game, and he died knowing that his very narrow views about family and sex and gender are ascendant, and not just on the Right. 

I was raised by heathens—which surely explains why I didn’t take TV preachers seriously—but I know a lot of exvangelicals who are still working through what James Dobson did to them and their families. So, yeah. Happy James Dobson Is Dead to those who celebrate. 

About a million years ago, I would accept friend requests on Facebook as long as I recognized the name. Sometimes, this choice made it easy for me to reconnect with lovely people I’d lost contact with. Sometimes, I quickly remembered why I was not in contact with this person. And there was also a whole separate category: 80s punks who had turned into far-right conspiracy theorists. 

I think I understand why this swerve makes sense. Elizabeth Spiers gets into it in response to a Wall Street Journal Article in an op-ed she wrote for the New York Times. I can give you a gift link for the latter.

I have only one thing to say that the headline of this article—“How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World”—and that is Y R M3N? 

In conclusion, Sidney Sweeney. That whole controversy is so old that I listened to a podcast (which I recommend) yesterday. Maybe you’re over it? Maybe you just could not about the whole thing? Anyhow, if you’d like a thoughtful feminist take, check out my best gal Andi Zeisler at Salon. My main beef with this whole thing is this sentence: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.” Even eye color? This sentence began with hair color and the idea that eye color is determined by genetics is familiar to anyone who made a Mendel square in, like, the 6th grade? I feel like the claim that genes determine personality merits an “even,” but not eye color. Like, I find the whole thing gross, but this is what offends me as both a copywriter and a nerd.

Thank you for reading!
JJ