Mercy Brown's Blog

I'm at the Backdoor Comedy Club at Facebook from 8-10 EST hosting some giveaways of my book LOUD IS HOW I LOVE YOU, swag, and Amazon gift cards! Come be silly with me! 

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"...Funny and direct and profane when it needs to be; lots of short paragraphs and punchy sentences and a nice, brisk pace. Emmy’s voice is consistent throughout: she does indeed sound like a talented 21-year-old rock maniac whose world is her band and whose band is her world. I do hope Mercy Brown will forgive me for saying that the writing in Loud Is How I Love You often reminds me of that of another New Jersey author with sex on her mind: Judy Blume. Today they might seem tame by comparison to say, Young Thug, but in the ’80s, some of Blume’s books were considered too racy for young readers. A censor might be inclined to slap a big red X on parts ofLoud, and I can’t deny that the descriptions of various acts in this book are lurid. For what it’s worth, I found the sex scenes in Loud Is How I Love You extremely sweet — wholesome, even. Even on their worst behavior, Emmy and Travis truly care about each other, and their intimacy reflects that. The creepy violence, head games and coercion that has recently infected some of the popular titles in adult romance? None of that stuff is welcome at Brown’s party. The sex encounters in Loud are 100 percent consensual and enthusiastic, and I applaud Mercy Brown for keeping the b.s. capitalist power dynamics out of the bedroom. Given the present climate and current narrative conventions, this must have taken some real restraint..."

Read the rest here!

Think you might like to read LOUD but want to sample first? Assorted excerpts and outtakes are available at the blogs below! 

Pre-story outtake, Emmylou’s letter to Santa, December 1994 (at Under the Covers blog): http://www.underthecoversbookblog.com/2015/12/dear-santa-part-2.html

Entire Chapter 1! (at Natasha is a Book Junkie): http://www.natashaisabookjunkie.com/2016/01/13/exclusive-excerpt-loud-is-how-i-love-you-by-mercy-brown/

From Chapter 2 (at Life with Two Boys): http://www.lifewithtwoboys.com/2016/01/loud-is-how-i-love-you-by-mercy-brown.html

From Chapter 14 (at GReads): http://www.greadsbooks.com/2016/01/exclusive-excerpt-loud-is-how-i-love.html

This is me, launching my first book.

LOUD IS HOW I LOVE YOU launched this week! This is exactly how it feels!

Doot's first work

Doot wrote a book. It's called the Enchanted Sword. He's five. 

I'm not sure whether to be more concerned that he's got the writing virus or more relieved he didn't get the music one. Bing has the music virus, though, so either way we're screwed.

Long story, but I have to tell it. I wrote a book (fiction) that is about two kids in a band in the 90s who fall in love (yes, very loosely based on a true story). I'm querying that story and wringing my hands over it a little. Since then, @prosolarmech and I have been planning a follow-up to that story that is about two different characters in the first book and takes place when the band from book one goes on tour. So, we were trying to reconstruct the tour we went on with Plug Spark Sanjay in 2001 and fic it, basically. It just so happened that when I came to visit Mom in VA, she had been going through a box of old books she hadn't looked through in almost a decade, and stuck in one of the books was a printout of this email of ours from the tour with our complete itinerary. And maybe @prosolarmech doesn't believe in freaky supernatural signs or anything like that, but I do! Whatever happens with my query, this second book has to be written now. The universe has spoken.

Reposted from Instagram

If you're not interested in adorable things said by children, maybe skip this one. If you are though, then you may be interested in the conversation had by Doot, Bing and myself driving home today.

Doot: Mom? Do you think the fairies need more time to bake my wish for a Minecraft hammer?

Me: Probably. Sometimes fairies need substantial time to fully bake a wish like that, honey.

Bing: Fairies have ovens?

Doot: Yeah, of course. They have wish-baking ovens so they can bake wishes and make them come true.

Just in case you were wondering how fairies materialized wishes, Doot has a system. We go to his Granny's house in Virginia and there are these birdhouses there--an entire village of them hanging from the low branches on the path to the big rocks. 

Fairy Wish Ovens

Doot tells me this village is populated by magic fairies who grant wishes. When we were last there, he decided that if he whispered his wish into one of the houses, a fairy would grant it to him. I tried to explain I wasn't sure how many of these fairies were Minecraft programmers, but he's convinced. If he wishes hard enough, and if the fairy ovens are firing hot enough, there will be Minecraft hammers.