Tag: Funny Guy

Incoming Charity Auction!

The release week for Funny Guy has been so lovely–and the book has only been out for two days! You can grab your copy at Kindle/KU and Audible if you haven’t already.

I’m mostly here, however, to plug an upcoming romance charity event for a great cause: the Meet Cute Bookshop is putting together a Romance for Reproductive Justice Auction on 6/10 and 6/11.

I’ve donated a set of signed and personalized paperbacks of Funny Guy and Chick Magnet, and you can peruse the full auction here. There’s some AMAZING stuff that I will happily fight you for.

And while we wait, let me drop some links for things I’ve written and interviews and podcasts I’ve done to promote Funny Guy.

It’s This Stand Up Guy’s Time to Fall

We have a number of iconic pairings in romance. Grumpy-sunshine, innocent-experienced, and morally good-morally evil, to name a few. A decade ago, the legal scholar Dahlia Lithwick added another one to the mix: Chaos Muppet-Order Muppet. Essentially the idea is that all Muppets are either forces for entropy or forces for organization and structure. Animal and the Swedish Chef? They’re Chaos Muppets. Sam the Eagle and Bert? Order Muppets. And these opposites tend to attract. Think about Miss Piggy and Kermit.

Up until now, my characters have mostly been Order Muppets. When I have written the occasional Chaos Muppets (Vivy in Free Fall comes to mind), they’ve been minimally chaotic. But Sam in Funny Guy is not minimal chaos. Sam is the full tornado.

Continue reading “It’s This Stand Up Guy’s Time to Fall” →

SNL on the Page and Screen

It can come as absolutely no surprise that Funny Guy is inspired by Saturday Night Live. Not in the sense that the characters are based on any specific performers or writers–I’m fighting a losing battle, I realize, but let me repeat: no, Sam is not supposed to be Pete Davidson–but in the sense that SNL has cast a long shadow over my life.

I first discovered the show in the early 1990s while at a sleepover. I was a recent transplant from Montana to Dallas, Texas, and I felt like the shabbiest of country mice. When a friend I was trying to impress insisted that we should stay up and watch it, I was only too happy to oblige. And I found myself tuning in for most of the 90s and early 2000s.

So many of the jokes my husband and I make originated on SNL. I can’t say lover without saying it in Rachel Dratch’s voice. Without fail, if I ask my husband what a dish I’m cooking needs, he’ll respond, “More cowbell.” “Lazy Sunday” gets stuck in my head all the time. If the show has lost a little of its edge over time–where’s today’s “White Like Me” or even “Who wants to eat“?–but we do still get viral moments such as Bowen Yang’s iceberg.

That said, if you want to read about SNL, what should you pick up?

Last year, I perused all or parts of almost two dozen books about the show. I have recommendations, which I’ll break into three categories: histories of the show, cast memoirs, and fictionalizations.

Continue reading “SNL on the Page and Screen” →

Funny Guy Cover Reveal!

Isn’t the cover for Funny Guy amazing? Well, the blurb is even better:

From the author of Chick Magnet comes a heartfelt friends-to-lovers story about what can happen when a funny guy and his childhood best friend are stuck together in a small New York City apartment.

Sam can’t escape the smash hit “Lost Boy” because, well, he is the lost boy. His pop-singer ex immortalized him in a song about his childish ways, and now his comedy career is on the line.

At least he still has Bree, his best friend and confidante. Bree has always been there for Sam, but she’s never revealed her biggest secret: she’s in love with him. To help herself move on, Bree applies for her dream job across the country―and doesn’t say a thing to Sam.

But as Sam tries to resuscitate his career, he turns to Bree for support―and maybe more. In the confines of her tiny apartment, they share a different dynamic. A charged dynamic. But she’s his friend. He can’t be falling for her.

Except he is.

Are his feelings for Bree just funny business? Or is their smoldering attraction the real deal?

It’ll release on May 16, 2023, but you can preorder it on Amazon and add it to your Goodreads shelves now.

And while I have your attention, I had a wonderful chat with Meg and Liz at the Make Out Already podcast about Chick Magnet. You can listen here, and you should because they’re charming.