Courtney Block

Thank you, friend 🥹 💫

The intrusive voice has been very loud lately, but seeing the cover art for my upcoming book with the ‘Bloomsbury’ name underneath mine has me feeling quite proud as I sit in my car and cry over my Taco Bell lunch.

Subtitled: The Multitudes of Girlhood.

Pulled into therapy and a hearse turned in right behind me. What symbolism. I am not prepared for whatever that forebodes.

An out-of-context but very real one-sentence email I sent to my librarian colleagues this week: “I have returned with all my teeth.”

This is the *best* kind of synchronicity 💫

Oooh, I think this is a *solid* therapeutic plan

I’m thinking about rolling into therapy Tuesday in my Macho Man Randy Savage costume not only because it’s Halloween week but, more importantly, because I channel so much cathartic rage when I wear it. ⭐️

This week my therapist pointed out that for the first time in nearly three years I said I was more concerned about being heard than worrying how someone else would feel hearing my words.

And then two days later I went to an Ohio Valley Wrestling match.

These things are related, I feel.

🫂

Today my therapist told me “you don’t need to give a predator any grace,” and I’m just sending this reminder out into the ether for anyone who could benefit from this reminder as well.

I may have whisper-screamed “it’s fucking broken,” after a particularly lengthy battle with a stapler today at the library’s reference desk. One workstudy student found it quite amusing, so all is not lost.

112,152 words and all of them about haunted libraries. Deadline achieved. And now…Motivational Michael Sheen is replaced by Congratulatory Michael Sheen.

Here’s to book three 👻 📚 🥂

I should really consider dedicating this book to all the Pedro Pascal reels that have been getting me through it. 📕 ✍🏻 🔥

Fellow millennials, “Where in the world *is* Carmen Sandiego?” Well. She just might be haunting a library in Scotland based on the account I’m annotating tonight for my upcoming “Haunted Libraries Around the World.”

Thanks!! This book has been so fun and also so humbling to connect with library workers around the world 🥹💫📕

Annotating a story about a strange experience from a Latvian library tonight 👻 🐈‍⬛ 💫 📚

Annotating a story about a haunted library in Oldham, England and its ghost named Mary and pausing to have a very Cancerian cry-sesh because I think Mary is just the personified ghost of loneliness, the most pervasive and familiar ghost of them all.

Truly every day should be like this 💫 👻 📚 😭 🍫

My day so far:

1. Writing about haunted libraries.
2. Coffee break.
3. Phone interview with a haunted library.
4. Cry a little about how nice that phone call was.
5. Text reminder to friend about haunted bone.
6. Ooh, Reese’s.
7. Resume writing.

10 days until book deadline. Time is made up anyway but it will especially cease to mean anything to me til July 31. Therefore if you see me baking a lasagna at 4am or enjoying a 🍺 at 9am, or even just, ya know, randomly crying, don’t be alarmed. I’m living on #AuthorTime

Anyway. In case anyone is wondering how I’m doing mentally 😂

I just sent a 17 minute Marco to a friend in which a solid 14 minutes I spend lamenting the fact that the nearby gas station replaced their hand-painted, misspelled, off-center “clearance” sign with a perfectly spelled and centered machine-produced clearance sign. Whimsy is dead.

It’s 11pm and I’m just casually writing an entry for my upcoming book that features a funeral held in a university library in Virginia. 👻 👀 📚

Me to the cashier at the ice cream shop: “Can I pay with my HSA card? Cause this strawberry shortcake sundae is for healing my inner child.”

This reminds me of the time one of my girlfriends told me, “you’re a mad scientist of a woman.”

I think Rhea would have appreciated that line.

I also think it’s one of the most romantic things anyone has ever said to me. 💫

“I enjoyed Beecher. I like the man, I like his writing. He’s real. He cuts and he is solid. He’s a fraction of yourself.” Rhea White to Marg Anderson, July 25 195?

“She loves deep, winding conversations that go up and down, especially in the dead of night when everyone should be sleeping. She has forgotten the way conversations, really good ones, can change her-shape shift her like a tree. Sometimes leave her bare, sometimes leave her fuller.”

Saddle up, Sheenie - we’re in the home stretch ✍🏻 📝 💫 #MotivationalMichaelSheen #iykyk #SaddleUpSheenie

It is 5am. I have been writing since yesterday afternoon. I have not gone to sleep. I have entered an altered state of consciousness I think. I hope I see a ghost. How utterly fitting would that be? If that happens, this is the only way I’ll ever write again. 📖 👻 🌀

I knowwwww, right?! Alas 🫠 🍻 👻