Day 5 with Stephanie Keuhnert

I'm sorry, but they just don't come any cooler than Stephanie Keuhnert and in fact if she had a c in her name I would say that she put the c in cool, but anyway, you get my drift.

Not only is she my fellow Teen Fiction Cafe buddy and the the author of I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone and the upcoming Ballads of Suburbia but she has been getting all kinds of hard core critical praise for her writing. And let me tell you that critical praise is no easy thing to get! Where as, somehow I think if I tried to write a book with music in it, it would end up being about a girl who stays in her room and talks to her Spice Girl wallpaper (and who probably thought that Posh Spice was her invisible friend). Which, in turns proves that I am the opposite of cool!!!

But anyway, this isn't about me, it's about Stephanie who has been kind enough to come and play with us today and she's offered to giveaway a signed copy of her debut book I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone. So read on!

Zombie Wanna Be...Kind Of

When the question “What do you want to happen with your body after you die?” comes up in conversation (which happens more often than you’d think, perhaps because I’m a bartender and tend to be part of a lot of weird conversations), I always answer immediately, “I want to be cremated.”

There are two reasons for this response. One, I don’t want to be buried alive. (I think I have this fear because I watch too many soap operas where people are always coming back from the dead.) Two, zombies. I absolutely don’t want to have to come back as a zombie and possibly traumatize my brother or best friend. Not to mention, brains are totally not vegan.

My feelings about zombies are conflicted. I’d imagine many of us feel that way. I’m incredibly fascinated by zombies (the original Night of the Living Dead, which my dad showed me when I was about 12, is one of my all time fave movies and I was so stoked when I got to visit the cemetery in Pennsylvania where it was filmed), but frightened at the same time. I live in a town with so many cemeteries that the dead outnumber the living 5 to 1. If there was a zombie attack, I’d be totally screwed.

Even though I don’t want to become a zombie for real, I decided to be one for Halloween last year. It was by far my best costume since I was an ice princess in 2000. The reason I got all into it was because I’d spent the past two years feeling like a zombie. I worked an office job. In a cube. With glaring florescent lights overhead. I mindlessly replied to email, scheduled meetings, and took notes at those meetings. I had to wear hideously boring business clothes and refrain from dying my hair odd colors. I was so happy when my first book, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, came out, and I had an excuse to quit that job and go back to bartending like I had in grad school. (Of course my excuse wasn’t that I suddenly had more money. I just wanted to work part time so I could have more writing time.) Honestly, I think I’d rather eat brains than go back to another office job. I decided to dress up as an office zombie so I would always remember that.




I think I actually make a pretty cute zombie (and so does my fiancé Scott, and note that we are trying to attack my friend and former co-worker from the office job, Kathy, which seems fitting somehow..), but the whole brains not being vegan thing still bugs me, so I still plan to be cremated and I really hope there isn’t a zombie uprising in my town. And yet I’m dying to read Zombie Queen of Newbury High.

What about you? Do you have a love/fear thing with zombies too?


See, even when she is a zombie, Stephanie is insanely cool! And actually I can't begin to tell you how impressed I was when she sent me her guest post AND a zombie photo. Now, that's what I call rock and roll!!! Anyway, Stephanie has kindly said that one lucky commenter will win a signed copy of her debut book I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, so what are you waiting for?

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