I’d like to welcome Elizabeth Crowens to the blog for #ThisorThatThursday!

Things you never want to run out of: Money, milk, and coffee. I can live without sugar or honey in my coffee but not my whole milk, and I hate powdery coffee creamer—the fake stuff.

Things you wish you’d never bought: A bed-in-a-box that gets shipped to your house. They give you a 90-day free trial. The mattress felt fine for 90 days. Then it hurt my back. Also, they are too unwieldy to repack in the box they came in to return. Wasted close to $450 on a piece of crap.

Words that describe you: A progressive, “big city” liberal, Type-A, New Yorker personality (but without the accent), often a fish-out-of-water, especially in small, Southern towns.

Words that describe you, but you wish they didn’t: Pushy and aggressive to the point of being annoying, especially when I refuse to take “no” for an answer. Willing to still beat that dead horse. Extremely impatient.

Favorite foods: Katz’s Deli (Where Harry Met Sally) Kosher corned beef or pastrami sandwich with creamy coleslaw and homemade dill pickles, and steak fries. Junior’s cheesecake. Top-notch New York Pizza. Red bean sesame balls from Chinatown bakeries.

Things that make you want to gag: Natto, a Japanese fermented soybean that tastes like rotten beans swimming in spit. You’d never convince me to drink Mezcal and swallow the worm afterwards.

Favorite music or song: 30’s and 40’s jazz and blues, Swing music and big band. Rock and Roll – Fifties through select eighties (Queen, Punk, New Wave, Van Halen), and select Nineties (Green Day, Weezer, Foo Fighters), Classical music, Motown, Funkadelic, Soul.

Music that drives you crazy: Heavy Metal and Rap gives me a headache.

Favorite beverage: Coffee

Something that gives you a sour face: Lemon-flavored Magnesium Citrate (colonoscopy prep solution!)

Favorite smell: Pungent roses. These tend to be garden grown. So many flower sellers have roses with no smell.

Something that makes you hold your nose: Cigar smoke!

Something you’re really good at: photography and graphic design

Something you’re really bad at: putting together Ikea furniture.

Things you’d walk a mile for: A Haagen Daz or Van Leeuwen ice cream parlor.

Things that make you want to run screaming from the room: Listening to a recording of Yoko Ono.

Things you always put in your books: Humor and/or history

Things you never put in your books: I’m a big fan of Victorian paranormal and ghost stories and Gothic horror like Poe, Shelley, and the Hammer Horror films, but am turned off by spatter punk, body horror, and zombies just don’t do it for me.

Things to say to an author: I just read your latest book and gave you a five-star review on Amazon, Goodreads, on social media, my blog, and everywhere else I could post it.

Things to say to an author if you want to be fictionally killed off in their next book: I just read your book and gave you a one-star review, because Golden Age of Hollywood-style mysteries with celebrities aren’t my thing. I posted my opinion on NetGalley and Goodreads and told my book club that I would never recommend it.

Most daring thing you’ve ever done: When I was in college, one of my best friends and I hit a few bars on Ft. Lauderdale beach looking for cute guys and a party, but we kept striking out with dull crowds and nothing going on. Then my friend came up with a crazy idea.

She said, “Why don’t we hop in your car and hang out in Marco Island?”

My response: “Where is Marco Island?”

Her response: “Through the Everglades across Alligator Alley.”

It was already 11 pm. Without thinking and with seven dollars cash in my pocket with no credit card, we went for it, managed to find cute guys to buy us drinks, and realized it was 2:00 am and we couldn’t afford a hotel. She wanted to sleep on the beach. The bartender found us a friend’s vacant apartment where the furniture had been left behind. We crashed there, gave phony room numbers, and got free mimosas on the beach at a local hotel the next morning before driving home. I can’t believe we did it and got away from it but would never do that again. Ah, youthful folly!

Something you chickened out from doing: Diving off a high diving board. Always pissed off the lifeguards.

About Elizabeth:

Elizabeth Crowens has worn many hats in the entertainment industry in NY and LA for over 25 years. Writing credits include short stories and articles in Black Belt, Black Gate, and Sherlock Holmes Mystery magazines, stories in Hell’s Heart and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated A New York State of Fright, and three alternate history/SFF novels, which she self-publishes under the name of Atomic Alchemist Productions.

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