Elle Lothlorien
A “military brat,” Elle Lothlorien was born in Germany and spent her childhood in such far-flung places as Puerto Rico, Charleston, S.C., Italy, and Washington D.C. Sadly, the only language she ever became semi-fluent in is English. She writes romantic comedies that are loose riffs on the popular fairy tales she read as a child–stories she still loves as an adult. Elle’s first self-published romantic comedy, The Frog Prince, became an Amazon bestseller in 2010–a distinction it kept through the summer of 2012 when it peaked at #1 on Amazon’s Top 100 List for Humor. Her female characters are known for their snarky attitude, intelligence, quick wit, and a near-universal lack of interest in designer shoes and haute couture.
Before writing rom-com full-time, Elle worked as an administrator overseeing clinical research studies at the University of Colorado. Her scattershot work history also includes everything from running fire and rescue calls as an EMT to managing movie theaters to locating underground utilities to stay-at-home mom, although she readily admits that getting paid to sit around in her PJs all day dreaming up hot, amazing men who are good enough for her novel’s heroines is, hands-down, the most rewarding job she’s ever had. Elle lives in the Rocky Mountain Foothills, mostly because she’s deathly afraid of man-eating sharks and understands that, while they’ve successfully infiltrated every ocean on the globe, they’ve never quite managed to adapt to mountain living. She keeps a teenage boy and a miniature dachshund named Bacon Bourgeois of Legend around the house to provide comic relief.
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“Alice? You didn’t get this far without realizing that you don’t have to cheat to win. You just have to accept that people are easily manipulated.”
“Alice, you might be the product of the biggest ball of ignorance, confidence, and good fortune the universe has ever manufactured. But if you’re thinking that you can take your results at the virtual tables and your grand tactic of Ignorance Is Bliss, and make that work for the Main Event, forget it—it WON'T.”
“So you went back to your friend’s next donkament two weeks later, and this time you just laughed right along when they gave you that framed picture of the poker hands. And when they called you ‘pigeon,’ ‘fish,’ and ‘muppet,’ you just smiled and batted your eyes and said stupid things like ‘Does a straight beat a crooked?’ And while everyone else was throwing a party, you just sat there acting like a tourist with your kill stack until you were in the money. Those poor dills…they didn’t know what hit ‘em, did they?”
“How was I supposed to know ‘lucked out’ means ‘I got screwed over’ in Australian?”
“Australians are descended from a boatload of English convicts, right? So two hundred years in isolation at the bottom of the planet is plenty of time for the language to evolve into some sort of double-speak prison slang.”
“Hey, any idea why Australians speak something that sounds deceptively like English but isn’t? I mean, I’m trying to figure out why I can’t seem to converse with another human being who speaks the same language as I do.”
“I grimace, thinking someone should come up with a new phrase for 'I left the ocean without a kiwi-sized chunk of my lower-left butt cheek' to replace the rather nebulous term 'exploratory bite.”
“Hey…you don’t look like a rabbit.”
“Locals. They’ll eventually get out. They’re annoyed. Like when Americans go to the lake. And it’s closed. ‘Cause some kid pooped in the water.”
“I’m busy trying not to look like anything edible.”
“I try not to laugh too loud, afraid a bark-like noise will be mistaken by any great whites lurking in the area as the distress call of a juvenile seal.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but Australians have a LOT of bitches on their cashola.”
“Mouse likes to drag you to uninhabited areas with no cell signal—all those places perfect for dying of exposure.”
“My butt has a maximum drive time of seven hours.”
“You can pay for whatever you want, but I just want to warn you that I prefer to stay at places that don’t start or end with the word ‘motel.”
“First, I’d like to point out that I didn’t use ‘one of mine.’ You refused to let me pay for my ice cream cone with a good ol’ fashioned credit card, and you forced your pretend money on me. Secondly, I can’t take any currency seriously that looks like it belongs in a psychedelic-inspired Special Edition Monopoly box.”
“Because trying to think of how to ask a woman you’ve known for exactly two days if she’d be willing to get into a car with you and take a road trip across the country was something I hadn’t quite worked up to yet.”
“. I’ve watched about a dozen tourists almost get hit by cars since I’ve been here. I barely made it to the beach alive the other day. I mean, no one knows what they’re doing. They swing their heads back and forth like they’re mounted on a door hinge, but they don’t even know what they’re looking for, not really. Cars just come at you from all sorts of unnecessary directions here, and we’re all probably going to get killed.”
“I’ve found that lifting the lid with your foot is the most thorough and least gross path to two minutes of peace of mind.”
“I’m almost afraid to tell you. Let’s put it this way: clean toilets are the least of your problems in this country.”
“Don’t make me Alice-nap you, Alice. Because you know I can carry you.”
“Do you really think I’d let him call my sister a ‘bitch?’ Or you for that matter? Talon Hawk’s dumb, but he’s smarter than that…he’d be crawling around on his hands and knees picking his teeth off the tiles.”
“When she reaches down to touch his shoulder—a gesture only a few species and a million or so years removed from lifting a leg and marking him as her territory with a stream of urine—enough bracelets and bangles to lay track across the Australian Outback slide down her arm and come to a jangling stop at her wrist.”
“The line from Pulp Fiction—the one Samuel L. Jackson shouts at John Travolta as they’re trying to wash blood off their hands—pops into my head: 'I used the same soap you did and when I dried my hands, the towel didn't look like no fuckin’ maxi-pad!' I almost—almost—share this most quotable of cinematic quotes with him, when I remember it contains The Word. You know: 'maxi-pad.”
“I use the word “man” loosely. A better description would be “the most beautiful specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens with a set of XY chromosomes to grace the planet Earth at this moment, or any other era, epoch, or age in history.”
“Be yourself. Unless you can be a unicorn, In that case, you should always be a unicorn.”
“Basic economic theory. People behave differently based on how much they think something’s worth. Because everyone got their chips for free, people made huge bets on every hand—no matter what they were holding. People who play with everything on the line—for real—don’t act like that.”
“Like your sweet, affectionate house cat, Alice Dahl is easy to underestimate. It’s not until the songbirds in the yard show up eviscerated on the front porch that you realize you should’ve kept that bell collar on her—because those poor birds never even saw her coming.”
“I have a totally unhealthy and unrealistic fear of being eaten by a great white shark. This is because I belong to a very specific demographic called American Child Whose Parents Made the Ill-Advised Decision To Allow Her To Watch the Movie Jaws At a Sleepover During Her Formative Years.”
“That’s the thing you girls never get. It doesn't matter if you just woke up, or just got done bawling, or just finished your make-up. When a guy’s all love-sick over a chick, she looks exactly the same to him all the time: perfect.”
“Be a good little Alice and just follow the White Rabbit, okay?”