Shelly Mazzanoble

About a million years ago, Shelly Mazzanoble had a short story published in a literary magazine called Whetstone. They paid her $50 which she used to purchase a keg and threw a great big party.Motivated by her strong desire to curate menus for cocktail parties and her friends’ penchant for drinking free beer, Shelly has gone on to publish short stories and essays in Carve, The Seattle Times, Scary Mommy, In the Powder Room, and has been syndicated on popular websites such as Blunt Moms and BlogHer, where she has been named a featured writer. She writes a regular column called Mom in the Middle for the Seattle-based parenting resource organization PEPs (Program for Early Parent Support) where she seeks to scare daunt forewarn enlighten new parents about the terrors joys of parenthood.Not wanting to completely waste the theater degree procured from lovely Ithaca College, she removed all the narrative from that first published short story and turned it into a one-act play. Blue Malls, starring Shelly herself, was produced in Seattle’s Mae West Fest XIII. Due to the anxiety dreams still plaguing her, she did not star, support or even understudy in her play, The Chicken & the Egg (also originally a short-story), which was produced in Mae West Fest IV and later Manhattan Theatre Source’s Estrogenius Festival.In 2006, Shelly was introduced to the roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons, while working for Wizards of the Coast. She’s still bitter that no one introduced her to this game earlier as her imaginary friends and innate desire to lie tell stories would have been put to good use. Her book, Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girls Guide to the Dungeons and Dragons Game published by Wizards of the Coast, was nominated for an Origins Award and won an ENnies Award— the annual fan-based celebration of excellence in tabletop roleplaying gaming. Confessions has been translated into Japanese with the far superior title of, On Mondays I’m a Wizard (even though her game was on Wednesdays) and has been required reading in college classes focusing on game design and theory. Her second book, Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Dungeons & Dragons: One Woman’s Quest to Trade Self-Help for Elf-Help was nominated for an Origins Award and has the distinct honor of being read by at least six of her non-D&D playing friends. Shelly really loves writing books with very long titles. In fact, she is at work on another book with a very long title. Sadly it does not include a dungeon or a dragon but it does include a toddler and several uses of the term “lady parts.” (TMI? Just wait.)When not slandering the reputations of newborns and eschewing the very notion that having “just one baby” is indeed easy (WTH, Mom?!) She enjoys perfecting her Bert from Sesame Street impression (“Ernie! My pige-unnns!”), eating raw cookie dough, Ladies of London, when her husband is the one who gets up to fix her son breakfast, going down a Pinterest rabbit hole, painting things gray, ankle booties, her green sweatpants, quoting Mommie Dearest, the idea of a garden, and being the oldest mom at daycare. She lives in Seattle with an alpha cat named Zelda, various foster dogs, a very patient man who either doesn’t read her blog or just has a really good sense of humor, and a genius* toddler who loves Panda bears, falling down, and poop, and who provides his proud mother with endless fodder. At least until he gets a lawyer.Shelly encourages you to check out her blog, especially the older entries because she had a lot more time to think and edit back then. If you like reality TV, Shelly wants to be your friend.*According to 3 out of 4 grandparents