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I've been window-shopping for a paid-for editing service, getting a set of experienced editor-eyes on my manuscript with a focus on making the leading edge of it, in particular -- the first XX pages that get requested as sample, in other words -- as marketshiny as the storyline will accommodate in hopes of getting more nibbles from lit agents.

I reached out to some editors I had prior contact with from one of my previous books. One of them got back to me after requesting and receiving my current synopsis and 1st 3 chapters, about 45 pages.

"There was enough in the storyline to keep me turning pages", I'm told. "I was sufficiently invested in wanting to see what happens next. And the solid quality of your writing kept me going. My biggest concern is that I didn't find myself reacting well to your main character. He comes across as distant and cold, someone who doesn't care about any of the people he's in contact with, and as a result I found myself pretty apathetic about the character."

insert comic timing pause

It's autobiographical.

Well, that's consistent with the story I'm telling, actually. At one point within the book I relate the tale of trying to transition from childhood to adulthood in the employment zone, only to find that...

Basically, they don’t like me. Teachers mostly did. Classmates mostly didn’t. And now that I’m an adult, employers mostly don’t. Why?

... and as a child I'd had a similar bad time of it in school, not that I never managed to have any friends but that I was so widely hated:

Jan [my sister] didn’t easily fit in everywhere. Whenever we moved, or changed school systems, I think she had to work at it to make new friends, get people to accept her, avoid being the kid that other people leave out or make fun of. I think she put some effort into tucking in any odd corners so people couldn’t see. Popularity was important to her; I don’t mean she was super popular, most popular girl in the class or anything like that, but popular enough. Accepted. But that wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t merely some kid who was seen by some as having something about them that was a little different. I was the kid that everyone in the school heard about from the other kids before they ever saw me. I had a reputation that had stuff that people made up about me added to what was already there, and being stared at was not something I was going to be able to avoid. I remember kids from other classrooms bringing their friends with them to point me out through the open classroom door, you know, ‘See, over there, that’s him’. So I have a lifetime of training that’s made it pretty much invisible to me.

So my main character -- i.e., me -- comes across as uncaring:

Mark Raybourne [my assigned individual counselor] wants me to think about whether my tendency to not give a shit whether or not other people approve of my behavior is a tendency that has unhealthy components. Okay. You can consider it a defense mechanism, but you can also consider it the necessary attitude if you’re going to move forward. I couldn’t afford to care. I was under attack. I had to believe in me. They had to be wrong. Yes, that installs the worry that this is a coping mechanism. Yes, I’ve worried about that. That maybe my default assumption that I was right to believe in me and reject them as wrong was...incorrect, and I...for some reason...deserved this.

I definitely would not describe my main character as more tolerant than their classmates. I wasn't. I was judgmental all through the worst years, elementary and junior high school, just outnumbered very badly, so yes their intolerance was pretty nasty to deal with, but I wasn't a better person or anything.

So my main character is problematic: pushy and with a practiced "I can't afford to care, it hurts too much" attitude towards whether or not other people like me.

The editor who gave me the feedback may still have a good point. First let's make a split between whether the person I was as the main character is not a good main character or it's my painting of that me, how I'm written as that character, isn't a good representation of me. If I want to stick to the factual (regardless of whether I'm marketing it as fiction or as nonfiction) I can't retroactively fix who I was, even if that character needs fixing. But giving the editor a lot of leeway to make a reasonable point here, yeah, my book could be difficult to market because I haven't represented the character as well as I should.

To my way of thinking, it's a selling point that my book actually addresses so many of the editor's critical comments. The editor hasn't read the whole book and would not have seen that yet. I mean, yeah, they're totally relevant issues, but I've attempted to include them in the book. Trust me, I'm narcissistic. I may be vain and self-immersed, but I promise you it's not an unexamined life.

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Current stats on the querying process for Within the Box:

total queries to lit agencies: 498
rejections: 401
outstanding: 97

Until a couple days ago I was getting bogged down by the unrelenting turndowns, with nobody expressing any interest. The closest I had come to a positive response was an agent saying "This looks interesting but I don't handle this genre so I'm forwarding this to So-and-So my colleague". From whom I never heard a subsequent peep.

But over the weekend I opened a reply email that said "I really like your premise, but the writing didn't send me quite as much as I'd hoped. I can't offer you representation but please feel welcome to requery me if you revise it".

That may not seem like the kind of reply that would send me over the proverbial moon, but let me unpack it a little.

Lit agents might have been uniformly turning me down because they knew the market well enough to conclude that no publisher was going to go for a book about that stuff, at least not from someone who isn't already a market draw. Which would mean I couldn't fix the problem, nobody was going to agent this book. But she was saying she liked the premise.

Lit agents also might have been turning me down because of my lack of a Platform. It's something that they want from their nonfiction authors, that you already have a built-in audience, a following likely to buy your book. It's not something that they tend to look for from a fiction author (although they still care very much whether you've been previously published, and by whom, and how well it sold). I think it's stupid that they grade autobiographical memoirs by the same criteria that they evaluate a stock market portfolio management guide or a chronicle of the people who settled a Pacific island. Memoirs ought to be split into Famous Person Memoirs and Representative Memoirs and Expertise Memoirs and Memoirs That Entertain. If people have heard of the author, it's a Famous Person Memoir, and agents can sell those the easiest. Representative Memoirs are where you don't need to know the specific individual so much as you need to know about the Group, the collective cluster of people associated with some known social phenomenon — soldiers of the Vietnam war, the first women elected to American political office, the software developers of the first wave of widespread personal computer use, these are all identities where if you knew the book was about what that was like, you might want to read it. Expertise Memoirs come from really qualified experts in their field, publishing nonfiction for them is like gettting published in a relevant academic journal. You need to show the publisher that you are regarded as someone who really knows your topic. That leaves Memoirs That Entertain where it's a well-told story that just happens to be nonfiction, it's a person's actual experience, but it's entertaining whether despite or because it's true. I mean, that's how I'd divide Memoir up, but of course I'm not a lit agent.

My book falls into Representative Memoirs, using my system, because I write as a genderqueer sissy male coming out in the early 1980s. It's not about Allan Hunter, it's about the social experiences that eventually yielded words like "genderqueer". But it's also a Memoir That Entertains. It's a fun story, it's as good as a movie, it has drama and tension and characters and dialog and concepts and danger and escape and an unreliable narrator and a reason to question what is or is not actually happening here.

So...::coughs:: the query that elicited this reply was the FICTION version of my query letter, pitching it as a psychological suspense tale, to a lit agent who doesn't handle any nonfiction.

"I really like your premise, but the writing didn't send me quite as much as I'd hoped. I can't offer you representation but please feel welcome to requery me if you revise it". ——> as a work of fiction; she's saying that about it as if it were a work of fiction. The nonfiction agents have shown no interest. Oh, and I would guess that 90% of my queries describe the book as memoir, nonfiction.

The thing about positioning this book as a work of fiction is that it puts me up against fiction authors. They get to structure plot for the purpose of making a good story. I'm competing with them while trying to relay what actually happened when I was in the hospital that I alias as Elk Meadow in the book. I'm not going to say that I didn't take any liberties when writing Within the Box. I'm describing hour-to-hour events that actually took place in 1982. Of course I'm painting specific renderings of things I only remember in the general, same as when we're in conversation and I'm telling you what I said to someone yesterday in the drug store or the supermarket, we all know I'm not claiming to recall each literal word of each sentence, but I was like this, yeah? It's an honest memoir in that sense. I did move a couple of events because they helped paint people's character even if that's not when (or even to whom) they happened.

A lot of fiction authors are drawing from real-life events. "Write what you know", we're advised, and so of course fiction authors are people who draw inspiration from events and experiences they've been there for.

We could dive into a whole philosophical treatise about what is fiction and what is nonfiction, but that's actually not my focus — I'd be happy to market it either way. Rubyfruit Jungle didn't lose any impact because it was positioned as a work of fiction.

Third major observation: the lit agent's instructions for querying had said to upload a query letter, the first ten pages, your "about the author" self-summary, word count, ever been repped by an agent before, have you ever been published, synopsis, one sentence pitch, descrip of potential audience, and a short list of comparable books. Most of those I have a limited ability to modify, especially given that I'm not a great author of short little "bumper sticker" summaries. But it says that "the writing didn't send me quite as much as I'd hoped" is after reading ten pages.

I have reached out to three different significant contacts to ask for recommendations for an editor. I want to consult someone who can help me shape it as a work of fiction. Especially the first 50 pages (the max that they tend to request shorter than the whole manuscript), the first 30 within that, the first 20, first 15, first 10. First 5, god help me, and lately a tiny handful of them only want to see the first 3.

I'm nervous about going up against fiction authors. This is their craft, and I just picked it up the best I could because I think I have stuff to tell. I just have to hope that I've told my own story really well.

And I'm off to get some help with that.

Those of you who write: do you spend a lot of time wondering how to position what you've written? What to call it?

Do you like selling it, the experience of marketing what you've written, however you go about it? I'm thinking more in terms of "do you feel utterly inept at it and have no sense of how to go about doing it", rather than "do you feel like you've prostituted your skillset and you feel exploited" but really however your thinking is on it, the experience of getting the publication world to opt in?

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Blogging: A Self-Evaluation

communication, frustration, grandiosity, platform, literary agent, listening

I started blogging in earnest about 12 years ago, mostly because I kept running into the idea that all nonfiction authors have to have a "platform" if they want to snag a literary agent. By "platform" they mean a pre-existing audience already following what the author has to say whever it is that they say it.

But it was kind of contagious, this process of making these diaryesque entries, entries which rather quickly morphed into classroom lesson materials, with me playing Dr. Hunter, PhD in women's and gender studies, you know? I mean, that was the stuff I wanted to talk to the world about via the mechanism of my book, and presumably the lit agents not only want you to have a following, they want you to have a relevant following. Well, that was my thinking at the time at any rate. Besides, I wanted to put a lot of that stuff into words, to practice expressing it, to get it down. And ideally to reach out to people with it, share these concepts.

It turns out that people don't flock to a blog where they are lectured at, at least not unless they get a grade and some class credit for doing it. I had a handful of people originally, reading my blog posts, mostly other bloggers. But some of them drifted away from blogging and those who are still around have mostly stopped commenting and interacting.

Well, I'm also in a Facebook group someone set up, and the person who set it up keeps asking questions instead of providing lectures, and she gets much better interactive discussions going on.

I think it's been meaningful and appropriate that I've slowed my own blogging pace this last year. It's not that I'm giving up on this "communicate with other people" thing so much as thinking "this isn't working" and step enough back from what I've been doing to see what I'm doing wrong.

One thing I should try is asking questions. Creating space for the people who read what I've written to talk about what they think about various things.

I really am a self-immersed person, and here in this case I think it isn't so much that I haven't been caring what anyone else might think but that I somehow expected that me making a bunch of declarative expository intellectual content and flinging it out there was how you started a conversation. I thought people would talk back at me. But I didn't bother to invite anyone, just sort of assumed they'd show up!

I still have a lot to learn about this "communicate with other people" thing. I feel like I'm awful at it. Or I guess I'm reaching for a lot more than I'm able to grasp. Anyway, I've never been satisfied with how well I do it.

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I am still querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking readers for reviews and feedback. I think of it as a jam session at this point: sure I'd like to get it published, just like a musician wants to get their song recorded, but in the mean time the musician's still gonna want to play it for people. Same for me as an author! So come read what I've written! It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Coming to Terms With It

I don't have the power to make the things I say and write be important to you. To be relevant and capable of explaining a lot of things that you were concerned about.

I think that a lot of the things I say and write are important and powerfully explanatory, but for the most part I don't have what you could call a following. It's an interesting word, following. When I was a juvenile, it had a kind of stuffy "congregation of the church" official kind of vibe, but now I'm more likely to associate it with TikTok and FaceBook and YouTube, places where you get other people to follow you and listen to your videos or read your posts.

I am frustrated because of this. Obviously I want the experience of being regarded as important. Let's be upfront about that, I definitely have an ego invested in this. It would be fun and would feel really satisfying to wow people. Musicians have that, the desire to really affect an audience, to have so many people tuned into you. Oh, and incidentally I am a freaking musician and I think more people should be listening to my music because once again I think I'm better than the miniscule size of my audience ever gave testimony to.

So in terms of desire and me putting focus on it, I'm definitely craving the experience of feeling important and connected to a set of listeners.

Please treat all the preceding paragraphs as Item 1. The observed fact that I crave that kind of attention. You're invited to be cynical. Children do that, but we don't necessarily give them attention because we agree with them that their ideas and opinions and perspectives are important. We often regard it as immature, but cute and some of us regard it as selfish if it persists in adults where it is a lot less cute. So here's Flouncy Derek, getting all frustrated because he's not getting the attention he craves.

Back to me not having the power to make the things I say and write be important to you. Communication is a competitive market. I'm not doing well in that market. I don't seem to have the skillset. I don't think that should be terribly amazing to anyone, insofar as I've been trying to explain myself as a marginalized outsider person. I don't know how to do the communication-market magic stuff. It's not that I am cynical myself about the process of selling what one has to say — I could admire the trait of being good at it, and I can definitely envy it — but my frustration does have me wondering if there aren't better ways to share stuff that you really want other people to pay attention to. Making it available to them is easy; but how do you make them aware of its availability when they don't already know what it is you're selling?

Say a shorter version of it, they say. Give me a Synopsis. Explain everything in one page. Please summarize what it is that your book says in one sentence. Give me the bumper sticker version.

This limits what one can say. I just applied to enter a writing contest.

(Admittedly Cynical Reason: claim another award in the text of my query letter)

I see a contest where nonfiction is eligible and what you submit is a full 1st 50 pages. After so many contests where they want you to submit 500 words, a page, 275 words, 100 words, etc, this appeals as a chance to communicate more. But on page two of the application, they ask for a Synopsis, 100 words maximum.

The usual description of Synopsis is "boil down your book into a single page; include all spoilers", which is a horrendously reductionistic request, but to do a 100 page version utterly defeated me. I wrote

1982. Derek, nursing student, is kicked out of program, refused to pressure patients to take medications. Parents think he has drug/alcohol problem. Sell him on idea of fancy rehab and life-coach facility.

Derek's genderqueer (sissy femme), wants facility to make him better speaker.

They're pushy, tell him he's in denial. Other residents initially resent him for being disruptive.

They're slickly manipulative, he's stubborn, they treat his femininity as pathological, he tries to get something out of the program but they're headed for a collision.

Want real synopsis? I need more than 100 words, I don't do bumper stickers.

That's a hundred freaking words.

There has to be a better communications process. I have my author's group where people read from what they've written and give each other feedback. What I visualize is something hierarchical but not in the sense of bosses and employees or captains and lieutenants and sergeants, but instead a hierarchy of communication itself, with little groups that meet often being a part of somewhat larger groups that meet a bit less often and concepts that get a lot of endorsement or generate interesting conversations are more likely to be brought forward into the larger group. Or something like that. I mean, I have more specific ideas but if we were to do this, I'd need to listen to other people's ideas pretty early on.

Call the preceding paragraph Item 2, if you will. This notion of a communications funnel. Local smallgroup passing on that which communicates in a meaningful sense to the next larger group.

That notion, Item 2 (even if it's not how our markets are really structured) suggests that I should select topics and insights that aren't mine or, even if they are, precede the stuff I'm attempting to publish, and trace back to some point where it's easier to make sense to people.

Circling back to Item 1, the ego stuff, ...I really don't know if it's how people in the publishing industry thing of it, but to me, it's like a conversation, very awkwardly conducted:

Author: I have stuff to say

Market: Who can you sell it to?

Author: That's what I was going to ask you, dammit!

Back to my lack of skillset.

Then somehow I'm supposed to leverage my sense of connection to those people so as to find the people to whom I could say more without losing them or failing to make sense to them.

God I hate this. I hate this process. Flouncy Derek: You people are hard to make sense to, I have stuff to say, I'm not very good at what I set out to do, and I'm very frustrated!!

Item 3: Acceptance

I once said — as recounted in the very damn book I'm trying to sell — that I think the Serenity Prayer should be inverted, like so:

God, grant me the wisdom to know the difference between the things I cannot change and the things that I can, the courage to change the things I can change, and when all else fails, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

I'm 65. Retirement age.

I actually retired once already from pushing this specific gender agenda. This whole notion that I had something important to say. I put it down when I left college, grad school, 1992. Not toting a PhD. Not having made a mark in academia with my ideas. Then I picked it all back up in the mid-2000s, intially just thinking and processing and rereading the things I'd written.

So I picked it back up and (again) pushed and spoke and wrote. (And yeah, again got all full of self-worship for how exquisitely damn GOOD it was).

But once again it hasn't caught much fire.

I don't want to use "acceptance" as an excuse for not trying any more. But if I'm going to keep doing this, I need some protection from how utterly frustrating and demoralizing the experience is.

Oh, as long as we're on the topic, here's the shit I usually append to the bottom of my blog posts. What is there about self-marketing that I don't get? It's like shouting into a void.
—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I appeared as a guest lecturer at the Psychology of Gender course at SUNY College at Old Westbury on Monday, reading selections from my various books and articles and stitching them together with introductory bits.

I had a really good audience! Another Women's & Gender Studies course came as well so the room was well-packed. They were very quiet and attentive and asked good questions at the end.

Class was around 60 or 70 percent traditional-aged students (people in their 20s) and the rest ranged up to mid-50s. The older students were more inclined to ask questions at the end but it was nice to see the younger ones really listening, not scrolling their phones or staring off into space or fidgeting. I may not have a flair for promotion and publicity but once I can get my material in front of people, it resonates!

A very pleasant break from querying.

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

When I came out 44 years ago, I set out to follow in the footsteps of the social change agents I admired. I had a real and personal cause. Not that I'd been looking for one, I'd mostly been drawn towards social justice movements to distract me from dwelling on my personal life dissatisfactions so much; it felt good to care about someone else, and to feel drawn in to a righteous commitment, you know?

I have obsessed a lot lately with the sense of not having made any impact despite 44 years of making the attempt. I do occasionally see that this isn't an entirely fair appraisal --

a) I may have been there in various times and places where I was supportive of someone else's self-investigations or where I was perceived as some kind of role model, and then someone *else* went on to make the social ripples I never made; and

b) There's a lot of aggregate accomplishment, of changing the overall zeitgeist of our society about gender, where the same forces that made it possible for me to develop my sense of identity drew strength from me and others like me and it made an environment where yet more people could come forth with variant identities

c) Certainly, having a vision of a differently configured society has been a great and wonderful shield, protecting and insulating me from internalizing and worrying about the views of the society I actually live in. And I have a powerful distrust of Missions where one sacrifices one's personal life and personal happiness for some Higher Cause that's all about bringing about a world that one never actually gets to.

How much of it is ego? Wanting the satisfaction of having an impact, of watching the ripples become waves? Certainly some of it and probably a lot. I like to sit at the piano and smash big powerful chords down loudly. I like to craft sentences and paragraphs that make ideas resonate with people. No doubt about it, and no room to pretend otherwise. I want to rock my world.

At least some of it is a sense of responsibility and even duty, though. I promised myself as a child that if I ever figure out why it's like this, why my presence seems to bring out the mean streak in other people and they mock me and express contempt instead of receiving me warmly, I would fix it, not just for me but for anyone else like me. Whether it's a misstep that I made in understanding life and people or something that the rest of the people have gotten wrong about or whatever, that it has to be fixed.

And that's the part that is reluctant to let me rest and keeps prodding me to try to Do Something, to figure out a new and different approach that might finally work.

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Back when I was hawking my first book, GenderQueer (at that time with working title The Story of Q), I decided after a long run of querying it as a memoir with no serious nibbles to try selling it as a work of fiction. "Consider Rubyfruit Jungle", I'd say to people. "It's categorized as fiction but it's pretty clearly Rita Mae Brown's own story. Or my colleague Noretta Koertge's book Who Was that Masked Woman?, featuring a main character named Tretona Getroek -- pretty obviously herself. So why not?"

So I'm again at that stage. Within the Box is a well-written entertaining tale (I have sufficient feedback to feel confident saying so). But nary a single lit agent has expressed interest.

Here are the pro and con arguments for repositioning it as a work of fiction:

IN FAVOR: Most lit agencies and agents divide the lit world up into fiction and nonfiction, and memoirs fall into the latter. And nonfiction authors are constantly being told "you need to have a platform, an already-existing audience of people who pay attention to what you say in your field". Which makes a certain amount of sense if your nonfiction piece is about climate change, or the boom and bust cycles of the stock market, or the extensive searches for remnant populations of ivory-billed woodpeckers and thylacines and other presumed-extinct animals.

And I suppose it also makes sense if your nonfiction offering is a memoir about your experience as an already-known public figure. Where that's going to be one of its selling points, that it's about a person that folks have heard of in the news or whatever.

But Within the Box is only incidentally a true story. Nobody has heard of me and hence nobody is going to buy my book because of who I am, but it's an engrossing suspense tale.

Lots of fiction authors write engrossing suspense tales and they aren't instructed to describe their platform of reputation and expertise that makes them qualified to write what they wrote.

AGAINST: I always figured a strong selling point of one's actual story is that it is, in fact, someone's actual story, that it actually happened. And I'd be tossing that away in order to market the book as fiction.

My companion-partner mentioned that if I query it as fiction, I run the risk of some lit agent wanting to change parts of the plot, insert an element into the storyline that didn't really happen or change the personality and behavior of myself as main character. Which I suppose is true, but it's not like I'm forced to go along with that.

The truth is, I have no freaking idea what makes my book more likely to appeal to these folks. I've done my reading and I've participated in message boards for authors and I'm still in the dark.

But since I can keep querying it as nonfiction while also querying it as fiction to other lit agents, I see no downside to having a go at it.

Current querying stats:

TOTAL queries to lit agents: 307
Rejections: 250
Outstanding: 56

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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As a child I thought it a good thing that there should be a system. Like patriotism but nonspecific, just the general notion that there was an ideal way to do things and we were those who had sought it and acquired it. Or were in the process of acquiring it.

Always in the process. Always there in the process, acquiring it. Not a state of being there having acquired it. The act of becoming.

Having that configuration of parts. Not for having decided to, just that you were born with them. A Privileged and yet involuntary situation, if you see what I mean. Gender is some nasty stuff.

Expressing it. Calling it something.

Realizing

It's that time of evening when I open the email mailbox that's dedicated to querying, so I can mark a handful of lit agents as "Rejected" and the date I received the rejection.

I open the first one and the agent likes my query and wants to see the full manuscript!

This happened a couple times with my first book, GenderQueer, although it never resulted in being offered a contract.

But this is the first time it's happened for Within the Box.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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I've overhauled my nonfiction proposal somewhat -- mostly on my own, but I did finally, belatedly, receive comments from the nonfiction author's association, courtesy of lit agent Jennifer Chen Tran. Most of these were highlighter boxes around individual words and phrases with suggested changes, and I mostly didn't understand why the suggested versions were better than the original wording.

As with query letters and the entire querying process, it all comes across to me as paradoxical: "Please submit your description of your book in a format that exactly meets our expectations of how an author who writes successful books in today's market would do it, but we're not going to specify what our expectations are. Emphasize how your book is different from what's already out there, but show us how it fits conveniently into an existing niche in the established market. Be original. Don't try to hand us anything we don't already know how to market to publishers. Please take time to write us a personal query that shows you bothered to familiarize yourself with our interests and track record, and why you picked us as a literary agency, but also be aware that we look at hundreds of these things very rapidly and reject nearly every one of them, so strip it down to just the facts, ma'am."

I do not think I would enjoy being a literary agent. Maybe I'm wrong about that but it looks utterly dismal from the outside. I like finding a fascinating book that takes me somewhere unexpected, and it's no more likely to have been written in the last couple years than to have been written twenty or thirty years ago. I think I'd hate to have to plow through a gigantic slush pile of query letters and proposals and first three chapter excerpts, looking not merely for a gem that hits my sweet spot as a reader but also one that I can get some market-driven publisher to consider.

You familiar with Stephen King's book Misery? Where the main character is an author being held hostage by a demented fan of his own book series' main character, and she keeps him prisoner until he writes a sequel that she likes? Well, maybe there's a market for a horror tale in which a frustrated unpublished author kidnaps a literary agent and ties them to a chair and makes them read their manuscript...

ANYWAY, as of today, Within the Box now has been the subject of 265 query letters, of which 228 have resulted in rejections or 3-month timeouts. The remaining 37 are still outstanding and could theoretically result in some type of positive response. Nary a single nibble yet, not a request for additional chapters or a full or anything else.

For the sake of comparison, for my first book GenderQueer I sent forth 1474 query letters to lit agents before I switched to querying small independent presses and hybrid publishers instead. I did get some interested responses, although never got offered a lit agency contract.

For all the subscribers and fans and regular readers of my blog who wonder why my blogging pace has dropped off from the once-a-week schedule I maintained until around October of last year, I apologize. And to both of you, I should explain that I started this blog because of all the advice telling me that an author trying to get published, especially a nonfiction author, really needs a platform. Meaning a base of already-attentive audience members who would be likely to go out and purchase a book by that author if one were to be published. But I think I only have a certain threshold tolerance for how much I can write and push out into the world and watch it not being seen and read. And right now I'm querying and it is soul-destroying enough without also writing blog posts that nobody reads.

I left Twitter nearly a year ago, never was on TikTok or Instagram or any of those other social-media critters, and I'm increasingly tempted to leave Facebook. I just don't find the short-attention-span popup-notification world to overlap much with what I regard as communication.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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You ever notice how large a percent of the social argument is about whether to treat your difference -- the factor setting you apart from the conventional assumptions -- as a verb or as a noun?

I have noun hunger; I wish the way I am to be understood as a thing and not a behavior, an identity not a way that I am acting. I don't want to be an adjective or an adverb, a How You Are rather than a Who You Are.

I know enough to be cautious about seeking to be seen as innately different, though. I'm also a psychiatric survivor, a person who's been a resident of a place with bars on the windows and locks on the doors and they take away your shoelaces and your belt. They treated us as innately different. "Ruined useless brain-damaged crazy people, that's Who They Are." So it works both ways.

In my opinion, we of the sexual/gender identity variant sort have done a good job of setting forth how we want to be perceived, claiming the noun, I am this different kind of self. This isn't the entirety of who I am, but it's good shorthand starting point.

I get some pushback sometimes. Good. It's nice talking to the ones who agree with me but if you want to change the world you live in you've got to communicate with the ones who don't. I mean, it's why we push.

So I propose more testimonial personal descriptions of why marginalized people want the noun treatment. The difference in how it feels. Why shouldn't we be entitled to not having our selves painted as a behavior and, since we're variant, a misbehavior? That's the whole point, I'm not being different on purpose, I'm being me; maybe it happens to be different from you being you, however plural you may be and however singular and nonbelonging I am.

I'm not saying nobody ever gets to judge me, I'm accountable for myself. But "different" isn't wrong and you don't get to treat it as wrong.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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I haven't been blogging very regularly in recent months. I suppose some of that is maudlin discouragement. Thinking nobody reads what I post anyway, or that my posts have no impact in the world.

But the mood doesn't come from out of nowhere. I'm trying to query. And I'm trying to research each literary agent and give at least a superficial reason for why I'm querying that specific lit agent when I send out my queries. That may not seem like much investment, but it's taking a toll. It makes me care that much more, because I'm writing to someone I actually have a sense of, and I can't help developing a hope that this one will actually want to represent my book. And so far, nobody does.

What else? Well, I signed up for a proposal course, a course in how to write your nonfiction proposal. So far I'm very very unimpressed. It's broken into three segments of 1 hour each, on consecutive Thursdays. So far, all of it is geared towards people who are experts in their field writing nonfiction guides or prescriptive recommendations. Which does, admittedly, cover a lot of nonfiction offerings. But my primary reason for taking the course was that as a memoir author I find it really hard to shoehorn what's closer to being a fiction suspense tale into a format designed for experts in their field giving advice.

I've said it's as if you'd written a politcal polemic about social justice and to get it published you have to format it as a legal brief to the court, obeying all the structural injunctions about what statutes you need to reference and what precedents you need to cite.

Anyway, the second session was entirely devoted to having a platform. Because, generally speaking, nonfiction authors need a platform, i.e., a bunch of people already tuning in to what you might have to say on your subject.

I'm familiar with the notion that as a nonfiction author I ought to have a freaking PLATFORM. That's why I have a goddam Facebook account. That's why I blog. It isn't working. I don't have a following. Telling me I need to have a platform, that I need to develop a following, isn't helpful right now. It's just depressing and frustrating.

What I want is help developing the best nonfiction proposal I can, given the platform, such as it is, that I do have. And the overview, and the review by chapters, and all the other shit that proposals involve.

I have one more session upcoming. We're supposedly going to get individual feedback on the proposals we have, and I'm going to be pushy about getting such feedback on mine. Otherwise, a complete waste of money and time.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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MetaNostalgia is that state you get into by looking down at your pot pipe and remembering, nostalgically, one of the first times you got high on pot and how it gave you this burst of nostalgic memories.

I've always been nostalgic. I'm always backwards-looking, continuing to react to things. Processing in my head what I think of this event and that ongoing phenomenon and still being in that moment.

This is not a confession. I mean, you do you; maybe being like this wouldn't work for you, and I'm not trying to prescribe it for you. But I like it, and it works for me.

Do I sound defensive? That's fair. There's a lot of propaganda that favors the forward-looking. I'm not saying you're a part of that, just that it's loudly out there as an attitude. That if you're looking backwards, you aren't watching where you're going. That it means you aren't a planner. That, from a healthy psychology point of view, you aren't living in the present moment. And that, from a psychology point of view that's watching for pathology, that you're traumatized or haunted or imprinted upon by your past and therefore can't move on, as if your past were one thing and who you are is another thing, victimized by it. Does any of this sound familiar? You've heard it too then?

So yeah, here's the deal. I'm here in the here and now. I act and choose and make the same efforts to shape my life as you probably do, I'm not ignoring the present moment.

The past is how I make sense of the present. It's not a different reality, one that has expired. Now is Then, later. I'm continuing to look at all things, as they have been and on up until now when they're continuing to happen. I don't really know for sure if those of you with this present-moment attitude are doing the exact same thing I'm doing and we're just using different words, or if you folks think differently.

I'm not done with the past. I reminisce, I replay, I continue to learn from. Much of it is abstracting, seeing patterns that reoccur from time to time as part of events. That includes my own emotional and cognitive reactions at the time, what I was going through and what I was doing in those situations.

And yes, I replay in my head pondering what if had done this instead, all that second-guessing and trying on regrets like garments from the dress-up box, playing the scene out different inside my head. Of course I do that.

I am who I have always been. I never stopped knowing the me that I was when I had only recently acquired a language to think in. Maybe before then, too, it's just that I can't think back to my thoughts I was thinking because they weren't in words yet. Only some of them ever are, of course. But you can remember patches of the other stuff if you have the verbal-memory framework to anchor them to.

It hasn't been all pleasant. Or easy. The tendency is that I'm marked as Other, and marginalized, but I'm a participant in that marginalization too, pulling away from others. The problem isn't that I don't want connection and community. The problem is that other people want me to be more like them, and I want other people to be more like me; they, in general, are over there in that direction, in other words I'm different in a direction. There's tension, sometimes frustration; communication is a recurrent concern. So I'm not saying I've found Zen or sublime peaceful acceptance or whatever.

But I'm also not messed up, either by my past or by the ways in which I'm different. It hasn't been a miserable life so much as a struggly life. I'm passionate and intense even though I'm also mellow and sweet.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Back in December, when I reviewed Cyrus Dunham's *A Year Without a Name*, I noted the author's fleeting worry that an ambivalent attitude towards the identity he transitioned to could be seized upon by transphobes as proof that this whole transgender thing is being embraced by people who might get buyer's remorse and reject it all later.

Torrey Peters takes it to the next level and wades headlong into it, giving us a character who has, in fact, detransitioned. It's not a screed against the danger of having a transgender identity available as an option, but rather instead another novel that upends the neat little identity-boxes and the oversimplifications.

Amy/Ames, the detransitioned character, has not abandoned their she-identity because it did not fit, but because it fit a little too well, opening up an enticing menu of desired options and outcomes that left her as Amy too vulnerable in a world where vulnerability is a liability. The extra social cost of being trans, on top of the interpersonal emotional price tags of being a woman in this society, was too much, and if the response was to close down, to deny one's feelings and be as oblivious to them as possible, why not go the whole way and retreat back into being one of the guys?

Amy/Ames' former lesbian partner, Reese, is the second of the three primary characters. Reese, unlike Amy/Ames, has not detransitioned and is still coping with life as a trans woman. She, too, finds fulfillment and connection an ongoing challenge but she's in it for the long haul, and resents Ames for abandoning her.

Katrina is Ames' boss, and his current lover, and at the book's opening she does not know that Ames lived as a transgender woman. Ames has assumed the female hormones taken during that time ensured sterility. Incorrectly, as it turns out: Katrina is pregnant.

The premise of the book is that Ames is totally not ready to occupy a social and psychological role as a male parent, feeling utterly like a fake man. Reese and Amy had been planning to adopt before they broke up, and Ames comes up with the solution that the three of them jointly should raise this baby.

Katrina is gender-nonconforming in various ways herself. She tops Ames in a BDSM-flavored dynamic and has never felt as ease in the conventional woman role. This is her second pregnancy; she was married, became pregnant, and miscarried, and to her horror realized she was glad because it gave her an excuse to break up the marriage and escape from the projected identity-assumptions of all their married-couple friends.

A significant amount of the story is told as backstory, filled in in flashbacks: we see Reese as a boy, pre-transition, at the ice skating rink, skating with the girls who are his friends, wanting to blend in with them, resenting it when they're all taken to MacDonald's afterwards and he alone gets a boy toy with the Happy Meal. We get to review the Amy-Reese breakup in slow motion, with Amy being distant and unresponsive and Reese pursuing an affair with Stanley, who in one pivotal scene calls Reese and Amy "queers" and fights Amy in a sidewalk brawl. We're shown the attenuated communication between Amy and Reese that led up to Reese turning to outside connections for her emotional needs.

It's neither just an edgy new sitcom nor a feel-good tossed-salad of spectacularly nontraditional identities. There's a sharp edge to the ending, which flings the three of them hurtfully against each other and remains unresolved. So it's a reminder that we continue to hurt each other in our neediness and desperation, and are only now in the process of forging a way forward more united than adversarial and resentful.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

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I did not go through a phase as a child where I resented not getting dolls as presents or where dolls represented a girl world I was cut off from. It wasn't like that. First off, I got to play with some girls I was friends with, and some of that play involved dolls. Second, when I lost that, when we all became older and I no longer had a girlfriend or a best friend who was a girl, it wasn't the playing with dolls that I missed.

I could do the thing where we say "let's pretend" except those weren't the words we used, it was more "Ok so then the Daddy comes homes, and you be..." we just made stuff up for our own entertainment. As adults we think of it as art, perhaps, when we still do it. Making stuff up. Making stuff. Being creative. As a kid, I didn't think of it as something I aspired to, or worried if I was good enough at it, if I was talented. It definitely wasn't competitive. Playing with other kids was generating our own entertainment, and it was fun in its own right, not some avenue for some other purpose, social success or whatever.

Having said that, yeah, I did see that there were a different set of superficial symbol things associated with the girls, like different clothes that they wore and makeup and playing with dolls and stuff. Boys had a different pattern, and I always found the overall sense of who we were to be unadmirable, right down to most of the superficial aesthetics. Like watching the Super Bowl right now would be a boy thing for instance. I remember as far back as third grade that it seemed ridiculous that other boys so often aspired to these things that were ascribed to us.

And yeah, I did wonder if I'd cope at least equally well if I were perceived as a female person and called girl, thought of as girl, including the superficial silly things, all the pink etc, you know? Not like "that's what makes a girl a girl" but more "Yeah well that's part of the experience, having that shit flung in your face as a definition of you".

Being defined by other people. That's what brought me to this table. I gravitated to the tables where other people had something to complain about as far as being defined by other people.

It's not about my right to wear lipstick or my desire to wear lipstick, for me, It's about thinking the lipstick expectations would have been something I could have coped with, along with much worse things. I'd have been an okay girl if those things had happened that way.

I did finally get around to watching the Barbie movie. I'm putting this up in lieu of an attempt at movie review because I don't feel particularly coherent and yet I want to discuss the movie. Lack of coherency is because... well, I was expecting either a Barbie-seizing kind of PowerPuff-Girls thingie that was assertive about Barbie power or else a sophisticated wry mockery of Barbie as per Saturday Night Live sketches. Neither is how the movie hit me.

The plot, the storyline, felt like tossed-salad randomness of childlike play-with-barbie events, initially in a dollhouse and then in accessory plastic cars but would run directly into adult conspiracy thriller involving the political and economic maneuvers of Mattel, Inc and the general "outside" society and the dollworld she came from. They asked a lot of cool questions and basically left them on the sidewalk to move on to other things, so the serious content didn't manifest to me.

I woke up the day after seeing it, with a different take on it. Something gelled while I was asleep.

I had this image of girls who were also adult women, the same self, playing with Margot Robbie... here at this moment positioning Barbie to face to other dolls and have a conversation about whether Barbie set women back fifty years, or instead that Barbie was an inspirational role model. And then second later, the girls/women playing with their Barbies drop them into a plastic car and, see, she's driving over the bridge here...

Yeah, well done. Playing with Barbies wasn't centric to my life but I do get it.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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As author of autobiographical nonfiction, I'm occasionally questioned and challenged about my recall. I even once had a potential publisher tell me I could not market my book as nonfiction at all, since human memory is so unreliable!

That's an extreme position, and hence pretty easy to dismiss, but to a lesser extent the question has come up in various ways several times.

I do appear to have an unusually good recollection of events in my own life, but another factor involved here is that I've often written about things that happened to me, the events that had an impact on me at the time. That means that when I sit at my computer to write in the 2020s about something that happened to me in the 1980s, it's typically something I've written about previously. That works on two levels: the previous act of prowling through those memories and pondering them in order to write about them probably keeps them fresher than if I hadn't thought about them much in the intervening years, and in many cases I have copies of what I actually wrote at earlier points.

Within the Box has a couple pages of description of my first incarceration, in 1980, as a student at the University of New Mexico.

Here is a portion of that, followed by a snippet or two of an earlier description of the event from 2003 and one from a yet earlier description I wrote in 1982.

I dealt with Mountain View by starting my own local chapter of Mental Patients’ Liberation Front, and even though they were utterly coercive and we had no rights to speak of, I managed to get most of the patients in agreement that we should listen to each other and be mutually supportive, and try to ignore the horrible treatment the institution was subjecting us to. And I also got the support of a significant percent of the staff members, to the point that it polarized the institution and disrupted its functioning. I was making sense to a lot of people, and making their jackbooted authoritarian ways look silly and indefensible. Upper echelon clinical staff eventually decided I was a rabble raising psychiatric rights activist and booted me out, as if they’d caught me trespassing.

(from Within the Box, "Day Eleven" chapter)

So I make friends with the other mental patients. I’m thinking initially “I don’t belong here this is a mistake”, like most of you probably would, but the other mental patients here on the Seriously Disturbed Ward…umm, they don’t think they’re Napoleon and they aren’t seeing pink elephants and I can talk to them. Heck, I can even explain the stuff in my papers that got me into this place and they understand it (with varying shades of disagreement or ideas about what some things would mean that don’t overlap with my own). And I can understand the stuff that they are wrapped up in and concerned about...

After a week or so, we have started calling ourself the “patient people” instead of “patients” because to survive in this place you need to be very patient with the confrontational and abusive staff who belittle you and order you around, and patient with the situation in which you’re locked up and when not in immediate danger from the psychiatric professionals are generally bored. And we start referring to the staff when they behave at their worst as “impatient people”. We continue listening to each others’ stuff and give each other reality-checks and confirmations of the authenticity of feeling this or that based on what has happened to us here or there, and give each other pragmatic advice and sympathy and just someone to talk to about it. And pretty quickly we’re overtly saying that the only therapy in this place is what we are providing to each other. There are a couple of nurses, one in afternoon shift and another on night shift, who applaud this and say it is excellent. There are others on both of these shifts and everyone on the morning shift who regard it as inappropriate behavior and try to discourage us from talking to each other. The woman whose husband put her in there has a doctor who starts issuing instructions to the staff to stop this behavior. My doctor is mildly supportive but mostly for what he thinks it means regarding me individually. He thinks this is all my doing. At first it sort of was except that it caught on like wildfire once some of this stuff had been said out loud once or twice. There is another doctor who thinks the whole phenomenon is a great success story for “milieu therapy” which usually means “the therapeutic advantages of being surrounded by walls and barred windows” but now because we are essentially doing mutual therapy (and not assuming each other to be “sick”, by the way) we are part of each other’s “milieu” …at any rate he thinks it’s all wonderful and is instructing his patients to participate in our home-grown group sessions.

By the fourth week the staff is openly bickering, not just in the conference room behind the nurse’s station but in front of us out on the ward floor, and we’re behaving like calm patient little Zen masters. One guy hooks up the teenage couple with an attorney friend he knows and although he won’t “take their case” he gives them simple legal advice. I flirt with the married woman in front of her husband when he comes to visit and we imply to him that the two of us are having an affair in the hospital and he suddenly starts saying he’s going to talk to the doctor about her coming home. The guy with the Jesus freak parents is drawing his nightmare visions in crayons and it seems to help him cope and for crayon drawings they are pretty good.

Then one day I’m out in the barbed-wire enclosure (“yard”) where they let the patients go to smoke and get sunlight and when I come back in I find all my stuff is piled in the middle of the intake corridor and they won’t let me go onto the floor. “You aren’t crazy and you can’t stay here. You have to leave. Take your stuff and get out of here.”

(from a message board post, 2003)

...[I]nto the modern shiny psychiatric institution was tossed a stranger who had been handing out strange feminist manifestos, and he had just recently read an article about a group of psychiatric inmates calling themselves Mental Patients' Liberation Front, so when he deciced he wasn't getting what he'd come for, he decided to start a chapter right there in the hospital.

And the members of this new Mental Patients' Liberation Front wanted to talk about sex and politics and religion and love and suicide and life and death; and some of them wanted to sleep with each other while others wanted to sleep on the couches or on the floor, and they said, "So what if it it's emotionally intense, or unorderly, or different from normal? Does it hurt anything?" They complained about the godawful boredom, and some of the women put their makeup on their boyfriends while the men giggled, and the men shaved their eyebrows instead of their cheeks while the head nurse scowled from his plexiglass office.

In group therapy, the patients, now calling themselves the patient people, began discussing and redefining values. The nurses who had come to beam parentally and guide the therapy were told they could join in or listen patiently, but not to interfere impatiently with the patient people talking; after awhile, some of the nurses started talking, too.

But there were also a lot of very threatened and insecure people there who didn't like their reality tested like that, and they yelled, became violent, and insisted that personal contact was psychologically damaging to their patients' well-being. The patient people insisted otherwise, but the fearful ones lost their patience as rapidly as they were losing their patients, no matter how patient the patient people tried to be with them. Psychotropic tranquilizer drugs were ordered all around. It didn't look good for the patient people.

But some of the other therapists and an administrator or two began speaking up for the patient people, saying that these outspoken patients had an interesting set of ideas about reorganizing the care plan procedure of the institution. Some of them even went so far as to say that they didn't think the patient people were crazy at all.

Until one day a fiery MPLF radical or two found all personal possessions stacked in piles on the corridor floor after returning from weekend pass:

"You can't stay here any more. No, you can't talk with any of the other patients. Get your stuff off our floor and leave. If that stuff is still here tonight, it goes outside into the street."

(from The Amazon's Brother, unpublished, written in 1982)

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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I go on Facebook and encounter an image of an (apparently) male person staring in the mirror, caption says this person is trying on his mom's clothes while she's out; reflection in the mirror shows an (apparently) female person in bra and briefs staring back; thought bubble says "Wow, I look BEAUTIFUL"; caption below says "... and then she knew who she really was".

I am one of those people who were born male -- by which I mean born with the physiological equipment that tends to lead obstetricians to assign newborn infants to the male category -- who then subsequently identify with the girls and women instead of the boys and men. There is a pervasive notion that the core of identifying that way, the reason for it, the important part, is all about being a sex object, a desirable beautiful person.

And I do mean pervasive. It's everywhere. You can find this notion expressed by trans women and by trans exclusive women who mock them; you can encounter it among the socially aware who support transgender and other gender-variant people's rights and concerns but also from transphobes and social conservatives who are dismissive of us.

There's certainly some pushback, but not enough to keep me from wanting to push back against it myself. So maybe this is something you've heard several times, but maybe you need to anyway. This attitude is annoying AF and I get tired of encountering it.

* I first started thinking of myself as essentially one of the girls and only technically one of the boys when I was about eight. Third grade. There were a lot of things about being a girl that just seemed right, and superior. Being pretty wasn't an important item on that list. I'm not sure it was ever on the list at all.

* When I came out in 1980, at the age of 21, I began trying to explain that who I was inside (and who I had been for years, inside) made it appropriate to think of me the way you think of girls and women, and that I didn't aspire to be a man or have any interest in being measured by the standards associated with them, but that, outside, I was male. The male part wasn't wrong, just the man part. I never had any interest or intention of passing as a female person -- beautiful and sexy or otherwise.

* I'm not saying I never had any interest in being found sexually attractive and desirable. As a teenager and young adult, I developed a dislike for the asymmetrical situation, where the girls were being hit on and pressured and cajoled and sought after for sex, and where the boys were expected to do that hitting ond pressuring and, if they didn't, were assumed to have no such interests. You know the drill: sex as something where the female people are the commodity and the male people are the market. I didn't want to play at that table. I wanted reciprocity. I wanted to be desired in the same way that I desired, and to be no more a sexual consumer than the objects of my own desire were. So, sure, I ended up wanting those aspects of being human that are marked "female" in our society. But...

* In my particular case, the people for whom I felt sexual attraction were, in fact, female people. That meant I could not get this reciprocal and egalitarian sexual experience as easily as folks with same-sex attraction. It also meant that, although I did want to be sexually desired, the notion of literally being a sexy attractive female person myself didn't have as much appeal to me as it might have for someone who found male-bodied folks sexually interesting.

In a world where women in general are often treated like the only important thing, the only thing that matters if you're female, is to be sexually desirable to men, it should not surprise any of us that the attitude towards someone born male who says they identify as one of the women is to reduce that identification to an identification with being the sex object. And to map it directly onto the sexualized idealized female form with its idealized shapes and curves and associated apparel.

Not that there's anything wrong with wanting that, if that's what you want, but the people for whom that is true are not the only show in town. And, in the social climate where this is the pervasive default assumption about all of us born male who identify with the women and girls, you have some responsibility to avoid perpetuating that this is what it's all about.

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

I've been postponing a full-on resumption of querying until it should seem I was no longer dipping in to make little edits to the manuscript. I guess I forgot that that never happens, really.

One reason for ~~procrastinating~~ postponing -- aside from the obvious sense that one should get one's book into final form and then query -- is that I keep an array of snippets of the sort that lit agents ask to receive: 50 sample pages, first 25 pages, a sample chapter, first 5 pages, etc. Any of which might be out of date if I'm continually editing the actual manuscript.

That's a bit of a headache, actually. For American lit agencies in particular, sample materials are nearly always requested to be either pasted into the body of the email or else pasted into a web form such as QueryTracker. Either way, you can't depend on anything but plain text to go through and land intact. No tab stops or first-paragraph indents, no bold or italic.

So periodically I have to refresh all my snippets. Open the actual manuscript, select the relevant chunks and copy, paste into a plain text editor (I use BBEdit), replace all returns with double returns so there'll be a white space between paragraphs (since there's no paragraph indent), then comb through that portion of the manuscript looking for italicized passages and setting them off in the plain text with *asterisks*.

I've switched to keeping the snippets in a database, so that I've got a modification date on each one. Version control!

I'm seldom doing "deep edits" these days; the manuscript really is pretty stable. I mean, it's rare at this point for me to insert a scene or append another paragraph to a dialogue.

My most common edits are individual sentences I'm reading for the ten zillionth time and realize that it sounds slightly awkward or unclear and that I reacted that way last time and the time before that, so yeah, how can this be improved?

I confess I woke up the other day sitting bolt-upright in bed, convinced I had kept the same nurses on continual shift for 24 hours. That's the kind of error that can bounce an alert reader out of the flow of the story, so that would be bad. (I hadn't, though -- the scenes in question are rather long scenes measured in words and pages but despite all that takes place, no nurse ends up being in the story for over 12 hours of chronological time -- whew!)

Those are the sort of errors I have to watch out for. Sequences of events that read well and feel plausible until some little discrepancy catches your attention and makes the whole scene unravel. Like having everyone sit down for supper on page 137 and then you get two characters discussing what they want for supper on page 139.

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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