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Here's a short bite from Within the Box where Derek is thinking back to some interactions with one of his LPN classmates earlier in the spring.

I like this section because it fleshes out and explains some things about Derek, including shedding some light on his current attraction to April, another patient here in the rehab facility. It also lets me insert some complicated stuff about the intersection of gender identity and sexual orientation, hopefully without it feeling like a lecture or breaking up the narrative flow

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The ‘April and Jake’ thing prompts me to think about Marjorie for the first time in months. Marjorie Turpin. Nurses’ training school, another LPN student from my class. A class of about 35 students, me being one of only three males. A fairly warm crowd, overall. Women being themselves, in a way that you mostly only see when they vastly outnumber the male folks to the point that they don’t consider our presence very much. Teasing and banter and joking around. Our teachers, too. Ms. MacDonald and Ms. Jackson, professional and efficient but clever and amusing, down to earth, guiding the new crop of caregivers. It was a good place to be.

I fit in. I had fun there. I joined in with the teasing and joking and cleverness as well as soaking up the biomedical science and the technique of making a bed with military tautness or giving an injection. Marjorie Turpin was fun. I liked her. I don’t know when the name teasing got started... maybe when Ms. MacDonald spoke of the obsolete cough syrup called turpin hydrate. But then there was the TURP operation procedure (trans-urethral repair of the prostate). In one form or another, the syllable “turp” kept cropping up in our lessons and each time it did I’d make eye contact with her and pretend like it was named in her honor.

I liked my classmates and our cameraderie and wished for more time with them, casual time, off-the-clock time to just hang out and get closer. One day I asked a cluster of them if any wanted to go out for dinner together after Friday afternoon class finished and got a series of declines and excuses. I asked a few others separately. Penny said not this week but some other time. And Cynthia had to get back to the kids. Marjorie, however, said sure, and we agreed where we’d meet up.

I was standing out in front of the Pizza Hut we’d settled on, waiting. A friendly dark-haired fellow came over, asked if I were Derek, and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m Marjorie’s husband”. Oh, okay, cool. I looked around but didn’t see anyone else following from the direction he had come.

“Where’s Marjorie?”

“Well, she’s not coming”.

I was confused. Disappointed. I asked if he wanted to order anything. He looked at me oddly then said he had to get back. He had departed by the time I got the parts to click together inside my head.

Well, yes, actually, it was like that, I mean, yes, I found her attractive, I would totally go in that direction with her if that were an option. But honestly, I hadn’t been consciously thinking of it that way. It’s like I’m one of the girls one minute, then, suddenly, no I’m not.

How do lesbians handle this? Is it a problem for them too, the same way? Where these are the people that you like, the people you want as your friends, but yeah you’re also attracted to them and you want that to happen too, some of the time? Do lesbians also not start off making a distinction, like “potential lover material, this one” or “I like her as a friend but only as”, and instead just respond open and warm and let things develop however they develop? Because that’s what seems to come natural to me.

Then there’s the militant heterosexual sissy attitude: It is not my responsibility to make things go in a sex direction just because I’m the male.

The Marjorie event wasn’t unusual for not resulting in me ending up with her as my girlfriend, or affair partner. What was unusual was her picking up on the presence of that kind of interest on my part.

So it’s another part of the communication problem. I want to broadcast to the world that there are people like me. Femme people, male people, sissy heterosexual male people, and we have these natures and these interests. Then I want to be sufficiently readable that people can pick up on me being open to possibilities, or specifically interested in them personally for that matter, without me behaving in some pushy intrusive way. Without me pretending to be someone I am not, donning male courting and flirting behaviors. Behavioral drag.

Of course I’d apparently been intrusive, maybe even creepy, from Marjorie’s vantage point. Hadn’t intended to be. I don’t tend to censor my flirtatiousness in situations where it might be inappropriate because for the most part nobody notices.

It’s all rather complicated. I long ago reached the point of being unapologetic and proud of who I was, my identity, and to talk at people about it, to come out, to insist on myself as a valid self and a valid sexuality. What I really really wanted, though, was to talk with people about it all, and finish sorting everything out.

—————

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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

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

Hi! I've been churning away on my third book, the working title of which I've changed to Within the Box (previously: In the Box). Here's a scene I'm sharing, where I'm sitting down one-to-one with my assigned personal counselor Mark Raybourne.

The overall backdrop here is that this is a rehab facility; my status is voluntary; I went AWOL once, bored and less than thrilled with the place, and since then I've been barred from going outdoors for recreation, so to get exercise I've taken to making circuits of the long hallways of the institution, walking laps around the rectangle that they form in this sprawling facility.

-----

“Thanks for being flexible about the time”, Mark says. He had had something else going on that conflicted with our regular individual counseling session, so he’d asked if we could meet early afternoon. He knows my schedule, and it’s not like I was likely to have penciled in a dentist’s visit or a wine tasting, but nice of him to ask me instead of telling me.

“We need to talk”, he tells me. “About your excursions up and down the hall. It’s attracting a lot of attention.”

I nod. Yes, and?

“Most people aren’t comfortable in a social situation if everyone else thinks they’re behaving oddly. So it’s not just that you’re walking around and around like a robot, it’s also the fact that you don’t show any sign of recognizing how odd this looks to everyone else. A lot of people on the staff are saying this shows a worrisome lack of insight, and we’re all concerned that you’re in some type of emotional turmoil”.

“That’s interesting”, I reply. “My nursing instructor brought that up to me once. I had just had a patient die on me while I was away at lunch, and she had me clean him up for the family to come in and have a final visit. So I was still in the patient’s room when they all came trooping in, a minister with a Bible and three or four middle-aged people and an older woman with a cane. They didn’t speak to me, so I didn’t speak to them. And the minister said a prayer and we all stood there like that for awhile. My nursing instructor said they all kept looking over at me, wondering why I was there in the room, and she found it weird that I didn’t react to that at all. She said they clearly expected me to leave so the family could be with the man in privacy. But they were all standing between me and the door and it felt like it would be more disruptive to push past them, and I didn’t mind being there, he’d been my patient for all the good I’d done him, and it felt disrespectful to dash off like I have more important things to do than stand here honoring the dead. So, yeah, I can be pretty oblivious to being the focus of attention if nobody’s actually saying anything.”

“Doesn’t it occur to you that nobody else goes on a purposeless march and makes a spectacle of themself in the corridor? Everyone here is trying to get better. Healthier. Nobody wants to look like they’re having some kind of breakdown! So either you really are experiencing a breakdown or there’s something fundamentally wrong, that you don’t care how people perceive you!”

“I’ve been blocked from going out for recreation. I was already not getting enough exercise, so if the hospital’s going to keep me indoors, I’m going to get my recreation this way. Simple as that. If nobody’s going to bother to just ask me why I’m doing it, it must not matter much to them.”

“Well, people are usually reluctant to point out that someone’s behaving strangely. They don’t want to embarrass the other person”.

“I haven’t found that to be true. All my life people have made a point of coming up to me and telling me I’m strange.”

“I was hoping you’d give some more thought to it maybe not being in your best interests to not care what other people think about you. I spoke to you about this just the other day. Clearly, it didn’t seem to have any effect, because next thing I know, you’re out here pretending you’re a wind-up toy instead of a human being!”

“I actually have been giving it quite a bit of thought. It’s an interesting topic. What you need to realize is that I’ve spent a lifetime having people react to me as if I’m weird. They mostly weren’t very nice about it, and mocked me and made fun of me and called me names. I learned not to care because how else would you keep them from getting to you? I was never going to blend in.”

I pause for a moment, reminded of a line of thought I’d pursued once or twice before. “That was less true for my sister. Jan 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 talk about and 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, but popular enough. But that wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t a kid who was seen 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. That means even if I agree with you, which I partly do, by the way, that it probably costs me certain things, that’s like saying ‘Gee, if you’re moving to Spain, you’d be better off if you spoke Spanish instead of English’, you can say it and it may be true but you don’t just decide to switch languages and the next day you’re speaking Spanish. Just because you don’t notice any difference in my behavior doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about what you said”.

“What does speaking Spanish have to do with walking around and around and around in the hallway?”

I sigh.

-----

—————

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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both 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 made one major structural change in my WIP (book three, In the Box): I converted it all from first person past tense to first person present tense.

The precipitating reason was that the internal monologues, the main character Derek's stream-of-consciousness stuff, was awkward to write. Obviously Derek isn't thinking in the past tense. I had written some of it in this kind of format:

Derek thought to himself, "Seriously, do I need this? It's been a long day"

In other places, I used italics instead:

The administrative staffer handed me another stack of forms and said, "Fill this out".

Whoa. The name of every prescription drug and when it was prescribed, going back ten years?? I'm supposed to just rattle that shit off from the top of my head?

Then there was the author's voice, narrator's voice. The book is autobiographical (I am the "Derek" character from my books; I change all the names but it's nonfiction memoir through and through). That meant I was sometimes writing some thoughts about the events being described but doing so as Allan Hunter, author, and that was being rendered in past tense along with the rest of the narrative. But distinguishing between that voice and the internal monologue of character Derek, my 23-year-old self who was in the situation at the time, was often complicated and challenging. Or arbitrary and random.

I realized this would all be so much smoother and integrated if it were written in present tense. I experimented and quickly found that I liked not distinguishing between Allan-author's voice and Derek-character's internal thoughts. It felt more intimate, with a single unified me telling you this story about what happened to me.

The other thing it did was enhance the sense of immediacy.

The goal with this story from the start was to immerse the reader in a rather claustrophobic suspenseful environment and convey as visceral a sense as I can of what it was like.

Is like. Be here now with me, hop on board and fasten your seat belt. The sections I did the experimental rewrite on did feel more immersive.

So I plowed through rewriting it up to the point I'd gotten to, casting it all in present tense.

For the first three or four days after that, as I went on to write new sections, I kept accidentally reverting back to the more conventional past tense narrative. He said, she said, bell rang, I walked down the corridor.

But it's been happening less and less often.

It's not that I've never written present tense before, but I've mostly done so in short stories. I've done a lot of interesting things in short stories. I once wrote a science fiction short that was all in second person: You wake up in an almost featureless room. You rub your eyes...

Novel-sized endeavors, though, for me at least, involve a lot of contemplation of the next chunk I intend to write, jotting down notes for the next few sequences, imagining the dialog or the descriptive narrative in my head while walking or cooking or whatever, then sitting down to it and pouring it into the word processor screen. So that makes it different from a short story, where I would most typically sit down and write the whole thing all in one shot.

All those broken-up writing intervals, different sessions at the computer, mean my regular habits tend to reassert themselves and knock me out of any variant groove I'm attempting. (This has also been a challenge for me with regards to my attempt to write the entire day, each day, instead of hopping out of a scene after making a plot-propelling point and skipping ahead to the next example situation or meaningful event. Part of the desire for immediacy and claustrophobia, but so hard to stick to it. (No, wait, that last conversation would have ended around two. I need to fill the rest of the afternoon before ending up in the dining room).

Anyway, it all seems to be working. I'm spewing a respectable amount of text onto screen and it's adding up.

Please tell me I'm not going to decide to write my next one in second person plural future tense or something...

—————

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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

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

Haven't been blogging lately... fell down the author's rabbit hole. I'm 37,000 words deep into book three :)

Here's an excerpt -- it's a flashback sequence in which I'm thinking back to junior high days and another misfit named Malcolm, who hung out with me in seventh grade.

The narrator's voice is me-at-23 thinking back, so if the analysis at the end comes across as somewhat unsophisticated and even a tinge homophobic, that's intentional.

----- from In the Box, "July 28, 1982 (Day Ten)" ----

Nobody in our high school was out as gay. At least as far as I know. This was circa 1974-1977. Small town. Esoteric town, to be sure. But not terribly safe to be different from the categories of people available to be categorized as. There was no role for Out Gay Guy. Anyone opting for the role would have had to have created it from scratch. I have a strong sense that I can relate to that.

I met Malcolm in seventh grade at Valdosta Junior High. Earlier, 1972. We’d been in some youth church group which is where he knew me from. I don’t know, Methodist Summer Youth Program or equivalent. He did one of those “Hey, I recognize you” things, and although I had that facial agnosia thing going on for me, where I’m slow to recognize people out of context, I thought I’d for sure seen him before, so when he explained, it fit.

Malcolm liked to talk to me, and early on seemed to find it amusing to try to shock me.

“Let me tell you about these people” was Malcolm’s general presentation.

“These people like feet”, he’d tell me. “Like they’re hot for it, you know? And they hang out around libraries...”

Malcolm, I think in retrospect, probably quickly reconfigured his estimate of my sophistication and experience. Way downward.

“Do you know Betsy?”, he asked me. “She’s in our classroom for homeroom. Do you think she’s cute?”

I always had, since fourth grade. We all had. Betsy had it.

“Well would you ever want to stick your hand inside her skirt and feel around?”, he posed.

“Umm, no, yeeck, I’ve known her for a long time, that’s creepy”.

Malcolm insisted, “She would. You don’t believe me? She would. She’d let you do that. Or somebody. But it could be you.”

I was in seventh grade, mind you. The concept that the girls might have these same feelings for us like we did for them, I mean interest in the shapes and textures and wanting to touch or perhaps to be touched like that....this was all new information, or alleged information, all under consideration. With a lot of rather intense interest, yeah, I wanted to know. Did I ever.

But the way Malcolm was describing it back then... he was like a bridge person, honestly, echoing a lot of the things I’d overheard the boy boys say about girls; and still at the same time he made more sense to me. Nobody’d ever asked me about whether I’d want to put my hands up inside some girls’ skirt or not. Not that directly. Definitely not Betsy Johnson. Or maybe Betsy Johnson. It really changes how you think about it if you think maybe they want it to happen. Malcolm was saying the girls liked it. That would be wonderful. It would be so awful if it was just me, being a pervert, a creep, wanting to touch girl parts. Which was how I still worried, down deep inside, might be the case. So of course I never wanted anyone to know.

Yeah...so., Malcolm. We hung out during recess at Valdosta Junior High. I really didn’t have many friends so someone who wanted to hang out with me and be company, that was nice.

One of the interesting kinds of people Malcolm told me about at some point were boys who got fantasies about other boys, and wanted to touch them. Wanted to do sex with them, he told me.

My seventh grade self looked back blankly. I held up my hands and banged my middle fingers, left and right, into each other, tip to tip. I told Malcom, “That’s not possible, it wouldn’t work!”

Malcolm shook his head. “One of them goes up the butt of the other one. Like being with a girl. It feels a lot the same”

I ewwed a face at him. Gut reaction.

“Well they also lick and suck. With mouth and tongue”. Malcolm looked back at me, confident and gentle. “I’d like to do that if you’d let me”.

“Yecch no”, I replied.

So that was my first real-life first-hand experience of gay guys. Totally not some creepy invasive thing where one guy has a lot of power over the other. Or some creepy salivating begging person who just seems pathetic to you. Or any other stereotype, really. We were both fascinated by difference. He had a lot of interesting tales to tell. I hadn’t thought about sexual variation as a plot device for a story, but yeah it was intrinsically fascinating. Got me thinking more about where the way I was might fit in to all that.

He hit on me. Yes, that happened. He didn’t act like I had no choice, or he was entitled, or fawn at me like oh please, I need this from you. He was okay with it not being something I wanted, and we stayed friends and it totally didn’t matter. Or I assume that’s how it was for him. I have no reason to think otherwise. He was totally non-sulky about it and never brought it up again.

—————

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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both 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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My latest book (which, yes, I do appear to be working on beyond "conjecturally") is different; or at least I'm trying to write it with a different feel, by going at it differently as an author.

One of the main themes I want to establish early on is the nonstop, unrelenting way that the institution went at their task of reprogramming us.

In books one and two (GenderQueer and Guy in Women's Studies), my writing style was to pick up at an event or occurrence that would be typical of things that might happen in a given day and which would be an example of an interaction with these characters in this setting, thus providing for character development (both of Derek the MC and the folks he's interacting with) and propelling the storyline forward. "This kind of thing tended to happen" gets written as "and then, shortly after that, this happened"; the reader intuitively realizes that between scenes is probably a lot of downtime when nothing in particular is taking place.

But in book three (working title: In the Box -- may become Within the Box or Inside the Box or some other variant), I am trying to give it a different feel, a sense that as author I am not dipping in for a scoop of sample event but rather going nonstop from my arrival at the place onward.

One simple tool I'm using is inserting the date for each consecutive day; I'm going to use those instead of named chapters, and except for the Prologue section the dates will be uninterrupted and consecutive, several pages' writing for each day in the bin.

But I'm also trying to shift from the conventional format of "writing the next scene", and instead trying to connect each scenario to how Derek gets into the next one, even if it means describing the squeak of the linoleum as I walk the corridor from where I was to where I'm going next.

It's definitely not a typical modality for me. I'll generally write a conversation and have a character make an important point and stop the scene right there as if nothing more happened or was said at that time, which is perhaps a rhythm I absorbed from television and movie drama.

I think I've been reluctant to actually begin work on this project for fear of discovering that I don't write this way effectively. That I'll end up with something that's boring or articificial-feeling. But so far (a mere 5600 words in) it's not so bad, I think I'm making it work.

I've gotten feedback on two of the segments from my author's workshop peeps. Without me having to prompt them, they said I was conveying a certain feeling which was exactly the hoped-for experience in that section, and in the other one elicited reactions to Derek's character and the situation he's in and his interactions with his parents and his nursing supervisor.

I'm walking a different kind of tightrope when it comes to character and sympathy. In many cases I want the other characters to seem believable and not like comic book villains, and to make them accessible and their behaviors relatable, while at the same time showing the main character's frustration and cut-off untenable situation with regards to those same behaviors.

Reciprocally, a big part of the rationality and courage of main character Derek is that he is in fact willing to consider the possibilities being pushed at him, that he is possibly in denial in some fashion, or that his behaviors are genuinely maladaptive or destructive, even though none of this seems true to him at the time. But ideally I want the reader to join Derek in concluding that "no, they're wrong about that, and Derek is right".

There's an unavoidable risk that some readers will get through the book experiencing it as the story of a messed-up mentally disturbed main character and the trajectory of his failure to accept the help he needed.

I have to make the case for Derek as hero with appropriate subtlety and nuance.

—————

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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both 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 have notes for a third book. I haven't been working on it. Or even them, the notes.

I admit I'm thinking about it.

Writing books is somewhat addictive on its own. I like the books I've cranked out so far, and to have a notion for a new one? Yeah, there's a certain lure to it.

The flip side, to be blunt, is that neither of the first two books obtained many readers.

That's been really disapointing. The first book (GenderQueer), in particular, was written with the sense that I was speaking for an entire identity, and I wrote it to achieve recognition for us. I mean, yes, there was some portion of my motivation that had more to do with wanting my own personal story to be told, or with my sense that my story was entertaining and should engross readers. But let's say 90% of my motivation in writing it was that I hadn't had any such book available to me as a resource when I was 14 or 17 or 21, and nobody should have to work all this mess out for themselves and feel all alone with it.

The second book (That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class) also had a socially relevant message or two, although to a larger extent than with the first book, I wrote it for personal reasons, to explain what I'd attempted and how it had gone down. And to have a platform from which to argue about specific types of feminist theory. Let's say 70% of my motivation was feeling that this content needed to be put into writing and the rest was about just telling my story and feeling like it was a a good tale to tell.

So because they both had prominent "mission statement" elements, it's been very discouraging that I didn't get more readers than I did. I don't mean I expected to get listed as a bestseller, but I admit I was hoping for maybe 15,000 copies sold, or 23,000, or 10,000. What I got was more like 100.

---

The third book is more of a thriller story. Chronologically it takes place between book 1 and book 2. I had come out as a heterosexual femme sissy male, but had not as of yet chosen to major in women's studies. My parents were worried about me.

I was convinced by my family to give psychiatric treatment a second chance. "That place you went to before was a snake pit... locked up with bars in the windows and locks on the doors and wearing hospital gowns. This place is all modern, and focused on helping clients communicate. They look at your diet, your personal hangups, your relationship with drugs [yes I know you don't think you have a drug problem, but you know your Dad and I do], your plans...please try it? If you decide it isn't for you, they promise you can just leave. You know we're all so sorry about what you went through, that wasn't right".

At that time in my life I was extremely frustrated in my attempts to become a gender activist and speak out about my situation as a social phenomenon. The word "genderqueer" didn't exist yet but I'd essentially formulated the notion and was trying to draw attention to it.

---

I want to try doing book 3 as a thriller. To make each day a chapter and give a sense of nonstop passage of time between the time I checked myself in and the time it all came to an end.

I still am not committed to doing it. Probably nobody's going to read it. It won't be as socially relevant as either of the previous two. The writing challenge will be harder for me.

—————

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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both 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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ahunter3

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June 2025

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Page Summary

A Little Flashback Sequence
Progress on Book 3 / Scene: Dispute with my Case Worker
Present Tense / Present Intense
Excerpt: Reminiscing about Malcolm
Walking the Tightrope
Author Thoughts / Possible 3rd Book

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Style: Ivory Alcea for Mobility by branchandroot
Resources: Mitsuba Aoi

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