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.
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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.

———————

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 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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Index of all Blog Posts

This is Transgender Awareness Week, Nov 13-Nov 19, culminating in the Day of Remembrance. Transgender is nowadays defined as follows (courtesy of Wikipedia): "A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth." By that definition, I'm transgender.

There's a good chance you know all that, or I probably wouldn't be popping up on your feed, but let's pretend you didn't, and the above paragraph was a learning experience for you. Are you glad on my behalf, that my peculiar and marginalized identity is now being recognized and celebrated and authenticated instead of shoved into the shadows?

I wish I felt that way.

I am still lurking in the shadows, not because I want to be, but because the transgender umbrella is covering me -- not so much protecting me as blocking me from being seen. The awareness that the Awareness Week celebrates doesn't include me or people like me, while at the same time the definition, which does, makes it easier to dismiss us with a faux-inclusive wave of the hand: "and them too".

In the public imagination and in the shared social comprehension of what being transgender is all about, transitioning occupies the central space. That's the act of presenting to the world with the cues and signals that would position one as a member of the gender not typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth, and living as such, using the pronouns that go with that gender and having other people do so as well, as part of being accepted as a normative person of that gender.

When we ask "Wait, what about the rest of us?", a large percent of the people who constitute our social world will quickly say, "Hey, you are valid as a member of your gender with or without a medical transition. Lots of trans people go with a hormonal transition only, and many don't even do that. So, hey, you're totally included! What's inside your underwear is nobody's business but your own, lots of trans men have a vagina and lots of trans women own a penis, no big deal."

But just as being transgender isn't defined as modifying one's body, neither is transitioning. With or without any sort of medical process, there is still the pervasive assumption that a transgender person is one who presents to the world as, and wishes to be viewed as, a member of the gender not typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.

So now that we've cleared that up, we ask again "So, what about the rest of us?". And a smaller chorus of the enlightened and socially aware say, "Hey, there aren't just two genders. There are dozens, maybe thousands. You could be trans and identify as nonbinary, as genderfluid, or bigender. Not everybody falls into either male or female and we recognize that. What, have you been hiding under a rock somewhere, you didn't notice the whole thing about 'they' being some people's pronoun?"

That's still a problem though. That still combines "gender identify differing from what's typically associated with sex assigned at birth" with "pushing away from the sex assigned at birth". Rejecting that sex. Not wanting to be perceived as that sex. Hey, if being male doesn't force me to be a member of the gender typically associated with it, why do I need to reject that sex? So, once more, with feeling: what about the rest of us?

People who were assigned a sex at birth and who agree with that assignment. But whose gender identity is other than the gender typically associated with it. People who don't wish to disguise or distance themselves from the sex they were assigned at birth but who want to proclaim their atypical gender.

The transgender umbrella defines us as included in "transgender" but nobody talks about it this way. We aren't transitioners. We're doing something different.

If you're going to cover us, give us some coverage, instead of covering us up by claiming you've already included us.

Real-world fallout: in several socially-aware communities that are strongly accepting of transgender issues and rights, I've been contemptuously dismissed. "You're not trans, since you're perfectly fine with being male, so stop being a special snowflake!" And in several political and social communities for LGBTQIA+ people to join together, I've been silenced or ignored: "He's said a lot of things that are at odds with our queer values today". Loose translation in both cases: "You're not doing it right". In other words, the same attitude that transgender people in general have gotten from the mainstream.

I could definitely use an increase in awareness here.

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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. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

Short version: We sort of need meta-agents that we turn to whose expertise lies in finding us agents. Because those of you who are agents are no easier for us to acquire than publishers are.







I mean, how would you go about picking an agent if you were an author? OK, you wouldn't. You don't get to do the picking. The market is not one in which authors get to choose from among available agents. But you agent folks, you kind of want to know why we sent you our query letter; you want to feel special among agents, not just wasting your time with the authors who send query letters to everybody, spamming up the place with form letters explaining why we're seeking a lit agent and a publisher. So let's say I really wanted to accommodate that, to pick from among you as if it were the kind of market that it isn't, to behave as if I get to pick.

If I get to pick, I want a lit agent who understands that I don't write for the literary market; I don't know enough about it to write for it, I read books, not markets. So I don't come in knowing how to package my book within the vocabulary of genres, at least not unless you let me discuss more than one of them and how my book is — and also in other senses isn't — a part of this one.


Or another way of going at it: can I find a literary agent who will work with an author who didn't sit down thinking "I am going to write a science fiction book" or "I am going to sit down and write a true crime story" or "I'm about to write a fast thriller spy novel" and instead had an idea for a book. "This would be a good story".

So how shall I, as the person (pretending) I get to pick, find the ones who match that description? Their querytracker profiles don't often answer these questions. Literarymarketplace doesn't provide the answers. The literary agency pages listing the agents and describing how to submit hint at it sometimes. But in general, you lit agent folks present outwardly as "Bring me this! I want to represent a book like this!", most often identifying the "this" by genre.





I had books prior to the current project, and I sought to get a literary agent, and I kept sending out query letters and eventually the criteria for who to send them too consisted of "is a lit agent accepting queries". I don't think that situation was serving any of us well. I'm sorry for spamming your mailboxes. With this new book I'd like to start over somehow.


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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. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I think I'm going to consider my audience. I have tended to think of myself as speaking (or attempting to speak) to the world at large, in general, about the things I wanted to speak of. And I did speak (some; mostly I wrote and attempted to get people to read what I'd written), I did try to communicate. The terms I used were things like "I am marginalized as a gender invert; it's a type of being genderqueer", and I tried to flesh out those terms with descriptions of who I was and how I had been treated by others. I was angry. I was quite aware that I was angry and considered it justified. How does an angry person communicate?

We associate anger with violence. I wasn't drawn towards it though; violence is not a good strategy for a marginalized individual angry at society.

It's not that anger doesn't mean I am willful and there are changes I want to make, because that's still true, but my strategy is to make sense to people. So let's look at the willful part. I am stubborn and I want things to make sense. That translates in part as I want to be understood. To communicate.

Violence theoretically offers power. Coercion.

Define power, though. I can't have what I want as an individual by using coercion to get it. I want cooperation. Unlike coercion, all the participants are voluntarily cooperating. Define voluntarily, though.

Repeat last paragraph, so that you see it as a loop. A thought-structure or attitude-tension between being willful and wanting one's way and wanting things on a voluntarily-cooperative basis; to belong and to have my way and change some things.

I know that I am at peace in my anger. I've accepted it. I've long since accepted it. I said so when I was 21, I am angry about this stuff and I want to talk about it. After awhile the anger felt like intentionality. Defining myself.

So that's who is on this side of the 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.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

This is by far my least favorite part of the process. Yesterday I likened it to cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue.

I'm not Don Draper or Darrin Stevens. Whatever talent I may have for writing 1600-word blog entries or 7000-word articles or 97,000-word novels, it does not translate well to writing one-page query letters. Or single-sentence pitches.

The insider advice is that the author is supposed to carefully research the lit agents -- find out who they've represented in the past and what specific kinds of books they're most interested in seeing; investigate their reputation and make sure their style of working with authors would be a good fit for you, be sure that they've got a proven track record for placing books like yours with solid mainstream publishers, verify that the kind of book that you wrote is fully up their alley so they'll know how to represent it successfully and will be enthusiastic about it and so on and so forth.

Uh huh. Sure. And all those teenage job seekers fresh out of high school should Google the companies they're considering applying to, research the personnel who run them. Look for local newspaper interviews to get their philosophy for how to run the workplace. Investigate how happy their employees are with their job situations. And custom-tailor your resume to each of your carefully chosen targets and only apply to the most perfect jobs, because you wouldn't want to work for anything less than your ideal employer, right?



I am trying to approach it with less urgency than in the past. I think I've got a good book that's entertaining and not just socially relevant this time. So I actually am spending more time putting focused attention on the material I send to each lit agent, and seeing if there's an opportunity to tailor the inquiry a bit to that recipient.

One thing that makes this book different from the previous two is that it is less relevant that it's a true story. I tried to make the other two books entertaining, but the topic and the story arc didn't make either of them a really great fit for any major fiction genre. "Kid grows up being made to feel weird and ultimately comes out genderqueer" isn't a genre. "Young LGBTQIA activist goes to college to major in women's studies to discuss gender" isn't a genre. But Within the Box is a pretty good suspense tale. I found it far easier to assemble a list of "comparable titles" than I did when querying the previous two books.

So I can query it as fiction or as nonfiction, and I plan on doing a bit of both.

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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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I understand that you think what I should be saying is that sex-specific expectations of male people are sexist, limiting, and harmful. And that I should leave it at that and not be embracing a bunch of gender-positive rhetoric and going on and on about having a marginalized gender identity.

Well, that's actually where I started, embracing the basic feminist "sauce for the gander" concept like it was a get out of jail free card as long ago as when I was in sixth grade. I grew up with feminism as my defender, a shield against the attitudes that if you were a male you were supposed to be a certain way that wasn't expected of your female classmates and friend.

It wasn't sufficient. If it had been, I would not have ended up coming out and claiming an unorthodox identity.

I don't expect you to say "Oh, well, gee, in that case of course you're correct" or anything like that, but give me a chance to explain. I like to be understood even by people who don't end up agreeing with me.


Androgyny and the Male-Default-Identity Thing

Feminists saw that as women they were perceived as Other, disqualified from a lot of what was granted to adult humans. A lot of this special Other treatment was wrapped as veneration and adoration, even while a lot more of it was unadorned dismissive contempt for the lack of necessary male attributes, without which female people couldn't be allowed or expected to do a wide range of things. Feminists called it all limiting and wrong and demanded it all be discarded; they demanded to be perceived and evaluated simply as generic people. The generic person, though, was male; a cartoon stick figure without a skirt or lipstick would be considered male; our species was 'mankind', and 'he' was a generic pronoun that just happened to also be male.

So when feminists opted for women to be thought of as generic people, they were accused of wanting to be men. They were told that they were discarding the Special Other status that was women's privilege to wear, and that this was very sad and would ruin the family and so on and so forth.

I surely didn't just tell you anything you didn't already know, but now let's look at a bunch of hypothetical male people who want to opt out of gendered assumptions about male people. It's not a mirror-image situation because the generic undifferentiated human is already male-by-default. To say "view us as generic people and not as 'men' per se" doesn't invoke any of the notions about how women are or what the strengths of womanhood include, because those are marked-off special as only applicable to the Other.


Gender is Installed Deep, Exceptions Included

The pattern of behaviors and interpretations and perspectives that makes up gender isn't kin to a simple blocked-out behavior like wearing pants. You can decide on Tuesday that because of the weather and the planned activities everyone should wear pants. Instead, it's more like the behavior of using Spanish as your language. If that's the language you were exposed to throughout your life, you converse in it, you can read it, write it, speak it, and within your head, you think in it, even to yourself. But if you grew up exposed to English instead, and then on Tuesday it becomes apparent that it would make more sense if we all used Spanish -- perhaps because today we will be in Spain, let's say -- switching this behavior isn't at all a simple matter of deciding you're going to do so.

Gender is deep. We have roles in our head and we've learned them all our lives, and those roles are gendered. I don't mean the klunky Tinker-toy sense of roles, like she's the Mommy and housewife and he's the breadwinner, but more fleshed-out examples, role models, archetypes of how to be a woman or a man, a whole library of contrasting roles that we know, that we admire and emulate.

You probably have heroes, feminist heroes you look towards as inspirational and as celebratory of an alternative identity for women; they may not be public figures that other folks have heard of (although they might be); they may be brave stubborn passionate brilliant fiery individuals that you happened to have encountered at some point. People who are admirable women and are the antithesis of the Barbie and the subservient helpmeet and the dainty proper lady and the other prescriptivist examples that the world tried to spoon-feed you as models to emulate.

These alternative role models may represent a pathway out of the original imposed gender, but one thing they are not is genderless. Not unless you have to stop and ponder for a moment to even come up with what sex they are, wondering as you do so why it matters and why it's relevant.


The Significance of an Alternative

Robin Morgan once wrote -- confessionally -- about being an early feminist in the days when feminism was just dividing from the male left, and speaking dismissively about sex role conforming women who were doing and being what society told women they should be and do. Some hostile and judgmental things were said about stay-at-home moms and trophy wives and beauty queens and whatnot. But really it didn't take long for the women's movement to swing away from that kind of divisiveness. Feminists needed to be on all women's side, and perhaps more to the point here, they needed to create options and alternatives; if the old conventional roles were demeaning and unfilfilling and limiting, then just making it so that women had other options should be sufficient.

When I came out in 1980 as a sissy, a femme, a male person whose deep behavioral patterns were mapped onto the girl model rather than the boy model, I did not make any serious attempt to condemn the man identity that had been shoved down my throat and which most male people embraced as their own. It was certainly an identity that I did not want for myself, but I didn't feel like I was linked elbow-in-elbow with a mighty groundswell of male people who felt the same way. Far from it.

I'd spent most of my life disapproving of them, these boys and men and their way of being in the world. Just as they disapproved of me and called me things that indicated they regarded me as acting and thinking like a girl.

Coming out was actually about letting go of a lot of that. I didn't need to negate and replace their definition of how to be a male person properly. What I needed was to establish an alternative.


Trans Women and All That

I understand that you aren't at all comfortable with the transgender model, because hopping over the fence between sexes because the grass looks greener on the other side leaves the fence intact. Instead of dismantling sexist expectations, it seems to reinforce them, spreading the notion that if you exhibit characteristics associated with the other sex, that is who you are and you should disavow the tension between sexist expectations and how you are in this world by transitioning. You say that presenting as, and being seen as, a member of the sex they fit in with better, means embracing, not discarding, the notions that a person of that sex should have these behaviors and these personality characteristics and these priorities and values and so forth.

Well, I can see how that could be a valid worry and concern if transitioning were to be the only alternative to conforming to the expectations originally imposed on you.

But once again it isn't necessary to condemn and disapprove of other folks' way of coping with the expectation-tension. What's important is to establish an alternative that functions differently.


Conditioning and Inverting

As we're growing up, our identities take the form "I am a person who". How we think about ourselves, how we position ourselves against the backdrop of others, how we regard ourselves as fitting in, or not, among these established identities and roles.

Those of us who -- for various reasons -- gravitated towards sticking our tongues out at sexist gender expectations developed an "I am a person who" self-image that included "I am a person who doesn't try to be like they say people of my sex ought to be". And usually, because we get accused over and over of being more like a member of the other sex than of our own, our self-image ends up including "I am a person who is like a person of the other sex (and so what?)".

There may sometimes be a carefully nuanced person who grows up evaluating each and every one of these gendered expectations (and counter-expectations) and meticulously selects each characteristic with total disregard for whether it is associated with their own sex or with the other -- or we can at least toss that notion in as a hypothetical way of growing up -- but a lot of what actually happens for a lot of us is a kind of inversion. We -- unlike the other kids -- decide we are comfortable with the notion that we're like the other sex. And the more that the conventional expectations are shoved at us with judgmental hostility, the more we may push back against the demand that we personify the expected patterns for our sex by thinking of ourselves as "not like that at all".

Does this make us just as much a prisoner of gender as the conforming kids, just on the other side of the fence? Generally no, I think: we're less likely to internalize the most dehumanizing portions of the conventional expectations, because they're unpalatable to everyone, conformist and nonconformist alike, but unlike the conformist kids, we're not being pushed to embrace these. So the male nonconforming folks are less likely to internalize the most constricting aspects of "dainty", and butch women don't tend to internalize the most toxic parts of masculinity either.

But this inverted reaction is still gendered. It's a formulation in reaction to something. It should not be confused with a magical immunity to gender socialization.

I think a lot of feminist women do not always realize this phenomenon takes place, perhaps in themselves personally or perhaps instead in their butch friends and colleagues and associates. Feminism describes women's oppression, and the imposed content of femininity as part of that, so the entire content of femininity as conventionally enshrined in the role model is suspect, something to push away from in the name of being fully human instead of constrained by oppression. So the traits that lie outside it are often viewed as normal-in-the-absence-of rahter than being perceived as gendered masculine stuff.


Positioning and Joining

Feminism does contain threads of analysis about how patriarchy is inimical to male happiness and male well-being. That the set of sexist expectations and roles that constitute masculinity are bad for male people, and that feminism is therefore good for us too.

I sought them out, and found them, and rejoiced in them. But they aren't the most repeated and the most recognized parts of feminist analysis. I meet feminists online all the time who don't see male people as having any affirmative stake in feminism's success. Many more would agree that what feminism is about most certainly isn't the rescue of male people from what's imposed on us by patriarchy as males.

So although I found validation and recognition within feminism, I mostly found people unable to see what I could have to complain about.

I could not really contribute to what was being said, either. Inserting a contribution and having it become a part of what people understand to be feminism would first require that I have the authority to criticize it for what it lacks. And I don't. It isn't my movement. I don't get to set its priorities. Most people familiar with feminism, if asked about the male relationship to it, would say adversarial.

When I looked around for where else I could say what I needed to say, I found that I could speak as part of the gendered rainbow, that I could participate as a genderqueer person and try to establish that alternative identity. A non-transitioning male identity for male kids who grew up thinking "I am a person who is like one of the girls, not the boys". An identity that does not conflate sex with gender but embraces the apparent mismatch.

I haven't been welcomed with enthusiasm across the board, to be sure. I am occasionally perceived as a threat. I am often seen as violating ideological standards, and it sometimes offends other gender-atypical people who tell me I am not saying the things I'm supposed to be saying, that I am saying other things I really should not be saying.

But there's no fundamental barrier that renders me an illegitimate participant as completely as being male bars me from participating in feminism as a feminist.

Thank you for your time.



—————


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.


My third book is about go to into second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. 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

From Within the Box -- my third autobiographical book and current work-in-progress -- this snippet is a stream-of-consciousness monologue.

The book contains many such. After all, as a person in a "work on yourself / rehab" clinic, I'm focused at this point, both officially and in real life, on myself, and whether some portions of what's going on in my head are counterproductive & unhealthy or not. So naturally I'm self-obsessing. More than usual, I mean.

At this point in my life, I'm not much inclined to default towards "yeah I'm fucked up". I stand up for myself. I'm dubious about professional therapists and leery of their power. But I'm willing to consider that I might be defensive and hiding stuff from myself that I need to confront.

Mark Raybourne, to get you started here, is my designated individual counselor. I spend more time in group sessions of various types but I do get one-on-one sessions as well. As you'll see shortly, Mark and I haven't exactly hit it off.

------


Mark Raybourne wants me to think about whether my tendency to not give a shit whether other people approve of my behavior or not 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 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 can’t talk with Mark about this, because he’s Mark and he’s not good at this. Yeesh. I think he means well but seriously, inept counselor-person. I don’t feel at all understood by him.

But still, back to his question.

Them. There’s a them. People not approving of me. I didn’t get why. I was a conscientious kid. I remember being in second grade and this girl in our class said something had been stolen out of her desk just now and several people in desks next to her said this one guy, who sat in front of me, that they’d seen him steal it. I knew he hadn’t done it, not in that time frame. I didn’t like him. He was nasty and he was stupid. He was one of the kids who picked on me whenever he could. He was mean. It wasn’t him. I’d have seen him do it. I’d been staring at people in my vicinity for the last ten minutes, just thinking about what would happen to each of us as we got older, became older kids. Anyway, I said so. My word didn’t carry much weight. I thought it should, because I thought everyone knew I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me.

I remember thinking that I could not care what the other people in the classroom thought. I felt like I’d done the right thing. I also felt like it was important to do what you think is the right thing. To care, and to act.

Yeah, so now at the age of twenty three, I want to reach out to them. Communicate. Share a concept, a set of thoughts, a model that they, too, might find helps them make sense of their experiences. Stuff about gender and sex and sexual orientation. Changing people’s map of the possibilities.

This is 1982. We know there are gay people. And we’ve heard them say we all should stop thinking there was something wrong with them. They liked who they were. They weren’t hurting anybody. They found how to seek out each other, and that’s who they wanted, others who were like them. So quit being all paranoid about it being a way of life that’s somehow stalking you. The lesbians in particular have explained that being on the constant never-ending receiving end of sexual interest from people you aren’t sexually interested in is not an experience that only hetero males might ever have to wade through. Yeah, fucking hell, sometimes there are people who get hot for you and you aren’t so inclined. Learn to deal with it, get used to it, unless they’re coercive it’s not the end of the world. Even the coercive ones don’t get to define our lives.

We also know there is transition. It’s in the media, part of the news. I’ve read Conundrum: From James to Jan. And also accounts written by that tennis player, Renee Richards. Oh, yes, of course I’ve thought about it. Things written by transsexual women resonate with me. A lot of them do. Some of them do not. The notion that it’s the wrong body, that does not. I often feel like I’m rejecting that notion the same way gay guys reject the notion that in order to find male people sexually attractive, they should have been female.

Yeah, it finally congealed for me. That I’m a male person, essentially one of the girls, in the same way that transsexual women know it, but in my case the male body is okay, it’s that there exists an identity of malebodied people who are girls or women, whose attraction is to female people. So they’re neither transsexuals nor gay guys. It’s something else.

And that’s who I am. I’m one of them.

So... joining other people... I’m open to advice on how to be the most open listener and still stick up for myself, and especially how to find people who would want to have this conversation.

I’m not trying to join them to have a community. I’d like that too. I’d be pickier about who I’d try that with. But for the message stuff, I want everybody I can get. I want to change your head. All you folks.

—————


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.


My third book is in post-first-draft corrections and is being circulated to beta readers for feedback. Provisionally title Within the Box. 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

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