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Current stats on the querying process for Within the Box:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Blogging: A Self-Evaluation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Coming to Terms With It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's a hundred freaking words.

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

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

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

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

Author: I have stuff to say

Market: Who can you sell it to?

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

Back to my lack of skillset.

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

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

Item 3: Acceptance

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

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

I'm 65. Retirement age.

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

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

But once again it hasn't caught much fire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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.

—————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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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In my November 16 post (the "Transgender Lack of Awareness" post), I returned to a recurrent theme: that the mainstream transgender message doesn't make me feel included and recognized. Quite the opposite. Even when there's an effort to mention nonbinary trans folks and emphasize that a person's gender is valid regardless of their body, I feel left out, omitted.

Well, I'm currently reading several books that are likely candidates for what are called "comps" in the world of querying lit agents and publishers: books that your own book can be compared to because of similarities. One such book is A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Dunham.

Dunham refuses a lot of blocky klunky binary either-ors and dives straight into the gooey ambivalent conflicted territory he had to transit, and shoves it back at us, demanding that we consider it. He opens with a preface in which he indicates that his testimony of gender identity being a complex and nuanced thing without certainty could be seized upon as evidence that transgender identities are being embraced by people who will get buyer's remorse later and wish to de-transition.

And that's a big part of why so many trans people embrace the mainstream narrative. "I always knew I was born in the wrong body and was actually a [person of the opposite sex's gender], that's a solid irrevocable fact", goes the narrative. "I had to transition and get a new name and new pronouns because that's how you do it, and to do otherwise would make me horriby disphoric and suicidal, whereas transitioning totally makes me whole and comfortable in my own skin and validated". If you don't say it that way, the world looks back at you with dubiety and tells you "You don't seem like [that gender] to me, and since you aren't sure yourself..." and suggests that you're disturbed in the head, that these weird notions are obviously delusions brought on by the stress and so on and so forth.

But Cyrus Dunham appears to recognize that there's a problem with that: if young people contemplating these matters are led to feel that authentic trans people have that kind of absolute certainty, where everything is quite clear, where the correct identities and the correct courses of action are obvious and compelling, ...but that isn't how the young people going through it feel at all.. isn't that, itself, telling them that their identity isn't real and valid?

It takes a special courage to step forward and say "My identity and understanding is not clear and sharp and plain. But that doesn't mean it's less important than yours or doesn't count for as much". And to testify directly about the ambivalences, the worries about compromises, the contemplation of alternatives, and the presence of conflicting feelings and attitudes and inconsistencies in thought.

Dunham doesn't tell us that each gender identity exists objectively and that a person comes to recognize which one is authentically theirs. "The more I suspected people thought I was a liar, the more impossible it seemed to tell the 'truth'. There were so many truths; I didn't know how to locate one. Lying was embedded in every gesture, every statement, every interaction; every time I reaffirmed the presumption that I was female, which was constantly. I resigned myself to being incapable of not lying...I hesitate to call the exhausing day-to-day of embodiment 'dysphoria', that catchall for the pain of having a body that doesn't align with one's sense of self. What was a sense of self, after all: a delusion; mental illness...And if I admitted I was dysphoric, I'd have to deal with the fallout. I'd have to decide whether to do something about it".

He also asks the complicated question "Why do I need this?" rather than positing it as self-explanatory, rather than embracing "this is what you do if you realize you are trans". He writes:

"My story isn't resolved enough for me to believe that I have an unquestionable right to my own gender-confirmation surgery. I do believe it, in one part of myself. At the very least, because I know I should. Because it's my body, and I have to live in, with, and as it. Let me pilot it.

But it's not that simple for me. My brain monologue sounds like this, spoken in a cacaphony, not a linear progression of ideas: My breasts have felt invasive since they started to grow; every time I remember they are there, which is constantly, I am defeated; I have the right to augment my body in order to make it livable; the only reason I need the surgery in the first place is because the tyrannical gender binary has made me believe that my breasts are incompatible with my felt gender".

Cyrus Dunham accepts the turmoil as a legitimate part of identity and does not set out to vanquish it in the name of certainty. At least not internally. When he decides to proceed with top surgery, he -- like so many other trans people in his situation -- finds it necessary to oversimply for the moment, to package his situation in terms that the world is prepared to understand:

My confession of utter transness sacrificed nuance for legibility. I defaulted to the trope that I was born in the wrong body. That I had the soul of a man. Which implied that I believed in such a thing as a man in the first place. Which implies that I believed that, were I to live as a man, I would finally be okay.

But I didn't have time to be rigorous. I just needed them to believe me...

The week before the surgery, I got a letter from my insurance provider:

A request has been made for coverage of "top" surgery to help with your change from female to male gender. We are unable to approve at this time. We require that you must have a desire to live and be accepted as a member of opposite sex for at least six months. The letter from your therapist indicates only "recent months". Therefor [sic], you don't meet our requirements that you desire to live and be accepted as male for at least six month [sic].

Cyrus Dunham's willingness to show his actual unedited internal processing in all its vulnerable uncertain state allows for a rare thing: he describes someone like me as a hypothetical possibility in his writing:

If I was truly transgressive I would be able to tolerate the simultaneity of my breasts and masculinity and see them as co-morbid rather than contradictory

I do like to feel truly transgressive, it's a confident brave look, but in truth I've spent my life unsure. Unsure if I were embracing this 'explanation' because I so badly needed an explanation, not because it was the right one. Unsure if claiming an identity that had no specific external objective characteristic had any substance at all to it. (My sociology research professor once told me gay men could be studied because you operationalize them as men who have sex with men; crossdressers because you operationalize them as men who dress in clothing designed and sold as women's clothing; but you can't operationalize 'thinks of himself as one of the girls and not one of the boys' because that only takes place inside his head). But yeah, I have a sex (male), I have a gender (girl, femme, woman, sissy), and my transgression is to insist that neither one is wrong, neither one needs to be changed. I'm not a transitioner.

So -- interestingly -- Dunham's openness creates a space for me to feel included, whereas the conventional/mainstream narrative about what it means to be trans, with the litany of officially sanctioned viewpoints, never has.

It was my intention from the start that in Within the Box I was going to put my own internal processes, including self-doubts, on display. So that makes A Year Without a Name a very good choice for the comparable lit section of my forthcoming query letters.

—————

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 a third book, Within the Box, which isn't published yet, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

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

———————

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

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I've paused querying my third book Within the Box.

As I've mentioned, I hate querying. Well, lately I've come to realize that when I have a task that I hate, my default way of handing it is to take a deep breath, scrunch my face up tight, and then go at it with single-minded determination, blocking out everything else, and just blast ahead it until it's done, thinking "let's get this over with!".

And that's often effective and efficient, but there's also a price tag. For example, one of the things I detest is getting rained on. I hate the feeling of cold wet clothes and wet feet in squishy socks and wet hair in front of my fogged-up glasses and the slipperiness of the wet ground and getting chilled from it and everything about it. But when my attention focuses so narrowly on just getting to a covered destination, I block out awareness of obstacles, the terrain, and other moving objects like cars and other pedestrians. My intense dislike for the sensations means I'm trying to not pay attention to how anything feels. So I have dashed out in front of cars on occasion, I've bowled over people with umbrellas. I once twisted the hell out of my ankle trying to round a corner on a wet cobblestone. I'm a menace to myself and other people when I'm being rained on.

So with that in mind, I've realized I shouldn't approach querying my book with that attitude. I have grudgingly sought feedback on my query letter from people in a forum I dislike almost as much as the rain, and before I got banned for not being sufficiently grateful and appreciative, I acquired enough comments and observations to let me (after I cooled off somewhat) shorten and tighten it.

They made me realize how inadequate and inappropriate my comparable literature list was -- it's nearly all fiction, and my book isn't! And the titles that weren't were mostly published over a decade ago. "None of that should matter", I mutter, annoyed with the industry. "My tale has more in common with these fiction books, and who cares when the damn book was published, that should tell them what my book is like!". Yeah. Uh huh. I dash through the rain because I don't like to be rained on and I'm just trying to get out of it. When it comes to querying, I don't like it that lit agents want titles that are in the same genre as the book being queried, and of recent publication. I don't like it that they expect me, the author, to tell them about where my book would fit into the current publishing market.

Meanwhile, I have also belatedly realized my book is weak in one area that it shouldn't be, an area I'd like to tout in my short descriptions of it as one of its feature strenghts: Derek is not just a patient being subjected to violations of patient self-determination in Elk Meadow facility, he's also specifically a genderqueer individual being viewed through a homophobic and sissyphobic lens. I need that tension to be there. But although I've got Derek's own internal musings about gender well-documented in the tale, he's keeping that so much to himself that the gender-identity tension between him and the institution isn't very well illustrated! So perhaps I will rewrite some of the internal dialog spots as conversational dialog, ideally within a group therapy scene and maybe followed by informal continuation with other patients around the cafetaria table. Or perhaps I will write entirely new scenes to handle this.

Also meanwhile, I continue to read from the book in its current form to my bi-monthly author's circle, and so I continue to make little changes in response to the feedback I get from the other authors.

All total, I need to stop approaching the selling of my book to a lit agent as a necessary chore to dash through. I need to wait until the book is in its best form, and I need to hone my querying tools patiently instead of trying to jam some words on a page and get it over and done with.

—————

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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It's there in the part of my mind where I care the most. That's the area where I'm most likely to express my difference from you and your perspective. On any subject, I mean. It's not that I mostly think like you; or that I don't. It's that if I don't care about the difference, if it's not part of the topics where I care the most, then I'm less likely to express that there is a difference. So the stuff I emphasize, that's what's important to me. More or less by definition.

It doesn't mean I'm not interested in communication. I'll listen even if I strongly disagree. Whether I'm currently emphasizing or currently empathizing, I do want to communicate.

—————

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

There is definitely a personal emotional stake when you write about yourself, about what happened to you, and then make it available to others. It's different from writing fiction. I mean, you can have a significant ego investment in being the author of a work of fiction, and it can leave you vulnerable to dismissive or hostile opinions of readers and potential publishers and whatnot, but at least what's being rejected is your creation, your art. When it's autobiographical, it can also come across as a rejection of you personally: that what happened to you, what you went through, isn't interesting or important. Or that you, as the main character, are not interesting to read about.

That vulnerability is heightened when the specific portion of your own story that you're trying to share is a segment involving psychiatric hospitalization and diagnosis. There's the general shadow of being examined and found to be mentally out of order, to be not processing things as a healthy stable person should. That sort of raises the stakes -- or at least it can, depending on whether you agree that you were indeed in a deteriorated state of mind during that segment. I don't. So in Book #3, Within the Box, I'm inviting the reader to weigh the evidence and think about whether I was the person in the story whose mental processes were worrisome or if, instead, I'm the person in the tale who makes the most sense, whose reactions and behaviors were the healthy ones.

Querying a book -- trying to get a literary agent interested in it, so that it could perhaps get placed with a mainstream publisher and end up being read by a lot of people -- is by its very nature a vulnerability-making prospect. No matter what you've written, putting it out there in hopes of getting a rare thumbs-up isn't a particularly pleasant experience. It isn't a seller's market, at least not for unproven / unknown authors. Your query goes in a big pile and the people to whom you sent it will accept only the tiniest handful of prospects and reject the rest.

I am out at work. Both as a genderqueer person and as a person with a history of psychiatric diagnosis. I've nearly always been so, wherever I've worked, refusing to be silenced or shamed. Since I was out in my private life (which was as public as I could make it), there was always the risk that an employer or colleague or coworker would encounter that, so I preferred that they know in advance. It was my litmus test for whether the venue was a place I'd want to work: if you can't deal with it, hire someone else!

My current employer is the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which is actually involved in psychiatric intervention and treatment of people, which makes it a little trickier if someone were to develop the opinion that I'd been quite rightly diagnosed and perhaps have a brain that processes things in a less than ideal fashion.

I'm seeking early-reader opinions and feedback on the book, and among the other places I've sought them, I have made such an announcement at work. Three colleagues I know fairly well from ongoing interactions asked for a copy of Within the box. That was in December. Having not heard a peep, I sent a follow-through email to the three of them on July 6, "Checking in with folks who requested a copy of Within the Box...If any of you would like to discuss the book, shoot me an email!". No reply so far. It's a bit hard not to imagine them reading and going "holy shit" and developing a rather worrisome new view of their coworker Allan. I mean, I am kind of putting them in a position where they either need to set aside some conventional assumptions about institutional behaviors and professional behaviors or else reconsider whatever opinions they'd previously developed about me. What if that went the wrong way?

All of this vulnerability is quite predictable, very much "you opted for this situation going in" stuff. Including the likelihood that if I get upset about any of this, or depressed about any of this, or worried or angry about any of this, that my less-than-cheerfully-stable response to it could get interpreted in a light that other people's behavior generally doesn't. Yes, I did know all that going in. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe it needs doing, and I also wouldn't be doing it if I didn't have a lot of confidence in my ability to cope with it.

In fact, to be honest, I'm actually a bit too close to arrogant about it. Picture me staring at you sardonically and laughing and telling you, "After what I've been through in my life -- including the events from the tale I'm hawking in the form of this book -- there's not much that the world is likely to dish out to me that doesn't leave me saying 'I've survived worse', ya know?', so bring it on!"

Maybe that arrogance needs to get reined in now and then. I'll admit, it does occasionally get intense 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.

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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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.

—————

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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This spring, my second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, went to press.

I had the distant vague hope that, unlikely as it seemed, maybe this book would catch fire and then draw attention to my first book. But that was not to be. As I'd more realistically expected, the tale of a male student majoring in women's studies was less topical and less engaging than the tale of a genderqueer person's coming-out.

I won't deny that it's been frustrating and disappointing. I made effort and I stuck money into the effort. I could probably have obtained more readers if I'd stood in Central Park with a pile of my books and offered folks $20 if they'd be willing to read and review my book. Every now and then, someone does something and it attracts attention and goes viral and at a certain point people want to know all about not not for its own sake but in order to not be left out of what everyone else is paying attention to. But either it is utterly random or I don't have the skillset and intuition to make that happen. Even the more trendy and topical book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, never made the social ripples I wanted to make.

But you know what? I have a good life. I get to have a wonderful partner, and to be a participant in a continually fulfilling relationship, which is, when you stop and think about it, what the first book was all aimed at: that people like me are generally deprived of that opportunity. I figured enough stuff out to understand how to seek it and recognize it when I found it; I did have a learning curve (same as everyone else does, really: how to be a good partner, how to balance my own individual needs with what a relationship needs) but my understandings and realizations let me step up and participate on the same general basis as anyone else despite being rather differently configured.

I'm sorry I wasn't better able to share it and make a social presence of this sense of identity, but it works, it's real, and I personally do get to reap the benefits.

I just sent out a little batch of "well, well?" follow-up notices to various people who had indicated they'd review my (second) book if I sent them a copy, but who didn't follow through. I would like to harvest at least a few more reviews for my web page.

I am definitely glad I wrote the books, not just for whatever good they do other people, but also to stave off any sense of regret I might have otherwise felt that I didn't try hard enough, didn't really do anything with my life. I set out to make sending this message to society my mission in life and I've made a credible effort, and I don't owe the world any ongoing self-sacrificial obsessive attempts. Doesn't mean I won't make further attempts, mind you, I can if I feel so inclined, but overall I feel pretty good about having stood up and defined myself and lived the life I've lived.

—————

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.

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This is an internal-thoughts monologue excerpt from my work-in-progress Within the Box. Since Derek's mind and overall life-competency are being scrutinized throughout this book, there is a lot more focus on his thoughts and feelings than in the prior books.

I've selected this excerpt because it illuminates an informal but pernicious type of discrimination that exists to the detriment of feminine males.

-----

It’s frustrating being sidelined from having a respected contribution to make, though. All through my school years I figured that when I got to adulthood, I’d be snapped up for the same reasons I got good grades. I mean, I take assignments seriously and I’m smart and I dedicate myself to doing a really good job. Earn the good grade, you know?

That’s not how it’s worked out, though. I’ve mostly been yelled at by employers. And fired a lot. It isn’t because I’m too stupid to understand the work. Or because I don’t try. I don’t think I’ve fallen short of doing what was being asked of me, either. Most of the time, anyway. A couple of times it’s been because they assumed I already knew something so they didn’t bother to explain. But really, most of it has been unearned anger and criticism. Basically, they don’t like me. Teachers mostly did. Employers mostly don’t. Why?

I spent the year before my parents asked me to take care of Grandpa out in an oil field town, Rangely Colorado. I’d been told it was a place where, if you were willing to work, there was plenty of work available and a person could make some money. It was initially true, too: itinerant laborers like me occupied a public campground and lived out of tents all summer and fall, and employers would drive in with pickups and ask for any available people willing to do this or that type of work, and we’d hop on and they’d take us to the work site. While it lasted, I worked day jobs and socked away as much as a third of the price of the piano I wanted. I worked as a hardbander’s assistant, helping him weld lengths of pipe for the drilling operations — for one day, because he didn’t want me back. I worked a day as a roughneck in training, at the actual drill site, getting sprayed with oily water and handing equipment to the operator when requested, but they didn’t want me a second day either. I had better luck with the cutting crew, cutting down scrub pine and cedar with a chain saw or feeding the scraps into the chipper, a machine that turned branches and twigs into sawdust. I worked with them for two and a half weeks before the team boss said he didn’t like my attitude and fired me.

When someone says things like that keep on happening wherever they go, we’re nearly always justified in thinking the problem is their behavior, because that’s all these recurrent situations have in common, right? So I really can’t blame people for starting with the assumption that I’m probably lazy or insubordinate or don’t follow instructions.

It seems more like employers think that I have too high an opinion of myself. Just like Jake and Ronald and Dr. Barnes, they don’t like me talking like an intellectual. I learned a long time ago to keep my unsolicited opinions to myself, try to keep my head down and just do what’s asked of me. But it seems like I have mannerisms, facial expressions, stuff like that, that hit a lot of guys in a way they don’t care for.

My parents are college educated and they read all the time and always encouraged me and my sister to put a high value on thinking and understanding and absorbing facts and learning processes. When other kids acted like I was putting on airs, my parents emphasized that to be more intelligent or better educated than others meant being different from them, and therefore different was okay.

So some of it, I think, is a sort of reverse classism. I have upper middle class intellectual mannerisms and thought processes, and I seem weird and out of place in the kind of environments where I’m qualified to work, given my lack of a college degree. It certainly works in the opposite direction, where someone in a professional setting has a hard time being taken seriously if they don’t speak grammatically or they slouch or don’t have the right kind of serious attentive facial expressions. And if your family or your culture don’t perform the right behaviors, you won’t automatically pick the right ones up just by getting a professional degree or certification, so it’s class snobbery. But that’s the direction we usually think of it working, of keeping the aspiring lower classes at a disadvantage any time they poke their head into a setting occupied by people from higher classes.

I think it happens when someone from the upper middle class like my parents find themselves in a situation where they’re surrounded by the established wealthy, the genuinely rich. For example, I once followed in the wake of a program administrator trying to schmooze potential donors at a charity event, and got the sense that all the wealthy patrons knew each other and had been to the same schools, but the program administrator I was with wasn’t one of them and had a different set of tiny behaviors, gestures, ways of speaking. He didn’t get the big donation he was hoping for.

I wonder what happens when the young adult children of the rich try to have an actual profession, and all their behavioral habits mark them as trust fund leisure class prep kids. Do they come across as uncaringly lazy and arrogant and incapable, even if they’re trying hard, because of their mannerisms?

A big part of me not fitting in when I’m trying to find and keep a job is me not fitting in specifically with males. I didn’t notice that originally, or I didn’t question it that way. But the working class world is a lot more sex segregated than the office world that people like my parents inhabit.

Guys always think I’m doing something offensively wrong. Thinking I’m better than them. They do this thing, it’s hard to describe, but it’s the equivalent of that high-five that Irma has us do at the beginning of morning meetings, and I don’t engage with them the right way.

The hardbander seemed offended that I didn’t join in with his sex-word-laden metaphors for the parts he was working on. I wasn’t offended by his language, I didn’t act all huffy about it or anything like that. But he didn’t like me being polite. The roughnecks kept correcting my way of latching the clamp or handing a tool over. I should do it with more of a bang. They wanted me angrier, more emphatic. I wasn’t slow, and when I latched or attached something, it was solidly latched or attached. But still I wasn’t doing it right; the foreman said I wasn’t taking it seriously and could get them all hurt.

Back when I was in fourth grade, some boys in my class said I walk wrong. I bounce too much, and they took it upon themselves to instruct me. Walk flat and level, like this. And don’t walk around smiling, it makes you look stupid. Wear your face like this. Walk around showing that nobody better mess with me, see? It felt like they were partially doing this to get me on board, for my own good, but they were also irritated with me, annoyed with me.

They started calling me ‘Skippy’ and would prance in an exaggerated way when they saw me in the hallway, mocking 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.

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.

————————

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Here's what happens: we come together because of what we have in common, the ways we're regarded as Different, the ways we're badly treated, the ways we don't get included and the ways in which we have to live in a world not designed around people like us.

And out of that comes a narrative, a story that we tell the rest of the world to explain who we are. But the narrative always oversimplifies. It leaves out some of us, those whose experiences and identities are a bit unusual even among the misfits we've connected with.

Let's pretend for a moment that we could see identities and experiences as if they were visible shapes. The constellation of all the people with gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual morphology variations making us exceptions to the rule, might look like this, let's say:

But the description of us that the LGBTQIA+ community asks people to embrace and become more tolerant of and supportive of ends up looking more like this:

Some individual stories are out there, accessible, but the ones most likely to get promoted and retold as representative of "us" are the ones that fit into the big general boxes, where a small handful of identities are represented to the world as "what it's like to be one of us".

Just for the sake of illustration and discussion, let's say that the big red box at the top is labeled "gay and lesbian", and it contains a bunch of widely publicized notions about how gay men and lesbian women are different from hetero people. As you can see from the smaller red figures that the big red box encloses, this description does directly include and accurately describe a lot of actual real-life gay and lesbian people. So the things that the world is told about what they feel, what they believe, what's important to them, what it's like to be them, those fit a lot of people and makes them feel recognized and supported and promoted. But you'll notice some smaller squares in that vicinity that are partway or entirely outside of the description. In one way or another, those people's felt experiences or their viewpoint or understanding of what it means to be gay, etc, aren't being included in the overall LGBTQIA+ rainbow message to the world about what it means to be gay or lesbian.

We can make the big red box at the bottom the transgender box, a similar set of generalized descriptions and narratives that stands in for the real-life people, and again it speaks truthfully and accurately for many but is a bit of a misrepresentation for some of the others.

And the smallest of the "large" boxes can be the public face of being intersex, although this diagram probably makes their voice in our society look larger in proportion than it really is. Once again, it gets some of the individuals pretty accurately but misses the boat for others.

I want to address the entire LGBTQIA+ community about what it feels like to be one of those smaller points that doesn't fit the big public description of us very closely. Trans people whose actual experience and attitudes don't correspond to the public presentation of what being trans is all about -- including some who prefer not to be called "transgender" for precisely that reason. And bixesual and pansexual and orientation-fluid people who don't feel very well-defined by the generally publicized notion of what it is to be lesbian or gay. And all the rest.

How it feels, a good portion of the time, is that we aren't truly included. That the loud voices of LGBTQIA+ social activism aren't talking about us. That We're once again being left out, the same way the mainstream world was leaving all of out of consideration.

Then, to add additional insult to the injuries, when we try to speak up and dissent just a little bit from the one-size-fits-all messaging that's being promoted all over the internet and airwaves, we're often corrected. Oh no, what you just said is wrong, because it contradicts the party line we're trying to establish. So get with the program, don't be saying Wrong Things like that. Yeah, how do you think that feels?

—————

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.

-----

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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. 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

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.

————————

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I've been waiting for an idea to inspire me. What to blog about. Then I started reading the current book assignment for a book club I'm in. It happens to be Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau, and it is not about gender identity, sexual orientation, sex vs gender, or LGBTQIA+ issues. It is about identity politics, though, and it starts off by doing something that annoys me, which makes the matter a good thing to blog about.

The fact that it isn't about gender or related matters makes it a good detached "exhibit A" for discussing the annoying stuff. Because it annoys me when I encounter it within our environment, and I definitely do, quite often.

I should state for the record that I'm only through the first chapter of Ladau's book and the remainder of it may be provocative and informative.

The annoying practice

Ladau kicks the book off with a tour of vocabulary and why you should use these words and phrases and why you should not use these other ones. The explanations are short and choppy and don't provide much analysis: "The way we talk shapes how we think, and the way we think shapes how we talk", she informs us. This term is outdated, hence bad, don't use it. This term is reductionistic, hence bad, don't use it. Sometimes the reasons are more personal: "It makes my skin craw", or "I don't like euphemisms".

She declares herself not to be one of those judgmental people who have no tolerance of someone who uses the wrong words: "It's totally normal to worry that you'll mess up on what to say...if you get it wrong, just apologize, move on, and try to do better in the future".

But when you spend the first 25 pages on nomenclature, and only provide superficial explanations for why saying things with these words and not those words is important, and to whom, it still looms in significance and emphasis.

The real reasons

Whenever an out group begins to stand up for itself as an identity, having a different vocabulary to describe the differences than what the mainstream majority uses helps to do these social tasks:

• It underlines group identity and polarization from those who are not us. We do this; they do that. It signals one's allegiance, much like the wearing of berets or khaki or jeans have sometimes done for people at various times. It's likewise similar to the wearing of one's hair a certain way. It reminds everyone which group we're in.

• The lack of explanation itself serves a purpose: it emphasizes embrace of the group over retaining individual nitpicky differences in perception. It puts a higher priority on group loyalty than on respect for individual dissent.

Why I dislike it

• First off, I do my own thinking and I can follow yours if you bother to share it. Don't treat me like I'm too stupid to consider the real thought process. And if you didn't engage in any real thought process and you're just handing down "because everyone in the group all says so" wisdom you absorbed when you joined up, you shouldn't be writing as if from a position of leadership on the topic.

• Visualize the mainstream folks for a moment. Think about the ones whose initial response is to be dismissive of ideas they aren't familiar with, but who are willing to listen. They're following along with the culture's ongoing dialogs at home. Well, when you come out with a bunch of "is" declarations that lay out what is right and what is wrong, and don't unpack any of your thinking, you haven't given the mainstreamers any reason to consider your viewpoint. In fact, you've given them ammunition to be contemptuous of us.

• Then there's litmus testing. Other people whose situations put them into the same camp with us may arrive at a sense of identity from having analyzed their own situation. That means they may not be camp followers who have absorbed the appropriate vocabulary lesson when they first show up and attempt to communicate. The mindless thoughtless and arbitrary "never say this, always say that" approach often causes people to label them as enemy, as wrong-thinking outsider, instead of listening and recognizing that they're us.

—————

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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In the matter of being a gender nonconforming person, I've heard it said that we need to rally to make it okay for boys (or males) to cry and be soft and wear pink, to wear earrings and skirts and dance ballet.

But mostly that's never been an issue for me. I could already cry: who was going to stop me? I bought my first skirt at a thrift store; there may have been many people who didn't think male people should wear skirts but short of them tackling me and beating me up and taking it off my body, it's not like there was a lot they could do about it. I don't mean to belittle the real occurrences of violence towards gender transgressors. I've been assaulted a few times during my life. But in general, broadly speaking, I don't need other folks' cooperation in order for me to do things that are considered feminine. Instead, the disapproving factions would need my cooperation in order to have things their way.

The place where I found myself vulnerable to the impressions and opinions of others was sexuality. Sexuality is a need, a hunger for a participation. To have access to another person's body, to be found attractive and to be wanted, to play and fondle and nibble and hug... all this requires the active cooperation of others.

As I left childhood behind and came into adolescence, I suddenly needed for there to be a pattern change in the world. Among the delightful sea of attractive and interesting female people, I needed there to be some who would find a sissy femme male person like me to be attractive and interesting in return.

The conventionally masculine boys tended to have that. Some individuals more than others, of course, but in general they could look around and see attractive girls who seemed to be attracted to boys who were similar to themselves, and this would encourage them to think this would happen for them personally.

Me, I looked around and was faced with the sense that what I wanted, what I hoped for, just wasn't done. Wasn't how it was.

And that is how it came to be that I started to think I shared a situation with gay and lesbian people. My gender being different meant my sexuality was different. I was still male and still hetero but none of the observable patterns of heterosexuality matched up with me being a sissy femme kind of male.

Like gay and lesbian people learning that they probably won't find what they crave until they look beyond the conventional looking-places and outside of the conventional flirting behavior patterns, I came to realize I was different, I was queer, and I had to approach this all differently from what I saw other people doing.

You hear people saying over and over that sexual orientation and gender identity are two entirely different things. Yes and no. What people usually mean by that is that being femme, as a male, is not the same thing as being gay. Or that being a transgender woman if you were designated male when you were born is not the same thing as being a gay male. And mirror-image for the lesbians and gender-atypical female people. That being butch isn't identical to being a lesbian, and neither is being a transgender man. All that is true.

But where having an atypical gender identity for a person of my sex has made all the difference has been in the world of courting and kissing and flirting, the world of trying to meet possible partners.

Because all I need in order to wear my hair long and put in earrings and so on is that you refrain from physical attacks on me, and most people, even the disapproving sort, aren't predisposed to do that. But the coupling-up stuff intrinsically requires a lot more from people. It won't work if I'm not understood. It won't work if I'm not seen and recognized. It won't work if my identity is invisible to people and they've never imagined any such person.

And understanding is a much larger ask than "just leave me alone", if you see what I mean.

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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, hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both 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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Blogging: A Self-Evaluation

Coming To Terms With It

Self Dissatisfaction

Status Update -- Querying WITHIN THE BOX

Coursework: Writing One's Proposal

MetaNostalgia

REVIEW: Cyrus Dunham's A YEAR WITHOUT A NAME — A Nuanced and Eloquent Trans Narrative

Update -- Status of Within the Box

My Tendency to Dissent

The Emotional Knife Edge

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2022 PostMortem on That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class & Etc

Excerpt Snippet: Employment Discrimination

The Coarseness of Our Accommodations

Progress on Book 3 / Scene: Dispute with my Case Worker

Walking the Tightrope

The Words That We Use

Author Thoughts / Possible 3rd Book

It's All About the Sexuality

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