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I'm still querying literary agents in hopes of hooking my book up with a commercial publisher. I don't blog very often because querying has been so dismal and discouraging. I mean, it always is -- I hated the querying process for my first book, GenderQueer -- but at least for GenderQueer I got some encouraging comments, and an occasional nibble.

It hasn't been that way for Within the Box. Nothing but a long string of form-letter rejections and one-sentence "not for me thanks" turndown replies.

Until this week.

Opened my email and found this:

Hi! First, let me apologize for taking SO long to get to your submission. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down! That being said, I shared it with my interns as well. We had a few discussions about it and talked about the strengths and areas for improvement. Ultimately, I feel it's just not ready, and would need substantial work for me to find it ready to submit to publishers. Therefore, I'm afraid it's a pass for me. I'm so sorry it's not better news. But I want to share feedback, and hope you find it helpful.

First, I love the main character and his voice. You've done a wonderful job at drawing in the reader. It's a compelling story, but the beginning and end both felt too short and not fleshed out enough. The middle section felt too long. I had questions about the parents and their motivates, too. I'd want more closure with them. Your secondary characters were a great addition, the people in the hospital with him. However, I'd like more insight on the head of the hospital who really seemed to have it in for your protagonist. Was he just evil, or a narcissist, did he have any redeeming characteristics that would make him more 3-dimensional? Also, what is the ultimate point of the story? Is it primarily to show the journey of your protagonist, or perhaps a slice of life to show the problems with mental health facilities? I'm not clear as to the reason for the story, mainly because the ending was rushed. (I loved that he made his way in the world though. That made me so happy!)

I want you to know this pass was a very difficult decision. I'm a fan of your writing and welcome any future submissions from you! You're very talented, and I appreciate you letting me read this story. I hope my decision does not discourage you from continuing to work on it and send it out. It shows real promise!!! Take care and please keep in touch.

I really needed this. Some sign that what I wrote just might, maybe, have appeal within the mainstream book market. Some sign that it's worth continuing to fish and see if I can get a bite.

This came from Tina Schwartz of the Purcell Agency. I'd originally sent a query in to Bonnie Swanson there, and instead of receiving a reply from her, this came in from her colleague Tina Schwartz:

Dear Allan,
I have read your query for WITHIN THE BOX and found it interesting. Please follow the instructions below to upload your full manuscript. I'm looking forward to reading it.

That was encouraging at the time -- a request for the full manuscript is rare and always a hopeful sign -- but then time ticked on and I figured if she's seen something she liked I'd have heard about it. Many lit agents don't bother sending rejection letters at all. "If you haven't heard anything in a few months consider it a turndown". My assumption is 3 months.

I'd rather have someone take their time and get to my material when they can, if they engage with it like this!

—————

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

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

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

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

insert comic timing pause

It's autobiographical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current querying stats:

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

—————

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(from a message board post, 2003)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

In last week's blog post, I noted that I need to rework portions of Within the Box to include more tension between me and the staff of Elk Meadow around being gender-atypical. As it stands, I've got Derek thinking a lot about gender inside his own head, but you really have to read between the lines a lot to get any sense of Elk Meadow as sexist or heterocentric or transphobic.

This kind of falls between the cracks between nonfiction and fiction. There's a lot that I recall from the actual events of 1982 without recalling the granular details, and mostly that hasn't mattered much, but in this case I remember the folks running the place being very sure of themselves in their conventional gendered attitudes, and I need to convey that better. So although this specific conversation didn't take place, I think it's not a dishonest insertion. Things sufficiently like this occurred.

This is the start of Day Seven, which is one of the shortest chapters in the book, so it's a good target for expansion. (As originaly written, this entire scene ends with "Well, it’s better than being sneered at in derision or being informed that I’m intellectualizing"; the rest is new.

(This isn't the only insert I'm planning. Just the limits of what I've actually done so far)

-----

Day Seven

A less apologetic Dr. Barnes shows up at our unit’s morning meeting. “Derek, it is good to see your face here among us this morning. Derek has come to some important conclusions about us here at Elk Meadow, has decided he’s in the right place after all. I think we’ve all seen how someone can come to recognize important truths that may not have been apparent to them when they first arrived. So let’s all go forward with a fresh start attitude.”

I guess that’s better than being sneered at in derision or being informed that I’m intellectualizing.

“Our Mark Raybourne tells me that you don’t care if other people don’t see you as a real man”, Barnes continues. “That’s actually a healthy attitude.” He glances around the room, gathering everyone’s focused attention. “For all of us, sooner or later we have to look into the mirror and deal with the person whose opinions matter: ourself! And I think Derek has been trying to tell us that, that it’s not your opinion of him that counts, and it’s not mine, or the opinion of any of the Elk Meadow staff that counts...”

Barnes crouches down slightly, resting his hands on his knees, narrowing the focus back to me. “A real man has to live up to his own standards. He has to put down the excuses and the avoidance strategies and face up to his mistakes and his errors of judgment, and examine any patterns of self-destruction he might be stuck in. A real man can’t be satisfied with being less than what he can be, what he was born to be, and you’re right, Derek, it’s his own opinion of himself that he has to live with.”

Barnes straightens up and opens his hands, palms upward. Benign kind fatherly face in place, waiting.

“I agree with you about being honest with yourself and living up to your own standards”, I say, “but what I was talking with Mark about the other day is that I’m not into all that ‘be a man’ stuff, the standards I have for myself aren’t centered around masculinity. I do have standards and sometimes I don’t meet them and have to work on myself or, you know, try to deal somehow with my faults, but I don’t aspire to a lot of the things that were pushed at me in the name of proving I’m a man”.

“Well now, one thing I think you should examine, since you’re being honest with yourself as much as possible, is whether you’re using that as an excuse...”

Barnes steps back slightly and holds up one open palm, a stop sign. I don’t think I was reacting visibly, but it’s possible that I did. Or maybe Barnes just finds it expedient to act as if I was about to argue. “I’m not saying you are”, he continues, “but what if you’re using that as a way to set your aspirations in a way that doesn’t leave you open to failure. Just consider that. I mean, anyone could redefine their failures and disappointments as their goals, hey look, everybody, I always wanted to be an unemployed homeless guy with a drug habit, I’m a rolling stone, I’m a tumbleweed and I’m free, never wanted to pay income tax and live behind a picket fence. See how that works?”

“Well, I don’t think I conjured this attitude up to excuse what some people regard as my failures. I was a university student a couple years ago and doing okay in my courses, but I was keeping a scrapbook in my dorm room, I wrote ‘Militant Heterosexual Sissy’ on the first page, and the more I took those ideas seriously, the happier I felt about myself. I was never like the other boys and I never wanted to be. It’s not that I didn’t think I was as good as other boys. I used to think I was better than them. I don’t really think that way now, but I do think I’m different. And always have been. But to your other point, yes, I think I have things to work on, ways in which I don’t measure up to what I want of myself, and that’s why I’m here”.

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I'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.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

So many of us crave a world where it doesn't matter. "It" meaning our difference, the thing that, in this world, has set us apart. Marginalized us. Sexual orientation. Race. Gender identity. Whatever.

Raise your hand if you've run into people who have told you "Well, then, quit making an issue of it, why don't you? Just be you! Don't be so quick to stick a label on yourself. Why does it matter what sex you are, or if you like boys or girls or both, or any of that stuff? Let's all just be people!"

What do you tell them?

I totally get the inclination to roll one's eyes and sigh and say "You just don't get it", believe me. But rolling my eyes at them and telling them they don't get it isn't likely to expand their understanding.

From the snippet of Within the Box I'm reading to my author's group on Sunday:

“I don’t think none of us really knows what it’s like to be in another person’s skin”, George says. “But it’s not just because of pride that I’m always aware of being a Black man. World ain’t gonna let me forget it. We all have our own shit we have to sort out, but I don’t think it’s right to make out like seeing people with racial attitudes is hostile when this happens all the time.”

We can't draw attention to ways in which we're prevented from "just being people" and make an attempt to change that unless we can describe the pattern and, yes, stick a label on it. Something to call the phenomenon.

But yes, to those of you who don't see why "it" should matter, yeah, it shouldn't, and glad to hear that to you it doesn't make any difference, that actually is a good thing, even if you're annoyingly oblivious about the ways in which the world won't let us forget about it yet.

I've often found it useful to compare being genderqueer to being lefthanded.

In today's world, being lefthanded does not marginalize me. I can "just be people" despite being lefthanded. The world does not make an issue of it and draw my attention to it. I've never been treated substantially differently from how other people are treated because of being lefthanded.

I do still live in a world where being righthanded is the default, the standard assumption. Sign-in sheets at meetings have the pen glued to the wrong side of the clipboard, and I have to stretch the cord awkwardly to write my name on the form. Desks with the little table attached have the tables on the right instead of the left. But you know, these are trivial things; the truth is that it's simply not a "difference that makes a difference". Kids in elementary school didn't invent an array of hostile mean-spirited things to call me because of it. I didn't grow up hearing hateful epithets that meant "lefthanded person". I haven't faced discrimination in employment or housing or banking. Or singled out for special treatment by the police. Politicians aren't telling voters I'm a threat to their way of life and things need to be done about people like me.

But guess what? It wasn't always like that. Did you know? If I'd been born in the 1800s I might have had the back of my left hand hit with a ruler if my teacher saw me writing with it. It was considered to be the wrong hand. There was judgmental hostility. And if we go back even further, there was a time when it was associated with the devil. Not just wrong in the sense of incorrect, but wrong in the sense of evil. I might have been considered by the community to be morally depraved. It could have affected my ability to work and live and basically "be a person". It could even have played a role in getting me burned at the stake as a witch!

So if I'd been alive back then, it would have been fair to describe myself as a marginalized person for being lefthanded. It would have been legitimate for me to make a political issue of it, to point out that this was unfair and unreasonable.

Moving back to the present era, yes, I hope that having an atypical gender identity will someday be no more problematic than being lefthanded is. Maybe people will still make cisgender assumptions about people by default, but it will be no more oppressive than those signature clipboards and desks.

But a big part of the process of getting there is drawing attention to how that is not so yet, and testifying to what it's been like and why it's unfair and so on.

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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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Thanks to my partner anais aka Cassandra, my synopsis has been whittled down to a tolerable size.

A lot of lit agents request a synopsis, so I needed to have one in order to be ready to begin querying. (Yes I could have deliberately chosen targets who dont' ask for a synopsis, but that would interfere with procrastination!)

And, on that front, folks: I have begun. The first tiny handful of lit agents are now in receipt of my query. I have begun the process of trying to sell my third book.

So...

SYNOPSIS

Prologue:

Derek, a 23 year old nursing student, is suspended for refusing to manipulate patients to take their medicines. Derek's parents worry that he will never finish any course of training. They're convinced that Derek's problem is drugs and alcohol, and they want him to check into a fancy private rehab facility. Derek doesn't believe that he abuses drugs or alcohol, but agrees to go because they also do other types of therapy.

Derek is genderqueer -- or that's what he'd call himself in 2023 -- but it's 1982. Derek thinks he has an important message, but finds it difficult to make people understand. So it's the promise of improving communication skills that lures Derek into trying rehab. He's told it's voluntary and if he doesn't like it, he can leave.

The First Six Days:

Derek goes through an exhausting intake and orientation, with residents and staff praising Elk Meadow Clinical Retreat. He quickly tires of the one-way flow and puts posters on his door defining himself as leader of his treatment team. This offends some residents. Dr. Barnes says Derek is intellectualizing, and a counselor says Derek is in denial. Derek tries to remain open-minded. He participates in psychodrama, and learns about his interaction patterns with his parents.

Dr. Barnes pushes Derek to turn his life over to the pros since he isn't running it well himself, and Derek pushes back by making a nameplate like the one on Dr. Barnes' door, angering Barnes. Derek goes AWOL through an improperly locked door, sees a movie, then drops in on colleagues of his Dad's who live nearby. They call his parents, who aren't pleased. Dr. Barnes calls and apologizes for Elk Meadow failing to meet Derek's needs, and Derek agrees to return.

Days Seven Through Eleven:

In psychodrama, Noelle takes the role of Derek and mimics him sounding intellectual but incoherent; this clears the air and Derek starts making friends with other residents. In group, Dr. Barnes says Derek should remove the materials from his door if he's "serious about a new start." Derek is cynical but complies. His counselor says Derek takes a "certain pride" in not caring what others think, and notes that this hinders others from connecting with him.

The recreational therapist tells Derek he can't go outside anymore because of his escape. On his own, Derek contemplates the link between being a feminine male and his difficulties getting and keeping blue-collar jobs among males. In group, Dr. Barnes baits Derek for acting femme. Derek asks to read his own chart, but is denied. While power-walking in the hallway to get exercise because he's being kept inside, Derek grabs his chart from the nurses' station. He finds he has been diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, and that his father authorized involuntary treatment if necessary.

Days Twelve Through Sixteen:

Gary says Derek should admit he shouldn't have read his chart; but Gary subsequently shows contempt for schizophrenics in a way that residents find inappropriate and offensive. Derek tries to crawl up above the acoustical tiles to escape, but gets caught. His therapist says "You know what you need to do to walk out of this place. Why don't you just do it?" Derek agrees, and asks to be discharged.

Dr. Barnes says he's preparing the discharge paperwork, but has orderlies restrain Derek in seclusion. Derek expresses his fears and vulnerability to the supportive night nurse, but the morning nurse treats him as a diagnosed psychotic. A mental hygiene attorney explains Derek's options and files a 72-hour letter of intent to leave, which Barnes says he'll challege in court. Dr. Barnes warns Derek that he plays golf with the judge. He tells Derek to cancel the 72-hour letter and take psychotropic drugs or Derek will never be outside of a mental hospital again. Derek agrees to take the medicine. He wakes up under the effect of the drugs, and decides he has to break out now. Derek escapes, walks all night in the rain, and eventually collapses crying.

Aftermath:

Derek hitches to his sister Jan's college. Jan offers him a bed for the night but calls their parents, who tell Derek to go back to Elk Meadow. He hangs up on them. Next morning he hitches to his girlfriend's home and she welcomes him.

—————

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.

My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. 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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"List some books that are similar to yours. (500 characters or less)" reads the query manager entry for both Kristin Nelson and Stephanie Rostan, two professional literary agents.

It's not explicitly required by all lit agents and publishers, but some folks advise including a "comp titles" section on any query letter.

I haven't tended to, but it was definitely in my formal proposal (which, in turn, is required by some lit agents and publishers for any nonficton queries, and memoirs are nonfiction), and I had a standalone Comparable Titles snippet I could include whenever it was a part of what was requested.

So now that I've generated at least a rough draft of my third book's query letter (see previous blog post), I've started work on assembling a list of other books that Within the Box has some important resemblance to.

"You may be intimidated or skeptical, thinking either that your idea has to be unique in order to pique their interest, or that your book needs to be similar to others, or else there won’t be an audience for it. The reality here, like with most things in life, is somewhere in the middle", says Kevin Anderson.

Yeah... I'm not aware of any other first-hand account of being in a rehab clinic that turns out to have similarly sinister overtones. Or a genderqueer person's narrative about having their inability to function well socially attributed to their drug-addled mental instabilities instead of pinned to marginalization and society's biases and attitudes. But let's see... books with a lot of internal thought-processing and which invoke a sense of a possibly unreliable narrator who may be more messed up than she thinks she is, in a place or in the care of people who are supposed to be taking care of folks but may be doing something a lot more evil...

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh looks promising. It's a first person narrative from an unguessably different individual, one who seems sharp but perhaps damaged goods in some not fully explained way. Definitely an outsider. She's not institutionalized but works in one (a juvenile reformatory prison). A facility that is at least officially and nominally about doing good but pretty evidently, from the narrator's observation, isn't. A narrator who cares about her interactions with others and is vulnerable on a number of parameters, but not in the usual manner; she's an interesting mixture of impervious and insecure. And Eileen is even more self-immersive than Within the Box -- very little action and events have occurred in the first 60 pages.

Dennis Lehand's Shutter Island takes place in a high security forensic psychiatric hospital. The main character and his companion are federal marshals brought in because one of the committed inmates has gone missing. But readers learn pretty early on that the main character has some hidden agenda of his own involving a murderer who killed someone in his own family, a murderer committed to this same facility. And he may not be wrapped as tightly as he likes people to think. Something's totally up with the shrinks running the place, too. They're not playing honestly with the agents; the marshals don't believe the inmate could have escaped without assistance from at least some staff members, perhaps highly placed ones. And now, 50 pages or so in, I'm seeing signs that they may be doing conscious and deliberate things to manipulate their federal guests... or is it the narrator's paranoid imaginings?

I'm also 45 pages into A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. The first person narrator is the younger sister of Natalie, a brilliant high school student who created entertaining stories but whose imaginings are going very dark and twisted. Natalie is clearly suffering -- she says so -- and her behaviors are impacting others in her family negatively, making her situation different from that of a person who may merely be perceived by others as deranged.

You get more of that from A. Mark Bedillion's Psychiatric Survivor. Or that's my expectation at any rate. I haven't started it yet, it just arrived in the mail. But it's billed as "from misdiagnosed mental patient to hospital director", and it clearly comes from the critical perspective that we call the psychiatric patients' liberation movement or the anti-psychiatric movement. So it is unlikely that the author will position himself as believing he needed to be in the facility, and equally unlikely that the people running it will be portrayed as agreeing with him.

Another couple books I picked out as prospects are Good as Gone by Amy Gentry, which a brief inside peek revealed itself to me as a suspense tale in which a daughter returns after years of being missing, but the mom actually isn't at all sure that this girl is really her. That creates the worry that the situation may be a dangerous one for her family. And An Anonymous Girl from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, the first couple chapters of which shape up as a psychological chess game in which a girl swipes another girl's invite to a paid research project involving personal questions about moral choices, and in which the psychologist running it knows she was not being honest about how she came to acquire the invite.

Then there's The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) -- unreliable narrator, substance abuse, questionable mental status, blackouts (so maybe she's hiding stuff from herself and us)... but I think there's a risk involved in comparing one's unpublished book to something that's sold quite that successfully. Still, I won't rule it out.

Oh, and I'm still waiting on the arrival of Upstairs in the Crazy House, another memoir from a psychiatric survivor.

If any of these titles or descriptions conjures up the names of other books you think I should take a look at, let me know!

—————

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.

My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. 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

Derek is genderqueer, or nonbinary -- or rather that's likely what Derek would call himself in 2023 -- but it's 1982, and 23-year-old Derek is finding it a challenge to explain to people. He views himself as needing help becoming a better communicator. His parents view him as having a drug and alcohol problem.

They reach a compromise: he'll check himself into a very modern upscale facility that promises to help people work on all their issues. It's strictly voluntary. “But we’d want you to give it a real try”, his Dad says. “Don’t stalk out the first time you think there’s some policy or some person that isn’t perfect. You won’t get anything out of it unless you go in intending to get something out of it.”

Dr. Barnes and his staff think Derek is in denial about his situation. He insists he doesn't have a drug or alcohol problem, but he's never been able to keep a job or complete any projects, including two attempts at college and a more recent attempt to complete nurse's training. And he's constantly deflecting, bringing in social issues and political theories. “You can’t go out and fix the world and solve its problems when you haven’t dealt with the mess in your own life”, Barnes tells him. “I think you’re just afraid to confront your own worst enemy, because unfortunately he isn’t out there with expectations and roles, he’s right there where you are.”

But Derek is finding the facility heavy-handed and coercive. They've gotten off to a bad start -- nobody asks his reasons for coming there or what he hopes to get out of the program. He thinks being a heterosexual femme is relevant to why he's had difficulties fitting in socially and doing well. That and the resulting isolation which have left him deprived of the easy interactive social skill-set that most people have. He wants to work on that, but the institutional staff seem bent on working on him in ways he isn't consenting to.

The other patients in the program don't warm to him immediately; he's disrupting the program and they're also being judged by the staff on how appropriately they react when someone behaves disruptively. Derek watches and observes. “Therapy here is all about residents proving that they can be an obedient part of Dr. Barnes’ echo chamber. Anyone who doesn’t echo doesn’t advance to the higher levels”, he says.

Within the Box is a psychological suspense tale. Derek can't be sure they aren't right; maybe he seized on this weird notion about gender because he so badly wanted an answer other than "horrible unlikeable person with a hideous personality and atrocious social skills" for why he's been reviled and hated, and it's really a defense mechanism, like they say. And the reader is invited along to wonder who is right, and whether the institution is benign or awful, whether Derek is arrogant and stubborn or bravely resistant.

Arching over all of this ambivalence is the issue of safety: if, indeed, the institution is unduly coercive, and Derek is openly resistant to them, is he being paranoid about worrying about what they might do in response, or is he on safe grounds because, as Dr. Barnes himself said, “You all know you can leave any time you want"?

Within the Box. 72,000 words, nonfiction, a personal account (memoir) rendered in the style of entertainment fiction.

—————

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.

My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. 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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"We shouldn't call it 'homophobia', that's misleading", my Facebook friend writes. "It's not like those haters out there are hiding from us with their teeth chattering and worried that we're gonna get them. The word should be something like misogyny for hating women, what would that be, misgayism or misqueer, or an 'ism' word, but not a word that makes it sound like they're scared of us the way people get scared of heights or cats or something".

But although I've seen this sentiment quite a few times, there doesn't seem to be any consensus emerging about what else to call it, so 'homophobia' is still the word that's in use.

Besides, I don't think it's entirely wrong to think of it as a phobia. As being about fear.

I've got a scene in my book Within the Box where Derek is at risk of being locked up as a dangerous involuntary patient despite not having done anything threatening to anyone. He finds this bewildering.

But he's always found the anger and hostility bewildering, too. People so upset just because he has behavior patterns that are more like those of the girls, that he acts like a girl instead of acting like a boy.

But then he turns the question to a different angle:

What if they felt threatened by me? I never did anything to hurt anyone, but I broke some unspoken codes of conduct, how boy children are expected to behave, how other boys like us are supposed to be, how one’s students can be expected to act. If somebody doesn’t act the way you thought they would, you end up not having much confidence about your sense of what they might do next.

And of course if there’s a right way to be a boy child student, and we all know what it is, we’re secure in thinking we know how it’s supposed to be, but if there’s one who isn’t like that, then either he’s wrong or our thinking is wrong. Our thinking includes the notion that it matters, having everyone being the way they’re supposed to be, so there isn’t even any room for ‘he isn’t the way he’s supposed to be but it doesn’t matter’. So that’s a different kind of threat, but yeah, that too.

This is actually about sissyphobia, since the provoking behavior is gender noncompliant behavior and not same-sex attraction. Not that the hateful fearful violent people were making that distinction.

I do come to the topic of homophobia partly as an insider and partly as an outsider, being a heterosexual femme. I have had my own fears that could be considered homophobic fears, and I have been on the receiving end of the violence and hate that may be partially fear-driven too.

So what's so scary?

Girls and women have a significant excuse for heterophobia. Decade after decade they've gone on marches and addressed classrooms, trying to get a cultural consensus that "no means no". That it is not tolerable that just because someone is interested in having sexual contact with you, they might impose it on your whether you want it or not.

If there were a similar significant risk of gay people pushing their sexual attentions onto people who didn't want to have sex with them, violating their "no", sexually assaulting them, I could clearly see that that would be a legitimate source of homophobia. But I've never had anything like that happen to me, I've never had any of my friends or colleagues tell me it's happened to them, and the overwhelming majority of the cases where same-sex sexual contact has been imposed has been ostensibly heterosexual male people calling another male homosexual and making intrusive sexual contact while angrily yelling that this is what the victim of the violence obviously wants. I had variations on that theme take place in junior high and high school but mostly it was confined to threats and verbal assaults and the destruction of personal property like books and clothing and whatnot.

Then there's the specter of somehow being stalked by "being gay", as if the sexual orientation itself were somehow predatory and involved in chasing people down and converting them against their will. This is something that needs to be distinguished from the notion of a person crossing the line and imposing themself sexually. It's usually painted as a threat due to the difficulty of negotiating a good heterosexual situation. Sort of like hungry people at a restaurant being barred from getting the food they want, so they're threatened with the prospect of settling for something else that's more readily available.

The cisgender version of heterosexuality has very polarized rules and roles. Obtaining a string of heterosexual encounters with a wide range of different partners is something that is perceived and treated very differently when one is female than when one is male. Sex is portrayed as a conquest, as something that the male person makes happen and the female person says "yes" or "no" to, and to say "yes" too often or too easily obtains for her a set of unpleasant labels and epithets. So sex is set up as an adversarial contest of wills and he wins if he makes sex happen. Therefore it is against that backdrop that same-sex opportunities are positioned as a threat: "You're such a loser that you can't conquer any female partners, therefore this is all that's available to you".

That's a pretty hollow threat though. One might face the prospect of being a loser and failing to secure heterosexual contact with any female people, but unlike the hungry person in the restaurant, sexual appetite isn't the kind of imperative that one dies from absence, and there's autoerotic release available and nonsexual friendship and companionship.

But another form it takes is the fear of being perceived as gay. What's interesting about that is that the most emphatic and noisiest homophobes are nearly always males, but as I just discussed, the ensconced roles and rules of cisgender heterosexuality cast it as the boy-role to make sex happen. So why would it matter particularly if a lot of female people were to perceive one as gay? The suspicion here is that it's actually mostly a concern about what other male people think that's the driving force in this fear.

Of my own fears, my own homophobic responses and hangups, the one that it would be most logical for me to have would be the fear of being perceived as gay and harassed and violently attacked for it. That's certainly happened a lot in my life! But my reaction has been indignation and outrage, and I haven't been much inclined to modify my appearance or behavior to make the queer-bashers less likely to think I'm an appropriate target.

I have at times in my life worried that female people in general might dismiss me from consideration due to thinking I'm gay. That's in part because I'm not cisgender. I'm femme. I'm girl. And I'm very alienated by that whole cisgender heterosexual expectation that as the male person I'm the one who's supposed to be trying to make sex happen and wear down a female person's resistance and reluctance and all that. That totally doesn't fit who I am or how I want to be with someone in a sexual or romantic relationship or encounter. Through most of my life, I've held onto the hope that women would find me interesting and sexually fascinating and would do things to make sex happen between us, that they'd choose me and communicate that to me.

But in the long run, faced with what was painted as a pretty binary choice between being thought of as femme and gay or being thought of as masculine and cis and straight, I decided of the two, being considered a typical boy creature was the worse of the alternatives. When my article "Same Door, Different Closet" was being considered for publication back in the early 1990s, one of the academic reviewers said my model of heterosexuality "didn't depend on a committed effort to avoid sexual feelings and experiences with men". Or perhaps more to the point, wasn't anchored in the need to avoid appearing gay to others.

The world doesn't get to dispose of me or decide for me what my sexual orientation is. Thousands of people thinking of me in a certain way doesn't conjure it up as my reality. And as far as the prospect of other males having a sexual interest in me and misreading the signals, well, as one of my lesbian friends pointed out, it's hardly just heterosexual males who occasionally have to cope with someone being sexually interested in you and you don't reciprocate, and it's not exactly the end of the world. No big deal. Get over it.

To get back to the role of fear in this hatred and violence, though, I'll end with this additional snippet from Within the Box:

You try to get a handle on why people would be hateful and oppressive and you just end up finding them guilty of being horrible people with no justification, and there’s no understanding for that. But I can understand scared. I don’t know what to do about it, but it’s a starting point.

—————

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.

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

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

———————

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

I'm doing a fifth pass (give or take) of Within the Box, revamping some confusing or inexact paragraphs and redoing dialog that doesn't quite fit the character who is speaking at the time.

Here's one example from fairly early in the story — the character Gary developed into a coarser and more impatient person than I'd portrayed him here in his first appearance, and I finally took notice of that.

BEFORE

“The important thing”, Gary tells me, “is that you want a fresh start. It’s your life. You’ve got to reclaim it. We want to make this a safe place for you to rethink what you came in here with, which may be counterproductive, and consider everything anew. I like my work here. It is my job to work with the people who have been assigned to me and help them let go of habitual ways of thinking that aren’t helping them get on with their lives."

AFTER

“The important thing”, Gary tells me, “is that you want a fresh start. It’s your life, dude. You gotta reclaim it. You got a safe place here to rethink what you came in with, stuff that ain’t working for you, and find yourself some new paths. I like my work here, man. I take the people who get assigned to me and help them let go of what’s holding them back and give them a push in the right direction."

One of the themes that emerges in the book is that the main character Derek speaks the way he writes, and is thought by some to be putting on airs, and by others to be intellectualizing to avoid his real issues. I, of course, am Derek, and I do tend to use language in this way, and unfortunately tend to stick overly-intellectual-sounding sentences into the mouths of many of my characters. It's okay if it's Dr. Barnes, because he has a definitely double standard by which it's appropriate for him to speak that way, but it just doesn't work if the other characters do it too. So without making them sound unintelligent, I need to make them sound colloquial and their speech patterns normative, so that Derek's can stick out better.

For a second example, here's a bad description from later in the book, a combination of overly convoluted sentences and general lack of clarity. That's a different problem. I, as author, know what I intended to say. Sometimes that gets in the way of me realizing I haven't said it very well.

BEFORE

I dealt with Mountain View by starting my own local chapter of Mental Patients’ Liberation Front, and even though they were utterly coercive and we had no rights to speak of, I managed to get not only most of the patients in agreement that we should just listen to each other and be mutually supportive and reject the treatment they were subjecting us to, but also enough of the staff members, to the point that it disrupted their functioning and they decided I was a rabble raising psychiatric rights activist and booted me out like they’d caught me trespassing.

AFTER

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

The procrastinating thing, meanwhile... I should really be working on a pitch letter, and perhaps sample chapters, synopsis, an 'about the author' paragraph, and the rest of the things I need to assemble in preparation for querying lit agents and seeing if I can get this book published.

I haven't done any of that.

It's certainly not a bad thing that I continue to polish the manuscript. It needs it. And I don't have any compelling need to be in a hurry, I suppose. But neither of those things are the reason I haven't made any effort to put together a querying package. I'm procrastinating because I detest querying.

Well, I've at least given some thought to how to position the book. From early on, I've viewed it as a psychological suspense tale, one that just happens to involve an LGBTQIA+ person as the main character (Derek being genderqueer), but where his unusual gender identity is not the central focus of the book. It's constantly there but the book is much more about whether or not he needs help, and of what kind, and whether or not the institution can provide it or if Derek is spot-on correct in seeing the place as coercive and oppressive despite its modern facade and claims to being state-of-the-art rehabilitative therapy.

That should shed a lot of light on what the components need to focus on. What I need to focus on. Well... I'll get to 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.

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

My third book, Within the Box, is about a gender-variant person in a rehab facility. And rehabilitation is approached as a type of psychiatric practice, with the facility being run by psychiatrically trained personnel. So the book is also about the clash between a gender-variant person who doesn't think they have something wrong with them, and an impersonal psychiatric practice that considers all of its clients to be pathologically impaired.

A lot of LGBTQIA+ people get seen by psychiatric services. If you don't already have a politically critical perspective on the profession, it is time for you to develop one. Even if you have found some good in their services.

To start with, the psychiatric establishment is fundamentally conservative: that which is typical and normative is defined as that which is healthy. Different is intrinsically regarded as pathological. Clinical names are affixed to each of the ways in which people seem to follow a different pattern than the mainstream pattern.

This works against you on two different levels, simultaneously: first of all, every one of your decisions, preferences, tastes, priorities, and so forth are subject to being evaluated for being different from those of your peers, and considered to be possible symptoms of some unfortunate condition that they watch people for.

Then, on a broader level, they often regard a specific difference, such as what they call "gender identity dysphoria", as a pathology. Until 1973, "homosexuality" was tagged as a mental disorder. It is true that they removed it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and thus no longer define it as a psychiatric ailment, but many individual psychiatrists continued to believe it to be so (since that was how they were trained). With gender, being trans used to be conceptualized officially as a disorder; then they shifted to only defining it as a pathology if it was making you miserable. But again, attitudes often linger behind official definitions.

People in the LGBTQIA+ community often turn to psychiatrists because they are seeking help with coping with the friction between themselves and an unaccepting society. This is sometimes very specific and official help, such as the requirement that in order to obtain medical transition, a person needs to be assessed and under the ongoing care of a psychiatrist.

Their role as gatekeepers and enforcers of the most stereotypical gender norms for people desiring to transition has been commmented on often. But the psychiatric profession serves a larger and sneakier role as excuse-maker for patterns of life that don't need any excuse because there's nothing wrong with the person in question.

If you aren't particularly happy and satisfied with your lot in society, that does not mean something is wrong with you.

If you are different from the normative, that does not mean there has to be some underlying brain difference or chromosomal variation that made that happen, which "makes it okay" since it isn't your fault. Because if there's nothing wrong with it, it doesn't require an excuse.

What do you have on your desk that you can safely toss without doing any damage? Maybe a box of paper clips, or that handful of dice you use for that game? Select a spot on your floor, and then toss your items at that spot as a target. You see how they spray all around and some of the individual items are pretty far from the target? But you didn't throw them differently than the others. Their different landing position doesn't have a "cause" or a "reason" different from what happened to the other items. When our differences are tagged for investigation into "what caused it?", the implication is that our difference is a wrongness in need of explanation that the normative ones don't need.

Think about 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.

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

Day Eleven in a substance abuse rehab facility. Excuse me, a multi-component self-growth therapy center, and it had been the other aspects -- "social skills and communication skills and how you integrate into your social environment" -- that had lured me into signing myself into the place, not the substance abuse rehab stuff.

I'm trying to come out. It's 1982 and the terminology available for coming out as what would later be called genderqueer or nonbinary does not exist yet, so I wish for more fluent social skills, to be a speaker, to have an influence on people and affect their thinking, you know?

Unfortunately, I find them heavy-handed and authoritarian.

It's not quite that I'm not getting anything out of the experience -- I like the class they call "psychodrama" and also the informal chatting with the other resident patients. But I'm not broken and I didn't come in here to turn myself over to these folks to let them "fix" me.

One thing that's gotten on my nerves by this time is their insistence that we be honest and open about what we feel and think, but the staff don't share what their actual feelings and reactions are -- they're instead constantly telling or reacting according to what they think we need to hear.

WITHIN THE BOX, by Allan D. Hunter (work in progress)

--- excerpt begins ---

I’m idly hovering in the vicinity of our unit’s nurses’ station. It’s not that I’ve made close friends of all the nurses; more that I find something reassuring about the rhythms and professionalism at this intersection of medical and office work. I hear the click clack of the Selectric typewriters, the booble-booble-boop of the multi-line office phones, the muted chatter of people doing their tasks. One of the nurses opens a cardboard box and unpacks bandages and cotton balls and carries them to where they stock them.

I watch Nurse Vicky signal to the other nurses to handle the phones, then go back past the racks of medicines and syringes and stuff and into the staff bathroom. She closes the door and I hear the faint chink of the lock turning. We don’t have locks on our own bathroom doors. Or our bedroom doors for that matter. It’s not for us to decide to put a door between us and the rest of this place. I’ve had bonus privacy they hadn’t officially planned on giving me, due to being without a roommate all this time, but that’s soon coming to an end.

I stare for a little while longer, thinking.

I often think better when I’m in motion. I begin doing my corridor laps. Down towards Unit One. Right turn. Across to Unit Three. Back up and past the cafeteria to Unit Four. Over again to Unit Two. Eyes track my progress everywhere I go. I see the nurses lift their heads from their paperwork as I blast by them with my long strides. Down to Unit One again. Past the hallway that goes to the entrance foyer. Right turn at the end of Unit Three. Sailing past the piano. Right turn and the approach to Unit Two again.

But this time, instead of continuing down the corridor, I make a sudden left into the nurse’s station itself. Nurse Vicky looks up in belated surprise as I stride past her, still moving at my brisk hiking pace, my fingers snagging my own chart out of the chromium wire rack as I zoom by. I continue full bore past the medicines and supply shelves and into the currently empty nurse’s station bathroom. I immediately whirl and lock the door behind me.

I close the toilet lid to make a seat. Flip to page one and begin reading. Intake sheet. Address and social security and date of birth and all that. Flip. MMPI interpretation. Rorschach interpretation. Signs of confused mental processing. Antisocial elements.

Flip. Dr. James Barnes signature on my diagnosis. Paranoid schizophrenic with delusional content. DSM-III code numbers following that.

Flip.

BANG. BANG. BANG. “Open up, Derek! What are you doing in there? You are not supposed to be in this bathroom. I need you to come out of there!” BANG. BANG.

Nurse’s notes, dated timed and signed. “Continues to display inappropriate behavior.” “Withdrawn. Hostile.” “Still not engaging with others.” “Very little affect, uncommunicative.”

BANG. BANG. BANG. “Derek?? Did you take your chart? I need you to give that back” BANG. BANG. “Right now! Open this door!”

Flip. Group notes. Psychodrama notes. Individual counseling notes. “Still rejects all opportunities to integrate.” “Still continues to display inappropriate behavior” “Constantly and deliberately uncooperative.”

There are many more voices now. Male voices. Mark. Gary. “If you open up, you won’t be in any trouble.” “If you don’t open this door you’re going to be in so much trouble.” “C’mon now. I don’t have patience for this!” BANG. BANG. KICK!! “What do you want me to do, he’s got the door locked” “Go see if there’s a key for opening it from the outside” BANG. BANG.

“Derek, are you in there reading your chart?.” Dr. Barnes’ voice.

“Yes I am”, I reply.

“Derek, you shouldn’t be doing that. It could be very disturbing for you. These are medical evaluations that you don’t have the training to understand!”

Flip. Drug tests. Urine. Blood. Flip. Weight. Blood pressure. Respiration. Temp.

Flip. I, Edward Turner, relationship father, do authorize Dr. James Barnes to involuntarily impose any treatments deemed necessary for the care of Derek Turner, dated and signed.

Flip.

When I’m done reading, I unlatch the bathroom door, hand my chart to Dr. Barnes with a smile, and walk back out of the nurses’ station.

—————

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.

My third book is deep in second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. 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 had any book reviews of my books show up in quite some time, so I was pleased to get a notification that Amanja Reads Too Much, a book blogger with a long pending stack of books to read, had gotten to That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class and her review was now up.

---------------------------------------------------

February 2, 2023

I previously reviewed Allan D. Hunter’s first memoir, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet. This book is a follow up that focuses more on his status as “outsider” all the way from high school, to college, grad school, and beyond....

Interested in feminism he enrolled in college as a women’s studies major. He stood out as the only male in any of his classes. Some women welcomed him as an enlightened male, others took objection with a perceived invasion of a woman’s safe place.

That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class candidly discusses social issues beyond feminism as it also explores race and class struggles. Hunter is honest and open about his time spent homeless and “in the system.”...

For those who aren’t part of the LGBTQ community it will be upsetting to learn that there is a lot of infighting still going on today. Well, it’s upsetting to those of us in the community as well. Hunter experienced it through being genderqueer, I’ve faced it through being bisexual (why don’t you just pick a side?!), and many others experience it from other angles. Even outsider groups are not immune to judgement and discrimination...

Hunter is a strong writer and the memoir is a surprisingly quick read. Both of his books are strongly recommended for anyone looking to branch out their reading list to more than just one closet

(snippet; for full review click link below)

AmanjaReads

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Speaking of my books, I am still seeking interested readers to read my third book, a work-in-progress now in the midst of second draft (working title Within The Box), and give me feedback. I'm particularly interested in getting beta readers from these demographics:

• People with any connection to women's studies or feminism, especially if their connection dates back to the heydays of the second wave, 1970s-1990s.

• Anyone from the psychiatric rights / mental patients' liberation community.

• LGBTQIA folks, especially those who participate in organized gender politics

• Currently or formerly homeless, or homeless advocacy workers, or people who provide services to same

• People who provide services to folks with psychiatric diagnoses, especially residential services

If you're interested, shoot me an email, a PM, or post a reply.

—————

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.

My third book is now in second draft. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and 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.

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

------

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

I can’t talk with Mark about this, because he’s Mark and he’s not good at this. Yeesh. I think he means well but seriously, inept counselor-person. I don’t feel at all understood by him.

But still, back to his question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s who I am. I’m one of them.

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

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

—————

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

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

My third book is in post-first-draft corrections and is being circulated to beta readers for feedback. Provisionally title Within the Box. Contact me if you're interested.

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

———————

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

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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.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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My New Favorite Rejection Letter

Comment from an Editor

Reprising a Theme: Querying as Fiction

Within the Box -- First Request for a Full

My First Psychiatric Incarceration, Told and Retold

Author Notes, January 2024

An Expanded / Revamped Scene

Update -- Status of Within the Box

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Synopsis of Within the Box / Querying has Begun!

The Comparable Titles Game

First Draft of Query Letter for Within the Box

Homophobia

Polishing and Procrastinating

The Psychiatric Connection

An Action Scene (from WITHIN THE BOX)

Another Book Review of Guy in Women's Studies + Still Seeking Beta Readers

An Interior Monologue Snippet

Excerpt Snippet: Employment Discrimination

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