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

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

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

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

So I do a vanity search one day on YouTube, being too lazy to just go to my profile account and click on "videos". And up pops:

This video review of GenderQueer... from somebody named "Novelzilla ( Read more... )

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

I've paused querying my third book Within the BoxAs 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 with it ( Read more... )

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

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 ( Read more... )

I think I'm going to consider my audience. I have tended to think of myself as speaking (or attempting to speak) to the world at large, in general, about the things I wanted to speak of. And I did speak (some; mostly I wrote and attempted to get people to read what I'd written), I did try to communicate. The terms I used were things like "I am ( Read more... )