Trans/plant/portation

On Monday I’ll post my review of Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation over on I Fry Mine in Butter. I’ll hold back for now on my opinions and reactions, save to say that this is not your mother’s transsexual.

The Good Wife starts its new season next week on CBS. I was enthralled with the series last year but annoyed by its cell phone cliffhanger. So I’m hoping we get past the wannabe love triangle and return to snappy courtroom drama. Besides, is anyone ever going to get picked over Chris Noth? Please.

I’m doing an experiment with Amazon’s direct digital publishing doohickey. Read: I’m releasing some flash fiction to see how the process works. Look for a link early in the week.

For some worthwhile reading of other good stuff, check out: Read More…

This is an excerpt from Bumbling into Body Hair that I may strike out entirely as I get my word count down to more publisher-attractive levels. But I thought I would share it here out of the goodness of my heart, and because it was a troubling moment within the LGBT community. One of the places I had the hardest time transitioning was among my queer peers, which shouldn’t have been the case.

Jeffrey and I were late to bowling. By the time we got to the alley, there were only five minutes of practice left. This was also annoying because in each of the previous weeks in this new league we’d joined, they ran behind schedule on the practice and start of play. Not so this week.

No sooner had I sat down to put on my shoes than the president of the league was sitting next to me. Buddy was a round, older, very smiley man who was every bit as laid back as the last president of the other league was over-engaged. I liked Buddy.

Buddy looked serious. “Everett, can I talk to you about something?” Read More…

Last week, Jane Friedman, an alum of Writer’s Digest and an advocate for writers working to get published, posted an article over at WD in which she steered very new writers away from hiring professional Web designers when those writers are just starting out on the Web. I can appreciate advice like figuring out what one wants from a Web presence before dropping money on some pricey design that may turn out to be a poor fit for one’s needs. But to me, this just means that writers should spend some time assessing those needs before they do anything else, even before they select a theme on WordPress, for example. Read More…

Susanne and I went to the fertility clinic today to see how close we are to another insemination attempt, after a trip last week to make sure her body had a green light for IUI. This was our second trip to that office after the now-infamous “two uteruses” comment from the counselor. I was pretty much over that episode, understanding that she’d been doing her best to explore all of our options for getting knocked up, even if it was a ridiculous conversation to have with her.

This being Seattle, a populated city that despite a decent bus service, has a lot of passenger cars crowding its roadways, I couldn’t find a convenient parking spot outside the clinic, which is just off of Lake Union. I do wonder idly why people who can afford Mercedes-Benz cars and yachts insist on taking all of the free parking available. Perhaps they need whatever help they can get to finance all of their payments. Whatever the case, I found a pay space, but the convoluted interface for getting a parking ticket was more puzzling than a Rubik’s Cube, so it took me a good 7 minutes to pay and join Susanne, who’d gone on ahead to the doctor’s office. Read More…

In Walla Walla, the sidewalks are rolled up promptly at 8, even on the weekends, and even in the height of the tourist season. As one would imagine, this can be frustrating for the residents of the city, whose dining options are reduced to Shari’s and Wendy’s if it’s later than 9p.m. And often, neither of those seems remotely appetizing, no offense to the hard-working waitstaff at either business. Additionally, sometimes I just want a little piece of sweetness that isn’t in the form of straw-busting milkshake. No offense to the Frosty. Read More…

My heart was on fire, or at least, it felt like it was on fire. I kept one hand over the middle of my chest to double check. A nurse noticed and came over to me.

“Inez, are you in pain again?”

I nodded. I still wasn’t any good at talking. Not on a consistent basis.

The nurse leaned in and squinted at the monitor behind me. “I can only give you one more increase,” she said, twisting something on my IV line. “The pain should start to subside soon.” She patted me gently on my shoulder and I resisted jerking away. I smiled at her in as small a fashion as possible, so I wouldn’t tear the corners of my mouth. Read More…

A good friend asked me this morning where I find my ideas, and the first image that popped into my head was an Easter egg hunt. On the heels of this sweet memory appeared a roundhouse punch, something delivered in a grimy tavern. And so I had my answer. Sometimes I find my ideas, and sometimes they find me. Read More…

If the ocean signifies the breathing apparatus of Planet Earth, then the mountains are the memory of its earlier incarnations, seemingly frozen in time even as they move secretly in some new direction. I have an affection for sea water, since childhood play dates with sand, shovel, and pail. Growing up east of the Mississippi I thought that the Appalachians were as powerful as mountains ever aspired. They counted as wilderness, filled with things not commonly found in our suburban parcel. Read More…

I’m on the road again today, so I’ve got no writing time, although I do have some posts coming up for tomorrow in various places. In the meantime:

• In the only good news I can remember reading from a major newspaper this year, Canada’s The Globe & Mail reports that world hunger is on the decline. Note that at nearly a billion people, it’s still way too high.
• How Colorado is a testing ground for abstinence-only education, over at RH Reality Check.
• With a number of special elections coming up in the Senate, TPM reminds us that some folks will be seated in November, not January. How this might affect us.
• Sarah Shourd is finally freed from Iranian prison. NPR (and everyone else) has an article.
• Really interesting piece on game shows and soaps in a post 9/11 world, over at Snarky’s Machine.

Enjoy the day, folks!

A joke I’ve told over the years is that I have a 1950s education because I went to Catholic school in the 70s and they were twenty years behind. But it remains true that I learned penmanship using the Palmer method and I was forced to diagram my sentences as a means of mastering grammar and syntax. I’m sure I would have learned the difference between a complex and a compound sentence without diagramming, but hey, I had the additional instruction in seeing how words make patterns, and looking back, I appreciate the sisters’ determination even if it meant a lot of embarrassment in front of a chalkboard.

Before everyone rolls their eyes and runs off lest I carry on about sentence diagramming, know that it isn’t the focus of this post. Yippee! Actually, I want to talk about flow diagrams for novel writing. Read More…