Trans/plant/portation

Holed up in the Ozarks for Thanksgiving this week, I had occasion to meet a new step-niece from my brother’s recent marriage. She is engaging, geeky, obsessed with the Potterverse, and drawn to but nervous about writing. From the other side of my mother’s house, I could hear a whispered conversation between my sister-in-law and the young writer: Show him your story. No, no, I can’t. Come on, he can give you pointers. He’ll laugh at me, she said, the common worry of all writers who haven’t reached a minimum threshold of confidence in their craft. Then her mother’s reassurance, and a grudging, I’ll let him look at it tomorrow, from the girl.

Fifteen minutes before they left to go home after the holiday, her mother brought in her notebook computer to my room, and quietly asked if I’d read it. It was the kind of exchange more often reserved for clandestine deals in an urban alley. I squinted at the tiny screen and scrolled through the prose in a few minutes. Read More…

This post originally appeared over on GayYA.org.

There’s a fight going on, but not many people know about it. It boils down to what many fights look like after a long time simmering and evaporating away their unnecessary parts—the right to tell a story. Like many other battles this one is about a people, access to power, and ownership.

I’m talking about where transgender comes from, why it occurs, and what meaning to draw from it. Read More…

Before Emile was born, I made promises to myself about what kind of limits I’d put on conversation topics that I’d heard from other parents over the years–things I never wanted to be caught saying in public. These included both specific statements and more general categories. Roughly, my list of verboten discussion areas included:

• Insisting my child was a prodigy of anything–music, verbal or written ability, athletic prowress
• Commenting on how my child would someday be a heartbreaker because he or she was extremely attractive or charming
• Talking about my child’s genome (hey, I’ve seen this parent) as evidence of future greatness
• Doling out details about my child’s defecation

I’m sure there are more things on the list, but it’s 4 in the morning and he’s just fallen back asleep. Read More…

Xena bless Gwendolyn Ann Smith for starting the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, to focus on the losses our chosen family incurs from bigotry and hatred. But there is a kind of bleakness in the event—we’re certainly not celebrating as we come together, and I for one have to stave off the blues the week afterward because the names of the dead float around in my head. And trust me, I already think about those who haven’t made it on a regular, frequent basis.

Still, I won’t let the day pass without some reflection; it’s a time to re-commit myself to mentoring others, to putting myself out there so I can be a resource in times of trouble, in agitating my local community to push past their stereotyped notions of who trans people are, and in doing work that materially benefits the “T” part of LGBT, since it is so often carelessly forgotten. We want to stop future deaths from violence, but all we have to work with are ourselves and our sense of mission to cobble together a response to that violence. I try to focus on proactive work—call it violence prevention if you will—but I’m supportive of others who take different paths. A variety of responses gives us a better movement, if those responses are in concert with each other and not in opposition. Read More…

In the ominous news of the week last week, the Michigan Senate attached an exception to an anti-bullying law that was working its way through the state legislature. That’s right, an exception for bullying youth. The text of the exception read:

This section does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil and parent or guardian.

To clarify, the state senators wanted to exempt any individual who stated they were using their “sincerely held” religious or moral belief to bully others. This represents nothing less than another over-the-line moment of an increasingly strict fundamentalist, conservative few attempting to dictate its values to the rest of the country. In context with the attempt to redefine personhood in Mississippi (which failed on election day), destroy collective bargaining rights, and undermine the federal budget with still more tax cuts for corporations, the ability of state senators to validate harassment against children is a fine example of just how off the rails the GOP has ventured.  Read More…

The joke between me and a close friend is that it took a relocation to a tiny town, a blown knee, and a national economic collapse to bring me back to writing, so I had better get serious and back to it. I am one of those people who turned away from creative writing as a career because it wasn’t practical enough, and my parents are nothing if not dedicated to middle class pragmatism.

My exile from writing began with excuses—I needed to experience the world and grow as a person, I was busy working, I wasn’t any good at making words happen—and then blossomed into a series of non-starter short stories, some of which I finished poorly and most of which I left to rot on a 3.5-inch floppy disk. By the time I turned 30, I felt miserable about how I’d treated my writing life and I turned, once again, to my journal. I wrote a series of new stories that decade but not for a moment did I presume I was an authentic writer anymore. Read More…

This post originally appeared over at GayYA.org.

I write speculative fiction, usually somewhere between soft science fiction and magical realism, and often, though not exclusively, with LGBT themes and characters. I suppose I could write more mainstream stories, but I like to twist things up and mess with the universe, and besides, I’m a genre geek. I swear this is less from a God complex perspective, and more about playfulness and political intent. Metaphors for transition, coming out, family acceptance, and the like can replace a description of the real thing, and in so doing, open up some space away from angst so more time can be spent appreciating some of the other aspects of these moments.Personally, I’m over angst, having racked up enough of those moments through two whole puberties! But as a writer for young adult and crossover audiences, I’m invested in finding ways to depict all of that cortisol-inducing stress, especially as it relates to LGBT themes. So I opt to find a different geography, a reinvention of time, nifty gadgets and alien species to push, instead of resolve, tension. Read More…

One third done, gone, finito, into the books, as it were, pun intended. That’s where we are with NaNoWriMo. If you’re behind, on pace, or ahead of the game, I have some ideas about what to do with today’s writing push.

Ahead of Day 10’s wordcount pace (16,666 words)—Congratulations, you’re on fire, writer person! Go back and look at your outline. If you didn’t start with an outline, write down all of the characters you’ve invented thus far and draw a relationship map for all of them. Is there anything that you notice that you missed previously? The deeper you can explore any patterns or histories between your characters, the more they’ll come alive as you get through your first draft. You may even spot a new plot point or two you haven’t considered. This is when outlines can really enhance your first pass through the manuscript. And since you’re already ahead of the word count, you have time for some back story work, and you’ll appreciate the help as soon as you feel stuck, should that happen later down the road.

On pace with the word count—So far you’ve been keeping up with with the pace of writing, and maybe it’s stressing you out, like treading water against a current. Spend some time today before you sit down to write, and just think about what you like in this story. If there’s a scene coming up you can’t wait to get to, identify what it is about that moment that is so appealing, and just enjoy it for a bit. Change up your writing music, or whatever beverage is at your side, get okay with shaking things up a little. It’s good to infuse new life into your work-in-progress, even when everything is going fairly well. And after taking a step back about your manuscript, dig in and for today, don’t worry about keeping up the pace. Just write.

Behind the word count pace—Sometimes for me during Nano, this is the best place to be in of these three possibilities. I’m a writer with nothing to lose. I’m not writing for a month-long contest, I’m writing for the love of this particular story. It’s a good way to detach from the franticness that I can feel during November, and get back to basics. What is the story, why this narrator, who is it for, why am I telling it? I’ve gone from 4,000 words behind pace to 2,000 ahead in a single day because I found a heck of a writing groove, or I simply got to the part of the tale that had been pressing upon me the whole time to be written. With one novel I realized only on day 12 that this was the real beginning of the book. Chucking out the first 6 chapters felt like tearing off my own arm, but it made the manuscript worlds better, and I wound up writing for 75,000 more words anyway (in December and January). It’s ultimately not about banging out 1,666 words per day, but about finishing the draft. Don’t tell Chris Baty I said that.

Back in my usability days, I talked often about measurement error, the idea that something throws a monkey wrench into an otherwise careful attempt at accurate observation. Biases, for example, pop up in all sorts of interesting and confounding ways—I’ve seen users struggle with a site but say they loved their user experience. If not an issue with the Web design itself, users bring expectations with them as they use Web sites; one man I interviewed for the Social Security Administration consistently used an interface wrong because he didn’t personally identify himself as disabled, even though it took him 10 minutes to cross the room with his walker before taking his seat.

Usability scientists who aim to measure the success and efficiency of online systems have created an arsenal of tools for gathering more accurate information that can stem the effect of whatever measurement error is in play. One of those tools is a Likert Scale. We’re all familiar with them, those are the “rate this from 1 to 5, 1 being least and 5 being most,” items that float around opinion surveys and rating systems like Yelp. In truth, a scale can go from 1 to 3, 1 to 4, or 1 to 10, or whatever the designer thinks the range should cover.

But Likert Scales are notorious in the world of usability data collection, because very few people design them correctly, and very few respondents react to them appropriately. Read More…

Exposition is well underway, and the characters have made their initial appearances. The readers are hooked into the plot, aware of the struggle, and have identified who the antagonist is, even if they don’t yet know his or her motivation. This is the sweet spot, at least for me, of the first draft. Tell your imagination to run wild, let go of whatever doubts you have, be they overwhelming or annoying vestiges. Don’t even worry about sticking to your outline right now. Let the story go where it needs to, and you can take a look at your original plans later.

We’ve had nearly a week of writing now, so hopefully the novel is spending quality time in your thoughts. If you write scenes now that you’ll later cut out of the text, that’s okay, because anything you put on paper right now only gets you closer to the characters and the story. You’ll have edits to make later and you can use them to imbue your themes, meta-level messages, and so forth. But for now, today, just run with it and enjoy the act of writing itself.

Tomorrow’s post will focus on pacing, but this Sunday, dive into the narrative and write whatever comes out of your fingertips. And enjoy NaNo.