Trans/plant/portation

I’m in over my head on revisions to my young adult, time-traveling novel, and truth be told, that’s exactly where I want to be. Of course, I always want to be done already, because there are at least two more projects that I’d love to get started on and they’re beginning to act impatient, stuck as they are at the back of my mind and in the pages of my notebook. But I’m revising right now, and if I’m going to be revising, then I need to be immersed—all of the plot details, characters’ foibles, themes, and accidental lessons up close and personal for me so that I don’t lose sight of them. And I’m sure they appreciate such deft attention.

This is something like the twelfth revision, see. I lost track somewhere around 7 or 8. Read More…

We all know we can’t count on advertisements to give us the truth about anything. If the biggest, most widespread example of this is the coverup by Big Tobacco to hide the reality that smoking causes cancer, then we need only look at Big Pharma to see how this plays out in the 21st Century. Anyone remember Yaz, the contraceptive pill that also mellowed out Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder? That was reintroduced in a slightly new formulation by Bayer as Beyaz, with a new series of commercials to make the difference between PMS and PMDD more clear.

And then, no more Beyaz commercials at all until the latest data suggesting Beyaz’s side effects are even worse than stated. What’s worse than heart attack, I wonder? Greater risk of heart attack, it seems. Read More…

We finished baby class number 4 last night, which was All About Breastfeeding, and I saw more nipples on film than if I’d sat through ten hours of Girls Gone Wild. GGW doesn’t know anything about latching on, though, so at least my exposure to exposed breasts left me with a basic understanding of what to tell Susanne to do when she’s struggling to get into the nursing schtick. I’m sure she’ll want to hear advice from me at 4:20AM when the baby is crying and we haven’t slept in three weeks. Read More…

Perhaps Danny McGuinness had x-ray eyes, I’m not sure. But in one or two snaps of my right bra strap, he discovered the weakest link in the connection. Which, now that I think of it, was kind of the entire brassiere, because it was a fairly flimsy wad of cloth. In an instant the device was in ruins, and it collapsed underneath my dress, while I detected a note of relief from it. After being produced at the training bra factory, it probably expected to grace the shoulders of someone like Carolyn Westermann, not Maroon the Goon, and here I couldn’t even handle it for one week.  Read More…

Eighth grade, 1984. Enough of spring had popped through the soil that the scent of daffodils trickled up to the third floor of the Princeton primary school, which was set right up against busy Nassau Street. As the building was nearly 200 years old, we relied on cross-breezes for air conditioning, which, given that each classroom had windows on only one side of the room and given that New Jersey air does not come pre-conditioned, meant that we were all overheating on a regular basis at some point after April 6. Our core temperatures, however, to a great degree reflected our disparate uniform code: boys could wear thin polo shirts once winter was over, but the girls’ dresses were heavy and scratchy, not much of an improvement over their woolen vests and kilts.

It meant that the female students of St. Paul’s were subjected to more unworldy temperatures than their male counterparts. I would put dollars to whatever that this was an additional measure against girls wearing makeup, which they weren’t allowed to do anyway, but which they kept trying. It’s hard to sneak contraband onto one’s face, especially when it quickly melts off from one’s over extended, personal heat index. Read More…

Walla Walla suffered its first homicide of the year with a gang-related drive-by shooting on Tuesday night. Also, it was the first gunshot death in the city as far back as anyone can remember, which makes it ipso facto the first for us residents. When 20-year-old Julio Cessar Martinez was rolled into the emergency department at St. Mary’s Hospital, I can only imagine how the trauma team responded. They’re much more likely to come across a farm machinery accident, drug overdose, car crash victim, or domestic violence survivor than this. Presumably, this is a foreign moment to Walla Wallans, who are bent on creating a wine economy to draw in the nouveau rich from the West Side. As the economy sluggishly picks up speed, still in the shadow of the 2008 credit collapse, downtown is springing up all kinds of new shops and eateries to cater not to local folks so much as the weekenders who need a break from their hectic lives at Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

This violence is unheard of. Or is it? Read More…

Despite the many apocalyptic presumptions made regarding zombifying infection of the human species, there are worthwhile approaches for isolating and managing zombie individuals that should be considered for specific jurisdictions and communities. Agencies including the CDC and WHO have already implemented zombie response protocols and are on the lookout for outbreaks when containment is still an option. Quarantining zombie individuals can serve to protect uninfected people and provide an opportunity for future treatment should one be discovered. Further considerations include the following: Read More…

It’s an oft-discussed problem of writer’s workshops that first chapters get lots of attention to detail and craft, and then fall off like a continental shelf at the edge of a deep ocean. First sentences are even more the focus of early workshop experiences. While I try to pay at least as much attention to the last third of my work as the first third, I do think an opening can sink or swim a book in all kinds of ways—agents who’ve requested the manuscript will stop reading, readers thumbing through books in stores will put it back down and move to the next novel, and readers will get frustrated or have a hard time pressing on into chapter 2. In my aim to write a fantastic opening, I look to avoid certain things: Read More…

We took you to Seattle this weekend to meet up with some old friends and celebrate a union of two women we know. It was sunny if not warm, but you probably didn’t notice any of that. We’ve learned to appreciate what the late-day light looks like as it filters through a cumulus cloud and falls on gently moving water from the Pacific. We know to watch it when walking on old wood, or to hold onto a handrail as we lean over the sound and crane our necks to spy on a lone sea lion who has wandered near us and who makes us giggle as he snorts when he comes up for air.

I’m not sure about the world into which you’ll be born, and I apologize for that, little one. Read More…

A few days ago a trans woman was attacked just outside of a women’s rest room at a Baltimore area McDonald’s. Two nontrans women, one of them a minor, beat her until she was curled into a fetal position on the floor, and then kicked her in her back, head, and neck. The terrible video, captured by a McDonald’s employee who did nothing to aid or defend her, was quickly posted on YouTube, whereupon some ignoble comments were added to the physical injuries already sustained. The violence lasted around 3 minutes, and the Internet erupted, all over again, with vitriol, calls for quick arrests and/or vengeance, and a whole lot of assumptions about transfolk, people of color, and the McDonald’s anti-discrimination policy.

It is, as is the case so often, a lot to sort through. Read More…