My mother claims I’m hard to shop for whenever some holiday or birthday rolls around on the calendar. I love cooking, football, writing, gardening, reading, and coffee, but she insists it’s a quagmire to buy anything for me. (Cue eye roll, teenager style.) If others find themselves in similar situations, I hope you find this list helpful. May peace settle over the land of your family. No, this isn’t a secret or ulterior list for myself, but I wouldn’t throw any of these items off my front porch, either. Read More…
Latest from the Blog
A Humble List of Gifts for Working Writers
America off the Rails
I’ve pondered how to write this post for a while, at least since the third debate of this long GOP primary season, but in all honesty, I don’t know where to begin. We’ve seen one ludicrous statement after another:
April, 2011: Why did it take him two and a half years if it was no story? I made the assumption, and I think a lot of Americans did, there must be something that he wants to hide, there must be something on his birth certificate he doesn’t want people to know. If it was an issue, why wouldn’t you just put the issue away? –Rick Santorum, speaking about the President’s birth certificate
June 7, 2011: I am only going to allow small bills — three pages. You’ll have time to read that one over the dinner table. –Herman Cain
August, 2011: I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending. –Michele Bachmann
December 10, 2011: Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits for working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal. –Newt Gingrich
Taken together, these comments paint a terrifying picture of the GOP, in terms of competence, constitutional knowledge (Rick Perry has called for a constitutional amendment to ensure that schoolchildren can pray in school if they want to, which they already have the right to do), and in their incessant fear-mongering. The terrorists are coming for us, along with undocumented workers, queer people, socialists, anyone in a union, poor children, and so on, all led by the secret Muslim president who was really born in Africa. It’s a narrative that makes no sense. It’s filled with contradictions, easy-to-find inaccuracies, pseudo-science, and fuzzy logic, but it’s been presented so frantically to the nation that this story has taken on a life of its own. Maybe I could even call it the animated corpse of political campaigning. Read More…
Time Management for the Weary Writer
It’s been a little less than a year since I wrote a novel at the sugar-dusted tables of Top Pot Doughnuts in Seattle—the Capitol Hill location, not the one downtown that President Obama visited. They could make a mocha like nobody’s business. And while I may have not eaten the most nutritious breakfast on those days, I had something significant going for me: time.
Not so anymore. A close-to-full-time job and a little baby at home have taken a hungry chunk of my schedule, munching and drooling and leaving only a few crumbs behind for me. What’s left is some clunky time between work and supper, after dinner time that usually coincides with Emile’s daily fussy spell, late night, and before work time, only accessible via an annoying alarm clock. At 5:30AM I’m supposed to be funny?
In other words, it ain’t pretty. Read More…
Finding an LGBT Audience
This post originally appeared over on GayYa.org.
I’ve looked at stories, characters, plot devices, layering, the writer’s mission, and some of the tropes around gay YA and genre fiction this past month or so, but left to examine among many other aspects of writing is audience. Not all writers seek publication, and that’s fine, but for those of us who want to get our words communicated to the world outside our heads should understand our options, the market, and readers’ expectations. Read More…
Ending with a Whimper: 7 Thoughts for NaNoWriMo Failures
Yes, the clock is ticking down to midnight. Slouching toward a glorious National Novel Writing Month win for many folks. Not all of us, certainly, not even most of us, even if we built up new callouses from our keyboards trying to craft the next great novel. And then there are the writers who caved in on Day 10, or as the smell of turkey wafted over from the kitchen, or ignobly in the first damn week of the contest. Those are the stories barely begun for those failures, mere vignettes and half-thoughts lost on so many creaky hard drives.
The road to success is paved with moments like these, thank Xena. So even if a few notes and 2,000 crappy words are all you eked out this November, take heart. I have ideas for life in December and beyond. Read More…
By Hook or by Crook: Traveling with Baby
Susanne and I like to think we are seasoned travelers, people who move around continents with ease and without flinching. I know before I get to the security line how many bins I’ll need for my stuff. I know which planes have a great bulkhead row and which will cause me to wrap my legs around me like an experiment in human origami. Southwest trains their employees to present all information as a jolly delight, so I’ve learned to cut through the tone to get to the actual substance. Delta, after its merger with Northwest, has a lot of sullen, underappreciated staff at the till, so I make sure to smile when I talk to them and then I get slightly better service. I’m a gate-checking madman, avoidant of baggage fees, and I most recently am grieving the loss of the tiny bag of pretzels, because it seems even that microscopic luxury of flying has now vanished.
When people told me that everything would change once the baby arrived, they failed to bring up air travel. Not a single person in the 8,374 instances of “Your life is going to change, you know,” that I heard before Emile’s birth finished the sentiment with “especially when you try to get on a plane.” I recognized that life would shift, but I didn’t think about flying. Read More…
Advice for Young Writers
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…
Changing the Trans Narrative in YA Fiction
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…
All About Poop
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…
Transgender Day of Sadness
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…
Trans/plant/portation 