Trans/plant/portation

There’s a little less than a month now until the release of my memoir, Bumbling into Body Hair: Adventures of an Accident-Prone Transsexual. I’d rather keep it simple and just be excited, but that isn’t my DNA. Instead I’ve got anxiety up the wazoo and I find myself curtailed by disappointing fantasies of weak sales, offended reviews, and a whole lot of ho-hum regarding the writing. It would be one thing to keep my expectations low, but I enjoy flirting with the border of self-torture. Before anyone begins commenting that it’s all going to be okay, please know that I understand these are just as implausible outcomes as landing in a soft chair on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. If nothing else, I’m accustomed to my own neuroses. So in an attempt to foil my weaknesses, I’m writing today about the issues brought up in my memoir. Call it a teaser of sorts. Read More…

Let me come right out and admit that I have a terrible track record when it comes to making pitches at conferences. At least, I’m not so good at selecting the right agent for my four-minute sit-down appointment. Cherry Weiner waved me away with one stroke like she was a cynical fairy godmother and I was a wanna be frog prince. Or more specifically, a frog.

But then lo and behold, I had great pitch conversations on the fly, when I hadn’t been prepping and when I wasn’t trying to impress. Which leads me to today’s post—if you’re a person who works best fully prepared and working from some memorized text, these bullet points of advice probably aren’t up your alley. On the other hand, nothing read, nothing gained. Read More…

Once upon a time the title to my memoir was the vague and mildly misleading, “Jersey Boy.” Then that awful movie came out, and the cringefest that is Jersey Shore debuted on MTV. I recognized that in addition to these two negative contextual cues, it didn’t really matter that I am originally from the Garden State, becuase the whole memoir takes place in Washington, DC, and only people who know me personally could remotely care that I hail from the mid-Atlantic state.

Worse, it didn’t say anything about what the book was about.

So I came up with Bumbling into Body Hair: Tales of a Klutz’s Sex Change. That title spelled out everything I thought needed explanation. It’s a funny book. It’s about trans people. It shares the tone and a snippet of the protagonist’s voice.  Read More…

There’s something about looking at a fresh, crisp trade paperback book that belies the messiness of the publication process, and writing itself. Books have bright covers, a little bit of heft when you pick them up, sharp edges, and lovely summaries on the back or inside covers–what a perfect little package of enjoyment. And oh, what it took to get there.

An idea, a cast of characters, copious hours spent writing, rewriting, ripping out words and inventing new ones. Then there’s the swaths of time just getting into writing mode, which I personally need to decrease this year, what with an adorable infant vying for my attention and all (and he gets it, no problem). After so many revisions and passes through the manuscript, beta readers come in and make the author rethink everything they considered perfect or innovative, or interesting. More rewrites. Boil down everything into a synopsis, fret over the book’s query letter, and email those lucky agents who could decide the manuscript is a gem. Handle the rejections, revise the synopsis, pitch it in person at a conference, dust off other projects and get started writing something new. And finally an email appears that someone wants to represent or publish the book.

And that’s just the beginning. I haven’t even mentioned publicists and press kits yet. My point is, if all of this goes into making a book happen–or its cousin, the ebook.

Writers don’t need any distractions or dead weight in this process of inspiration to printing press; bad habits are the one thing we can identify on our own and work to eliminate. And yes, I’ve exhibited or performed nearly every bad behavior in the following list. Read More…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…