For those of you who have never heard me read from She’s Not the Man I Married, the Appleton Public Library put up a clip from my recent presentation there, this past Wednesday March 3rd.

My Husband Betty was published in January 2004, which means it’s been in print for six years.

She’s Not was published in 2007, which means it’s been in print for three years.

Kind of amazing, really, to know there are tens of thousands of copies of my books out in the world.

I’m reading Wednesday night at the Appleton Public Library, 6:30 PM — be there or be square.

Dairy Queen – whose name is funny enough, really, & kind of obscene – sells something they call a Dilly Bar.

A Dilly Bar. It sounds obscene in so many ways, doesn’t it?

But what makes me laugh the hardest is that “dilly boy” is slang (in Polari) for a male prostitute. So theoretically, a bar where male prostitutes hang out should be called a Dilly Boy Bar.

(Okay, so my mind’s in the gutter. And?)

For those of you who are continuing to follow the hullabaloo about Google Books, and specifically Author’s Guild’s settlement with them, do listen to this interview with Ursula LeGuin, who cancelled her membership to Author’s Guild as a result of the settlement.

She also has interesting things to say about the state of the book, education and literacy in the US, and her current project.

I’m doing a reading / Q&A at Appleton Public Library on March 3rd @ 6:30 PM. If you’re on Facebook, you can check out the event page here, & RSVP.

Check this out: Oak Park Library of Illinois was recently recognized for its transgender collection. & It just so happens they chose She’s Not the Man I Married for the article about it in the local Oak Park newspaper.

Apparently Caulfield was still alive to write Salinger’s obit:

“There will never be another voice like his.” Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it’s just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.

Goddamn if The Onion didn’t nail it exactly, even if, I”m sure, a million crumby people thought of it with them.

The world has gotten significantly less smart in the past two days: first we lost the people’s historian, Howard Zinn, whose books educated so many of us as to the real legacy of American Populism.

& Today: Salinger.

I can’t come up with anything better to do than dig the heels of my hands into my eyes and sit, fully dressed, in a bathroom stall, with my own grief. You remember the scene: it’s from Franny & Zoey.

Let me say right here & now that I don’t care if he wrote or what he wrote since he’s been in exile. It’s not like there have been any American authors that even touch his four books’ worth of genius.

For those of you who want to read more about Haiti, do check out the author Edwidge Danticat (if you don’t know her work already).

I’ll be on SistersTalk radio this Wednesday, January 6th, at 7PM Central time.  & Yes, they’re on Facebook. They recently interviewed Rachel Kramer Bussell, erotica empress.

Other upcoming for me: a reading at Appleton Public Library on March 3rd, and I’m doing a reading for the Fox Cities Book Festival on April 12th. My best calendar is still on the front page of my author site, www.helenboydbooks.com (along with a list of past appearances, etc.)

Staci Hunter over at Femulate decided I’m a beautiful blogger. Thank you, Staci! It’s a nice way to start the year, and I do have a scintillating personality, at least.

(Is “femulate” not one of the best names for a blog ever?!)

I do have important responsibilities that come with this honor.

1. thank the person who chose you.
2. link to her site.
3. put award on blog.
4. enumerate 7 interesting things about myself.
5. chose 7 other people to be Beautiful Bloggers.

So those seven interesting things:

1. I have been hugged by both Andy Patridge of XTC and Marc Almond of Soft Cell.
2. I published my first piece of writing – a poem about a kite – when I was in grade school. It was some national children’s arts thing.
3. I am, in my heart, a fiction writer, even though I have not yet published fiction in any major venue.
4. I have made my own holiday cards for the past 20 years, only ever missing 2008.
5. My first boyfriend was named Jason. Also, my last.
6. I was volunteer staff at the big “comeback” Earth Day of 1989 in Central Park.
7. I have been asked more than once if I do phone sex. (I don’t.)

So now, the seven people whom I’ve chosen:

1. Mercedes Allen of Dented Blue Mercedes
2. Kate Bornstein of Kate Bornstein-ness
3. Charlie Vazquez of Latino Musings on Literature (“beautiful” is not a gender-specific term, peeps)
4. Monica Roberts of TransGriot
5. Caprice Bellefleur’s Glob
6. Mattilda of Nobody Passes
7. Jillian Weiss of Transgender Workplace Diversity

So thank you again, Staci, and thanks to all of these bloggers for writing so regularly, and about such interesting things, and for being beautiful while doing so.

Wow, this is depressing to read. It’s also not even a little surprising.

In light of all that, then, I shouldn’t have been surprised that using a male pseudonym had such a dramatic effect on Chartrand’s career. Death threats and sexually degrading commentary directed at women writers seem very 21st century — so modern! so fresh! — but being paid half as much for the same work? Landing fewer jobs? Receiving more criticism and less respect? That just sounds so old-fashioned. I learned about women posing as men to get work in elementary school history lessons, not when I went to grad school for writing. The thought that if I’d tried writing as, say, Kevin Harding, I might have earned far more money, opportunity and authority than I have, is almost as inconceivable as it is chilling. Since the Brontë days, says Chartrand, “we’ve had feminism. We have the right to vote, to own property, to be members of Parliament and Congress, to get a job, and to be the main breadwinner of the family. And yet apparently we haven’t gotten past those 19th century stigmas.”

Here’s the original.

Maybe I should have been George and not Helen after all.

What a cool thing: a list of feminist books for five year olds.

Me?!

But yes, I’m going to be part of a ‘Meet Wisconsin Authors’ series at the Appleton Public Library in March of next year. Details TBA.

On Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue:

“In short, the book provides ample proof that Sarah Palin’s version of her own life is like the Turkish government’s version of the Armenian Genocide — and approximately as trustworthy.”

The full review is here.

(h/t to Sarah)

I recommend the upcoming Going Rouge, instead.

I’m going to get around to interviewing S. Bear Bergman about hir new book, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, I promise.

For right now, though, I just want to say a few things about Bear’s writing.

I read a lot of books about gender, and even more about trans stuff. Some of them are smart, some of them can be funny, and many even make me think in ways I haven’t thought before.

But Bear – zie does all of that, & something else entirely. As I was reading chapter after chapter of this heady, layered, sexy memoir, I kept thinking about Marc Bolan & the lyrics of a song called “Spaceball Ricochet” which go:

Book after book
I get hooked
Everytime the writer
Talks me like a friend

That’s what it is that makes this book, and Bear’s Butch is a Noun, really stand out. Zie trusts the reader to think as hard as zie does, to laugh as hard, to fuck as hard, to work as hard to live as a decent person in the world. There is such a deep care for things – for hir love, hir family, hir tribe. It’s humbling, as a fellow writer, to feel so safe in the palm of another’s work.

So go buy it, and read it, & get back to me with your questions for Bear, and I will, by flattery or threat, get hir to answer at least a few of them.

You really wonder why, as Americans, we get so hung up on sex, and on sex work. You’d think in an uber-capitalist economy, monetizing fucking would be a good thing, but we get hung up anyway.

I’ve been very pleased while reading Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys that I thought I knew almost nothing about sex work, but some of it is familiar – the substance abuse, the “first time” story happening when the woman in question was 13. But what I didn’t know was how much a 17 year old hustler might not hate having to go down on an 82 year old woman, or how, for an American living in Mexico, sex work could be both dangerous and sweetly naive. The stories in this book are good, even if they occasionally make you wish that really really great writers had done sex work and written about it, but in fact, there are at least a few really remarkably well-written pieces in here, & then a whole bunch of fascinating but proficiently-written stories. There is very little that isn’t good in one way or another (which, imho, could be said about sex itself, too).

Do check it out if you’ve ever had any curiosity about sex work. I’ve never been on either side of a sex-for-money equation but this book’s stories kind of made me wonder why I haven’t.

A Baptist Church is burning Bibles.

Church leaders deem Good News for Modern Man, the Evidence Bible, the New International Version Bible, the Green Bible and the Message Bible, as well as at least seven other versions of the Bible as “Satan’s Bibles,” according to the website. Attendees will also set fire to “Satan’s popular books” such as the work of “heretics” including the Pope, Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and Rick Warren.

Not to knock the whole of NC as a result, local David Lynch (not that one) said: “it’s a little disconcerting how close this is to my home. They are burning so much stuff I’ve dubbed them the hypocritical Christian Taliban,” Lynch said in a phone interview with Raw Story. “Just the scope of all the information they want to destroy is pretty disturbing.”

I’ve just been informed that both of my books are now available on Kindle.
I have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing for me, by which I mean, I have no idea what my electronic rights are.

But still, it makes me feel hip.

So here’s My Husband Betty in Kindle, & here’s She’s Not the Man I Married.