Posted on

Will Work for Food

I recently corresponded with two different people putting together an anthology about trans lives, and I asked if contributors were getting paid. I was told no one is getting paid, but they’re pitching to commercial publishers.

What the hell is that? I’m writing about this because it terrifies me. I’m not making a living writing – not many authors do – but jesus h., we still need to get paid! Sometimes I worry that because of the fierce competition in academic circles that people will do *anything* to get published, but goddamn.

So here’s Harlan Ellison giving you the what-for, writers. Get paid! & Join a damn union, whether you write books or scripts.

Posted on

The Problem of Digby

Many of you have asked about whether I won the “Top Ten Female Bloggers” contest over at WVWV, and in fact I did not. Digby did. and Digby should have; she’s a damn good blogger.

But what’s interesting to me is that she was not known to be female when she started blogging in 2003. Nor in 2004, 2005, & 2006. The many years she was being linked to by the likes of Kos, no one knew she was female.

No, it was when she won an award she accepted in person, in the summer of 2007, that everyone found out she is a woman. If you read some of those comments, the surprise was a little more than “Oh, Digby’s a woman, huh” but people were a little more upset than that by the revelation, which is interesting since she never said she wasn’t a woman; her readers did the assuming, & we all know what assuming means, thanks to that classic moment in The Odd Couple.

As a gendery-y sort, & especially as a writer of a gender-y sort, I find that interesting. I don’t want to admit that maybe George Eliot’s method still works better than being known as a woman, that hiding your gender, if you’re female, lends you more credibility than not.

But I fear that is true, & that Digby’s win perhaps underlines that point. Still & all, she is a fantastic political blogger. I am not in anyway trying to say she isn’t. What I am trying to say is that I’m not sure she would have been recognized if she had been known as female from the outset.

Either way, I think it was damned smart of her, since the likeliness is high that people will diminish or ignore the political opinions of women.

Which is sad in itself, of course, but still true.

Posted on

Not a Donkey

A New Yorker article about C.S. Lewis I’d missed that talks about the “two Lewises.” I’m a huge fan, & this was a good piece about him. I like this bit especially:

What is so moving about the Narnia stories is that, though Lewis began with a number of haunted images—a street lamp in the snow, the magic wardrobe itself, the gentle intelligent faun who meets Lucy—he never wrote down to, or even for, children, except to use them as characters, and to make his sentences one shade simpler than usual. He never tries to engineer an entertainment for kids. He writes, instead, as real writers must, a real book for a circle of readers large and small, and the result is a fairy tale that includes, encyclopedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in his favored mystical English winter-and-spring landscape. Had he tried for less, the books would not have lasted so long. The trouble was that though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure.

Prince Caspian comes out May 16th. The trailer gives me hope.

(Courtesy of Neil Gaiman’s blog.)

Posted on

Review: Becoming Drusilla

Nettie, one of our regulars on the MHB Boards, wrote a fantastic review of this book, and I thought more people should see it.

My sister is frustrated, she tells me, because she feels as though she’s the only one struggling with somebody else’s transness. When she goes to her oracles of emotional support (Oprah and Dr Phil), their trans families are in some polished, effortless space where they can say polished, effortless things about their support for their trans relative or friend.

Imagine that: inarticulate struggle doesn’t play well on television. Not a lot of room for “hmm” and squirm and “I don’t really know”.

Now, two weeks spent walking in the rain … there’s a place for a lot of hmming and squirming and “I don’t really know”. Two weeks in which the rain is too loud on the hood of your anorak to hear the other person talk. Two weeks being with somebody, but mostly thinking and reminiscing rather than talking. It’s the antithesis of television.

Becoming Drusilla is as close to the antithesis of television as any book I’ve read. It’s a piece of travel writing, really. Travel writing and a bit of biographic exposition. Because Beard is a very open, clear and entertaining writer the result is a book which is a pleasure to read. Continue reading “Review: Becoming Drusilla”

Posted on

Which Side Are You On?

It IS May Day. If everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, then shouldn’t everyone be a pinko on May Day?

Here are some of my favorite lefty reads:

More as this election season teeters on.

Posted on

Neil Gaiman Fan Club

Reason #428 why I love Neil Gaiman.

Despite his self-doubt, he’s given me two of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever gotten:

  1. Finish what you start.
  2. You can only get up to make more tea.

After that, it’s just a bitter fight to turn your brain off so that you can not think well enough to write.

Posted on

Fuck Seal Press?

I came back from visiting Betty upstate to find out that there is a huge mess involving Seal Press (my publishers) which came right on the heels of BFP’s departure last week.

So without pointing out every phrase and person involved, I’ll just say a few things as a white feminist who really only consciously became a feminist after reading Michele Wallace, and who, for nearly 10 years, worked for author Walter Mosley, who has written and talked about the absence of POC in the publishing industry, specifically.

The under representation of WOC in publishing has been a problem for a long time. The under representation of POC has been as well, in general. It’s not just chronic; it’s really fucking awful. Continue reading “Fuck Seal Press?”

Posted on

Opening Up

Tristan Taormino has a new book coming out about non-monogamous relationships called Opening Up. I’m actually really excited about it, since so many people have asked me how to manage that kind of change in a relationship, and I’m pleased to have a resource for it, and written by someone who knows.

The book has its own website, designed by the very fabulous & talented Betty, so do go check it out.

Posted on

Reading Time

Is there ever enough time for reading? I’m reading about four books at once just now:

I didn’t find much time to read anything other than the essays I’d assigned when I was teaching, so I wonder, if after teaching a while, the grading gets easier & you get in more reading time.

The good thing about writing is that you tend to go on overdrive, and read and write and write and read and it’s like you never get tired. The problem is that you really don’t want to deal with the rest of the world, for dinners with friends or class reunions or whatever on your social calendar bids you.

Not that anyone I know should take that personally.

One of the things that’s beckoning me toward Wisconsin is that there isn’t so much to do, and for a writer approaching middle age, that sounds perfectly perfect. (Now I just need to win that lottery, so I can pull a J.D. Salinger. Except I’ll publish what I’m writing, of course.)

Posted on

Novel

So I’m working on a novel these days. & That’s all I’m saying for now.