Brushing the Dust off Book #2

I am part of an author's group where we read 1800-word excerpts or installments (or, for the poets and short-article writers, the entire thing) and give each other feedback. For my own selections I have been bouncing around a bit, getting feedback on portions from all over the book, but also gradually getting a sense of people's reacion to the overall message, and it's a positive one, they're getting it. Even carved up into snippets delivered in random order, sufficient exposure to what I wrote is conveying the concept of being a gender invert to an audience of people who aren't particularly familiar with MOGII* identities or gender issues. That's all good news.

Most of the others who are working on long, novel-length books are bringing in their latest chapters and therefore picking up where we were left off at the previous meeting. That has got me thinking about returning to work on my second book, provisionally titled That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, about my undergrad and graduate school experiences as a women's studies major and about trying to explain my peculiar sense of identity within the framework of feminist theory.

It's been a long time since I worked on it. The autobiography certainly covered that portion of my life, but it's less easily lifted and edited and repurposed as a book than the eighth-grade-through-coming-out portion that became the first book. To render it as an interesting entertaining read, and to tell the story I want to tell, I'm going to need to rewrite it from the ground up and just rely on the autobio as a reminder of events and situations I might otherwise not think to use.

I started doing that, briefly, back in 2015 but didn't get very far because I've been so immersed in trying to get this book, GenderQueer (aka The Story of Q), into print.

I'm hoping the discipline imposed by wanting to have a new selection to read to the group will keep me going this time.

* MOGII = marginalized (or minority) orientations, gender identities, and intersex; an alternative formulation I prefer over LGBTQIA+ or QUILTBAG (queer/questioning, uncertain, intersex, lesbian, trans*, bisexual, asexual, and gay)

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