I’ve recently read a couple books that both fall loosely under the rubric of coming-of-age / coming-out stories. Neither is a new release but they were recommended to me and sat waiting on my “to read” pile.
Will Grayson, Will Grayson, John Green and David Levithan (Penguin, 2010).
A lot of lesbian and gay lit offerings are effectively romances, and romances tend to emphasize the romantic relationship (hence the designation), and end happily ever after (HEA) or at least happily for now (HFN). Although Will Grayson, Will Grayson is in part about coming out and having that first sexual-romantic connection, it’s actually not a romance in the conventional sense. The emphasis is on friendship and loyalty among friends; the romantic relationships described in the book end up being in the background. This book portrays the tensions within an ongoing gay-straight friendship and the complexities in a formerly romantic-sexual relationship between the exes who still care for each other.
The “gimmick” of the book, if I may call it that, is that two boys of the exact same name take turns as the story’s narrator. One Will Grayson is gay but not out yet, and hasn’t had any meaningful sexual experiences as of the start of the book. The other Will Grayson is straight but similarly inexperienced (he’s rather introverted and has embraced a philosophy of never drawing attention to himself if he can avoid it). The authors handle the back-and-forth tradeoff between the two narrators by having one Will’s chapters all in lower case while the other uses normal start-of-sentence capitalization. It works.
The storyline and the two narrators revolve around central figure Tiny Cooper, “the world’s largest person who is really really gay”, also “the world’s gayest person who is really really large”. The exuberantly flamboyant Tiny is a theatrical creative. I coincidentally just now read a news article via a link within a Facebook group about how many gay men feel marginalized within the gay community over body image, especially the notion that to be successful in love and sex and socialization, a gay male needs to be neither skinny nor fat but perfectly sculpted instead. (It’s a complaint that mirrors those made by straight women about mainstream society). So it strikes me as healthy that we have here a heroic and popular extra-large gay person.
My Razzle Dazzle, Todd Peterson (iUniverse, 2015)
This is a period piece where the action takes place just a few short years before my own coming-of-age experience (and hence the events in my own book). Todd Peterson is just about the right age to have been my babysitter when I was a child. There are a lot of events and specific descriptions I can readily relate to as a consequence: the girls jumping rope on the playground and what it was like to play with them, the boys and the specific ways in which they were hostile to both girls and sissies, the “feel” of the school hallways and classrooms. Also, for that matter, the later career in software development, although I didn’t get into that as early in my own life as Todd Peterson did.
There are other elements of the story that are quite foreign to me though, in particular the phenomenon of roller derby, the experience of competitive skating on banked tracks and so on. Todd Peterson made the transit from enthusiastic fan to eventual team member of the Bombers, and his sense of accomplishment and belongingness among the skaters is as much a journey of identity and self-actualization as his coming out as a gay person. This is something that’s often not well-explained, that a marginalized identity on the basis of gender or sexual orientation tends to be a prominent factor in a person’s identity, but not to the exclusion of other things that may be developing concurrently in that same person’s life.
As with Will Grayson, My Razzle Dazzle alternates narration, this time between the current-era Todd Peterson who is reminiscing about his coming of age years, and the Todd Peterson he was as a child and young adult. The tradeoff this time is handled by having the historical reminiscent Todd Peterson written in the third person, while the modern Todd writes in the first person. And this works well too. The overall impression is that of Todd the author sitting in a comfortable armchair and discussing the events of the previous backstory chapter and their impact on his life overall. It gives him a way to theorize and make sense of those events and how they shaped him.
I do note that My Razzle Dazzle is yet another “exhibit a” for my discussion of gender inversion and sexual orientation, or, more specifically, why people identifying as gender inverts as I do are likely to be males attracted to females or vice versa. Todd Peterson doesn’t make a distinction between being, or being perceived as, feminine or sissified, on the one hand, and being gay, attracted to other males, on the other. In an early chapter he describes playing double dutch with the girls, turning the rope and doing his own jumping in turn, and then being harassed for that by the other boys. There is, of course, no reason why playing jump rope with the girls means that one is attracted to other guys, or why having sexual fantasies about other boys would make a fellow feminine. But Peterson doesn’t say this or explore this distinction. And why would he? The people around him don’t make make such a distinction! Sissy means gay to them, so in accepting himself as a gay male, Todd Peterson looks back at sissy characteristics and interprets them as traits of a gay male child. Similarly, in a later chapter, he muses about the possibility of coming out to his family and one of his friends points out that he crosses his legs “like a girl” and from this and other such cues and expressions says “they may already know”. Because of this phenomenon, the people I suspect are most likely to identify as gender inverts will be sissy-femme males whose attraction is not towards other males (because those that are continue to identify as gay guys not as gay gender inverted guys), and similarly so for butch-masculine female folks (because the butch gals who are lesbians tend to conflate their butch attributes with their lesbianism rather than seeing it as a separate component of marginalized identity).
One notable exception to that is Jacob Tobia, whose Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is definitely a gender-inversion testimonial, a description of being femme that is definitely not conflated with sexual orientation. I reviewed Sissy last year.
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My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).
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Showing posts with label romance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label romance. Show all posts
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Saturday, October 5, 2019
Genre Variant
Originality has its limits; to make sense to people, we have to begin in familiar territory; to say something new, we must connect it with something people already know.
But the worlds of publishing and producing constrain originality far beyond that, in their expectation that books and other creative works fit into an existing genre, and that books within a genre fit narrow specifications and tick off the requisite number of anticipated elements.
The popular mystery/detective genre has its well-established requirement of Clues, Character-Suspects (among whom the perpetrator must exist), the Escalation of further perpetrations of subsequent crimes (and further clues), and the False Suspect thrown in our path to throw us off the scent, and so on. I've never written one, although like most of us I've read many over the years.
The romance genre should have the protagonists Meet Cute but initially behave more like antagonists, give us some Steam but establish reasons to defer pleasure for awhile, and insert a Setback just as things are lighting up (a misunderstanding or an unreconcilable difference) before it resolves as HEA (happily ever after) or at least HFN (happily for now). Nothing I've written qualifies as a romance novel, although I've read my share of these as well.
If an author writes within a popular genre, and writes well with an interesting twist that makes their book ever so slightly different while still mostly fitting the template, they stand a chance of finding a literary agent and landing a publishing contract as a debut author. The publishing industry knows they have a built-in audience.
There are some genres that have fallen by the wayside, styles of writing that were once written and sold in large quantities. Would you like to be a brand new author today and find yourself pitching a book set in the 1800s in the west, featuring an upright male citizen who is a bit of a loner, who rides into a town where the establishment institutions of social order aren't working, so he makes a stand, bravely facing death and being outnumbered, but with his skill with a pistol he and his sidekick, with whom he has his conversations, prevail, only to find it necessary to ride off into the sunset because the little town is ambivalent about him?
Or perhaps you'd like to be fishing for a lit agent for your debut book that features a vivacious gal who finds herself in surrounded by deceptive creeping danger, and is fraught with self-doubt and doubt about the attractive but flawed male of wealth and power who lives in near-isolation in a crumbling old mansion; he starts off hateful but she forces his reluctant admiration and shows him her mettle, then she gradually finds that beneath his compromised and ethically questionable exterior and all his characterological flaws, he's actually shiny and principled -- ?
If you're an established author with a proven track record, it might please you to put forth a book that's a clever twist on the old classic western or gothic genre, but I suspect it would be a far more difficult sell for a first-timer.
One of my favorite examples of a creative work that doesn't shoehorn nicely into existing genres is actually a film (originally a screenplay), Miracle Mile. It kicks off as a conventional romance / romantic comedy, invoking the trope of a main character reaching a misunderstanding about something that makes him believe there's a crisis afoot, resulting in him behaving in amusingly silly ways and luring others into doing likewise. Except this time it turns out that the crisis isn't the result of a miscommunication and the story becomes an apocalyptic end-of-world tragedy.
That it ever got made (without being revamped to make it fit into genre packaging better) is a testimony to screenwriter Steve De Jarnatt and his durable stubbornness. He was a graduate of American Film Institute and had credentials for prior work on Hollywood films, but even after the Miracle Mile screenplay won awards there were misgivings about proceeding with the project as written:
-- from Radiator Heaven
I hadn't anticipated as much difficulty fencing my manuscript as I encountered. Like most newbie authors probably do, I thought the writing was the primary challenge. Thousands of people crank up their word processors for NaNoWriMo every year thinking maybe they've got a novel in them, probably assuming that if they do indeed write one, and it's good, they can get it published.
I thought of my book as fitting into a genre: the LGBTQ coming-out story. I figured it would fit on the same shelf as Conundrum: From James to Jan and Rubyfruit Jungle and The Best Little Boy in the World and Stone Butch Blues and Emergence and so forth.
Unfortunately, as with the western and the gothic romance, the LTBTQ coming-out tale is treated as an "old genre". As I wrote in my various query-letter incarnations, there have been such stories for lesbian coming-out, gay male coming-of-age, and transgender (in both of the conventional transitional directions) stories *, but nothing addressing that "Q" that sits there at the end of the acronym; nothing that explains genderqueer -- or gender variance by any other name -- that doesn't overlap with the previous four letters. Well, that may have been part of the problem: the people I was trying to sell on the story's concept didn't see any unaddressed need there, because they, too, didn't have a notion of any remaining category for which we didn't already know the story.
Aside from that, "need" isn't the operative word by which the publishing industry makes its assessment. They think in terms of "market", not "need". They consider manuscripts in terms of their potential audience, the people already poised to go out and buy such a book. Genre, in other words.
Instead of being conceptualized as a part of an LGBTQ coming-out genre, my book was typically seen as either an LGBT book or as a memoir. The LGBT genre is mostly fiction, and mostly erotica-romance at that, with an occasional literary fiction piece from an established author. The memoir genre is occupied by the personal narrative by someone we've already heard of, a celebrity or a person who made the news and attracted our attention, and hence has a "platform".
Submission Stats as of October 2019:
Total Queries to Lit Agents: 1453
Rejections: 1441
Still Outstanding: 12
Total Queries Directly to Small Publishers: 117
Rejections: 58
Still Outstanding: 43
Pub Contract Signed (then went out of business): 1
Pub Contract Signed (rights reverted, creative diffs): 1
Pub Contract Signed (publication pending): 1
* to be fair, there aren't many bisexual coming-of-age / coming-out stories either. As with so many things pertaining to bisexual people, I think there's an attitude that if we have lesbian and gay equivalents covered, the story / concerns / situation of bisexual people won't be meaningfully different so we dont need to bother.
———————
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————————
Index of all Blog Posts
But the worlds of publishing and producing constrain originality far beyond that, in their expectation that books and other creative works fit into an existing genre, and that books within a genre fit narrow specifications and tick off the requisite number of anticipated elements.
The popular mystery/detective genre has its well-established requirement of Clues, Character-Suspects (among whom the perpetrator must exist), the Escalation of further perpetrations of subsequent crimes (and further clues), and the False Suspect thrown in our path to throw us off the scent, and so on. I've never written one, although like most of us I've read many over the years.
The romance genre should have the protagonists Meet Cute but initially behave more like antagonists, give us some Steam but establish reasons to defer pleasure for awhile, and insert a Setback just as things are lighting up (a misunderstanding or an unreconcilable difference) before it resolves as HEA (happily ever after) or at least HFN (happily for now). Nothing I've written qualifies as a romance novel, although I've read my share of these as well.
If an author writes within a popular genre, and writes well with an interesting twist that makes their book ever so slightly different while still mostly fitting the template, they stand a chance of finding a literary agent and landing a publishing contract as a debut author. The publishing industry knows they have a built-in audience.
There are some genres that have fallen by the wayside, styles of writing that were once written and sold in large quantities. Would you like to be a brand new author today and find yourself pitching a book set in the 1800s in the west, featuring an upright male citizen who is a bit of a loner, who rides into a town where the establishment institutions of social order aren't working, so he makes a stand, bravely facing death and being outnumbered, but with his skill with a pistol he and his sidekick, with whom he has his conversations, prevail, only to find it necessary to ride off into the sunset because the little town is ambivalent about him?
Or perhaps you'd like to be fishing for a lit agent for your debut book that features a vivacious gal who finds herself in surrounded by deceptive creeping danger, and is fraught with self-doubt and doubt about the attractive but flawed male of wealth and power who lives in near-isolation in a crumbling old mansion; he starts off hateful but she forces his reluctant admiration and shows him her mettle, then she gradually finds that beneath his compromised and ethically questionable exterior and all his characterological flaws, he's actually shiny and principled -- ?
If you're an established author with a proven track record, it might please you to put forth a book that's a clever twist on the old classic western or gothic genre, but I suspect it would be a far more difficult sell for a first-timer.
One of my favorite examples of a creative work that doesn't shoehorn nicely into existing genres is actually a film (originally a screenplay), Miracle Mile. It kicks off as a conventional romance / romantic comedy, invoking the trope of a main character reaching a misunderstanding about something that makes him believe there's a crisis afoot, resulting in him behaving in amusingly silly ways and luring others into doing likewise. Except this time it turns out that the crisis isn't the result of a miscommunication and the story becomes an apocalyptic end-of-world tragedy.
That it ever got made (without being revamped to make it fit into genre packaging better) is a testimony to screenwriter Steve De Jarnatt and his durable stubbornness. He was a graduate of American Film Institute and had credentials for prior work on Hollywood films, but even after the Miracle Mile screenplay won awards there were misgivings about proceeding with the project as written:
De Jarnatt decided to shop the script around to various Hollywood studios and was turned down several times by executives that didn’t like the downbeat ending. The filmmaker said, “I certainly could have made it a few years ago if (the hero) woke up and it was all a dream, or they saved the day.” In fact, at one point, he was approached to shoehorn Miracle Mile into Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) only with a happy ending, but he turned that offer down as well.
-- from Radiator Heaven
I hadn't anticipated as much difficulty fencing my manuscript as I encountered. Like most newbie authors probably do, I thought the writing was the primary challenge. Thousands of people crank up their word processors for NaNoWriMo every year thinking maybe they've got a novel in them, probably assuming that if they do indeed write one, and it's good, they can get it published.
I thought of my book as fitting into a genre: the LGBTQ coming-out story. I figured it would fit on the same shelf as Conundrum: From James to Jan and Rubyfruit Jungle and The Best Little Boy in the World and Stone Butch Blues and Emergence and so forth.
Unfortunately, as with the western and the gothic romance, the LTBTQ coming-out tale is treated as an "old genre". As I wrote in my various query-letter incarnations, there have been such stories for lesbian coming-out, gay male coming-of-age, and transgender (in both of the conventional transitional directions) stories *, but nothing addressing that "Q" that sits there at the end of the acronym; nothing that explains genderqueer -- or gender variance by any other name -- that doesn't overlap with the previous four letters. Well, that may have been part of the problem: the people I was trying to sell on the story's concept didn't see any unaddressed need there, because they, too, didn't have a notion of any remaining category for which we didn't already know the story.
Aside from that, "need" isn't the operative word by which the publishing industry makes its assessment. They think in terms of "market", not "need". They consider manuscripts in terms of their potential audience, the people already poised to go out and buy such a book. Genre, in other words.
Instead of being conceptualized as a part of an LGBTQ coming-out genre, my book was typically seen as either an LGBT book or as a memoir. The LGBT genre is mostly fiction, and mostly erotica-romance at that, with an occasional literary fiction piece from an established author. The memoir genre is occupied by the personal narrative by someone we've already heard of, a celebrity or a person who made the news and attracted our attention, and hence has a "platform".
Submission Stats as of October 2019:
Total Queries to Lit Agents: 1453
Rejections: 1441
Still Outstanding: 12
Total Queries Directly to Small Publishers: 117
Rejections: 58
Still Outstanding: 43
Pub Contract Signed (then went out of business): 1
Pub Contract Signed (rights reverted, creative diffs): 1
Pub Contract Signed (publication pending): 1
* to be fair, there aren't many bisexual coming-of-age / coming-out stories either. As with so many things pertaining to bisexual people, I think there's an attitude that if we have lesbian and gay equivalents covered, the story / concerns / situation of bisexual people won't be meaningfully different so we dont need to bother.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Polyamory and the Self-Actualized Sissy
Occasionally it comes out in conversation that I am polyamorous and have had multiple simultaneous partners. This is a fact that often gets misconstrued:
Now, I like occasionally having a moment of solidarity and experience-in-common with the non-hostile incarnations of the conventional male, and it may in fact have some element of compensatory pleasure or “making up for lost time” associated with it, I suppose, but I feel like most folks miss an important connection between being poly and being sissy.
Polarization versus Unification
The conventional portrait of sexuality, gender, and companionship looks something like this. I’ll work from the cis hetero male model since I am male and perceived as male and hence compared to this more often, regardless of how I identify. Ready? He has a cluster of same-sex friends, his “group” or his “buddies”, his “crowd”, and some are closer friends than others; these are easy informal relationships, without definitional structures. They are certainly multiple in nature and he may become closer to one friend over time or more distant with another, all without any need to redefine the relationships (since they don’t have formal definitions anyhow). Meanwhile, entirely separate from that, he has erotic interests in women, and is predisposed to form long-term pair-bonding with one if there is a sufficiently strong emotional attachment formed. Outside (or prior to) such a pair-bond, he may pursue sexual activity with multiple different partners, and may in fact behave in such a way as to preserve this sexual freedom by doing things to postpone or reduce the likelihood of pair-bond emotional passions forming. But it is still assumed that eventually he wants that to occur and that when it does he will be sexually exclusive. Even if not, it is assumed that he will not form similar deep emotionally connected pair-bonds with someone else, that the pair-bond relationship is at least exclusive in its own domain.
I am not going to critique this model for its inherent healthiness or desirability, at least not at the moment. Instead, let’s just toss this masculine model out of the way and bring myself in, a sissy male, and examine what changes from that alone. Well, first of all, instead of all my friends being same-sex, I tend to form friendships with women. Second, in contrast to some notion of a separate “friend zone” versus a “romantic possibility” classification, it’s not a separate phenomenon for me: the people I like as friends, being of the sex that I’m attracted to, are the people with whom there’s a potential for a sexual connection, a romantic connection. At the time that the connections are forming, I don’t know where they’re headed. Sexuality isn’t something foreign to friendship for me. Thirdly, just as the cis hetero guy’s friendships change over time, with him getting closer to some and farther apart from others, my relationships shift, and those shifts include into and out of sexual and romantic expression and feelings. So not only do I not know where they’re headed when they’re starting up, they may change.
That’s what it means, what it’s like, to be a person who is “like” rather than heterodifferent from the sex to whom I feel sexual attraction. It doesn’t make sense to “break up” with someone or to attempt sexual exclusivity or to expect or request it of someone else.
Works for Me
When I describe this to people, they sometimes say that it's a sad and inferior version of sexuality. They also sometimes say that it's a sad and creepy version of friendship. For my part, I think it would be sad and kind of pathological to be unable to be friends with someone you're strongly sexually attracted to. To be unable to feel that attraction without erupting into sexual aggression, sexual harassment, rape, molestation, sexual intrusiveness, etc; to find it necessary to attain that person sexually or else to run for the hills, to get away from them. I don't have that problem. I mean, yeah, I want sex and romantic love to be in my life, with someone, at least now and then; I need to experience that, and it's quite painful to be completely isolated from it. But as long as that's happening now and then in my life, I don't need it to be happening with this particular person, and it's OK to find them exquisitely delicious and not have anything develop out of that. And also, I don't think of sexual feelings as some kind of filthy things that are going to pollute a friendship.
There are people who practice a narrowly constrained form of pseudo-polyamory, wherein a person (nearly always male) is OK with his partner(s) having other partners of their own but only partners that are not of his sex. In other words, a “one penis policy”. In essence, he is isn’t seeing other female partners of his partners as competitive threats, but would see another male as such.
I don’t think I’m particularly inclined to see the sexual realm of life as all about competition, although I suppose some competitive aspects may be inevitable. But there’s another factor there for me, which is that I don’t tend to see other male partners of my partners as direct competition. Female partners either, for that matter. If there’s one flip side to sissyhood as a marginalized and rarefied identity, a structural advantage for a change, it’s the sense of veritable uniqueness. If someone likes being with me, they may also like being with other male people or other femme people but neither of those categories is going to be a snap-in replacement for me, so anyone with a taste for someone like me is going to be inclined to keep me around! I guess the closest approximation to a “one penis policy” in my case would be a “one SISSY policy”, but hey, we don’t exactly grow like weeds, with sissy suitors lurking around every corner, so I’ve never felt the need for that kind of protection either.
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Jake: Whoo, well, sissy or no, I see we have some stuff in common. Rock on! You may not be in to all that masculinity be-a-man stuff but when it comes down to the important things you know how to get what you need, huh?
Maud: Is this like a compensation thing, to make up for being left out and pushed to the sidelines while the manly men were getting all the girls?
Now, I like occasionally having a moment of solidarity and experience-in-common with the non-hostile incarnations of the conventional male, and it may in fact have some element of compensatory pleasure or “making up for lost time” associated with it, I suppose, but I feel like most folks miss an important connection between being poly and being sissy.
Polarization versus Unification
The conventional portrait of sexuality, gender, and companionship looks something like this. I’ll work from the cis hetero male model since I am male and perceived as male and hence compared to this more often, regardless of how I identify. Ready? He has a cluster of same-sex friends, his “group” or his “buddies”, his “crowd”, and some are closer friends than others; these are easy informal relationships, without definitional structures. They are certainly multiple in nature and he may become closer to one friend over time or more distant with another, all without any need to redefine the relationships (since they don’t have formal definitions anyhow). Meanwhile, entirely separate from that, he has erotic interests in women, and is predisposed to form long-term pair-bonding with one if there is a sufficiently strong emotional attachment formed. Outside (or prior to) such a pair-bond, he may pursue sexual activity with multiple different partners, and may in fact behave in such a way as to preserve this sexual freedom by doing things to postpone or reduce the likelihood of pair-bond emotional passions forming. But it is still assumed that eventually he wants that to occur and that when it does he will be sexually exclusive. Even if not, it is assumed that he will not form similar deep emotionally connected pair-bonds with someone else, that the pair-bond relationship is at least exclusive in its own domain.
I am not going to critique this model for its inherent healthiness or desirability, at least not at the moment. Instead, let’s just toss this masculine model out of the way and bring myself in, a sissy male, and examine what changes from that alone. Well, first of all, instead of all my friends being same-sex, I tend to form friendships with women. Second, in contrast to some notion of a separate “friend zone” versus a “romantic possibility” classification, it’s not a separate phenomenon for me: the people I like as friends, being of the sex that I’m attracted to, are the people with whom there’s a potential for a sexual connection, a romantic connection. At the time that the connections are forming, I don’t know where they’re headed. Sexuality isn’t something foreign to friendship for me. Thirdly, just as the cis hetero guy’s friendships change over time, with him getting closer to some and farther apart from others, my relationships shift, and those shifts include into and out of sexual and romantic expression and feelings. So not only do I not know where they’re headed when they’re starting up, they may change.
That’s what it means, what it’s like, to be a person who is “like” rather than heterodifferent from the sex to whom I feel sexual attraction. It doesn’t make sense to “break up” with someone or to attempt sexual exclusivity or to expect or request it of someone else.
Works for Me
When I describe this to people, they sometimes say that it's a sad and inferior version of sexuality. They also sometimes say that it's a sad and creepy version of friendship. For my part, I think it would be sad and kind of pathological to be unable to be friends with someone you're strongly sexually attracted to. To be unable to feel that attraction without erupting into sexual aggression, sexual harassment, rape, molestation, sexual intrusiveness, etc; to find it necessary to attain that person sexually or else to run for the hills, to get away from them. I don't have that problem. I mean, yeah, I want sex and romantic love to be in my life, with someone, at least now and then; I need to experience that, and it's quite painful to be completely isolated from it. But as long as that's happening now and then in my life, I don't need it to be happening with this particular person, and it's OK to find them exquisitely delicious and not have anything develop out of that. And also, I don't think of sexual feelings as some kind of filthy things that are going to pollute a friendship.
There are people who practice a narrowly constrained form of pseudo-polyamory, wherein a person (nearly always male) is OK with his partner(s) having other partners of their own but only partners that are not of his sex. In other words, a “one penis policy”. In essence, he is isn’t seeing other female partners of his partners as competitive threats, but would see another male as such.
I don’t think I’m particularly inclined to see the sexual realm of life as all about competition, although I suppose some competitive aspects may be inevitable. But there’s another factor there for me, which is that I don’t tend to see other male partners of my partners as direct competition. Female partners either, for that matter. If there’s one flip side to sissyhood as a marginalized and rarefied identity, a structural advantage for a change, it’s the sense of veritable uniqueness. If someone likes being with me, they may also like being with other male people or other femme people but neither of those categories is going to be a snap-in replacement for me, so anyone with a taste for someone like me is going to be inclined to keep me around! I guess the closest approximation to a “one penis policy” in my case would be a “one SISSY policy”, but hey, we don’t exactly grow like weeds, with sissy suitors lurking around every corner, so I’ve never felt the need for that kind of protection either.
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Sunday, July 28, 2019
Tomboys
"I think you have a misconception", my women's studies professor told me. "Feminism is not 'for women who step away from traditional feminine expectations and roles'", she said, making air quotes. "Feminism is for all women. We want to support women's freedom to choose their own options, and that includes being a mother, or a receptionist. It even includes being a sex object". She paused and sighed. "In my day we were trying to get away from that, but now lots of women are seeking it. Anyway, my point is, feminism isn't about telling women how they're supposed to be. It's fine to not conform to the expectations that are projected onto women but it's also fine if you do, if it's what you want for yourself".
I understood her point, but it was still nevertheless true that lots of women who were not traditionally feminine had felt a special resonance with feminism. Feminism told them it was okay to be the way they were, in a world where everyone else was saying otherwise, so of course they had a special interest in it!
I just finished rereading
Tomboys!, a collection of short reminiscences edited by Lynne Yamagushi and Karen Barber. The subtitle is "Tales of Dyke Derring-Do". It is specifically about the experience of growing up unfeminine, or masculine if you prefer. Tomboyish, hoydenish, boisterous and forward and irrepressible, physical, nervy, athletic, competitive, immodest and not demurely amenable. Hell on wheels.
The women writing the pieces were definitely seeing themselves as revolutionary insurrectionists, and they saw it as specifically feminist bravery. How could they not?
Anyway, I'm reading these stories again, and, not for the first time, wishing for a similarly compiled collection from tomboyish women whose sexual orientation was towards male people. In particular, I'd be interested in reading how they negotiated a sexuality that didn't require betraying their personalities and behavioral patterns as tomboys in order to be sexual participants with male partners. And how they structured their relationships.
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I understood her point, but it was still nevertheless true that lots of women who were not traditionally feminine had felt a special resonance with feminism. Feminism told them it was okay to be the way they were, in a world where everyone else was saying otherwise, so of course they had a special interest in it!
I just finished rereading
Tomboys!, a collection of short reminiscences edited by Lynne Yamagushi and Karen Barber. The subtitle is "Tales of Dyke Derring-Do". It is specifically about the experience of growing up unfeminine, or masculine if you prefer. Tomboyish, hoydenish, boisterous and forward and irrepressible, physical, nervy, athletic, competitive, immodest and not demurely amenable. Hell on wheels.The women writing the pieces were definitely seeing themselves as revolutionary insurrectionists, and they saw it as specifically feminist bravery. How could they not?
Anyway, I'm reading these stories again, and, not for the first time, wishing for a similarly compiled collection from tomboyish women whose sexual orientation was towards male people. In particular, I'd be interested in reading how they negotiated a sexuality that didn't require betraying their personalities and behavioral patterns as tomboys in order to be sexual participants with male partners. And how they structured their relationships.
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Wednesday, June 27, 2018
re: My Manuscript is in the Shop Again
I rewrote the section of my book where I (aka my "main character") meets the girl from the Massachusetts family that's vacationing out west, and falls in love. He takes her to a deserted overlook at the edge of a cliff and for a moment she thinks she may have put herself in a dangerous situation; the communications misfire leaves them shaken but that in turn gets them talking openly and honestly while they sit side by side pitching stones off the cliff.
As originally written, it was a description of the event, not a fully fleshed out scene with full dialogue and internal monologues and whatnot, and I needed it to pop a lot more, to be as emotionally moving to the readers as the event itself was to the characters.
I read the results to my authors' group, the Amateur Writers of Long Island, to favorable reception:
Now, it is a very warm and supportive group. We don't tend to tear each other down in our critiques. Even so, the feedback I'm getting from the group reinforces my sense that yes, dammit, I can write.
I actually do have a good book. One that is vivid and emotionally moving. I'm so weary of the process of trying to get it published, but it will be worth it in the long run.
Just hit a milestone, by the way:
The Story of Q — total queries to Lit Agents = 1200
Rejections: 1178
Outstanding: 22
As NonFiction—total queries = 970
Rejections: 951
Outstanding: 19
As Fiction—total queries=230
Rejections:227
Outstanding:3
The Story of Q — total queries to Publishers=41
Rejections:26
Outstanding:7
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, Publisher Went Out of Business:1
Pub Contract Signed, Rights Reverted (creative diffs):1
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As originally written, it was a description of the event, not a fully fleshed out scene with full dialogue and internal monologues and whatnot, and I needed it to pop a lot more, to be as emotionally moving to the readers as the event itself was to the characters.
I read the results to my authors' group, the Amateur Writers of Long Island, to favorable reception:
"Good balance of action and contemplation"
"Beautifully written. You have a wonderful flow to your writing — it seems to come so effortlessly. "
"Very honest and real."
"So glad to hear you express the boy's point of view on sexual domination."
"This is a great description of a best-on-earth sitch to be in. Well done."
" & Wow! A reversal of emotional fortunes. Cool!"
"I like their comfort with each other."
"Excellent. The pebbles were a great touch. You convey the mood, and the nature of the interaction, the internal emotions at work, all in such a gentle but real, relatable fashion. The development is so well paced. Fantastic analysis. Well told, particularly as it can be delicate subject matter. Very honest as well."
"Very revealing story, different fresh, mind altering -- thanks"
"Very genuine! Realistic, subtle."
"Great dialog, super flow. Love how you write! SO sweet!"
Now, it is a very warm and supportive group. We don't tend to tear each other down in our critiques. Even so, the feedback I'm getting from the group reinforces my sense that yes, dammit, I can write.
I actually do have a good book. One that is vivid and emotionally moving. I'm so weary of the process of trying to get it published, but it will be worth it in the long run.
Just hit a milestone, by the way:
The Story of Q — total queries to Lit Agents = 1200
Rejections: 1178
Outstanding: 22
As NonFiction—total queries = 970
Rejections: 951
Outstanding: 19
As Fiction—total queries=230
Rejections:227
Outstanding:3
The Story of Q — total queries to Publishers=41
Rejections:26
Outstanding:7
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, Publisher Went Out of Business:1
Pub Contract Signed, Rights Reverted (creative diffs):1
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Thursday, June 7, 2018
My Manuscript is in the Shop Again
It has been a very long time since I've done any rewrite in The Story of Q beyond a little superficial surgery here and there. It's mostly been a stable and complete-feeling book.
I've been contemplating some of the critical rejection notices (some of which process you saw echoed in my May 22 entry). The conclusion that I reached was that their complaints and feedback were not accurate or helpful, but that nevertheless, yes, the book has a major weakness. What should be the emotional centerpiece, or at least one of the major emotional centerpieces, was glossed over and described from a detached distant vantage point instead of being properly caught in vivid prose.
The love interest of the story is the girl from Massachusetts who shows up with her family in the summer between junior and senior year in high school. In its current form, the book covers that visit with scarcely a single actual conversation.
Not one of my beta readers or editors from lit agents or publishing houses have ever highlighted that as a problem. I don't know why. Now that I see it I can't unsee it. My book has some really vivid sections, but this event, which totally needs to be one of them, just isn't.
I know how that happened: it is painful for me to write. It is painful in part because I want to capture exactly how it was, and it's elusive for me, because I sealed up some of those memories because of how things turned out, so it is frustrating to try to evoke just what happened between us and the rhythms of how we spoke and interacted. And then it is painful because even after all this time it's still ripping scabs off. And it is painful because when I do write of it, it is inadequate. But if it is, it will still be far better than the woefully inadequate handling that these scenes received up until now.
Bloody hell. Then I have to find a way to trim some other stuff or else accept a longer word count.
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I've been contemplating some of the critical rejection notices (some of which process you saw echoed in my May 22 entry). The conclusion that I reached was that their complaints and feedback were not accurate or helpful, but that nevertheless, yes, the book has a major weakness. What should be the emotional centerpiece, or at least one of the major emotional centerpieces, was glossed over and described from a detached distant vantage point instead of being properly caught in vivid prose.
The love interest of the story is the girl from Massachusetts who shows up with her family in the summer between junior and senior year in high school. In its current form, the book covers that visit with scarcely a single actual conversation.
Not one of my beta readers or editors from lit agents or publishing houses have ever highlighted that as a problem. I don't know why. Now that I see it I can't unsee it. My book has some really vivid sections, but this event, which totally needs to be one of them, just isn't.
I know how that happened: it is painful for me to write. It is painful in part because I want to capture exactly how it was, and it's elusive for me, because I sealed up some of those memories because of how things turned out, so it is frustrating to try to evoke just what happened between us and the rhythms of how we spoke and interacted. And then it is painful because even after all this time it's still ripping scabs off. And it is painful because when I do write of it, it is inadequate. But if it is, it will still be far better than the woefully inadequate handling that these scenes received up until now.
Bloody hell. Then I have to find a way to trim some other stuff or else accept a longer word count.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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