The Maenad's Bone Garden

So, on and off in the background for a while now.  Since sometimes in November technically, I have been low key working on a sort of unnamed/unnamable project.   It’s kind of a memoir kind of an autobiography….thing. Of note, --I hate these kinds of books.— In particular I get vomitous at the notion that trans people in nay way are obligated to tell “our story.” Fuck you.   That’s ours. This is not a book for straight people. It’s not a book for allies.  It’s a book for people in the trenches.   It’s a book that does not give you easy answers. It’ doesn’t pat you on the head and say “everything magically gets better” Because we know better. Nothing gets better unless you make it better. This is for those who want to make their life better.  It only has a working title and, at this point I have to say that the increasingly ironically named Maenad’s Survival Guide is definitely going to need a new title.  Whatever I don’t care about shit l...

 

  “I understand that but forgiveness is about clarity.   It’s about letting go of what burdens you so that you can see the situation clearly.   It is not about letting anyone off the hook or dodging responsibility in any way. “ Forgiveness is not about charity. It’s not for other people. It’s mostly for yourself. So you can get past what someone else has done to you.   It is not for letting them off the hook, it’s for letting -you- off the hook. Forgiveness is about release of pain that you never asked to hold in the first place.   If  you have forgiven someone I dare say you are the one that will feel unburdened, not them.

Things I would do if given your cash once the Ishtar cycle is out -  Okay so I want to get a grant or con a tv network or something into giving me money so I can swindle someone into driving my ass all over the greater Midwest and into the American south with a boxful of books, trying to get them into bookstores.   I know some of the areas pretty well and could network the rest.   I’m sure we’d get into a fight or two with the locals.   This is the sort of fun normally reserved for criminal enterprise.   And hey I’m sure in some of these states we’d be violating obscenity laws (in fact those are the states I want to do this in.)   As with a lot of my out there ideas I’m actually quite serious about this if I could get someone on board with planning and, oh yea, I would need to do a high rite for some of that sweet sweet grant money.   (there is only so much I can pay in trade even on a road trip, Also I’m less bendy than I used to be) THIS COULD WO...

  Thankful   People tell me, people say  That I should be more thankful   Maybe they’re right, who’s to say? I’m thankful for my tools, without which this is all impossible.   My perfect partners. I’m thankful for those who support me.   A tiny but very reliable group. I value your loyalty as nothing else.  I’m thankful for my readers – without you my words are nothing. November 2020

No not that kind of naked.   However,  I’m a disenfranchised transgender writer, poet, and artist. I pour my soul into everything I do but I’ve got mountains of legal & health care needs.  It would be super awesome if you would consider looking at or supporting any of my work Games work content goes up Mondays irregularly at the Dreaming Gynoid studio blog   and on Thursdays twice monthly (minimum) on my Patreon You can buy my games stuff in digital from the  Dreaming Gynoid storefront Maenadum  verse and poetics are available here for gratis although even the smallest donations would be greatly appreciated.  Unless you just hate it I guess.  Paypal me Buy me a coffee  You can also support me on my Ko-fi page – I can take short or simple commissions (writing, modeling, light  proofreading,*simple* custom videos) easily there after some negotiation. Right now my plate is pretty full though.  Generally I would rather work ...

CW  Office environment, Seduction, Sexual content, Femdom, sexual tension, detailed arousal,  first person

  I think maybe it is time to explain what I mean by hustle as it is evidently not a shared point of common vocabulary, at least not in use. When I say hustle I don’t mean hoodwinking, tricking, hornswoggling, conning, or deceiving anyone in any way. I mean I *can* mean that by the word but that is not what I mean generally speaking.   No, when I say “hustle” I mean a very specific range of behaviors. Hustling is when you have to track down your source of income. You have to engage it in conversation, you have initiate negotiations whereby you offer to provide a service in exchange for which you get paid.   IT is barter pure and simple.   It is the most basic, most fundamental form of the so-called “gig economy,” there is. (Yes sometimes they come to you but generally if they are coming to you, you don’t need to be hustling for much longer, unless you just don’t know what you are doing.)   But hustling is when you have to chase the job and the...

Oh no, you totes misunderstand. I love horror. I adore horror. I just hate modern horror and in particular modern American horror because no matter what.   it reinforces the familiar.   All horror (or most) does this to one extent or another, but America can middle-class anything up,   and so the familiar (and thus the “uncontroversial”) is reinforced & elevated as both the purity that provides safety and that which must be defended. Bullshit. I don’t want to see that.   You lean into the familiar too much and you get head-up-ass talk radio republicans who think the world has always been like 1990-2020 and will always be like that forever.   I don’t want to defend that. I want that shit torn the fuck down. Let the monsters have it. Let it burn.   IF you want me to care about the horrors run amuck, threaten something of value, not just something recognizable. But fuck Stephen King and Dean Koontz and all of those small town values defenders out t...

  So if you are trying to write prose fiction and you are having problems, be it from lack of practice, newness, or having let your skill set lapse from decades of disuse; regardless of why you are having the problem, I have a simple piece of advice for you.   Take off your shoes. And your socks.   You need to be barefoot. Now, try wring your prose fiction barefoot. It works wonders. See?   Okay good. I have now dispensed a single – but vital – piece of hard earned wisdom.   That means I can prattle at you about whatever for the rest of this essay. Haha!   Oh don’t look at me, I’m in this weird middle place where I am super auto minimalism, telling the very least amount to get the story across.   It’s another of my weak areas and I’m trying to build that up.   About two years ago I looked at poetry and free verse, the “thing I’m worst at” and now I’m more published as a poet or lyricsist than I am as anything else.    ...

 

    “So….I made a sale.” “Great Kid!   Congratulations go you!” “It wasn’t much.” “That’s okay, it won’t be at fist.   What’d you do with it.” “……I used it to pay my phone bill. I suck. “   You don’t suck at all. Congratulations kid, you are now a working writer.   You have in fact done the hardest part.   You have also left 95% of writers behind.   Remember what you did to make this one? I just threw something together. Ha! It was like that for me to.   It .. often seems to be.   So figure out what you did there and just do that.   Keep doing it.   Eventually you’ll be successful enough to be able to do other stuff if you want.   There’s a thing though, once you are using this to pay bills and take care of business, a funny thing happens. After a while, I figure it’s different for each person, the brain begins to recognize in the deep gibblet lizard parts that “Writing = Food/shelter/Maslow’s Hiera...

Fire, Magic, Madness, and Change! The Maenad is a transgender goddess who creates art with words, pictures, motion, and flesh The Maenad (She/her/hers, also My Dread Majesty,, or simply my Queen) is the pen name of Gwendolyn Harper a Maenad, perceptual explorer, supernaut,  and Class V Full Roaming Slut who writes poetry, prose, rules, and essays.  Her work has appeared @fahmidanjournal @redplanetmag @wickedgayways @365tomorrows, the Gongfarmer’s Almanac and Madwomen in the Attic. Her first chapbook, the Ishtar Cycle, is forthcoming from @lupercaliapress An independent DIY e-publisher, model, camgirl, and sex worker, the Maenad writes about gender, class, sex, inequality, mental illness, and the intersection of these points, sometimes also writing about culture, games, space, futurism, and the human condition. Thinking of other worlds and how best to help this one  Trans queer poly kinked, mad, and Proud, Troublemaker Everyone gets liberated or not at all” No nazis Fuck g...

A composite, xposted from my twitter stream.  Work in different media, it’s good for you. building strong flexible brain muscles. You can//should cross pollinate the tricks you learn.   From a pure writing POV there is something to be said for the absolute purity of my SF design work in that when I work on it I, and here I mean my actual sense of self is absolutely subsumed in the work.   When I mostly wrote prose fiction (billions of years in the distant past) it was this   way when the writing was really flowing in that magical way it can. IN a sense (don’t go too wild with this, at least not without the right drugs) I become the setting.   OTOH my verse/poetry work & my lit work in general pulls from wholly personal sources Because you know you’re not supposed to do that; even lit has been trained to hate women and our experience.   Frankly a lot of it is trauma and experience processing for me.   So it is a wholly different state...

 The Maenad’s Bone Garden Here lie the rest of me. The \best of me  Here grows the night  bloomers reaching for rarefied light silver roses, blue mold and fungi rings,  naked rites on moonless nights Thorns and blood and stars and soil webs and mold that grows on bone Grave and ash and bone and bloom A living, green, growing tomb.  Lavender, scarlet, marmalade, saffron Old rust here, an empress’ garden For mine is a riot of many flowers Vine towers growing together  Shadowed rings where mushrooms grow into wild, gooey things Take time, climb these trees a million worlds to see, all strange and free Some hybridize, some change, but all are  One garden, roots growing together,  The same water, the same need  to grow and expand, thrive and be.  Each star in the skies of night  is a flower and it’s worlds pollen, petals, stamen, and nectar-wine the same seed, grown and died, a thousand times  A million colours separate but one Shar...

 From Maenadum no. 1