The Maenad's Bone Garden

A rant.  There are two things I’m never ever going to write unless presented with specific kinds of sell-out money – something six or seven figures. Transition narratives and some meandering plodding thing talking about how much I resent being a mother.  Each is 'the pigeonhole' – the thing that as trans people and women respectively we are "expected" to write. Fucking ew. The second one is soaking in biological essentialism and women as second class citizens. Also, I’d have to actually lie – I’d have to have been able to have a say in raising my child for me to be able to hold it in contempt. I don’t, and never have encountered a single one of those that didn’t leave me with a feeling of “must be nice to be that much of an asshole.”  My kid wound up with her Trump voting relatives for high school because birth-mom had better things to do.  Now she runs with Godslurping dipshits and wears an NRA hat.    Besides, I'm from Texas. There was NEVER a p...

  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...

  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...

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...