YouTube – Jaye Em Edgecliff

Beautiful characters

Published on 25 January 2015 by Jaye1 Comment

Have you ever noticed how often the characters of our novels and stories are beautiful?

What I find fascinating is, sometimes, they aren’t or at least aren’t explicitly described as such – we merely assume they are.

I think this has to do with escapism and romantic notions.

Too, I think it’s down to perceptions.

Now, it’s no good talking about the ruggedly handsome specimen of masculine archtypicality John Carter, Warlord of Barsoom. I suppose there are reasons we could, he’s described in pretty fair detail so we could make and reject all manner of philosophical debates about it; especially since it’s never explicitly stated he’s supposed to be remarkably handsome, only the kind of handsome that comes from being a healthy and fit human with self-confidence.

I’m going to use my own writing for this, though, because they’re my characters so I know them intimately.

Sally, Lauren, their friends: are they beautiful?

Oh sure, Sally describes Lauren as quite gorgeous repeatedly. Thing is … is she a reliable narrator? Most descriptions wherein Lauren is any remarkable beauty are (… wait for it …) from Salencia’s point of view! Sally’s biased. For one, Sally loves redheads. Why? Dunno, she just does. My high school girlfriend was a redhead, and I’ll admit she had a certain charm, and my wife certainly loves my red hair, and for that matter a lot of women I know (men too, come to think of it) … I suppose it’s something about redheads. Still, no one else describes her as beautiful beyond circumstantial points or when talking about her spirit and personality.

Lauren is not ugly, I would imagine, no. Simply put it is hard not to be attractive when you are healthy, fit, and take a certain measure of care in your choice of hair and clothes not in regards to societal expectations, but rather in regard to what suit both your body and your personality. Suffice to say, I do not have either the face shape nor personality to pull off a Pat Benatar or Joan Jett look, on me it’d be unattractive whereas on them it’s bloody stunning. She is what she is, a petite redhead with freckles, and a demure hippie fashion sense, and the musculature of a dancer; she’s healthy, she’s trim … and it’s important to note that healthy is specific. You can work out to the point of unhealthy, all muscle is not actually any better than all fat with regards to your overall health. If coppertopped pygmies are attractive to you, then yes, Lauren is quite beautiful, but if you’re not into that then she generally falls into the realm of “cute”.

Sally, on the flip side, does trend toward more universally beautiful. To each her own, not everyone digs the exotic skin tone, dark hair, etc. But on general terms, while Lauren probably wouldn’t have much of a modelling career, Sally could. She’s something between 5′ 6″ and 5′ 8″ (167 – 173 cm), proportioned like Shakira, with lots of leg, and features reminiscent of Aishwarya Rai (especially with regards to her hair); Sally could model pretty successfully (well, if she had the personality for it).

The rest actually aren’t described. They’re as pretty or ugly as you’re comfortable picturing. Though from my point of view the characters are all fairly attractive in that generic way that comes from good health.

I mention this because it’s an odd criticism that comes up about fiction, that the characters shouldn’t always be so spectacularly stunning to look at. On principle, I agree. I mean, Bilbo Baggins isn’t supposed to be some playboy with all the lady hobbits fawning over him, and maybe that puts an important detail into his character. I also agree that some fiction goes too far and … just peruse some of the not-so-good fanfiction some time for easy access to an example (though the gods know there’s plenty of it on store shelves too). Romances … okay, they’re given some leeway, for one thing they’re probably narrated from a POV that, like with Lauren, tends toward a bias, the rest is just tradition … for whatever reason, we’re happier with Westley and Buttercup than we are Miracle Max and his wife (whose name utterly escapes me now, even though she has one in the novel). Still, I think, if we look strictly at the text as given, we find more cases where the characters aren’t especially pretty nor especially ugly; generally the heroes are going to need to be healthy and fit, so a measure of attraction comes with that, but beyond it … I think a lot of character beauty is perceived, not narrated.

Verity Price, for example? Is she a Sally or is she a Lauren? She’s in really good shape, and depending how you like the look she cultivates, you could probably go either way; but the real point is … nothing explicitly says one way or the other. My vote is more of a Lauren. Dominic, however, is more of a Sally. He’s got the muscular Fabio-esque euro-hottie vibe turned up to 11 … well, until he talks, anyway. (see: Discount Armageddon and Midnight Blue Light Special.)

Now, to prove that it’s not always just the men who get to be the supreme hotties. Let’s look at Barsoom. Dejah Thoris is, admittedly, not explicitly described possibly to keep her look more timeless, since within Burroughs’ lifetime the epitome of feminine beauty had shifted a few times before he wrote that book. Still we’re given enough to agree with his assessment, and little enough to fill in the blanks with our own opinion – in short, Dejah Thoris is the most beautiful woman on Mars both because you’re told she is, and because she’s put together in the right way to somewhat ensure this. Our good gentleman, John Carter, on the other hand is described in detail. Yeah, he’s got a lot of dashing hero tropes, so he’s going to be handsome in that fit fighting man kind of way; but he’s also described in rather generic terms. He could be any of our brothers, fathers, sons, etc. if they only had spent so much of a lifetime relying on the strength of both their wit and arms to keep them alive.

What’s the point? Why does it matter?

I’ve wondered that too, somewhat. Why should it matter if there’re characters with crooked teeth, or characters with perfect teeth? Both sides, in other words, confuse me. Why are describing teeth unless it’s important? At that point, they’re perfect or crooked based on the dictates of the character. And, I’m sorry, but some people’s teeth grow in quite neatly without orthodontia (which, I might add has existed since the mummies were still being entombed in Egypt) so a pre-modern character can still have perfect teeth (just now you’ve a reason to mention it).

I don’t understand this idea of forcing “unattractiveness” on characters as some kind of Thing. This idea that making all the characters flawless beautifies as some kind of Thing is equally strange. Why can’t we just make characters people? More importantly, why do we need to describe the characters in such tedious detail that the only explanation of why would have to be that we’re jumping up and down going “look! not conforming to unattainable standards of beauty!” or “lookit how pretty (s)he is!!”. Oh, yeah, sometimes you gotta if the bloody point is how (un)attractive the character is. But must you do so for everyone?

I’m starting to sidetrack myself with rambling. Simply put: who cares?! Why should we care? Lauren an Sally only need to be pretty to each other everything else is just decoration; Sally being so remarkably pretty was because that’s what she looked like when she popped into my head as a character … maybe I’d been looking at a lot of Bollywood and Tamil actresses at the time or something. I mean, I don’t think it’s good writing to have every character be this flawless thing nor the opposite. I also just don’t agree with everyone thinking someone is oh-so-gorgeous/ugly. Even people who are considered “classic beauties”, in other words they fit the biological mould of healthy, good genes, fertility/virility, etc. like Marilyn Monroe, Aishwarya Rai, Chris Hemsworth, and Clark Gable aren’t universally adored as beautiful. Some people really just have a thing for this hair colour or that, for darker or ligher skin, etc. Also, Rodney Dangerfield was nothing much to look at, but as I recall the man was married and had children … clearly someone dug something about him, probably even found him attractive.

“Darling, did it ever occur to you that, if Salencia had a six foot nose covered in warts and no teeth and a squint and a great big hairy mole in the middle of her forehead, if you loved her then you’d still see her as beautiful? You’d see past the … mess to the person and heart inside and suddenly … well, very few happy and loving couples don’t think one another beautiful, quirky old songs notwithstanding.”

Excerpt From: Jaye Em Edgecliff. “Love or Lust.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/0Qu1N.l

Extremism. It’s rarely good; not never or that’d be a paradox and therefore nonsense. We should stop criticising works for having characters who are beautiful or not, and start looking at criticising the works that put big flashing neon signs over it needlessly. Not even for the act itself, but rather for the sloppiness and laziness that it embodies. Believe me, I’ve rarely met a story that was explicitly trying to make people stunning or hideous that wasn’t just all ’round badly written. When telling a story it’s down to that balance thing. Like Show vs Tell – sometimes you should have one, sometimes the other, generally a bit of an ambiguous blending of the two.

Preview: John Carter: Warlord of Mars #3 (graphicpolicy.com)
Twitter continues to concern me (groupthink.jezebel.com)
Eddie Redmayne Hilariously Reenacts Failed ‘Hobbit’ Audition (justjared.com)
New from FFG The Hobbit: Enchanted Gold (gamer-goggles.com)
This Week in St. Johns County (historiccity.com)

Thinking about Leelah Alcorn

Published on 3 January 20155 January 2015 by JayeLeave a comment

I’ve been thinking about Leelah Alcorn’s death and her suicide note a lot lately. There’re numerous reasons that hers would affect me in ways more personal than most … but they all come around to, that note resonated a little, uncomfortably, close to things I’ve thought or felt at various points. I, thank all the watching gods, have a wonderful family who is supportive and understanding of who I am and that led me to have … well, it’s why I’m able to be 33 and happy instead of the alternatives.

They’ve made me think long and hard about the way I tend to see the world and the people in it. I don’t know that Leelah was a bookworm. I don’t know, if she was, if she liked the sort of stories I write. It doesn’t matter, she’s gone from the world, but there’re others still here facing a struggle similar to her own – even the happy (or maybe I should say “happier“) ones.

I think, in our society, there’s an odd balance between the status known as celebrity (no matter how minor) and privacy. I think, too, that while we spend a lot of time trying to erode the privacy of some kinds of celebrity, we’re willing to provide virtual anonymity to others. To most people, for example, a writer – be it a columnist, a journalist, a novelist, a poet, a playwright, screenwriter, et al we tend to let those who wield quill and parchment all the reclusiveness she might crave and be content for her to be naught but a byline and maybe a short, uninformative bio at the back cover or last page of a book and one that neither the text nor photo of ever changes in the course of a 30 year career.

But in today’s world, with social media and everything else, we find ourselves able to interact on a quasi-personal level with those authors we love. Twitter, Facebook, Ello, and … okay, I’m not really big on the whole social media business so I’ve exhausted me list of interact-able venues. Well, Goodreads, somewhat and, of course, our blogs.

More and more authors are gaining a level of celebrity. We do start to learn about them as people. They suddenly do have a face. We know things about the lovely Ms Rowling, the quirky Mr King, and the hilarious Sir Pratchett that, maybe even 20 years ago we never would have.

There’ve ever been the ones who were very open, forward, and willing to share and interact with the world. I present as Exhibit A, the sweetest and most generous human I’ve ever had the pleasure to speak with: Mr Ed Greenwood. There’re so many wonderful stories from the early days of TSR of him at gaming cons being just the most personable “star” anyone’d ever met; like a bearded and jolly George Takei or James Doohan (the latter, I suppose was fairly jolly himself, now I think on it).

I’ve guarded my own privacy … well, there’re many ways one can use the phrase “guarded jealously”, and I feel rather like I might be justified in claiming more than one of them. In my own defense, I do not think in terms of caring who an author is as a person. I make an assumption that the photo of Dennis L McKiernan, in the back of my copy of Dragondoom, is actually him so I know he’s a) a him (or it’s a reasonable assumption) b) he’s bipedal c) humanoid d) apparently monochrome! e) incredibly young! (I’ve an OLD copy of the book). All I much know about him is he’s good, and I love his work. Then I realised, I do know more. Because of the internet I know that Mithgar grew out of his own pen & paper RPG sessions.

We can’t, I think, avoid learning bits and things about the people whose books we enjoy. Human curiosity and the internet work together to ensure we can learn more and we often go looking for it.

I’ve guarded my privacy because I didn’t want people to say they love or hate my work because of me, I wanted them to do so because of it. I wanted Lauren and Sally, Allison and Jake, all the rest, to be the role-models and to be judged by my skills and talent as a writer. I’ve said before, and I know it’s a real thing that people who know a book is by a woman, or a homosexual, or a 17′ tall rabid badger from Mississippi will buy it or reject it just because of that. It grates against my sensibilities. A person can have a wonderful library of diverse characters and tremendously wonderful role-models of setting and characters and every single last one of those works can be by rich, straight, white, ennobled, cisgender men. All it takes is for those authors to be empathetic, sensitive, thoughtful, imaginative, intuitive, creative, and talented story tellers. Exhibit B: John Scalzi. I can’t, to be honest, speak related directly to his novels, I’ve never read them (my wife has, but only one so she’s no help), but if his blog is any gauge …

Maya Angelou with Bloomberg and Nadler (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That said … to hell with it. My own examples: Ed Greenwood, John Scalzi. I’ll add the likes of Neil Gaiman, Seanan McGuire, and Patrick Rothfuss … yeah, lot of those are SF/F authors, I told you that’s most of what I read. They all interact with the public. And I’m no recluse living in a cave with no social media accounts or ones only known about and accessed by some intern working for peanut butter and saltines.

I don’t follow their blogs. I don’t read them every day. But I do read an enjoy their blogs when the whim strikes me. I do get to know them as people. I’ve interacted with Ed Greenwood, mostly via Candlekeep.com, but I have. With the Takei’s … these days celebrity aren’t lofty, remote deities to be admired from afar.

I forget, too, I grew up in the 80s, and early 90s. I own (no, not past tense, I still have it) an 80286 with a 2400 baud modem. I’ve got floppy discs with Prodigy on it from before there was an internet for it to access. I’ve used BBSes, FIDONET, and IRC. I remember with ICQ was brand new, and Search.com was what Google is now. Maybe I see the world, sometimes, through the lenses of an 80s kid instead of a 21^st century one. I’d have had virtually no way to know the sexuality or birth-assigned gender of a favourite author. I’d only know their race if the book had a photo, and I’d have their name (and said not-guaranteed-to-be-present photo) to guess their gender … but today that’s just not true. When books really make an impression on people it often includes the author becoming someone they might look up to. I’m no Maya Angelou, but … then again, early in her career … was she?

I plan to begin trying to write a for really real author bio for the places I’ve got my current silly one. I may miss one, please feel free to point this out to me, I’ll be very grateful. I may begin to include one, though probably a bit different, in my books. Certainly I’m going to be more open about myself from now on.

If my books had only 1/10 the sales figures I do, I might assume that too few people know I exist to actually care, but I have hit best seller charts. I have sold as many or more copies of Love or Lust than most first printings of a new author’s first book. I finally had to admit to myself, like it or not, a blog with some 500ish followers, a decent daily hit rate, etc. means I’m achieving some degree of notice and that translates to celebrity even if it is very minor. More bluntly, people know who I am, know what I wrote, and might be curious about me. Some of those people might be Leelahs, and I want them to know that it can (I won’t say does, that depends on factors both in and out of the individual’s control, but it undeniably can) get better. On the outside chance that there’s someone struggling with sexuality or gender identity or whatever who needs someone to look to for an example of that “can get better” business … I present myself.

Hello, world.

I am Ms Jaye Em Edgelciff. I am a transsexual lesbian living in the Georgia in the United States and from the Ozarks part of Arkansas. I am happily married to a woman who I met in college, I have two ridiculously odd, but wonderful little kittens and a hyperactive (as in for the breed) black-mouth cur. I, sadly, do not have any children … yet. I’m 33, and my birthday is 8 July 1981. I’m an Army brat who never got to see too many places but I did get to live in San Antonio and Honolulu. I’m a geek, and always have been. Hard as it is, looking at the world today, but even if I’d known what I was as a little girl I could not have transitioned … it just wasn’t done back then. I didn’t know what I was, or why I felt the ways I did. I was awkward, I was shy, I was … I won’t say unhappy, as I had wonderful friends and a good family, but I was terribly depressed and had more than a few suicidal thoughts growing up. As a teenager I finally started to get words around how I felt … I clearly had spent many of my past lives as a woman and had made the exceedingly foolish choice to come back around as a man (or had done something awful and was being punished with a penis, in some of my more self-hating moments). Eventually I learned what transgender and transsexuality actually were (as opposed to the rather limited and skewed understanding I had under the term “sex change operation” where one envisions a guy going to get it cut off because he wants to be made into a woman … language matters, and connotation of sentence choice makes all the difference in the world).

With the help of hormones, and all the other fun things that go along with transitioning I am now a much happier, much more confident, much more me person than I was when I was young.

I don’t really write my books for myself. Joe doesn’t exist to represent me or what I am. Joe exists because, in the ficton of Now & Forever, Joe exists and is a transsexual man. Lauren and Sally don’t represent myself and my wife … the most we have in common is I’ve red hair and hazel eyes, but Lauren has those features because Lauren has those features … my own eye and hair colour are rather different shades from hers and while I’m fond of them, clearly I’m not so vain as to force them onto someone else. My stories are just for you to enjoy. If they have any social purpose, any moral reason then it’s is only to remind people that we are all of us people. To quote Stranger in a Strange Land, “thou art god, thou art goddess”. I write what I write and the characters I do because they had the story I loved enough I wanted to take the time to write it down and share it with you, and if that story happens to illustrate a point you can take away and maybe see the world differently then that’s a bonus. I read for pleasure and entertainment, I’m not about to write something with a purpose other than that; but I will admit there is a moral message that evolved as I wrote, but it was a pretty easy one … but it comes back to the Golden Rule which Bronson Alcott proved ages ago is so simple and obvious that 5 year old children are able to reverse engineer it with a little help from the Socratic method.

I do not feel that I am really all that interesting a person. There’s not a lot about myself to talk about. I enjoy cooking, though not much lately due to having an exceedingly tiny kitchen that makes cooking more a chore than a pleasure. I enjoy foods, especially sushi and pasta. I play video games, and board games, I love nature and hate cities. I’m quiet. I don’t get out a lot, but I also live somewhere that there’s nowhere to go if I wanted to get out. I’m average height, if a bit petite in build. I’m black, Cherokee, Irish, Dutch and German that I know of. I’m a distant cousin of George Straight and that’s about as exciting as my universe gets.

I’ve said before, it’s not because of what I am as far as sexuality and gender that are why I’m inclined to care about rights and equality. That’s just who I am. When I thought I was a straight white male I still felt this way. People don’t have to be LGBTQ or black or whatever to empathise and care and understand that equality matters. It also doesn’t require someone to be non-white, not-straight, and/or non-cis* to be discriminated against. White people experience racism in Hawaii, the natives are a little angry about the whole annexing the place at gun point (I’m simplifying the history, but really … Hawaii didn’t want to be a state, dirty pool was used to make it #50), in some forums of the internet there’re LGBTQ who can get just as mean or meaner to straight and cis who venture in there as they might assume that the hetero-cis would be … and maybe turn away a potential ally. Men can be feminist, and we do have unrealistic and harmful stereotypes about men just as we do for women; in short, they face their own brand of sexism and objectification … I think fewer of them seem to care, but it doesn’t change the fact it’s true. In short, you can be the king of flippin’ England and still care about ending sexism, ending anti-lgbt* nonsense, ending racism, etc. just because you take the few seconds to care and to remember:

What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.

—Shabbath folio:31a, Babylonian Talmud

And … I know my audience is mostly teens and parents of them.

Parents, please remember that the most important thing any parent can do is to love and support who their child is. Please do not be Mrs Alcorn saying “we loved our son” when speaking of your trans* daughter who has died because of too many of that very statement; and please extrapolate down for the less extreme (and not-trans*) analogues to that statement.
Kids … maybe you’re somewhere, right now, where you’re misunderstood and alone. Maybe you’ve parents who … maybe they’re confused but do love you, or maybe you’re right and they don’t … but if that’s the case they’re no parents; do what you must to be safe, but within that context be you. Do your best to get by, channel your sorrow and pain into determination to have the best schools all banging down your door for you to attend, or if you’re crafty/creative/musical/whatever … use your pain to fuel your exodus into somewhere accepting, tolerant, somewhere that you are at peace and happy. For the trans* kids, yes it is easiest to transition as a child, easier as a teen, but possible as an adult and hey … depending what aspect of it you’re talking about, it’s possibly been within your lifetime that transition was even possible for someone who wasn’t an adult. It can be okay, but you have to hang on long enough to let it do so, and you can’t just cross your fingers and wish for it to get better. The wishes that come true best are the ones you make true. Not every dream can come true. I won’t paint a fairy tale where every mom & dad eventually sees how foolish they were and accepts you for who you are, it happens so don’t give up hope, but if your dream is that … steel yourself that it might not happen, but the fun of the word ‘might not happen’ is it contains the caveat of ‘could happen’. Family has a number of meanings. My wife has little to do with her blood family for a laundry list of reasons, not all of it, but a fair chunk. Her family is, mostly now, mine. You can control your destiny, somewhat, if you give yourself the chance to do it.

And … depression is real. It’s serious. Life can be roses, unicorns, sunshine, and bunnies cuddling and you still hate the world and want to die. I know this, first hand I know this. If you can work through it yourself, fine. But I know that nothing I say will make that pain and those thoughts go away, that’ll take the right help and what that is varies from person to person. Need someone to talk to? Suicide hotlines exist in droves, contact me if you like, friend, pastor, cousin, dog, cat, tree, or rock. Maybe you need someone to care about … of all things, one of the biggest reasons I’m still alive is that I’ve always had cats and I’ve always loved them too much to leave them. Maybe you straight up need meds; fun part is, a competent doctor might recognise (for the trans* I mean, obviously this won’t help for anyone else) your issue and help you get your parents to help you transition … you really are a boy/girl trapped in a girl/boy body and your brain craves the correct hormones and your body isn’t making enough. Everyone else AND some of the trans* folks … sometimes you need anti-depressants, St John’s Wort, Prozac, or whatever. Do what you must and can to make that better, it’ll make the rest of life a lot easier.

There. Now you know me, sort of. If this helps one person, it’s worth it for the loss of privacy and for the loss of that barrier between people judging my work through the lends of who and what I am instead of by simply looking at the page. Because life is far more precious than any of that nonsense.

~~I’m going to sticky this until I can get ’round to working out what to say in my bio. So please don’t forget to scroll down to see if there’re any new posts made after this.~~

Happy New Year

Published on 1 January 20151 January 2015 by JayeLeave a comment

Well, unless I’m doing bad math, I’m pretty sure it is now 2015 across the entire surface of the Earth.

I don’t know about where you’re from, but here there’s a tradition to make New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t really know why, because it’s also pretty traditional to never actually meet any of these lofty goals.

Still I’m going to make a realistic approach to it:

1) I will get book 3 finished, get started on its editing, and hopefully make a go at book 4 before 2016
2) I will spend more time at the lake staring out over the water thinking about absolutely nothing whatsoever.
3) I will make headway on this 50lbs I really should lose if I want to be able to wear more of the styles of clothes I actually like.

There. That about does it.

While we’re at it, though, I think we ought to all look back at 2014 and the tragedies it held and make a resolution, as a species, to prevent such things from ever happening again.

Things like Leelah Alcorn’s suicide, the mess in Uganda, anything related to LGBT & Russia, various wars and invasions that took place (didn’t Russia invade Poland for some reason? There’s the whole thing with ISIL, etc.), I could keep going but how about we just sum it up that maybe now that it’s the year we’re supposed to have Mr Fusion, flying DeLoreans, and self fitting clothing … maybe now would be a good time to get around to listening to the likes of Jesus, Buddha, and others who all said “Be excellent to each other”.

God doesn’t make mistakes, people do (raisingmyrainbow.com)
Flower and their role in world religions (serenataflowers.com)
My New Year’s Message (boomantribune.com)
US uncovers $2m Uganda currency scam (thepuffington.com)
Bike ambulances deliver healthcare in rural Africa (roadtrafficsigns.com)

Mind leakage

Published on 30 August 2014 by JayeLeave a comment

Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So, very recently I posted this which contemplated the ‘obligation’ of those of us who have a voice in the public ear to be out about … ourselves, really.

After much thought and discussion I’ve decide that I agree with myself. I’ve no obligation whatsoever to say if I’m straight or gay, bi- or pansexual. If I’m married, single, dating, taken a vow of chastity (though in all sincerity I share Sally’s view of that) that’s my own business. Hell the only validity to saying if I’m male or female is because English has gendered pronouns; what anatomy I currently posses or have previously possessed is certainly no business to anyone except one who intends to make any use of that anatomy.

Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It can be argued that, were I gay or were I trans, or were I a particularly gifted gibbon that I ought to say so in order to show other gay writers, other trans writers, other gibbons that they too can be a published author. No. I can see a certain validity in that for things like acting or other things that truly put you in the public eye. Writing is nothing at all like that. I cite as my reference and infallible proof: Bill Watterson. This is a man who wrote a comic beloved by millions (billions?) through a number of years (decades?) and who some believe to be mythical as there is exactly one photograph that most anyone has ever seen and it’s been joked/rumoured that even his agent has no idea where he lives or what his phone number is. He could be a she under a pen name. We certainly know nothing about him – does he like men? Women? Sheep? Does he speak Welsh, Russian, or Portugese? Does he have testicles? No one knows … and few have any reason to care.

What Bill teaches us is that, when we are invisible creators, us writers, we are as much or more inspirational than when we are visible. Visible I’m clearly a 6′ tall transsexual lesbian gibbon with a unicorn horn and seven breasts. Invisible I’m whatever and whoever I need to be to make you feel better. I prefer semi-visible. I mean, we learn a little of Bill from his incomparable Calvin and Hobbes comics (if you have been under a rock and know not of what I speak I suggest you hie thee to the nearest place of obtainment and remedy this unspeakable deficiency with all available alacrity); just as we learn a little of any author by taking her collected works as a whole. I’ll talk about whole work versus single character/works later. We learn a little from his name and that one photograph. And we learn one more thing from his reclusiveness: clearly he is a shy or at least not terribly egotistical man.

These little clues tell us some things. Okay, he’s probably not a woman, he’s not a self-centred loudmouth, etc. and his characters tell us he’s probably a pretty swell and thoughtful person with a keen and well-read wit. Does this help you decide if a cisgender llamaphilic lesbian nanny goat can make it big in the comics world? Sort of, yes, actually – as I said, he proves that we’re anonymous behind our pages. People see us as our creations on the page, not as the people our families look at during dinner. Stephen King is a slightly known geekish face, a few people know he writes from his nightmares, and some know about his alcoholism – most people know him as a byline that scares the living shit out of them.

According to authors who’ve discussed it, yes, in the publishing industry there are agents, editors, publishing overlords, etc. who will take one sex or another more seriously than the opposite. SF tends to be dismissive of women is the biggest complaint, but men are sometimes given a little less attention in the romance universe, and people get funny ideas in mysteries and … stuff. But look around. There’re published women in SF (Elaine Cunningham, Andre Norton, etc.), men published under romance (Nicholas Sparks, lots of pseudonyms, etc.), Mary Shelly anyone? Lord Byron? No, in the end, the publishing world is wide open. For one thing, if you must, just do it yourself. Your work is what should matter.

My work shows that I’m sympathetic – be I an ally or member – of the LGBTQ community. My blogposts affirm this. I am colourblind (not in the disability sense, but in the racial sense) – to me a human is a human, their skin colour is nothing but melanin, I even spent formative years of my life somewhere that it was white people who were not the racial powerhouses and, in fact, were discriminated against and bullied – the people of Hawai’i haven’t forgot the whole annexed at gunpoint and the very dubious circumstances of the vote for statehood things. My name is in the feminine form.

People can make of that data, as they can with what they know of Bill Watterson, what they will. No, I’m not going to make an evangelical Christian fundamentalist with very strong anti-LGBT philosophies feel much of a connection with me or my characters, not unless they’re inclined to changing their minds or at least have an open mind for lesbian characters despite their Views against their ‘lifestyle choices’.

Those looking for a rolemodel … in writing your role model should be the text on the page. I’ve next to nothing whatsoever in common with Professor J R R Tolkien, the great man who brought us The Hobbit; I’ve little in common with C S Lewis, little in common with A A Milne or Ed Greenwood. Spider Robinson, Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Terry Pratchett, Lawrence Block, or William Shatner. All of those are authors whose works I’ve enjoyed, authors who – along with many more – taught me to write by having themselves written and by my having read them and learned from those pages. I do not know them, I do not feel I know them, I do not feel I must know them. I do know Granny Weatherwax, Bilbo Baggins, Winnie the Pooh, Storm Silverhand, Lady Sally, HAL 9000, Bernie Rhodenbarr, Jake Cardigan, and Lucy Pevensie; they are the ones I met and the ones whose adventures I shared and share again & again. They are the ones who taught me what is possible and how to dream and hope. Those characters told me that it doesn’t matter that I’m a woman; they told me it doesn’t matter one way or the other who I love – just that I should love, and well; they taught me wonder, they taught me many things.

I think in most ways public figures only matter in what they do, not what they are. Exceptions – always exceptions – would be those who rely on others to see their dreams through, like actors. If, after coming out, Neil Patric Harris was never seen nor heard from again in Hollywood … well, that’s a pretty strong message. Thing is, yeah, it makes sense that he should be out, and his career being so strong is inspirational – despite being a married gay father he is a beloved STAR, but actors have directors and producers who can decide to never give them a part because “I just can’t work with someone with green eyes, oh God no! They’re really Satan come to Earth in disguise” and, necessarily, artistic pursuit is left open to some discrimination (hey, I’m sorry, if you’re not tall enough nor leggy enough you just can’t be a Radio City Rockette … the routines won’t work for it, learn ’em and start a competing group of shorter folk, might work though) so stupid discrimination gets by far too often; sad but true.

But as writers we’re not selling ourselves – recently popular advice to the contrary exists, but it’s bull as the good Mr Watterson so fabulously illustrates (uhm … no pun intended). We do not inspire with our selves, we inspire with our creations. Writer is a, largely, crappy job – pay sucks, it’s sometimes (for some, rather often) thankless, it’s lonely … it’s a lot of things, none of them glamorous. It is those who populate our pages they are our contributions to societal change and philosophical debate. Professor Tolkien may have been a force to be reckoned with in the world of academia, but that inspired people studying philology and myths; Bilbo Baggins inspired people, lots of them. Suddenly it didn’t matter how small or inexperienced you were, you could out riddle a voice in the dark, escape goblins, face down dragons, ride the skies with the eagles, meet elves, and live through the war of five armies – not bad for a timid little hobbit from The Shire. Classics have few (no?) LGBTQ characters … at one time, including them would have actually got the authors worse than just shunned and boycotted, so give ’em breaks. Today … today we have Lauren & Sally, we have Dumbledore (I’m sorry, but I was not surprised when Ms Rowling said he’s gay). We’re lacking, admittedly, in trans* representation. I’ve only got Sally’s cousin Joe, and he’s pretty minor. I’m sorry, I’ve just not met any trans characters in my head with a story to tell, just a few who exist as … decoration. Maybe that’ll change one day, I certainly hope so, it’d be interesting to see what stories they tell. I’m no expert, but I think it’s not unheard of in manga, for what it’s worth.

That doesn’t matter, though, today you write your story. You tell of the heroism of your pansexual Japanese trans woman, then you put it out there. The more who do this the more it becomes visible. Sooner or later someone else has to rise to the ranks of Pratchett and Rowling, King and Meyer … sooner or later no one will notice that a character in a story is a lesbian because it won’t be that important a detail, or that he’s transgender, or that she’s black, or that he’s Asian or … already that’s starting to happen, and it’s a Good Thing. The key isn’t to make the books about being black, or about being Asian, or about being a sentient dolphin – not that those books aren’t helpful too, but they’re not necessarily as generally accessible as books not about those things – it’s to make books about fighting dragons, about saving the princess, about climbing Everest, about life but with characters who aren’t status quo. Few, if any, who read The Hobbit were, themselves, hobbits … and it wasn’t exactly about him being a hobbit, it was about him being on an adventure despite all the things that define a hobbit, and proving that Gandalf was right in suggesting that one, this one in particular, be brought along; and who has never, not once in their lives, had something they had to be overcome, especially something that was no handicap whatsoever but rather only perceived as so by the short-sighted?

That is the obligation of a writer, I think, if we wish to be inspiring and to Change The World – we need to all have more Bilbo Bagginses. We all need more Tiggers, and more Aslans, more Prince Thorks, and more Tee Tuckers. It’s them who spread the message. If your book preaches to the choir, you do a service and your book is important – it tells those who may feel excluded and alone that they are not alone; please by all means do still write and keep on writing them. But if you don’t want to write a book about someone being gay, but you want to have a gay character … well … that’s a damned fine idea too – that‘s leading by example.

I think I’ve wandered and meandered long enough. I’m going to stop here and hit publish. I’m tired and almost afraid to actually spellcheck or proofread this.

Bill Watterson will draw the Angoulême Festival poster and write more intros (comicsbeat.com)
Art from Watterson’s comics return up for auction (usnews.com)
In the Spotlight Now: Nicole Gibbons (potterybarn.com)
Pastis confirms Watterson drew ‘Pearls Before Swine’ this week (robot6.comicbookresources.com)
Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did. (l1b3ra70r.wordpress.com)

How do people shop for books?

Published on 20 April 201420 April 2014 by JayeLeave a comment

Okay, in perfect honestly I almost never read the comments of blogs (other than my own), YouTube videos … I’m not even wont to read internet forums much. So I never noticed, until it was pointed out to me, a very peculiar phenomenon that just blows my mind and makes me wonder just how pervasive this is … I mean is it just a Paranormal Romance/SF thing, or is it all books? Did I get some of my initial sales from this, for example?

What phenomenon is this? People buying the author rather than the book.

I don’t understand this. I mean, I do in the sense of, for example, I’ve met next to no Heinlein books I didn’t like, thus I will often buy a Robert Heinlein penned story without doing more than glancing at the synopsis, and (given the single Heinlein I can’t stand, Starship Troopers) I read the first page to be sure I can get past it. Same with Dennis L. McKiernan. Thing is, I’m not buying the person, I don’t really care, I’m buying the writer or writing.

Now, it is true and fair to say that I’ll not be in any hurry to put money in Orson Scott Card‘s pockets, but if I discover a story of his is particularly fantastic, I can always pick it up at a second hand bookshop with no itch of conscience, he doesn’t see a dime from that. Why? Well, because his homophobic tirades were just a little too offensive to want to give him my cash when I can help it.

I guess I can’t understand this idea that the producer of something is the brand that needs selling. I mean, yes, Starbucks, this is somewhat the case – that said, though, I don’t care how awesome they are as a company, how good they are to employees, how they use fair trade coffee and such … they make awful coffee! And, in the end, the coffee is their brand! Tazo, on the other hand, is fantastic, and Starbucks gets lots of my money for that stuff.

So I have to wonder now, did someone buy Love or Lust because they were impressed with one of my random blog posts about writing or about … stuff? Because I shared something from The Kindness Blog? Before tonight I’d have never wondered that. “Of course not,” I’d say. Then I learnt that in the comments of authors like Seanan McGuire and John Scalzi are people going “Wow, this post moved me so much, I’ve got to buy your book!” All I can think is, I like Scalzi’s blog, he’s got a fun way with putting things … doesn’t change that his stories don’t interest me, I don’t care how much his blog posts inspire or move me, I’m not buying a copy of Redshirts, I’m sorry. Certainly a blogpost of Seanan’s is how I got addicted to Incryptid stories, but that had to do with a part of one that was describing Verity Price from Discount Armageddon and Midnight Blue-Light Special that involved her being like the bastard offspring of Dazzler and Batman; who wouldn’t want to read that!? It, admittedly, was in conjunction with her post about being annoyed that so many people equate rape and tragedy with character growth and … I already blogged about it, here but that’s irrelevant, I didn’t buy the book because of her views of rape, I bought the book because of Verity, I bought the sequel because of Seanan’s talented writing.

I always assumed everyone else thought this same way, certainly no readers I’ve ever once had the chance to converse with seemed to operate on any other basis besides the few who shop by genre and will read anything that’s from the Science Fiction section, or the Fantasy, or anything that’s a Warhammer 40k title, or Star Wars Expanded Universe (a rant for some other time), etc. which is understandable enough if you just enjoy wizards and warriors, or ray guns and spaceships and the rest be damned.

I’d be interested in comments on this, but I’ve learnt in the past that most people will just click like. C’est la vie. It’s an interesting insight into someone’s psychology … I’ve no idea what to think of it, or how to interpret it, certainly no idea what I’m supposed to actually do with this knowledge, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.

Half-Off Ragnarok (indiefic.wordpress.com)
Kaiju: Mangina! (whatever.scalzi.com)
“MIDNIGHT BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL” BY SEANAN McGUIRE BOOK REVIEW (bookjunkiez.com)
Seanan McGuire explains why you shouldn’t expect every fantasy heroine to be raped [Quote Of The Day] (io9.com)
Punk is not a dog, it’s not gonna die (365pathsonearth.com)

How disgraceful

Published on 7 October 20139 October 2013 by JayeLeave a comment

It’s really sad just how petty, cruel, and hateful people can be.

“A gay couple is beaten, in broad daylight, on the streets of New York.” Sounds like the headlines of a news paper in a dystopian novel or of a barbaric and bygone era. Of course we know that humanity, and Americans are still rather barbaric and that this is common place.

Still, it makes people wake up when it’s New York City! This is a place that’s been gathering such a hodge-podge of humans that you can believably have the bartender from Keeping the Faith. People expect this kind of thing in Georgia, Arkansas, Rural Montana (actually – is there a part of Montana that isn’t rural?), Arizona, or Utah.

It doesn’t matter who you are. Gay, straight, or other. Male, female, eunuch, trans. Human, dog, cat, or parrot. Sooner or later you have to stand up and be heard for your fellow beings.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.