I finished a book I'd been working on that I bought way back in November: Afterworlds, by Scott Westerfeld. Honestly, I don't have the energy to review it properly, and I don't feel guilty about that because it's not queer fiction, and it has no trans characters whatsoever. However, what it does have is a queer main character and a plot that does not revolve around her queerness. It raises the tension, as it would by virtue of our society, without *being* the tension. And my favorite part about that? The inside flap mentions nothing about the love interest being a woman--it merely says "falling in love--with another writer." And it is that fact that is most important to the plot. Imogen being a writer provides far more tension than Imogen being a woman. Thus Westerfeld, and whoever writes his jacket copy if it's not also Westerfeld, puts another brick in the process of normative-ization. TW for pyromania, possible cultural appropriation (they actually talk about the lines of cultural appropriation!) death, terrorism, serial killers, murder, ghosts, degradation plot (character goes from innocent to murderous).
It's written as two books in one--Darcy writes the words, as the cover says, and Lizzie lives them. Between that and listening to my mother talk about the new book by David Mitchell, who wrote Cloud Atlas, I had an idea for a story that follows four characters, each of whom is directly impacted by the same fifth character in very different ways. They each paint a different picture of him based on their own experience--one falls in love, one is terrified, etc.
I've been playing along with ideas from this website: mogai-archive.tumblr.com. It lists tons of words for genders, orientations, and pronouns. I have a vague 'verse in my head about a people who are not sexually dimorphous (there's only one basic body type, and the variation is in the little details) and use all of the words for gender and all of the pronouns. I also want to write about characters with flower genders. I've been attempting to find a word that describes my gender, and I think I'm going to just combine two and say I'm subgirlfluid. Subgirl is 3/4 agender and 1/4 girl. Subboy is the same but 1/4 boy instead of girl. Subfluid holds the agender part constant and the 1/4 part goes between girl and boy. I don't *quite* like subfluid because I want to emphasize the girl side of the fluidity--the boy side only occasionally crops up and doesn't feel as much a part of me.
Exciting news, or perhaps not so much, for my readers: I got for Christmas two of the research books I'd not been able to get ahold of. One is Passing Lines, which is about sexuality and immigration, and the other is another fiction book, Freakboy.
I also got some of Jonathan Friesen's books for Christmas. He was my old writing teacher. If his style has evolved any closer to mine, which it looks like it has based on the fact his latest romance is with a boy with DID, perhaps I should look into his publisher? Never pass up a chance to
