10 COSAS QUE NO DEBES DECIR A UN ASEXUAL

Video that´s actually quite detailed debunking common myths about asexuals. In Spanish.

Part of my experience coming to Spain/the novel condensed into a poem

Ella, se dicen, ella, senorita,

Y no sé si puedo be trans here.

No sé puedo decir, este género no es lo mío.

No soy mujer, no soy hombre

And I don’t even know enough about this language to know

if that doesn’t just mean no soy adulto.

And you thought it was hard

getting gente estadosunidense

to use they pronouns

My pronouns, mi ‘ele’ y ‘senore’

are not to be found anywhere but in the radical queer spaces

that I can’t find.

‘Cause I’m glad you guys

got gay marriage

but that doesn’t help me

I’m not interested in your

white bread poster child gay boys

and lesbianas who are ‘just like you’

respectability politics shit.

Give me your QPOC

Your agender, aromantic bi pan trans

Your nonbinary, agender, genderqueer and

none of the above.

Give me your disabled queers and your mentally ill.

Mierda

Give me your queers who never get to see themselves on television.

Que están enojadas radical feministas

Que se dan miedo un poco

Who don’t give a shit about respectability politics

because it never helped them before

not while pretty white boys are the faces of queer

Pero, ¿existen en este país? ¿Dónde están?

These are my people, this is my home

Pero en esta lengua, no tengo las palabras.

No sé how to ask.

30 percent!

I have reached 30% of said novel. I am very excited. This calls for celebration.

It's probably gonna be longer than 50K just because I've only just gotten to the scenes where Nadie and Leandra get to know each other. I like them. Nadie is gas and Leandra is a sparker, and together--fire.
Other news. I am teaching myself to play guitar with correct fretting technique this time, and now feel as though I don't know how to play at all. Is very frustrating. Most of my muscle memory--useless.
I have basically discovered that if you want my news in mostly sensible, continuity-heavy, long posts that read like chapters of a story in that they're mostly related to what happened before, you should stay here. If you like them in shorter chunks, don't mind me commenting on feminism, random other story ideas, trans* and NB resources, and a hell of a lot on asexuality; enjoy watching me get excited about random things, and like a consistent update schedule, you should follow me on tumblr.
My boring interny stuff is closer to being done but is still not done, same with the shopping stuff and reading through Poets & Writers. Dang, but that's a long magazine.
Also! I don't usually put fanfiction here, but! Aro/ace Natasha Romanov! Heterosexual biromantic Sam Wilson! The soulmate trope suddenly making sense!

Coming Out Day

So I barely noticed National Coming Out Day: Like every year, it passed pretty much without any actual coming out.
And then like three people on my news feed were all, "Hey, I forgot it was National Coming Out Day yesterday. Newsflash: I'm_________." Some I already knew, some were not a surprise, but I'm having feelings about it because I've never done it.
At some point, I built it into my lexicon for dealing with new people. I don't hide it. It comes up in conversation. It does this a lot of ways.
"My girlfriend--"
"Why did you_____?" "Well, I'm a lesbian, so---"
"Wait, are you--?" "Gay? Yes."
So everyone at college knows. My parents know. My close friends know. My grandparents on one side at least know.
But not most of my extended family, and not most of the people I knew through middle and high school--who make up the majority of my facebook friends. At least, I don't think they know. People have surprised me before.
"Congratulations on coming out!" "Thank you. How did you know?" "You know, the Internet."
Part of me feels like I should. Visibility is important. Visibility is a thing I advocate. And I feel like I'm talking the talk but not walking the walk to stay closeted.
And it's no longer a thing that would likely get me outright disowned or a large amount of nasty messages sent my way. I expect a couple "It's a sin, repent" messages, one or two, maybe, and my relatives talking around it for the next forever, but I can live with that.
So why am I still not doing it? Why am I still scared?
Partly, why should I tear down my shields and allow in the messages and the judgment when it's not negatively affecting my life not to be out to some people? The people that needed to know, the people it was hurting me to stay in the closet for, they know. Why should I expose myself that much more? Is it that likely that there's someone on my news feed that doesn't already have sufficient gay role models?
Sigh. I knew it wasn't my duty to come out as long as it would hurt me. Not sure what the right answer is now.
Atalanta says stop using 'should' statements. I'm not sure I know how to police myself without 'should' statements.
Hello, everyone. I'm a Kinsey 5, that's predominantly homosexual/romantic and only incidentally heterosexual/romantic. I'm sexually and romantically attracted to women almost exclusively, to their minds and their souls, not to their bodies. I usually identify as female but once in a blue moon experience brief dysphoria. I touch on the asexual spectrum extremely lightly, so that I almost always have to have heard someone talk, enough to get an idea of their personality, to be attracted to them, but mostly identify as allosexual (not asexual). My gender expression tends toward fellagirly with a large helping of genderfuck, which means I sit like a guy, grow my hair long and dye it, don't wear makeup or shave my legs, appreciate jeans and skirts, love suits, vests, and ties, and occasionally do makeup/police my body language/bind/dress/wear a wig specifically to make people question my pronouns.

Back to school!

I realize I've been off the grid for almost a month. It's been kind of a hard month, and school started in the middle of it, so I've been scrambling to try and get everything under control. Sorry 'bout that.
I also got a touch of writer's block with one scene that I couldn't figure out how to write. But the idea came to me at dinner on Wednesday, and I held onto it until tonight, when I unexpectedly finished my quizzes an hour early and decided to reward myself with writing. As usual, the scene blew itself much larger than I expected, but it was fun. I'm a little worried that I'm doing too much tell instead of show, but I'm trying to leave that stuff till after I've got the whole thing written. It's probably going to go unbearably slowly from here on out, but hopefully it will be a steady slow instead of a is-this-ever-going-anywhere slow.

In other news, school is having a craft fair in December and I've booked a table to sell my wee bracelets. So I'm trying to work out what I want to make. I have a current stock of:
2 rainbow diagonal stripe bracelets
1 completed, 1 half made trans diagonal stripe bracelets
1 half made genderqueer bracelet
A long string of ace bracelet I can cut into individual bracelets
Yeah. Per-thetic. But I keep giving them away.
So I reckon I'm almost good with ace--I'll make another Viking Weaving of them and then cut them into bracelet sized strings. I'm going to steer clear of earrings (though I might do zipper pulls) and of multiple patterns--I'll do diagonal for the wider flags (rainbow and trans) and diamond for the narrow ones (GQ and pan). But wait! I can pull off diagonal of the narrow ones if I double the colors and work with six strings instead of three. Hm. And it's easier. Is the diamond cool looking enough to go the extra effort? I need more of everything. Diamond's way too much effort for rainbow or trans, so I'm probably good there. Thoughts?
Also, have a link the Trevor Project poked at me just today. Adorable humans for my inner hopeless romantic, who also happen to be a-spectrum.

Vivaldi in the Dark (and sequels)

by Matthew J. Metzger

This one has absolutely nothing to do with trans* topics, but includes gay, bisexual, asexual, and experimenting characters, and these books are wonderful, and Matt deserves some free publicity, so you're getting a review anyway.

Vivaldi in the Dark, The Devil's Trill Sonata, and Rhapsody on a Theme are a trilogy exploring Jayden and Darren throughout the course of their relationship. So as to avoid spoilers, I'll only summarize the first one. When Jayden discovers a wild-haired, blunt boy practicing Vivaldi, he doesn't expect the prodigy to become his defender against schoolyard bullies. He doesn't expect to fall head-over-heels with Darren and his violin playing. But what he absolutely never imagined is that Darren struggles with severe depression that will impact Jayden's whole life if they pursue a relationship. Trigger warnings over the course of the trilogy include depression, panic attacks, self-harm, suicide, violence by mugging, car accidents, and poor reactions to medication.

They're beautifully contrasting characters. Darren is brusk, lacking a brain-to-mouth filter and rarely willing to talk about feelings. His father pressures him daily to become ever better at the violin, never listening to Darren, who doesn't want to go into music. Jayden is naive by comparison, despite being out at school as gay. His parents love him completely and constantly have his back as he struggles to understand Darren. Jayden falls in love with Darren for his violin playing, but it grows into something much stronger and much more powerful. Jayden's optimism combined with Darren's bluntness keeps a reader hooked and waiting to find out if love will conquer all...if it even can.
 Matt's books, especially Rhapsody on a Theme, have a tendency to start in odd places, and definitely eschew the traditional plotline of coming to a climax that the characters got themselves into and then ending. In multiple places, events happen that are completely random and out of the characters' control. The effect this has, though, is to keep us constantly guessing and unsure what the consequences will be. Especially in RoaT, he removes the surety of 'well, we're twenty pages from the end, this is definitely the climax' and that removes the surety that things will turn out a certain way. Matt tackles challenges like convincingly emotionally aging characters, writing from two points of view in two different places, and realistically describing the struggle with mental illness like a pro. The writing gets ever better throughout the trilogy. I have only two complaints with the whole series.  Jayden thinks Darren's violin playing worsens his depression, and I never noticed a connection...could have been me being oblivious, though. And Darren comes to completely rely on Jayden, saying, essentially, that he can't live without him, and nobody comments on how a relationship can't be healthy if one partner feels they can't leave the relationship--whether they want to or not, it's still trapping them. I'm willing to forgive it this, because it is a romance, as long as I can register with y'all that you should never feel like you cannot survive losing any given person, and that if you do, you're not in a healthy or stable place with yourself or with the other person.

Overall rating:
Vivaldi in the Dark: 4/5
The Devil's Trill Sonata: 5/5
Rhapsody on a Theme: 5/5

Project upshot: Absolutely nothing, but you should read them anyway and buy copies for all your friends.