Cover art

My mother informs me that this is the font she used for her first business--which she named after me. Trans flag on the left, Puerto Rican flag on the right. This took most of a day, and I'm rather proud of it.

New Years' update

I went to Haverford in early December and poked around the dorms I mention in BT, came home and added new details to those scenes, and now I'm hunting for a publisher!

Edits

Sooo the first legit round of edits is done! This is exciting because I do edits using two techniques that I am assured are the most painful and most effective ways of doing it.
1. I leave it alone for a year, not looking at it, then I print it out and mark up the copy.
2. Using the marked-up copy, I retype, word for word, the whole thing.
It's better. It's definitely better. It's still only 37K words, but I think I'm ready to start shopping publishers--I can't afford an agent right now.

Edits update

I'm about 30% of the way to 50K words, and more like 40% of the way through the existing story, and I come across this note.
TF do I mean by the pity contest?

Spring update

Hello from the other side, as Adele says--the other side of the ocean and almost the other side of the semester.
I've been stocking up on little details for the rewrite of the novel, like the actual workings of a Spanish keyboard. However, I still have found only three people who agreed to read it, and only one of which ever sent it back.
In related news, I've been planning to direct Angels in America for a year now, but the obstacles just keep showing up. I can't have any time in April or the second half of March. I can't have the first three people I contacted for stage manager and/or master carpenter. And nobody on the Facebook pages for the techies has written back to my impassioned plea, either.
And it is an impassioned plea! I broke out all the stops for this one. Help me make my dream come true, I've never fallen in love with a play like this, stuff like that which are all completely accurate.
The sad thing is, sometimes it does matter who you know. My greatest challenge in both of these beautiful works is I'm just not popular enough to get any crowd support, as techies or as readers. I have to run after everyone individually and make them turn me down to my face, nobody's going to just volunteer. And that's exhausting.

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.

Call for Readers

Hola, followers! I am currently living my dream by spending the next four months in Spain perfecting the language. I spend a lot of time thinking in sentences like ‘entonces estoy thinking in two languges’.

But more to the point, I’ve decided I need to step up my game in acquiring people to critique Binary Talk. I have significantly more followers than when I last checked, so I thought I’d give it a shot asking you lovely people.
Thing is, I’m only one kind of trans. I have four major trans characters and one minor one, and they’re all very different.

• Whitney: Effeminate trans boy.
• Chrys: Genderfluid person.
• Nadie: Native genderqueer person.
• Lee: Mentally ill agender person.
• Ja’Naiyah: Black trans girl.

I don’t want to screw anything up, and I also don’t want to tokenize anyone. I figure my best shot to do both at once is get a TON of people, especially trans people of all kinds, to read and review.

If I can tempt you to critique, perhaps with an offer to do a prompt fill for you (see my AO3 account to get an idea of what fandoms I write) or proofread a paper or story in return, leave me a comment, message me on AO3  or send me a tumblr ask (that's easiest if you don't have an AO3 account and don't want anyone else to see).

Done.

Guys. The first draft is done.
It weighs in at 127 pages, 36650 words, and it needs so much polishing and another 8K words if I wanna publish.
But the first draft is done.

100 pages!

 Look at this, guys! I have officially written a hundred pages.

 

That's 58% of the way to 50K words. 

I did another pie chart based on the end goal of 45K words, which is about the shortest you can still publish a novel. That gives me 65%.

Ahhh!

I'm unexpectedly upon the climax. Will I be able to stretch it and the denoument out into enough words to publish? Stay tuned to find out!

August update

GUYS. I just hit fifty percent. 25000 words.

Jimena has just showed up at Bryn Mawr to confront Lee.
In other news, I've sent my poetry chapbook in to four different poetry contests, a play to another, and a short story to another.
The short story contest tho. Here's a copy of the first paragraph of my cover letter.

I was extremely excited to discover Twisted Road Publications and its short fiction contest. Twisted Road’s tagline, “Bringing Marginalized Voices Into the Mainstream,” exactly describes what I aim to do with all my work. As a queer, chronically ill, feminine person, I have some experience with marginalization and feel very strongly about working to improve visibility and challenge common narratives. The Southern Gothic Anthology contest marries my mission to my style—the contest page’s description of Southern Gothic is the closest description of my genre that I have ever encountered. From childhood I’ve written tragedy-ridden depictions of people misunderstood by society, and have always struggled to find a niche for my work. Discovering that Dorothy Allison was the final judge was the absolute icing on the cake. I have greatly admired Ms. Allison’s work for several years now, and in fact wrote my college essay on my relationship with an essay of hers, “This Is Our World,” which put into words for the first time how I felt about the purpose of art: to challenge the viewer’s comfortable perception of their world.

This is not me trying to butter up the judges, this is pure enthusiasm. 

Mandala update

 

I made more! I took the color schemes for each character and shamelessly stole celtic knot patterns made of three strands off the internet and colored them. I tried to post this like two days ago but Blogger was giving me trouble.

Today's update: I wrote the scene last night. HALLELUJAH I WROTE THE SCENE. 

Guys I am so close to 45% I can taste it.

Character mandalas

So I'm stuck in a giant plot hole, right? This is the scene where Lee and Nadie call Jimena, the first time our heroes are (sort of) in the same room together. The scene where Jimena calls the outcome of the romantic subplot, and tries to explain to Leandra how they're going to eat each other alive, but only succeeds in driving them away. But I can't figure out how to write the scene so she'll get that, on account of Lee and Nadie get along really well. 
So I colored mandalas of all of them.

 

Nadie "all that glitters is not gold" Jones

 Jimena "what you see is what you get" Navarro

Casey "don't call me pretty"

I kind of love them. Maybe I can do a design with the color schemes of all of them, so I can metaphorically pluck out why they do and don't work?

Summer Update

I finally have a week free, and I'm devoting it to the Art. I have a box full of things from the school year to look into, but primarily I'm working on the novel and attempting to get four other things published.
I got a chance to read the new Poets & Writers, which is about contest-entering. I circled some contests, and this time I've gotten so far as to look into the work each publisher puts out. A lot of them I have to buy, and I was stuck in the conundrum of that basically doubling how much cash I'll have to invest in this venture (the first half being reading fees). And then I noticed that one of the publishers sells through Barnes & Noble, and it was like a lightbulb. I have a Barnes & Noble card leftover from Christmas with more than enough cash on it to cover three publishers' worth of work. So I only had to spend $8 of my own money on one publisher that doesn't sell through B&N.
Also I got to 39%!

And 34 percent!

I did 4% and almost 2K in a single sitting! When I say I've been writing every day, I mean I've been writing a sentence to a page every day. This is a really good session, and I'm only stopping because I'm approaching the kind of tired where basic vocabulary eludes you.
In other news, I've finally re-reached the point where I can play guitar for longer than 15 minutes without giving up out of finger pain + frustration. I don't know how beginners are expected to play for half an hour at a time, three times a week. Steel strings bruise your fingers but good before the calluses come in. I started reading Passing Lines, and now I have a decent idea of Puerto Rican gay culture and where trans culture is likely to fit into that. Boring interny stuff now pretty much done. Of the two issues I had of Poets & Writers to catch up on, I finished the earlier one and I read through the classifieds of the second one. Seriously, they have so many contests, conferences, publishing companies etc. in the back of that magazine. It's awesome. I started looking into some of them.
I wish I had a decent sense of how long this novel is going to be. There's a contest for a novel, which doesn't have to be finished, just has to have a synopsis written and be projected to be over 65K, whose deadline is at the end of the month. How should I know if this is going to be over 65K until I'm done with it? How does one estimate such things?

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!

Merry Christmas!

       I think I've managed to write SOMETHING every day except Christmas Eve (which was a travel day), though I don't feel like I've gotten very far. We're nearly to the actual coming out to Jimena part.
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 name-drop network.