Category: comings & goings

when we’re up to.

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9th Preview of She’s Not the Man I Married

Well, we’re almost there, folks: the official pub date is just two weeks away, and I know many of you are already reading or have already read She’s Not the Man, but for those who aren’t, this is the last preview I’ll be putting up. It’s from my Preface:

This book is a sequel to My Husband Betty, at least in that our story and my reasons for thinking about gender take up where it left off. Mostly it is a love story, our love story, which, like any other, is not typical. It is the story of how a tomboy fell in love with a sissy, how a butch found her femme, how a boyish girl met a girlish boy. Who is who is not always clear and doesn’t always matter. In some ways, that’s the heart of this book: the idea that a relationship is a place where people can and do and maybe even ought to become as ungendered as they can. It comes from my very specific dislike of Martian men and Venusian women and the adversarial ideas about relationships that permeate our culture. While I am not interested in a genderless world, I am curious about the ways that gender can be manipulated in a romance, the ways it can be controlled instead of controlling our roles.

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Photos from First Event

I *know* people took pictures of/with me & Betty at First Event, but almost no-one has sent any! Please do send any photos you took of/with us, pretty please.

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Books

It looks like amazon.com and B&N online both have them, too, as the pages now say “usually ships within 2-3 days” instead of the pre-order page.

Some day I’m going to figure out why books seem to ship before the actual pub dates, but it’s not like I mind.

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They’re Here!! They’re Here!!

While I was at a client’s today, Betty got to receive a very large, heavy box full of the new book. This is the first I’ve gotten to see it, so it’s very exciting. It’s a sturdy book, and there’s an artsy typesetting effect that I really love.

Those who have ordered signed copies should get them by the end of the week (unless you live in, say, Australia).

& Just to say: it is something to hold your first book in your hands. It is something else altogether to hold your second.

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The Year of Magical Genders

When I started writing She’s Not the Man I Married, I was thinking of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which made me think about driving up a mountain road in order to see something a ways off, & the way the road curls around the mountain, so that every time you go around a bend you get a slightly different perspective of the thing you’re trying to see.

I think that’s what this book does. I hope so, anyway. That very same aspect of it also makes choosing excerpts to read aloud kind of difficult, as right in the middle of a narrative about one thing I tend to go off on a huge tangent about shoe-buying or faghags or something. It’s thickly layered, in a sense, so that it’s hard to just pull a piece out that doesn’t loose something in the excerpting.

So now that the first review has come up, and the word “repetitive” appeared in it, I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’d argue it wasn’t unnecessary. Ineffective, maybe, but I was doing it for a reason. “Humorous” and “self-deprecating” are much more accurate.

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Overfill

All my life, my dreams have used water as one metaphor for anxiety: I might find myself on the top of a very tall wave or under it a moment later, or somehow a room I’m in is filling with water even though the room right next to it isn’t. I don’t know if it’s a typical anxiety metaphor, but it’s always been one of my regulars. (Others include having to keep kittens safe from adult feet crossing a room, and losing teeth.)

But a few months ago my dream metaphors worked their way into my waking life. I found myself worrying all the time that I’d left the tub running. I take a lot of baths so I do run water for a tub pretty regularly, and I’ve certainly had actual near misses where a moment’s more delay would result in some flooding. So in a certain sense my brain caught hold of a regular circumstance that does need attention but blew it out of proportion: first in my dreams, of rooms filling with water, and then in my waking life, with me having panic attacks while out that I’d somehow left the house with the tub running full blast.

For a while I worried I was losing my mind entirely; I’d never had such a constant metaphor for my anxiety in my waking life. Before it was just a general physical response of increased heartrate, a cold sweat, clammy hands – but now it’s as if I have a made-to-order gauge for how anxious I am. Now I know that if I leave the house & panic about the tub, my stress level is high. Sometimes I’ll even have a strong urge to check the tub when I’m sitting at my desk – which is a whopping 10′ away from the tub – if the TV is loud or Betty’s playing music – because I can almost hear the sound of running water under it all.

What’s nice are the times when I have a moment of panic & then realize how long it’s been since the last one, which is what prompted me to write this blog entry. I’ve been calmer than I’d expect what with Betty losing her job & the new book coming out. So today I was surprised to wake up having dreamt about the tub again, and yet – I appreciate my mind keeping in touch, as it were. Because it reminds me it’s time to do yoga, or sit and pet the cats for a while, and otherwise find ways to calm my mind.

& Yes, it is mostly about the book. Once it’s shipping and the first reviews are in, I’ll feel decidedly less nervous about it all. I hope, anyway.