Gender is fluid, hokay?

 

This has been stewing in my subconscious for a few weeks now, and recent things I’ve run across on Twitter have baffled and angered me to the point where I need to talk about this. To wit: gender is fluid, sex is weird, and trans is a valid identity for some of us.

Some folks are very comfortable in their bodies, and that’s wonderful. You’re a guy and you like women? Hey, great. You’re a woman and you like guys? Fine. You’re a man who digs other men? You do you, dude. A woman only into other women? Fabulous, go find your bliss. Comfy in your skin and like ALL the fiddly parts on other people? Hey great, have a blast.

Not everyone has gone through life comfortable in their own body. Some of us have never felt right with the biological parts we were born with. Gender identity is as much a function of brain chemistry as it is physical genitalia or secondary sex characteristics. See numerous biological studies done to determine how much of gender identity is genetic and how much environmental, such as the ones noted in this article . Repeated, corroborated studies do seem to point toward gender identity being a function of brain gender at least as much as external genitalia. Yes, there were many flawed psychological studies done about this. Which is why I’m sticking to biology. Having been in a relationship previously with a true intersex person (XXY) I can attest that figuring out one’s own gender is not always easy, especially when doctors aren’t sure either, as was the case in that instance.

 I’ve never felt at home in my body. My love of monster-as-hero stories, identifying much more with the freaks than with the mundanes, has been a constant theme throughout my life from as early an age as I can recall. I spent far too many years trying to fit into society’s “acceptable” roles for a kid born with girl parts who didn’t feel like a girl at all: Tomboy. Butch (and that didn’t go well at all; though I can admire the beauty of a woman and even be attracted to them, that doesn’t extend to sexual desire). After years of anguish, shame, and feeling like a freak who didn’t fit in anywhere, I’ve finally found a partner who loves and desires me as I am, no judgement given. I lucked out. 

Am I trans? I don’t know. Best analogy I can provide is that I feel like a gay man in a woman’s body. I dig guys. Guy parts are fun. I don’t feel as though I need to have them on me in particular, now that I found a man who adores me as is, pointless boobs and all. (Also, have to admit multiple orgasms are pretty darned nifty.) I have never ever felt like a girl, almost never wear feminine clothing, never wear makeup, never felt any sort of motherly instinct or desire for kids, never felt seductive or attractive. My sweetie doesn’t care how I identify; he loves me as is, and that’s all I need to feel secure. So in my case, altering my physical parts isn’t necessary for me to be happy. But I’m definitely not cisgendered. Is my not-a-woman weird identity less valid than any straight woman or man, any gay or queer or lesbian, any bi?

 No, it fucking well is not. I am. I exist. I’m a weirdo and my love is fine with that and I’m fine with it. I don’t care what label you feel like sticking on me. But. BUT.

 Not everyone gets this luxury. Not everyone is happy in their body as it came out of the womb (or was arbitrarily assigned by a surgeon, if it came out indeterminate). Lately I’ve seen a lot of absolutely incomprehensible blowback against trans people, some by other folks on the LBGTQ+ spectrum even. This boggles the mind. Folks, if you’re on that spectrum, guess what: most straight folk regard you as The Other and some of them, still in this modern age, fear and hate you. How can you possibly consign any of your fellow freaks to “invalid” status?

 You’re comfy in your gender. Lucky you. That does not make another person’s discomfort with theirs invalid, wrong, or fake. That does not somehow “invalidate” homosexuality. Where the fuck did that argument even come from? “I like guys and I like my guy parts. If you’re a woman trying to make yourself into a guy because you feel like a guy inside you’re WRONG”-- I mean what the actual fuck. How dare you. Guess what, the mundanes are still gonna lump you both into the freak category and revile you equally as perverts. You enjoy feeling like shit about yourself? No? Then don’t fucking do that to other people.

 If someone feels enough like a different gender that they wish to use a different pronoun for themselves, or neutral pronouns; if they feel strongly enough about it that they seek reassignment surgery; that is none of anyone else’s business. I’m not in that person’s shoes, I don’t feel what they feel every second of every day. But I’ve been close enough to it that I can sympathize, and I know it’s not my call to make. Nor is it yours. You’re straight and don’t understand any of this? That’s okay. Trying to identify with The Other is hard, especially if you didn’t grow up around people not like you. I don’t understand straight cis people at all. That doesn’t make them bad or wrong. Nor does it make me wrong for being different.

 Biology is weird. Humanity is weird. Sooner we all accept that and stop judging each other for something as stupid as whether they feel more like a girl or a boy, or neither, or in my case more like a wendigo who regards all stupid people as snacks…the better off all social interactions will be.

 Now go on and get down with yo weird selves.

The Wendigo Lives!

So, today is a scary day. No, not talking about COVID-19, or economic instability, or the pervasive corruption and lies in high offices in this country. It’s scary for me personally as today Graythorn Publishing is releasing my first novel Wendigogo for presales! This is the first book in The Reluctant Wendigo series, and I’m both excited (woohoo I has a real BOOK I WROTE which has been my dream since age 5) and anxious (oh man now I have a very real deadline by which all rewrites must be DONE and people will be reading my work assuming they buy it and aaaaaaaaaaaa).

Just a bit stressful, yeah.

I’ve updated this blog and intend to resume posting more often. At least once a month. Blogging for me is an afterthought, well behind daily grind stuff and friends and family and oh, of course, the near-constant scenes running in my head for Book 2 at this point. (Working title is Love Song of the Murder Deer, to give you an idea of tone.)

So, my wendigo. I started this story years back (you can even find an early bit in an earlier blog post), but then didn’t know what to do with it. The story felt incorrect. The characters didn’t gel. So I abandoned it for a while.

Cut to early 2019. The everyday bullshit spewing from this administration and my continual fury at the Congresspeople and CEOs of some companies who dug right in to enrich themselves at everyone else’s and the planet’s expense, coupled with my love of snow, sparked the wendigo back to life. I hadn’t clearly envisioned my protagonist to this point, but pop culture sources combined in my dreams: the film Cabin in the Woods for overall tone and bloody humor, as well as the name Mordecai; and I’d been watching a lot of Better Call Saul, and later, Mr. Show. It suddenly hit me what Morty would look like, how he would sound and act, and how his reaction to our current news cycle would be amped up considerably with an infusion of ancient, angry manitou. I revised my original plot and launched in. The first complete draft was done January 2020. And now here I am working on rewrites, with cover art gorgeously finished, and pre-orders now available for ebooks!!

UPDATE: Now also available directly from Graythorn Publishing at https://graythorn-publishing.square.site/s/shop ! Support indie publishers and booksellers!

Welp. Didn’t think I’d publish first as a comic horror author, but here we are. Wendigogo now up for preorder; publishing 4/21/20! Gorgeous full cover art by Sally Jackson -- go check out her art ! I’m a little overwhelmed right now; still at the DIDJA SEE A REAL LIVE ARTIST PAINTED MORTY ALL PRETTY FER ME stage…

More hyped than a cannibal at a crowded buffet! Hope among you there are folks who enjoy a good evisceration served with a big ol’ dollop of snark. Happy Friday the 13^th!

PUMPKINS ALIVE!

It’s that time of year. Vines stretch outward, twining around any unsuspecting thing they find and holding fast. Emerald leaves hide the ballooning bulges in murky shade. Yes, PUMPKINS ARE UPON US!

 

We’ve been trying for a couple years now to determine the exact perfect time to start pumpkin seeds in order to have healthy plants by the time the sun warms the ground enough…but not so early they starve for sunlight outdoors. After mediocre results last year on our patio, this year I planted some sugar pumpkin and mini boo seeds indoors around mid-April. Three plants have survived; one mini on our patio just starting to flower:

 

 

Another mini bravely struggling in the garden soil.

 

And THIS beast, which daily attempts to eat any passing children small enough to be consumed whole.  

I have been trying to train the beast up a makeshift cage. It has other ideas. 

  But LOOOOK!  

Mmmm. Yes, my darling, groooowwwww

 If you’ve never eaten fresh pumpkin, there is a vast difference between fresh and canned or processed. The first time I cooked a sugar pumpkin, my tongue was opened to the glory of the Orange Wonder, and it’s impossible to go back to the insipid goop in cans. If you don’t have a spare acre or two in your graveyard or lab to give over to the monstrous vines, some grocery stores sell fresh pumpkin in September and October, and of course it’s always worth a country drive to find local pick-your-own patches. Just remember in that case to bring a sharp stick to fight off any roaming vines, as they’re more aggressive than kudzu.

Don’t just think PIE, although pie is of course perfectly acceptable, if you’re into mundanity. Think chili. Think smoothies. Here are some links to pumpkin recipes (yes, some are Martha, don’t judge me). 

Tineh boos planted by my sweetie's brother Shane.

Another tineh of Shane's.

In other pumpkiny news, the craft stores have Halloween stuff incoming, and our local Goodwills have Halloween aisles already! I’ve nabbed a few things; this is my one consumer weakness. Very happy that Goodwill has so much neat stuff, else I’d be broke. No idea what my costume will be this year; was fairly happy with last year's witch, and the sugar skulls and pumpkin carvings. My sweetie still needs to finish his awesome plague doctor outfit. And we have tombstones to papier-mache and paint. And I have a miniature tableaux to create. SO MUCH TO DO BEFORE OCTOBER.

For anyone else interested in propmaking and home haunting, may I direct you to my friend Sabrina's hauntmaking blog. She is highly talented, and has no skeletons in her closet because they’re all in the basement instead…

Happy Pumpkining!

HOSPITALS ARE CREEPY AF BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN HUMAN BODIES

Welcome back, creepy peeps. Yes, you’re creepy. We’re all creepy. Know why? Because we all are host to a cloud of bacteria and microbes which surrounds us, precedes us, and announces our very identity to anything withy a sniffer. Think of it as your aura…just much less romantic than the Kirlian variety. 

Kilroy was here.

 I’ve been co-editing an upcoming science fiction anthology with Sue London, Dark Clouds, themed around this microbial miasma we all carry with us, and its tropes have crawled into my nightmares and set up a thriving bazaar. 

Probably this hospital. (Image: denofgeek)

 

 

Last night I dreamt I was trapped in an elevator in a hospital, struggling to hold shut the door or get up to a less populated level where I could kill myself, as this was preferable to allowing the cheerful swarms of infected people bless me with their virus.  

All the infected were irrationally happy as their insides turned to guacamole. This was not a dinner party I wished to join, but social pressure proved overwhelming; I woke up still trying to brace the elevator door shut.

People, as any germophobe will tell you, are the cause of all the world’s problems, what with always bleeding out their ears or being used as alien hosts. People have microbes. Microbes are trouble. 

An SF anthology capable of giving this editor nightmares about those microbes ought to be worth reading, no? Do check it out so you’ll be prepared for the next outbreak; you’ll need reading material in your sealed bunker. Advance supporters get cool rewards, some of which may even protect you from your cubicle colleague’s insistent sneezes! 

The Dark Clouds Anthology pre-release fun stuff, here.

There are, of course, a really quite ridiculous number of sick people in hospitals (you’d think they’d do something about that). The sickest hospital of all, however, was Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.

Marenghi also wrote as John Saul or Dean Koontz.

Anyone who came through the 80s mostly unscathed will rejoice at the hairstyles, the awful lighting, the misogynistically wooden acting and panoply of parodies that linger in Darkplace Hospital. 

Of course all of us have read at least one Garth Marenghi book, though it may have gone under one of his noms de plume… 

 If 80s horror hospital tales from several of The IT Crowd’sbest brains don’t frighten you, you need to take a long hard look at your life choices. The classic but fortunately short series has been resurrected online, to inject a little terror into your midday doldrums. Set aside your Jell-O (you never know who’s already touched it) and consider this tale of telekinesis amplified by PMS: HELL HATH FURY!

I guarantee either the anthology or the TV series contained in this blog, like active cultures in a too-small petri dish, will leave you shuddering and pulling your hair. 

Of course, if it’s coming out in great chunks, with little dangly blobs at the end, you have more to worry about than superb writing and phenomenally bad acting. 

Wisconsin Death Trip

Aaaaaand we’re back!

Holy shit, y’all: Wisconsin is FULL OF DEAD PEOPLE. I’m not kidding. You can’t go a mile in any direction without stumbling over a gravestone. And while half of the cemetery plots I’ve seen in the Fox River valley area are the yawnworthy wedge-o-granite variety, this area was settled by white folks with funereal hang-ups in the Victorian era, and many of their resting places show off the aesthetic values (or lack thereof) of those wonderfully repressed people.

Guess the Good Book fell out of favor with this family after a generation?

Or maybe the family fell and couldn’t get up...

My serendipitous partner Scott and I made a photo trip through Oak Hill Cemetery in Neenah, Wisconsin a few weeks ago when there was still a bit of snow on the ground. (Isn’t that a great name? Don’t trip! NEENAH NEENAH!) We snagged a few pics of anything which caught our attention, from lovely, ornate carvings to Victorian hubris. So grab a snack, ‘cause trompin’ around in the snow with dead folks makes you hungry.

MAUSOLEUM: n. The Final and funniest folly of the rich. – Ambrose Bierce

First up: the mausoleum of one Charles R. Smith, with a decidedly Deco flair. Note the stylized sphinxes and gratuitous Latin. (I’m pretty sure it reads: “Here lies a dude with lots of money who wanted his tomb right up front here so everybody knows what a swell guy he was.”)

The cherry on this sundae is the cool lion guarding the door:

There are a handful of rare iron tomb markers here. Useful for keeping the fae folk in their damned graves, I guess. (Zombie tommyknockers?) All the ones we found were impressed in German. Many of the cemeteries here have a high percentage of Germanic, Dutch, and Nordic names; I’m having a field day collecting them. Never know when you’ll need an obscure German surname for a story. (I’m lookin’ at you, Sue London.)

The anchor on that guy’s marker isn’t the only sign of seamen being buried far from the briny deep, nor the coolest. That  honor goes to this wonderful mashup of treestump and naval symbology:

Esoteric orders often found in abundance in the burial grounds of the South seem largely absent here, though we did run across these two subtle proclamations:

There also seem to be some disturbing graves here. I really hope these aren’t premonitions in stone.

Doctor Strange is a comic hero. Joss Whedon writes comics. 

COINCIDENCE?

We also discovered some curious tracks, leading from and to nowhere... (cue suspenseful music):

Despite some car trouble (oddly starting soon after we took those three photos...I’m not saying it’s aliens, BUUUUT...), we had a great day. And there are many more boneyards just in our immediate region to explore and document! The loveliest of them, Riverview Cemetery in Appleton, begs for an afternoon of tromping around. 

We haven’t had the opportunity yet to fully explore it, but here’s a teaser, taken at dusk on Valentine’s:

Remember: if you haven’t yet mapped out where the graveyards are in your neighborhood, you’ll be caught unprepared when the zombies rise. Don’t let this happen to you!

More photos! Check out the gallery on my G+ page.

ICYMI: My flash-fiction "The Munchies" was posted on deadlyeverafter as part of a series of   "March Madness" fiction shorts. Not for the squeamish, but you can read it here. Be sure to check out the other entries as well: some great mad-creepy things throughout the month!

TAKE OFF to the Great Cheesy North!

Oh, for exciting!

Thanks to everyone who chipped in to the Frogdonut Alliance Indiegogo campaign, we raised enough funds for me to drive over 1900 miles, going from 90 F to 40 F in three days. So, I’ll undoubtedly be blogging with a sniffle next time, but I’ll be OUT of the horrendous Tucson oven and in beautiful, cloudy Cheeseland! Presumably Richard Cheese hails from there, or is at least a big tourism promoter.

No comment is necessary.

My brain has been crazed for a few weeks, organizing every possible detail of the trip and forgetting to sleep, but they tell me the swelling in the left temporal lobe definitely looks a little less puffy today, so here I am. Most of my belongings are packed, the car is repaired and spiffyclean, motel reservations are confirmed, and today I learned that the very Santa-paradey store where I work is approving my job transfer, so I’ll have cash coming in almost immediately. w00t!

Yes, dear, there IS a job opening!
But try to take mine and I WILL
cut a bitch.

I’ll be driving through territory unfamiliar to me. I promise to stay off the goddamned moors, and not to feed the inmates. Sadly, I won’t have time to stop for giant fiberglass chicken statues or the Hair Museum, but I promise to take pics along the way. Maybe I’ll document how many items of clothing I’m forced to don as the trip progresses and the ambient temperature drops. Departure date is a week from today!

For anyone reading my steampunk serial novel, I WILL resume storytelling as soon as I’m settled in with my gorgeous, brilliant, lusty fiance...well, as soon as I have time! For anyone who just wants steampunk cereal, a word of advice: don’t add those cute little gear-and-sprocket beads to your Lucky Charms. Not even encased in marshmallows. Too crunchy.

See you on the other side, Ray!

Happy Halloween, and may the full power
of an unlicensed nuclear accelerator
be with you!

All Hallows' Road Trip!

"Seriously? Candy canes?"

Nearly Halloween! I’ve begun wearing my googly-eyed skeleton earrings and grinning-pumpkin socks...nah, I lie: I wear those all year. Still, the impending festivities have me giddy despite the stupendous and continued misery of the Arizona Easy-Bake Oven weather. Spooky props and pumpkin-spiced-meats in all the stores! Fake leaves decorating shelves of corporate-sponsored sugary cholesterol builders! Trees and bulbs and...what the utter FUCK who put their Yule in my Halloween?!

Just a couple of points here today. First, if you’re participating in All Hallows' Read, check out these FREE, deliciously morbid and creepifying posters by Sabrina Zbasnik! She makes new designs every year, and they’re killer. Why not hang a few over the mantel with your dirty socks, so that He Who Walks Behind the Gourds will leave extra candy for you this year?

BOW DOWN TO YOUR DARK LORD, CHARLIE BROWN!
(art from http://www.darkhallmansionstore.com/)

You DID remember to say your prayers to the Great Pumpkin, yes? He Who Must Not Be Seeded? No? Heathens. You’re all heathens, and I wash my bloody smock of you.

The other item I wish to hold up for inspection like a freshly severed spinal column is also the reason why I’m extra giddy about Halloween this year: ROAD TRIP!!

You can view all the steps through the link above,
but here's a general idea of my route.

Before the snows drench all of Cheeseland in cold curds, I intend to journey from Tucson to Appleton to be with my soulmate. This is the route I’m planning to take. There’s a slightly shorter one, but that travels through more barren wastelands, which I dislike; IF anything should go wrong, I’d rather it was within reach of a town than in the middle of East BFE. If any of you know parts of this route well and have any tips, suggestions, etc, please let me know: comment here, tweet at me, or email. Planning on stopping overnight in La Junta, CO and West Des Moines; don’t want to have more than 12 hours drive time on any one day.

Our fundraising campaign, the Frogdonut Alliance, still needs your help, and let me emphasize that even small contributions really DO make a difference in this case! Five bucks? You just bought me lunch on the road one day. Ten? Change of oil before I go. The more we can raise, the better off we’ll begin our Cohabitation of Excellence! And please keep spreading the word. Two weeks left to chip in!  

THE COUNTDOWN TO SEXYTI--HALLOWEEN, I mean Halloween, HAS BEGUN! WOOOOO!