The Region Between

I have spent some of this New Year Day bragging anywhere I can find to brag about the very nice review at the cool new Rise Reviews site of M-Brane Press's queer spec fic anthology Things We Are Not. I am way pumped up that someone has taken a look at this book again and posted about it now, because for the most of the past year, it has not done well as far as selling copies, and I hope at least a couple more people will consider buying it now. It started out strong with a lot of pre-order sales ahead of its release in October of 2009, and it did earn just barely enough money to where it is now technically profitable, but I have yet to disburse any royalties to the authors because it seems really dumb to Pay Pal everyone barely four dollars (my usual practice with royalties is to pay them when we're at least at $10, which is a good way away from happening with Things We Are Not.) 

The book has not been reviewed very often, and not usually in a very comprehensive way like this new review of it by novelist Kelly Jennings who really seemed to "get" me in what I was trying to accomplish with it. Is the book the greatest thing ever? No, certainly not. Would I change some things about it if I could go back and do it over? Yeah, probably. But with a bit more than a year of hindsight on it, I still think it's pretty damned great and I am very proud of the range of writers and visions in it. 

I must admit that my stomach nearly dropped out as I was reading the review and I realized that she was going to comment directly on my own story, "The Robbie." 



Then I heaved a great sigh of relief when the reviewer seemed to understand and like the story I was telling or at least trying to tell. My nightmare, ever since I made the decision to include my own story in that book, is that a review would appear saying something like,
So I gotta tell ya, it was a big damned relief to see a nice review of "The Robbie" (and especially so from someone who does not know me and has no vested interest in flattering me). But all this made me reflect upon my decision to publish the story in the first place. I do not ever run my own fiction in my magazine, M-Brane SF. It's a rule that I imposed on myself at the beginning of it because being the one controlling the content could make it too easy for me to turn the zine into a platform for promoting myself (or make it look that way, at least), which I definitely did not want to do (though I would like to follow Oprah's example and start putting pics of myself on every cover ;) ). So my little handful of published fiction credits have all been attained fair-and-square by submitting for approval from another editor and publisher (even my Aether Age entry needed to pass muster with my co-editor, and he would have told me if it was crap). Except for "The Robbie" which I accepted for my own antho and never showed a single other set of eyes before it was published. And that's what's a little weird about my thought process on it: why did I not at least pass it by a single "beta" reader or even just ask my friend Brandon (H. Bell, of Aether Age and Fantastique Unfettered) to look at it and warn me if I was about to print some real garbage before I did it? I did, in fact, show him my foreword to the book (which is admittedly a somewhat haranguing piece) and he wisely got me to turn down the volume on it a little bit. But I didn't show him or anyone else "The Robbie" even though I knew they'd see it eventually.

Why? Oddly, I think it is because I was somewhat embarrassed by the way I probably reveal a personal sex fantasy with it. It is very graphic in several places with its depiction of sex acts, and somehow to just hand a single copy of it to someone seems like more of an exposure than publishing it far and wide. I'm kind of an exhibitionist anyway (I think a lot of writers are, and probably certainly ones who write erotica) and am happy to share what turns me on...but it somehow seems more comfortable to do that in front of a distant audience than directly with one person.

"The Robbie" is one of two sex-oriented stories that I wrote in 2009, inspired by dreams and written rather frantically first thing in the morning. The other was an untitled werewolf story, that I gave the working title "Wolven" (yeah I know that's been used elsewhere). After some additions and revisions to both of them, I really felt that "The Robbie" was printable if only there were a market for it. ("Wolven," on the other hand, is so transgressive and sick-ass that it may never see the light of day even though I do like it; it's become the troll under the bridge of my unpublished fiction). Things We Are Not became the market for it, and now I think it was maybe not such a bad choice.

Things We Are Not is available at Amazon in paperback and for the Kindle. 

Consider getting thyself to the Things We Are Not page ASAP and becoming a Benefactor of M-Brane and this fine new project. I need to increase the size of the treasury by $500 this month, and I think it is easily done if a lot of people throw in a little bit. Details on becoming a Benefactor and what you get for doing so are at the site. I suck at fundraising, hate doing it and generally fail at it, but this time I am serious: we need funding. It's not that much. It's attainable. It will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. 

Cover art feedback! When you go to the Things We Are Not page, you can also take a look at Mari Kurisato's great cover art. Overwhelmingly the opinion has been that we ought to use both options and have a girl edition and a boy edition instead of selecting one of them as I was planning. OK...well that may be what happens, but I still want to have the contest because I think it will be fun to have something going on where someone wins something. I spoke with Mari today about it, and we came up with a cool prize. I will get it announced and started within a day or two, and make it known on the M-Brane pages and over here.

The other day I was listening to a radio program the general gist of which was that there is altogether too much use of the phrase "That's so gay!" and things like it to indicate disapproval and derision of a thing or a person. And how it can be hurtful to young people who are, in fact, gay. Obviously, this sort of speech is mostly confined to dumb-ass children and fuckwit  teenagers, but where I live I do actually hear it once in a while from people who are chronologically adults--people in their 20s and 30s--and it really casts them in a bad light. It makes them appear quite uneducated and unworldly, like a kid who has no education or life experience yet but is somehow moving in the adult world, a humanoid beast whose brain quit aging at thirteen while his or her body got to be thirty.

I have been thinking about this as I prepare my thoughts for the introduction to the queer anthology, the way that dumb kids use language like that and the way that other people use it in different ways. Words like gay and queer and fag, etc., as we know, get imbued with lots of connotations and nuance from one user of the words to the next, and, of course, it's got a lot to do with the context. Certain people in certain contexts can, for example, call me a fag and I do not take it as a pejorative, while certain other people in many other situations may do that, and I would consider it quite hateful. In both cases, it's quite intimate and extremely personal in what it carries connotatively: an observation or assumption is being made and then stated aloud about what gets my dick hard and what sort of sex acts they figure I like to engage in. Certain people can make this observation and mean it as positive thing, while others would bring negativity and even hate along with the word.  It's interesting how a lot of Americans tend to be quite puritanical about sex, yet most of us freely discuss each other's sexual orientations: "He's straight, he's gay, she's bisexual," etc. If one were to substitute language like "He likes to bone chicks, he likes to suck cock, she's been known to lick pussy from time to time" then the room (depending on what room you are in) might get real quiet. Someone might drop a glass. Someone's monocle might pop out of his eye. I don't advocate that sort of language be used in all situations, of course, but perhaps if people were more thoughtful and honest and good-humored about what  they are saying when referring to orientation, then maybe there'd be less "That's so gay!" noise pollution and a generally more relaxed, easy-going discourse about sex and life among people of different orientations.

But I'll tell you "what's so gay!"  in the best way: The M-Brane queer anthology, official title and TOC to be announced soon at the M-Brane blog!

[Image is of Rictor and Shatterstar locking lips in X-Factor]