I promised a second thread on Plastic, Prism, Void & here it is! This time I want to talk about it as writing, not as typesetting. And I want to talk about it as writing about love, specifically about trying to be loved as a trans woman.
(remembering to put the pre-order link at the top this time!)
It was not ideal! thankfully nothing happened but the mild disruption of our Adult Braces book club meeting
there was a moment last night when the weatherppl said “we told u to go into the basement bc tornado but now you need to leave bc flood” 💀
yep. the water was so high you couldn’t even see where the weir was.
if five years ago you’d told me that Wisconsin’s version of climate change was going to be multiple historic floods in 6 months—
middle-aged trans man sits by flooded river
stairs descending into flooded river
husband took a pic tonight that’s probably the coolest I will ever look, thanks horrible 2026 Milwaukee floods I guess? also pictured: stairs to nowhere
also cannot control yet another round of Milwaukee flooding, which is happening outside as I try to draft. this metaphor needs workshopping
yes!! such a good Art Thoughts novel. I feel like you can really see the influence of him having read Every Single Zola in re: his descriptions of NYC too; every landscape is resonant, a miniature story
Cover of Alice Stoer's Again, Harder: two furry girls about to fuck on a red background, one seems to be a wolf and the other a bunny so I assume things are messy. This one's about trans women in the midwest (!) and I am very excited for it
Cover of James Merrill's Divine Comedies: Poems. This book is a gift from a dear friend I saw at AWP whose parents knew Merrill! Merrill's one of my favorite poets, an elegant formalist whose confessions are made with tongue always firmly in cheek
this week has been garbage even beyond our govt threatening another genocide, so it's a gift from the universe that all the books I preordered are starting to come in / I'm diving into my AWP pile. thank fucking god. I don't believe art will save us but it's what's keeping me functional rn
RoJo preemptively thoughts-and-prayersing a war crime he could prevent is almost too on the nose
www.jsonline.com/story/news/p...
I feel like Kaminsky got cancelled awhile ago & I can't quite remember why, but "we lived happily during the war" beats louder in my head every week, esp "we opposed them but not / enough"
every week "we lived happily during the war" becomes more ghoulishly apt
thinking of the universities we bombed in Palestine & the ones we're bombing in Iran, & the ones we're defunding & censoring in the US, & how much self-proclaimed defenders of the 'western tradition' hate all tradition including their own; the only history they recognize is a mirror Reagan-era deep
see this in the literal academy too, where it's a fashionable (derogatory) overcorrection for a perceived 20 yrs of historical miserymongering + a desire to defend history as "inspirational" w a malnourished sense of how inspiration actually works
I wish more of the cultural gatekeepers interested in ye zeitgeist's (mostly bad!) flavors of masculinity would engage w transmasc fiction, not as a fun lil sideshow but as an exploration of the same ground that often looks beyond reifying (while pretending to overcome) the same old turgid stoicism
“The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel cited Othman Atta, the executive director of the mosque, as saying that deportation documents focused on Sarsour's arrest by Israeli authorities as a teenager living in the West Bank to argue he provided material support for extremists.”
Sarsour is 53 years old.
rough trans news week, rough dayjob week, rough writing week, would like to be Rxed a W by doctor universe, thanks
glad for the vetoes, obviously, but it doesn't feel great that these bills made it all the way to the governor's desk
www.jsonline.com/story/news/p...
ahaha the guy here is giving the hideous-lazy 90s fashion of gundam wing, all 5 of whose pilots were, canonically, trans
I forgot I had this saved for when I'd announced TRANSLUNAR. Anyway, this is TRANSLUNAR (2027), get ready.
the 2 best new books I’ve read in 2026 so far have been brilliant unpublished MSes by trans writers; I can’t yell abt one but I can yell abt the other!
This novel is a masterpiece—a reckoning w truth & art & memory, an archaeology of the c20 & its echoing violences. we’re v lucky to be getting it.
back at you. <3 reminding self: cat is good, books is good
really sad tonight even beyond the horrors & have to find a way to do the second shift (writing)
Hugo Nominations close soon!!!!!
my novella, The Death of Mountains (from @lethepress.bsky.social) is eligible! if you're wondering if it's any good? it's a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Nebula Award.
please consider small presses in your Hugo Nominations. thank you!!!
thanks so much for reading!
thanks so much for reading!
should link the story here again I suppose. it's about:
-AI’s effect on teaching literature
-what literature can (& can't) actually teach us
-trans fatherhood
-the road to hell being paved with white saviorism
www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/tell...
feeling feral so reposting one more time before the Hugos deadline when AI slop discourse is happening; for me "slop" refers not to quality of prose (humans write bad prose lol) but the soulless mush of art w humans removed, a sort of Excel AVERAGE of human thought & feeling, a sauce of no apples