What Have You Been Up To Lately, Ian?

Glad you asked!

After finally publishing Sexpossessed, I decided to do a bit of revision on Gloria's Daughter and publish that too. So I tidied up the rough cover that I'd created when I put GD on those writing websites and got everything loaded into Kindle and Amazon's book-printing service, Createspace. The Kindle version is live and available for purchase. The paperback version has to go through a physical proof stage before it goes on sale. If you are a stickler about typos, there's at least a small chance I'll find some in the physical proof. (I already did a couple of editing passes, but things sometimes slip by me on the computer screen.) So you might want to wait about buying even the Kindle version until after I've done my hard-copy review. I'll fix any issues in both versions at the same time.

Writing-wise, I think I'm about to jump back into a story I've had on hold for a while called "Contrasts." It's probably going to be in the novella/very short novel range, and is about a couple of people who have a just-for-sex relationship over the course of a year without even knowing each others' names. Obviously, it's very x-rated, but more thoughtful than it might sound from that description.

Thank Heavens, Someone Wrote Something I Don't Feel Like Complaining About!

I'm going to wholeheartedly recommend the book Subway Girl by Donna Beck.

 

I've posted a review of it on Amazon.com, but I'll copy it here in case you're too stubborn to just take my recommendation and go buy it.

I've never understood how people of ordinary means live in New York City, where even a shoebox apartment rents for an arm and a leg. But among this book’s many accomplishments, it immersed me in what it might be like to live on the low end of the economic scale in the Big Apple, below even ordinary means - and what's more, how grateful you might be to live that way. The narrator, Ray Kelly, opens the story with his life in a shambles, a bare step above homelessness. Yet despite his precarious and even shabby existence, Ray comes across as not just likable but worthy of our respect -- primarily because of his self-deprecating sense of humor and the way he views and treats others. In Ray, author Donna Beck has created a fully realized, intense, appealing protagonist who is at once masculine and sensitive, downtrodden and hopeful, ordinary and extraordinary. Through his eyes we see a side of New York that is grungy and yet not bleak, squalid and yet not miserable. We join Ray at a low point in his life, but he never asks for our sympathy or anyone else's, and when a chance meeting with an attractive young woman upends him from his day-to-day daze, we immediately find ourselves rooting for him not just because we want the good guy to get the girl, but because we want life to be the kind of vibrant experience that Ray wakes up to and works to make real.

 The other central figure in the book, Alicia Kaer, begins in circumstances that seem outwardly the opposite of Ray's. She's employed, in school, working towards a career as a CPA, and seemingly doing everything right. But inside, in her own way, she's on the same kind of autopilot that Ray has been on, and we come to learn that in reality her situation is one of even greater desperation than his.

 Beck brings these two characters to life and brings them together, puts them through an emotionally charged and sometimes challenging courtship, has each teach the other, and in the process lets us know things we perhaps did not know before, and better understand if we did know. This is a book that revels in all the bright colors of life without shrinking from the dark ones. It’s a story of great humor and deep humanity, with a streak of passion that simmers and then flares with erotic heat as Ray and Alicia grow ever closer. And it features a diverse, vivacious supporting cast that adds charm and reality to the great metropolitan backdrop against which the romantic focus plays out.

 It’s a book that’s not just worth reading, but then, if you have the time, worth reading again.

Do me a favor and go read the preview and see if it doesn't catch your fancy.

Counterproductive Activism

I'd like to quote from a Salon.com article I just saw a link to on Facebook.

To My White Male Facebook Friends

Hi! I need your help!

Some of you (not all of you, thank heavens) have been getting very defensive when issues of race and gender arise lately. Others have rolled your eyes and looked the other way. The best of you, of course, have been energized to join in the dialogue in a supportive, positive way. Whichever one of those groups you fit into, I'd like to make some heartfelt pleas about how we all look at these subjects, and how we look at ourselves when we're discussing them.

Well, I'd like to quote that, but I can't, because it's not what was written in the article. Here's how the author actually began her piece:

To My White Male Facebook Friends

This post is for my white male Facebook friends.

Some of the most disturbing, subtle, insidious, racist comments I’ve seen over the past few weeks have been from my white male Facebook friends. I know a lot of my friends are just mass defriending people, but I’m not quite there yet, because I’m (foolishly, naively) hoping I can reach some of you in a way that creates some kind of change. I know, I know, who ever had his mind changed from something he read on the Internet? But here I am, tilting at windmills.

First, let me say, I’m not addressing you to put you on the defensive. I don’t want to fight. But I really am hoping to reach your heart. So please start with holding what I’m going to say in love and openness, and see if you can let this reach your heart before you fight it with your brain meats.

Next, let me say, this doesn’t apply to all of you. There are some great allies, advocates and freedom fighters among my friends, and I ask you to join this discussion.

Notice how in paragraph four she implicitly acknowledges the blatant stereotyping that her headline and first three paragraphs have been indulging in. The absolute fact of the matter is that her piece is not aimed at all of her white male Facebook friends. The entire remainder of the article makes it clear that she's speaking only to those FBFs who are in denial about white privilege and gender discrimination.

Even if she didn't want to write the entire article in the style I used in my mock quote, how hard would it really have been to insert the words "some of" into her headline and first sentence?

You can't, can't, can't commit the crime of racial and gender stereotyping and then turn around and wag your finger at others for doing the same thing. You can't complain about racial and gender boxes and also complain that someone gets defensive when you put him in a race-and-gender box.

This isn't because you don't have the moral high ground with regard to the vast majority of the people you're addressing. It's because people have a legitimate right to feel defensive when you start stereotyping them. And even if the stereotype is 70% or 80% true in someone's case, that still means you're being 20-30% a jerk to them, and it's fully justifiable to get annoyed at someone who's being a jerk.

You also can't repeatedly tell people, "Stop being so defensive. Stop being so defensive. Stop being so defensive," and expect them to remain calm and objective in digesting your message.

These behaviors alienate people. They take people who are in the borderlands and push them away from our community of supposed inclusivity and egalitarianism. They make us sound like condescending know-it-alls who can't be bothered to wield our knowledge in a focused and responsible way.

I'm a white male feminist married to a black woman, and I'm fully aware that there are vestigal racist attitudes lurking in my psyche that I need to be on constant guard against. I completely understand and agree with the need to work against the phenomenon of white privilege, and that gender equality is woefully far from an achieved reality.

So if your article makes my blood boil and makes me think you're an arrogant, hypocritical, condescending twit, imagine how it must make a non-feminist, privilege-denying guy respond.

If you want to reach people, step one is to make them feel respected. If you want to demonstrate respect, step one is to treat your audience as individuals, not as a block of monolithic pathologies who need you to lecture to them.

And if you want to stop white male defensiveness, step one is to quit addressing your accusations and chastisements to all white males.