April 2022 – Sionnach's Online Lair

Genderqueer or Trans Man?

Something I haven’t talked about on this blog is my ongoing transition. I wrote a post a few years ago about being genderqueer. While being genderqueer or non-binary are perfectly wonderful identities, I realized during the height of the pandemic in 2020 that I had merely used genderqueer as a means to hide my cowardice. It wasn’t entirely me.

In dreams, I tend to be either a man or an animal. Although I felt more masculine when I came out as genderqueer, I didn’t think transitioning to a man was possible. I was insecure about how I would look, how others would perceive me, and, most importantly, what my family would think.

And then 2020 roared in. I spent the first few weeks of the year in a mental hospital recovering from an intense depressive episode where I no longer felt like life was worth living. Then, just as I was getting back on my feet, the pandemic hit. Amid all of the chaos and all of the fear, I realized two things: one, that I absolutely wanted to live, and two, that I wanted to do it as a man—whatever that meant, whatever that looked like, whatever the fallout might be.

I’m at high-risk for hospitalization with Covid, so I waited until I’d had my first round of vaccinations to seek out a gender-affirming clinic in Austin. I started taking testosterone this time last year. I started on a gel form, initially, because I have essential tremor and my hands tremble. I’m not good with needles! There were some problems with the absorption, so I basically missed a few months. Since then, I’ve started on injections, and my husband is administering them!

He has been an absolute jewel during this whole process. He said he’s always known I was really a man. When I asked him if he would still be attracted to me if I transitioned, he told me he was attracted to me—not some shape, not a physical being. Just me.

I’m middle-aged and a couch potato. I’m never going to look like one of the beautiful young men I see in the waiting room at my gender-affirming clinic. I’m going to come out the other side of this as me—an older, heavy man. But I’ll be me. The real me. And my husband loves me. I don’t need the approval of anyone else.

Do Your Characters Pee or Brush Their Teeth?

If you’re a writer, do your characters pee?

I had a funny interaction with a fantasy writer today who said that his characters don’t do a lot of normal, day to day things on the page. I don’t do that, either, unless I think it might be interesting. I write M/M romance now, so, unless my characters are going to do something interesting in the shower, they never take showers. They don’t bathe, brush their teeth, comb their hair, or trim their toenails. They are a bunch of unkempt, reeking men with failing organs because they never use the bathroom or fart. Flies swirl around them and no one can get near them without gagging.

Erm. No. They do all of their grooming and pooping off page. Actually, since it’s romance, they are ethereal beings who simply don’t poop. They’re like the angels. Unless angels poop. Do angels poop?

Thomas, oh, yes—that Thomas—Mr. Carillon, my troublesome medium—peed in the woods once. He also vomits when he imbibes too much absinthe. Frank Hope vomited a few times. I was pretty tough on poor Frank. Let’s face it, he had it coming, nasty Necromancer. I don’t know if those things upset any of my readers since no one has ever mentioned it—yet. Someday, someone will and I’ll regret upsetting them. Whatever anyone might think, I don’t enjoy upsetting my readers. That’s for writers like G.R.R.M. I’m an idealist. I love a happy ending.

In other genres, like fantasy or sci-fi, it seems like the way to add some grit is to make your characters do a few things (like poop). A few mundane touches can add a bit of realism that gives the fantastic elements authenticity. We believe them more because they occur in a world that shares enough in common with ours that the other stuff seems real, too.

It doesn’t have to be that way, of course, fantasy and sci-fi characters can be as pristine as my romance men. I’ve written fantasy stories where people were immaculate. I have to confess, however, I loved writing a story where I made the lead character, a mage, get a bad case of the runs. I never described anything about the actual sickness, just the fact that he was slowing down his prince’s band of warriors. The warriors kept having to take turns to stay behind with him, and no one really wanted to. It was a bit of comic relief in a story that leaned toward somber. It also allowed one of the warriors to have mercy on the lad and take him under his wing. They built a brotherly relationship that impacted the overall arc of the story.

In any case, the amount of reality one allows in a story depends heavily on why it’s there. If it doesn’t move the story forward, add something to the flavor of the story, or build characterization, it can probably just be skipped. Not everything needs to happen on the page. In the case of my romantic leads, some of it doesn’t need to happen at all.

Thomas never bathes, but, no matter what he does, he always smells like violet water.

Don’t Let Other Writers Get You Down

I think my latest book, Carillon’s Corpus, is up and on its feet again. It’s still wobbly, but at least it isn’t a dead heap in the mud.

Some people in the writing community look down on romance books as if they are fluffy and easy to write. (Some romance books probably are, but I think there’s a touch of misogyny with that thinking, as well, since it tends to be a women’s genre with an audience primarily consisting of women.) I had a friend, a female, who said romance was fluffy and not serious to my face. I kept wondering if she forgot what genre I wrote, but I think she did it because she was a jerk.

Carillon’s Corpus, like Carillon’s Curse, is a M/M paranormal romance with a Western setting and a mystery. In both novels, disabled gentleman Thomas Carillon, a medium, helps lawman Hadrian Burton track down a killer with the help of the victims’ ghosts. I’m basically weaving together two parallel stories—a romance and a mystery. I’ve written a couple of epic fantasy books with several subplots, but I find romances like this more challenging. Neither storyline is a subplot. They are dual plots. You can’t throw one out and still have a story.

To make matters more fun, it’s told in two points of view, and each POV (point of view) character sees the events differently. Since both of these novels are written in third person—close, that means each character’s scenes are written to reflect the POV character’s language as well as perspective.

So I have a lot of things to keep my eye on as well as all of the aspects of story structure, setting, and dialogue a writer has with any book. Since I also do extensive research with all of my romance books (except for the Chainmail and Velvet , a M/M romance fantasy D&D parody series—that was pure fun), I’m also trying to be careful about what words I use, what items furnish the scenes, where the events take place, etc. Oh, yeah, and I also have to write well.

But sure, it’s all a bunch of meaningless fluff. (I wouldn’t spend so much of my time writing this stuff if I thought, even for a minute, that that was true.)

Whatever genres are your favorite to read or write, don’t let anyone put you down for enjoying them. Sometimes other people just don’t get it. And sometimes they’re jerks.