Kathy L. Salt's Blog, page 9

P is for Pride, S is for Shy

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Pride has come to town. Sadly, I’m quite reserved. That includes my sexuality.

I’m comfortable. It’s not a big deal anymore. I’m still occasionally worried that a parent is going to freak out and complain (I’m a school teacher after all and to some homosexuality is contagious -.-) I’m not in the closet. Not even to my students. I don’t make announcements of course, but if it comes up in conversation I don’t deny it. If they ask if I’m married (and children do, especially if you’re a young woman it seems) I tell them “I don’t have a husband, I have a wife” and like I’ve mentioned before, kids usually don’t care.

I think the best gift we can give our kids, in terms of different sexualities, is to not make discourse of everything. As an adult I’m tired of lectures at university or high school telling me “when we meet gay people we must be nice to them”. I’ve never met another message than an ‘us and them’ message. It doesn’t matter how well meant it is. It shows that the lecturer or teacher or professor is straight and they assume that everyone in the room is straight too. And message recieved. I will always be “them”, “the other”. The message is not for me. I don’t want to be taught to be nice to gay people.

That’s not what I want for my students. I want it to be a non-issue. If my kids come running, telling me that someone is gay, my answer is always a mindless, adult, “oh that’s nice dear”. Call me crazy, but I think that if I start telling my kids “don’t say that, don’t call them gay, they’re probably not gay and even if they are, that’s okay, gay people are people too…,” all they will learn is that gay people are the other. It becomes an issue. If we want it to be normality, we need to treat it like normality. If we make it a discourse, it will be a discourse and you’ll wind up with kids like me – quite sad and uncomfortable when they learn that they are lesbian.

Speak about gender. Yes! Talk abut the right to be who you are. Who you want to be. You’re allowed to wear what you want, have nail polish if you want. Talk about the fact that gender doesn’t matter. But don’t turn sexuality into a subject that needs to be taught. We don’t do that with heterosexuality and as long as we treat homosexuality like something different, it will remain something different. We need it normalised. Not special.

Lesbian is not all I am. It doesn’t define who I am. The gender of my wife has nothing to do with my personality. It defines how I think to some degree, it has influenced my experiences. But it is not all I am and I don’t want it painted as such.

I am very proud of and grateful for the great people who came before me. Thank you for my right to marry. My security. My ability and right to raise kids. Compared to older lesbians my life has been, is, so easy (my wife’s life hasn’t, but that’s a different story). So thank you for your struggle. It is called Pride, not as in the biblical sin but as in “we are not ashamed”. And we shouldn’t be ashamed because we have nothing to be ashamed of.

But gosh, my reserved nature does not like pride. Or maybe that’s shyness. I’ve known I’m a lesbian for ten years now and I’ve never been (and I’ve lived in three different towns that hosts Pride festivals). I’m equally terrified and curious. (and enjoying the rainbows which are EVERYWHERE this week) So this is my thank you instead.

Thank you for your struggle, to all who struggle for LGBTQA rights. And I’m sorry for my cowardice and occasional recluse nature. I will most likely hide this year as well.

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Well here we are… (beware frustration)

And what have I done? To be honest it feels like nothing. On average I’m writing 300 words a week if even that. Updating my blog isn’t even on the radar. Even though I want to, I really want to. It’s May. Last time I updated my blog was January.

I looked at my goals for the year yesterday. Almost all of them are writing-related. And what am I doing? I’m either dealing with the stupid health issues or working. There isn’t much energy for else. And most of the time I don’t even feel guilty. I’m doing the best with what I’ve been given. And you know what? I have less than twenty working days until the summer. And during the summer I will collect myself, get my body to work again properly and have so much time to write. Before then all I can do is bide my time.

So I’ll probably not write anything here until the middle of June, but luckily it’s not far away. In the meantime I can start thinking about what I actually want to blog about.

Before I graduated, the idea of my blog was short stories. And it kind of works (except the mess that is “Never break a leg before christmas”, I know I haven’t finished it and honestly I will) except during school weeks when lesson plans take up a lot of my creativity and energy. Whatevers left I want to give to novels or novellas. So what can I blog about? What do people blog about? I don’t have that much writing experience, I mean, I do but not if you compare to other bloggers. Especially not this dreadful year. I have very little experience with self-publishing. What can I write about then? Teaching. I have experienced with violent kids, kids with dyslexia, kids with ADHD, unhelpful parents. I can talk about being rootless, of not living in a place more than four years all my life. I guess I can talk about boats. And nature. I can talk about stress and guilt. Of putting on music and dancing around to it. What else is there to me?

[image error]My mum gave me this light. It runs on cooking oil, how cool is that?

Artichoke, Lettuce and Mayo

 

“I can’t do this anymore.” I let my carving knife fall to the floor. “Do you know how exhausting this is?”

“What is?” Your eyes, beautiful. Like two deep bowls of gravy.

“Pretending that I’m not in love with you.”

 

I don’t even know how we arrived at this point, you and I. I have always needed so much. Attention. Care. Smiles. Answers. Answers more than anything. And food.

 

I found carrots. I found steak and worcester sauce and mushrooms. I found different types of pasta. I learned that potatoes never float and that different oils have different boiling points and that, for the love of god, don’t be scared of salt. I found double heavy cream and real butter. I found non-stick pans and the best recipe for pizza dough. I learned how to crack an egg with one hand and which season produced the nicest onions. I found food.

 

And I found you. When I bought my own restaurant you came with it. That first year, beloved, I hated you. You seemed to bring me the best produce at the worst of times. I couldn’t cook everything. There was never enough time. And people? People are cruel. It doesn’t matter if I did my best. People would never like my carrot and strawberry stew. People would never enjoy my pizza with artichokes, mayo and lettuce. Of course I knew this. You didn’t have to tell me.

 

I wanted to invent something new, I wanted to find that revolutionary spark and run with it. But maybe I shouldn’t have done trial and error with several thousand dollars in the balance. I didn’t care. I wanted to figure it out. Taste, smell, sight, touch. Stomachs.

 

You, a simple food runner, decided to teach me, the chef. I hated it. Your most resistant student. More Darth Vader than dutiful padawan.

 

You taught me to roast garlic. To grill the perfect medium rare burger. When I wanted to serve fries with risotto, you wouldn’t let me. You wouldn’t even let me eat it myself. You didn’t care that I thought that herring completes any lasagne or that liquorice smoothie should be on every menu. You didn’t care that every fermented snail I wanted to boil was organic.

 

And I’m the weird one.

 

At times I likened you to leprosy. You bound my arms, my mind. You made me blind in the kitchen.

 

And then you made me blind in other places. It was probably instinct. We’re human after all. We need food and air. We developed a nose to breathe and to smell. Taste buds to taste. Sweet, sour, bitter, umami. But humans have other needs to. I had known about that, in theory. But I had been too obsessed with finding the perfect sweet potato I hadn’t cared for anything else.

 

But then you kissed me. Beautiful idiot you called me. Crazy, crazy woman. And “What have you done to me?”

 

To you, I wondered. I didn’t know I had done anything to you. It had never even occurred to me that two women could share a kiss like that one. I thought you were the one who had changed everything. You had kissed me. Not the other way around. I was innocent as a summer potato. Small. Fresh. You were more like a devilled egg, maybe innocent on the outside, but strangely spicy and aromatic inside. A stable on any buffet table. You had taught me that.

 

The first time you took me to bed, I felt like I had gone out of the frying pan and into the fire. My skin bubbled and cracked, like pork belly in the oven, every time you touched me. But instead of cooking, it felt like every time you nipped at my skin, the more raw I got. Not just my skin but on the inside. My lungs and my brain and my heart. I had thought my organs ran on glucose and fat. I was wrong. My fuel consisted on one stubborn and patient food runner.

 

That led us to this day. I had been wrong, I realised that now. Carrots works best in carrot cake, not chocolate cake and you can’t make meringue out of whipped barracuda. You were right, I was wrong. I’m ready to admit that now.

 

I shed off my apron and my big white puffy hat that I had once thought I was entitled to. I had nothing left. If you wanted me to sell my restaurant, I would. Everything I am… is and was yours.

 

“I don’t want to talk anymore.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. It doesn’t matter. Not anymore. All words are said. I don’t have any left. “I don’t want to be alone anymore either.” I let my carving knife fall to the floor. There is nothing left of me. “Do you know how exhausting this is?”

“What is?” Your eyes are empty, like the sky.

“Pretending that I’m not in love with you.”

Author note: Don’t ask.

My pen drive

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As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in the middle of move. We get the keys in eight days from now and we honestly can’t wait. I hope for some stability now and stop moving around like a restless soul.

When packing and organising, I found my most valuable possession. My pen drive. I don’t know what I would do if I lost my stories. What do people do to protect their work? I have occasional months of being terribly lazy and forgetting to back up but I want to be better.

To me this pen drive encompasses my whole life. It contains everything. It contains all I have written since 2011 which might not seem like many years but to me it’s been years of rapid development. Not just writing-wise.

In it, I have my fanfictions. The good, the bad, the downright terrible. In it, I carry the first disastrous drafts of State of Emergency.  It has all my short stories, posted and unposted. It has the words I produced during the skiing vacation in 2013. One-shot femslashes I wrote during lectures in teaching school. Secretly. In the back. And I was still paying attention to the lecturer, I promise. It contains the full drafts of Out of Hand and Stargazing. The plans for State of Emergency part II. An an unfinished draft of On Board the Monster.

It contains stories I wrote while I lived in Sundsvall. Stories I wrote while I lived in Lysekil. Stories I wrote while I lived in Uddevalla. I wonder what stories I will write while I live in my new town.

I’ll probably run out of pen drive space before soon, though.

My current song obssession for when writing

Listening to this doesn’t make for happy writing.

Happy January 1st!

Here we are again, first of January! Welcome to 2017! I was reading my January first post from last year and I just feel like 2016 went incredibly fast.

So many things happened, not just in the world but in my own life. I got married, graduated and survived my first term as a proper teacher. I didn’t write as  much as I have in previous years but since I’ve been busier than ever, I’m not too disappointed with myself (well, I’m trying not to be).

My goals for 2016 were:

Finish On board the Monster (working title) which is my third novel.
Properly revise Out of Hand and add at least 20k words.
Find someone to publish State of Emergency.
Participate in Nanowrimo for the first time.

How did I do?

I *didn’t* finish On Board the Monster, it’s sort of on a semi-permanent hiatus. There are other stories that called my heart too much. Instead I started, and finished, a contemporary romance called Stargazing which is about a pornstar and a virgin who falls in love.

I did revise Out of Hand and added a buckload of words. It’s been through another bout of beta reading and editing and I’m planning to self-publish it in early 2017. But more on that in another post.

I self-published State of Emergency in August and loved the experience. I still want a publisher to publish it sometime in the future but we’ll wait and see.

I didn’t participate in Nanowrimo. There is no way I manage and I’ll not have that as a goal this year. In the middle of term it feels like I work 24 hours a day, planning, correcting, contacting parents, plus the actual teaching. There is no way I’ll manage to cram out 50k words in a month. That part of my life is over.

My new goals for 2017 are:

Revise and self-publish Out of Hand.
Revise and send Stargazing to a publisher. 
Try to update my blog once a month.
Not let my tumblr die. If I have one, I need to use it.
Read more of Sandra Gerth’s writer’s series. They help so much.
Finish The New Story, another contemporary romance.
Please, please, please finish Never break a leg before Christmas, (Come on, Kathy, this is getting ridiculous).
Start the sequel for State of Emergency. 

In just 12 days I’m moving to my new home. I think it’s going to boost my creativity a lot. The last six months I’ve been commuting four hours a day plus living in very tight quarters with too many other people.

I want this year to be a year of, well, writing again. More writing than 2016. Also happiness. And hope. And all the good things.

Happy January first everyone!

Updates

Hi guys!

I’m dealing with some health issues at the moment which is why I’m completely silent and inactive but after an extra nice dinner tonight (plus putting on birthday pyjamas I recieved a few days ago) I finally did something overdue.

Now State of Emergency is available through Smashwords and can be picked up here.

I’ve also recieved final beta read of “Out of Hand” but because of mentioned health issues I don’t dare to promise when I’ll publish it.

I hope everyone will have a great December!❤

/Kathy

Interview with Harper Bliss

Harper Bliss is an incredibly popular author of lesbian fiction and erotica with titles such as At the Water’s Edge, Seasons of Love and my personal favourite, Once in a Lifetime (and many more). She lives in Hong Kong with her wife, is also the co-founder of LadyLit Publishing and has the personal quest to be the most accessible author out there. 

Hi Harper! Thanks for the interview! Did you ever think that writing for fun would lead to your life today?

Thank you for having me. I certainly never believed it could be like this before the ebook revolution happened in 2011, which (lucky for me) coincided with me having lots of time to write due to my wife being relocated to Hong Kong for work. I’ve been doing this for 5 years now. Very amateurishly at first, and not making a lot of money. But even when I was only making a small amount each month, it was very encouraging because I could really see the potential. Now we both make a living off the best job in the world. It’s amazing and I’m very grateful.

As I understand it, you’re from Belgium. Have you ever had an issue with writing in English?

Yep. I’m from Belgium so English is not my native language. I grew up speaking Dutch, which is actually pretty close to English, meaning that it’s very easy for Dutch-speaking people to learn English. Belgium is a trilingual country (French and German being the other two official languages) where a lot of emphasis is put on learning languages from a young age. And one must never underestimate the power of subtitles when learning a language. Hearing the language while simultaneously reading translated subtitles throughout my teenage years has certainly contributed to my knowledge of the English language. Basically, you could say that I became fluent after watching Beverly Hills 90210. (It also helps that my wife is half-British and is very skilled at eliminating errors from my writing before it goes to the editor…) All of that being said, these days, I find it nearly impossible to write anything in Dutch. I live in Hong Kong, where I’m surrounded by English-speaking expats. I exclusively read in English (and have done so for a very long time). Though English will never be my first language, it has definitely become my language of choice.

Do you ever find it difficult juggling your marriage and your writing? I.e. Needing to write when your wife wants attention etc.

Not in the least. My wife has always been super supportive and now we run our publishing business together (and have done so for the past 2 years.) I only write in the morning anyway. She doesn’t want attention before noon.

In defence of coincidences…

Sometimes you read a story where something happens and you just think to yourself: “No way this could happen! It’s just too much of a coincidence.”Most of the time I agree with you. I want to read believable stories or at least for the writer to convince me. But sometimes strange things happen. Just like that.

Let me show what I mean.

Story number one:

The first one involves my cousin-in-law (fine, my wife’s cousin, you know what I mean). He is from Brazil, just like her, but has been living in London for the past ten or so years. He was taking the tube back home from the gym one night, wearing shorts in spite of the November cold. He hears behind him two people talking in Portuguese, saying how he is crazy for wearing shorts. This man, being who he is, strikes up a conversation for them. “Oh you’re also from Brazil?” They’re all from Brazil. All fine and dandy. “So what town are you from?” “Wow, Salvador?” They all come from the same city? Sure I can buy it. “So which part of town?” Now I don’t remember what the part of town is called but it was the same. They laugh. “So what building?”

Soooo… it turns out these two people lived in the apartment underneath the one where wife’s cousin had lived!

I mean, what are the odds?

Story number two:

My wife was going to fly from Brazil to Britain where we lived a few years ago. She was going to change flights in both Lisbon and London, like one does. Her father tells her, “oh, my cousin is flying to Portugal this month, maybe you’ll meet her!” My wife, being the cynic she is, probably replied something like “yeah, sure, out of all the flights in all of August, I’ll probably see her.”

Now, wife (well, she was girlfriend then, but you know) didn’t even know her father’s cousin. They’d never even met before.

The day comes, she boards the flight with assistance (we were minors then) and the flight attendant take her to her seat, says her full name and gives her some information. Once she leaves, the woman in the seat next to her opens her mouth. Of course it’s the dad’s cousin. She brought out family photos and apparently talked all the way to Portugal.

 

 

Sure, this is all anecdotal, but all stories like these are. And haven’t we all encountered strange coincidences to certain degrees?

Now maybe how the characters in my newest story “Under the Fallen Star” meet is too coincidental, too strange, too perfect. But I stand by it. In my world, it’s within the realm of possibilities.

How did they meet, you ask? Well, I’m not completely ready to share that with you yet. But soon enough you’ll know, don’t worry.

Update

Hi guys!

As you’ve probably noticed I haven’t been active here for the last couple of months. I’m still writing, but much less than before I started working. I’m now lying on the sofa, recovering from the flu and thought I would give a general update on what I’ve been up to.

Mainly, I’m working now. And to be honest, I’ve been struggling a little bit for different reasons. I don’t want to go into it but some days I haven’t been able to write anything. Not blog posts, not short stories and definitely not anything longer. I’m picking it up, slowly but surely and writing still has my heart. But I don’t have time and energy for everything I want to do.

The good news is that I have recieved the final beta reading on my novella “Out of Hand” which I hope to self-publish in January (more on that at a later time) and that I’m almost done with the first draft of my other novella called “Under the Fallen Star”.

Once I’m done with that I’m planning to finally finish up the next installment of “Never Break a Leg Before Christmas.”

In the meantime enjoy the photo of my dog, Einstein.