Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 69

So…what is it I'm supposed to be doing?

This is going to be a depressed post. I'm sorry for that, and if you wanted to read something positive, I posted one good story for you today. Just scroll down two posts.

I'm not sure if it's the weather or just a number of glitches and arbitrary decisions that have left me feeling helpless and defeated with most of my problems. Y'all already know about the problem I had with Smashwords, and you should know how depressing it is for me to put my books up at Amazon and wait to see which ones they'll decide to lose to a "glitch". (Blood Relations is a given, but there may be others.) There's also been news that they're going to stop making CDs in 2012, and here in Italy we're still not allowed to have digital music downloads or video streaming from the US or the UK. So my access to new legal music is in jeopardy. Today, I decided to download the new Xbox update, and my machine and games will only run in Italian now. Microsoft Xbox support on Twitter tried to help me out with no success, and the tech support number they gave isn't working. Even if it was working, I suspect my game box has just been taken offline for at least 2-3 months due to it speaking the wrong language at me.

So, short recap, all of my hobbies, the things meant to take my mind off my issues, are now being hindered or threatened by problems that are all completely out of my control. I can't undo the update, so I can't game until Microsoft sorts out what's wrong. My writing hobby is a fucking joke thanks to the constant "help" of my vendors, and sometime next year, the music companies will force me to begin constant piracy of music instead of letting me support the artists legally. It's the most ludicrous idea ever, that I will be forced to steal from these people because they flat out refuse to open any legal digital markets to me. I was getting around that by buying CDs, and now they've decided "No, we don't even like having your money that way!" It's like living in Bizarro World, where not selling to people equals huge profits.

It's more than just these first world issues depressing me, but all of these problem share the same theme. I have to contact people and say "Hey, this isn't going to be helpful or fair for me. Can't you please reconsider or at least offer a workaround for someone like me?" And for my troubles, I get back a reply like: "Thank you (client name) for your interest in us and/or our product. Unfortunately, you're not good enough to deserve our concern. If you have other problems that you'd like us to give you the same automated answer on, feel free to try again." And unlike Regretsy, no one is going to go to bat for me with iTunes, PayPal, Amazon, Smashwords…pretty much every online company I have to deal with where I've dared to need actual customer service instead of rude condescension.

Six years ago I had my first stage vaginoplasty. My doctor told me that he wanted me to heal about two years and come back for the second stage, labiaplasty. It's a much cheaper surgery. Or, it was six years ago. Now it's inflated to about half the cost of my original surgery, not including local pharmaceuticals, hotel, food, and travel accommodations. And it wouldn't matter if the procedure had stayed the same price, because nothing I did these last few years earned much money.

I suppose that if I had never sent donations to other people, and had never spent any extra money buying books or music, I could have easily afforded the airfare and surgery. But I was trying to follow the advice I'd seen on how to be a good member of the social media world and ensure that other people would care about my stuff and would want to help me promote it. I had this naive belief that if I followed the rules and busted my ass, I might sell enough books to support myself, maybe even pay for my own surgery.

So I shared links. I did reviews and invited people to do guest posts. I talked up my other hobbies, even came up with a drink recipes feature to do something a little different every now and then. I got out on the social sites and tried to join in the forums. I stretched myself as thin as I could to meet and know as many people as possible, and with everyone, regardless of their positions in the creative totem pole, I tried to sample their stuff.

But despite making hundreds of connections, the feeling of being alone with my problems and working alone on my projects didn't change. I mean, there's the creative folks who try to help with promotions. But like I said in an earlier post this week, the few readers I connect with are creative people. I don't connect with anyone else. So I write up these posts about child abuse, sexism, racism, and bullying, and nobody cares. They don't get shared or discussed. I'm just ignored. I'm not going to connect with other victims by posting these stories. Much as I hoped it might happen, Audrey and Rachel aren't going to contact me so we can sort out who needs more help in healing. I'm not going to inspire another blogger to chat up these topics. I've halfway convinced the writing community that I'm speaking up for the molesters, not the molested, and I can't connect with normal people either. They don't want to hear anything I have to talk about. They don't want anything I'm selling. Just like the customer service agent at the mega-corporation, I'm not good enough to deserve anyone's individual attention.

I'm feeling the same way about my future stories. I have so much work out, and none of has ever made a blip on the radar. When I promote any of my old titles, it feels a waste of time. Every new social network provides perhaps a month or two of hope that starting with an all-new community and a smaller pool of followers, I'll be shared on their network because there's no way to miss my posts. But even when people see my stuff, they don't share it. I share their stuff, but I have no idea why nobody ever feels compelled to return the favor. I see that they will share links from other writers, and they will thank me for sharing their work. But they won't promote me in return.

I see how they have lists of authors on their blog rolls. But even the folks who'd praised my writing in the past didn't feel the need to share links to my books, or to publicly count me as a fellow author. I did what was asked of me, so in the absence of any other explanation for why every project I launch sinks without so much as a whimper in response from others, I end up with the idea that I'm just not good enough.

It's a natural mindset for me, being the victim of two neglectful parents, the victim of bullying, and of constant belittling by teachers, counselors, principals, pastors, police officers, and any other adult authority figure who felt qualified to talk down to a queer child. I wasn't good enough for my mother or father to hear me or take me on my terms. Hell, these days, I feel the same way about Mom thanks to her about-face and journey to conservative Jebus worship. Dad's tried, but now that he's got grandkids to pay attention to, somehow every conversation with him could be summed up as "I'm sorry, Zoe, could you repeat that? There was something going on here that's more important than you." I tried stopping calling for a few months, to see if maybe not having talked in a while would mean we'd have more to talk about. Well I had more to say, but Dad would walk out of the room without telling me, and then I'd ask a question and sit there for a minute or two before he came back. When I asked how long he'd been gone, he'd just blow me off. So I'm not even good enough for my dad to pay attention to me.

I wasn't good enough for my friends to stand up for me when I was bullied. I'm not talking about childhood, although it was true then too. No, I'm talking about this year. That's what's ripped the soul out of me, and out of my passion to write. It's coming to the terms with how many people I thought I had a deep and real relationship with, and it didn't mean anything to them. I was just being stupid believing them when they said they loved me.

I wasn't good enough for most of the people I submitted work to. They didn't even consider my work worthy of a form letter. 98% of all my queries are met with dead silence. That was true before I got online, when almost nobody accepted electronic submissions and I was using a copy of The Writer's Market at the public library to look up contacts. Once I could get online and submit queries to more places electronically, my pattern of near-constant silent rejections remained consistent.

I've doubted myself and have written to editors and other writers to say "I'm not submitting this. I just want you to read it and tell me if it's awful." And they come back and say, "No, it's just different." But somehow being different doesn't mean being special or unique. It means everyone ignores me because I don't fit in. Sad thing is, I had a publicist tell me I should promote my work with gays and trans people, and I had to explain to him that I did, and that they ignored me too.

I'd hoped that at some point in my life, I'd be able to harness at least one talent and become well known enough that someone would care, and then, finally, I could talk about bullying and abuse without being ignored. And now…now I'm just counting down the days until I die. There's this howling chasm between me and most of you, and I don't know who to reach you. There's nothing I've shared or given of myself that's been deemed worthy of your attention. There's no hope that anything I'll share in the coming months will matter either. Every day, I'm just getting up and burning off another empty day of life without meaning, without connection to others, and without any sense of progress or direction. And at every turn that I ask for advice or help, I'm attacked for being negative, or for being entitled.

Fuck, people, I'd give you the clothes off my back if I thought it would help you out. I'll send you money for bills or food if things are desperate for you. I can love and feel empathy easily, and when you wound me, it hurts worse because you aren't just words on the screen to me. You're real people who I thought I knew. But for years now, people have treated me as just words on a screen. I'm not a real person with a breakable heart. I'm just that stupid entitled attention whore.

I want to love and know you people. So why am still so broken that I can't deserve something more than your scorn and derision? And how do I keep pressing on when every day feels more hopeless and pointless than the last?

So, what am I supposed to do that will make life into something bearable? Because I can tell you, not a one of my forms of escape can disguise how isolated and hopelessly lost I feel now. What's the plan here, people? Cause right now all I got is "wait to die."

Another suicide victim…

This is going to be a shorter post. First, here is the link to a story about a former victim of sexual abuse who committed suicide, but not before tweeting 144 times talking about her depression and her choice to take her life. No one reached out to her during this flood. She screamed into the void long and hard looking for someone to rescue her, and everyone was too busy tweeting about comic books and the latest TV shows.

People are losing their empathy in the physical world too, but here in the online world, I'm frequently left shaken to my core by how little people care. Lots of people will say they do. They will toss around the word love easily, claiming things like "Oh, that's why I love you! Cause you're so fun!" But there's no love here, no real emotion or connection at all.

Stories like this trouble me because I think about my past, when I had not Internet, and when the only thing that stopped me from suicide was an encyclopedia entry on transsexualism that confirmed that I wasn't crazy, even if I couldn't find anyone else like me. I had no allies in Texas, no support net. I had no allies in my family, and while my parents neglected me, my brother attacked me and convinced bullies to beat me for him in staged ambushes. I survived all of that based on the strength of two paragraphs that confirmed I wasn't alone. Somewhere out there was someone else like me.

And now on the internet, I'm connect to thousand of people, and yet, I've never felt more isolated in my whole life. So I get how these teens feel, when they've got 500 followers, but no one is talking. I have an inner strength that keep me alive, even on my most depressed days when I talking out load to myself and asking, "why don't I just walk out the window?"

And really, why don't I? I'll die, and people will spend one day wondering why I "just gave up". Then they'll go back to talking about themselves. After I die, my book store will probably close, and there will be no one interested in maintaining the library of titles, or in promoting my name. So my writing can be erased the day after my death, and all of the abuse and experiences that people claim they want to learn from will slip into the void with people intentionally ignoring me on the way out.

And, thinking like this may not be healthy, but it's a side effect of going online and talking all day to a full room, only to have one person respond to you. And then, they only showed up to say "You're way too negative. Why don't you just go away until you can improve your tone?"

Which is actually one more reply than this girl got. Society keeps failing victims of abuse in this way. Not because we didn't reach out for help. But because you people don't ever listen.

11th Ciruit decision could negate the need for ENDA…

Today I'm not in a great mood, but instead of dumping that here or the next post. I'm going to do a couple short posts and then ramble, to keep my words in separate piles. So first, I want to highlight this decision by the 11th Circuit Court that found that gender discrimination counts as sex discrimination. This case is noteworthy because all three justices concurred on this point, including William H. Pryor. Quoting the article:

Pryor's nomination to the bench was opposed by LGBT groups, who noted that he had filed an amicus brief supporting sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas. He also cast the deciding vote to oppose hearing a challenge to Florida's law that banned gay people from adopting.

So this is someone who is very conservative finding that indeed, the existing laws on sex discrimination should already protect us, but has not because companies claimed it's not the same thing to discriminate against trans workers as it is to discriminate a cisgendered employee. Well the judges don't agree, even the judge who doesn't like us. So that's a victory with huge impact all over the country already.

At this point, however, there is a high chance that this will go to the last appeal, the Supreme Court. But, based on Pryor's decision to concur, I feel optimistic that current sex discrimination laws could be found adequate gender protection. So we can use that federal precedent to start knocking some kuckleheads into complying with the law. With a legal precedent like this, the need for ENDA would be made obsolete.

This is another wait and see case, much like the Mayo patent suit I reported on a few posts back, but as the rest of my news today is grim, I want to bring this to your attention first and say "But it's not all bad."

No sale, but there will be freebies…

Well, it's now official: there won't be a holiday sale after all. To accomplish what I wanted, Smashwords wants me to generate one coupon code per book. There is no option for me to make up a coupon code that is relevant to my sale, only a random character generator that I must use for every title, and then keep a huge list of coupon codes straight during only a few weeks of promotion. This would end up confusing customers and sending them away, and this is why I wrote to Smashwords to ask for help. First of all, they didn't answer me for a week, and when they did, they told me that they can't make coupon codes for my books. Then they ended their letter ruining my plans with . I'm not sure if they realized how flippant that came across as, but I was so mad that I had to point out that it was that smiley at the end that convinced me to never write for tech support again.

Please note that Smashwords CAN make coupon codes for site-wide sales, and that those coupon codes are not random letters. A 25% Summer Sale code for this year's sale used SSW025. (The code expired, but will likely be used next summer too.) Very straightforward, easy to remember, and what's more, easy to tell how much the discount is good for. So it would be GREAT if I could have had them generate a code like HO099 for my sale. Instead, I would have given you a list of 32 codes like C0XUP, MY4S5, RH4RD, 0MGN0, WA1W4T, W41D0, UH8M3, SM5HWRD5, UDU05H3, and whatnot.

My liaison also added insult to injury by claiming that Smashwords had plans to "fix that soon." Mark Coker said the same thing about problems I had with the site in 2009. Those problems are still there, including the one Mark claims they fixed, the limited book blurb size. (Every other vendor will give you 4,000 characters to write a blurb. Smashwords added an "extended blurb" to their site design, but the one they send to other vendors is still the 400 character version.) When I complained in 2010 that they were still no where closer to fixing those problems, Mark said I wasn't cutting them enough slack cause they're just a little company. But he assured me again, they really had plans to update the site to address my problems. One year later when my liaison makes the same claim, I'm at my limits for suspension of disbelief because nothing Mark claimed would be fixed ever was. I wouldn't rightly call it lying. The company just doesn't have a history on delivering anything they've claimed was "coming soon." Two years later is not soon by any reasonable definition of time, and in any case, I don't believe these problems will be fixed in 2013 either.

So that's it. I'm officially done trying to promote my books with ideas that larger publishers could pull off using their own site-wide promotions. I must remember that even though I have a bookstore, and even though the owners of that store claim I can set my own policies, the fact is Smashwords has at every turn hamstrung me and made promoting their site harder and harder. I can't leave, because being in Italy, most of Smashwords' so-called competition are all US-only vendors. I can't pack up my toys and go somewhere else because there isn't anything else. I have to accept site as it is, even if I don't like anything about it. Not Meatgrinder, not the site design, not the pathetic power play of forcing everyone to put "Smashwords edition" in the copyright and cowardly claiming it's not a requirement when it most certainly is if you want to avoid hassles. I can't stand Mark Coker's attitude toward serial fiction, or his inability to work with indie writers on any of our issues with his precious project. But, there's nothing I can do, because nobody at Smashwords cares if their service is poor. Their word is law, and the rest of us just have to suck it up and accept their lack of support.

I feel like an abused wife telling my friends "But sometimes he's really good to me." Except, I can't give you one example of me contacting Smashwords customer support where I didn't feel diminished as a person. I'm helpless to every dictation made by the owners, and I'm daily hampered by the limitations of their site. And no matter how much I ask for help, everyone involved over there has made the experience of self-publishing unpleasant.

I can't pick take my business elsewhere and expect better treatment. Hell, if I try to publish Blood Relations on Amazon again, they'll hide the book and pretend it doesn't exist because a big publisher released a book with the same title. So now mine doesn't exist because I'm the little indie and it's easy to make me go away. The only store I have left to sell from ALSO makes me feel just as dirty for trying to plan any promotions as I did selling through Amazon.

BUT, I promised free books, and I'm going to do that. I'm going to make the coupon codes for the free books and put a list up here. I'm going to tweet the books with the codes all week, so people will see them. Then after new year's, I'll do another round of promotions for the codes. Finally, I'll do one last round before the code expire in mid January. These books will be the last time that I make any effort to promote for Smashwords titles as my sole vendor. As much as it kills me, I'm going to upload everything to Amazon. BUT, I'm not promoting either site. I'm sick of promoting people who do nothing in return to improve their site. I feel like I'm rewarding bad behavior with a promised return of further abuse heaped on me even though I'm still working FOR THEM.

I will continue to upload new titles, and I hope that one day, the service on at least one vendor improves enough where I can feel confidence promoting them. But at this point, I consider promoting Smashwords to be just as detestable a proposition as promoting Amazon. The size of the companies makes no difference to me when the quality of the customer care is exactly the same. Which is to say, non-existent.

And from now on, I don't care if I have a major tech problem with Smashwords, I'm not writing to them again. I might as well be writing to an autoresponder that answers every message with "Thank you for your interest, but at this time, we don't care what your opinion is. We like our product just fine. Go away now, and feel free to write to us when you need to be belittled and ignored again."

I just want one service using the word "empowering" would look it up in a dictionary before brutally mutilating its meaning in so vile a manner. Sorry for going emo on you, but you're looking at my last hope for a decent holiday run smashed.

The uglier side of Occupy…

I've talked before about how I was happy to see people rising up in protest against corporate corruption with the Occupy movements, and I'm still in full support of the anti-corruption spirit behind the movement. However, as time has gone by, I've been reading the blogs of people who aren't so enamored with the name Occupy serving as the slogan for the entire protest. There's some other problems lurking within the movement as well, and so today I'd like to talk about some of these problems. I want to stress, I'm not saying, "I can't support this movement because…" I'm bringing these issues to your attention to make you aware that even a movement created with good intentions can become hindered by poor decision making. I'm bringing this up so we can fix this together, not so I can walk off in a huffing tizzy. Huffing tizzies come next month.

First of all let's talk about Occupy. When the idea was just Occupy Wall Street, the word Occupy didn't seem so bad. But as the first phase of the protests close and people shift to other tactics, the name Occupy remains as the apparent goal of the protestors. Occupy what? Well, that changes with each group and location. People might occupy political rallies, or libraries, or foreclosed homes. But the idea is to keep the protest alive by occupying someplace.

Which, again, doesn't seem so bad on the surface. It's sums up the majority of the movement's tactics, right? Except the word Occupy ignores that most of the Occupiers are white, and as such are descendants of people who occupied America and stole the land from the indigenous people. The natural defense from most people is, "You can't blame me for that, and I'm just trying to defend what's mine." Problem with that logic is, you don't really own what you're occupying. You also don't have a legal leg to stand on, but you were silent when these decisions were made.

A few years back, several laws got passed and signed off by courts, and among those was an odious idea called imminent domain, the concept that even if you own your land, someone rich can come along and claim they need it for something better, and voila, they take your land. Kinda like Native Americans, except the bankers who stole their land also killed off a few hundred thousand NA peoples and forced the rest into death camps on barren land. Also, famous people Like Frank Baum wrote eloquently about slaughtering the survivors as "mercy killings to preserve their dignity." These atrocities have never been adequately addressed by the US, and the term Occupy is extremely offensive to peoples whose lands are still being occupied by foreign invaders. When those people speak out on the offensiveness of the term, white people tell them to stop complaining and focus on the present. Which shows that the core Occupiers can be just as biased and privileged as the Tea Party protestors.

But I digress, those of you protesting by using Occupy either remain unaware of the harm the word causes, or you are ignoring the harm it causes. Those who don't ignore it are attempting defenses that critics shouldn't attack people who are just trying to do the right thing. This is the classic "Why do you only see my negative side? Why can't you see the good things I'm doing?" Which is a straw man, because I have also reported on the good Occupy is doing. So the request being made is dishonest at best, and it ignores that I'm not just reporting the bad stuff. I'm giving a truly balanced report. So what they're really asking is, "Ignore our movement's bad side and only focus on our positives." Well I'm sorry, but I can't do that. None of us should, but there's a natural tendency to circle the wagons, even when an "attack" is legitimate criticism.

Which is why I also have to bring up how Occupy is turning into a great big white male rage stage. Worse, you guys don't want to acknowledge that many of the problems you're just now noticing are not new, nor are these changes coming "overnight." You were told time and again to expect this, and you dudes repeatedly said, "It's not our problem, and we don't owe the rest of you anything." You scoffed at people who quoted "They came for the Jews…" because you never believed anyone would challenge your white male privilege. And now that someone has checked your privileges, you're pissed.

Everyone else gets your rage, really. But it's just, now that you white dudes are bellowing, you won't let anyone else speak for Occupy. It's all white guy, all the time. You might as well start wearing tea bags, because you're just as unwilling to confront reality as the conservative's favored protesters.

Finally, there's been some talk among many of the Occupy camps that gender variant protestors did not feel safe or welcome in the camps. This goes hand in hand with the movement's unwillingness to embrace ethnic and racial diversity, but is even more problematic because it shuts out whole groups of well-trained activists who would have liked to help, if only they hadn't been treated poorly by their own potential allies. (Allies who are stumbling blindly due to inexperience while pretending to be thought leaders.)

It's up to you guys to recognize how close-minded your movement is becoming. If you snap at critics and refuse to acknowledge your own ignorance and privilege showing, then you shouldn't be surprised when you have trouble recruiting allies from oppressed minorities. In other words, quit acting like your one-year old boo-boo stings worse than the decades of system-wide oppression that you ignored because it didn't concern you yet.

Three important stories to bring to your attention…

Yesterday was one of those days where a lot of stories all hit Twitter, and there was so much that needed to be highlighted that I knew I'd need to sift through the pile and just pick a few. Thus, these are not the three most important stories of the day, but they are the ones I felt had been under-reported, and I want to bring them to your attention, with limited ranting or rambling.

First, you know I've been reporting frequently on trans suicides reaching a shockingly high 42%, but now I've got another disturbing statistic on a different group of a oppressed people: 60% of black women are sexually assaulted or sexually abused before the age of 18, usually by black men. This is a serious problem, but it's not really making many waves in the white media because…hey, not their problem. Unfortunately, this also means it's ignored by a lot of indie news sources too. Everyone passes the buck because it's only a problem for black women. The rest of us shouldn't owe them anything.

That's the standard logic, but I disagree, and I feel that this attitude of "not my problem" shows how little civic duty people feel to defend their neighbors from harm. This is a problem that everyone needs to discuss, even if it's just to get the subject out in the open without delivering a verdict on what's wrong with "those people." And that's what I'm gonna do here. I'm going to give you this story and ask you nicely, politely, please, pass this on to your people on whatever blog or social site you frequent. You don't have to use my approach in delivering the news if you want to also add your opinion, of course. But for a problem this epidemic and complex, I am so, so not qualified to be talking about solutions. All I can do is say "Hey, are you aware of how bad this is getting? Pass it on, please."

The same is true of this second story, where the Mayo clinic is suing over a patent. Now this case is very important, because if you think medical costs are high now, wait until patent trolls patent a few key medical procedures and demand payments for every use of the technology. Then you'll see medical costs go up even faster. However, there's not really much folks can do with this case until after it's over. We get a verdict we don't like, eh, an appeal is possible, and Mayo's got decent pocket depth to handle a few rounds of appeals. It's not cause for alarm yet, but it is one of those stories that I want to say "Did you see this yet?" So if you haven't do read this.

And now, finally, this third story is a familiar ranty refrain for me, and you WILL get some minor ranting. Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a politician posing as a cop, has failed to investigate over 400 sex crimes, as well as 32 cases of molested children, some as young as 2. As is typical, the children are convenient light weights to be held out and used by politicians seeking election through fear mongering. Everyone claims to want to protect the kids. But when it comes to backing up words with actual protection, only the most privileged kids get the advantages of the law's protection. Everyone else is screwed. No, in some cases, they're really screwed. And don't get pissed at me for saying it, because while you shout at me, the real villains, the cops not doing their jobs, miss your ire and fury. In other words, shout at me for being flippant about this, and you are barking up the wrong tree.

So on this last story, I would like to request that you try to feel a little real outrage and try some barking emails to Joe and his staff about investigating all crimes, not just the ones that will win white votes next election. And, if you're in this guy's district, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND YOUR CHILDREN, ELECT SOMEONE BESIDES JOE. *Deep breath*

Thank you for your time. And now I'm off to do edity shtuff to a rough draft. (With emphasis on rough.)

Glacial progress…

Someone last night on Twitter was really very flattering in talking about my writing and my level of engagement with people. I mean, sure, you can't see it here, cause my conversations are all one-sided. But over on Twitter, I can actually be locked out for an hour or three near the end of the night because I've used up my quota of tweets. I din't even know we still had limits until just recently! Color me surprised!

But so something they said was, "I couldn't get anyone to look at me when I had my podcast going. You got something special." (I'm trying to quote from memory, not paraphrase, but I may had missed a word or two.) I downplayed it in my typical way by saying my podcast hadn't gone anywhere either. But then only a few minutes later, I really started thinking about it, and I realized, he's more right than I want to admit because of the pace of my progress.

Try to appreciate, I transitioned genders in a little under two years. I expected that to take me much longer, at least ten years. But I got lucky and in two years, I was past every hurdle and taking the final rolling stroll to the operating room in a Phucket hospital. Which has really set me up for disappointment with the writing world because fighting to have the surgery wasn't nearly as hard as convincing a new reader to get over their prejudices to read me. I don't mean prejudices like "I ain't reading no queers." (Although I'm sure some people do use that justification not to read me.) I mean things like "I won't read you because you don't have a print book."

Transition felt slow. God, my transition journey plodded along at what felt like the most awful creeping slowness, with nothing to show for my progress. Even looking back was depressing because I hadn't moved so far from my old self. That was the first year. Then in the second year, everything just fell into place. I walked into the office of a newly elected Republican judge and walked out five minutes later with a court order allowing me to change all my documents BEFORE surgery. And yes, a lot of my case is helped by the fact that I'm short, slight, and looked like a little like girl even without hormones. Yes, it helped that when I first called my therapist, they asked when I wanted testosterone because they thought I was an FtM transsexual just coming to terms with my masculinity. That I was just learning to accept my feminine nature floored my therapist, as well as all the members of my group therapy. So I was kinda cheating, I guess.

It helped that hubby's aunt decided to supply cash for my surgery. And that's just it. Cash is a great equalizer that for just a little while, I was given enough clout to muscle my way through the last of the legal hurdles. I could pay my lawyers and doctors, and then they could stand up for me and my rights. Without cash from others I wouldn't have been able to stay on hormones either, and I was ordering mine from overseas, making them very expensive. Without the kindness of strangers and help from close loved ones, I NEVER would have completed transition. And their cash, their financial support, was the only thing that helped balance the scales of justice in my favor on this one legal matter.

In theory, cash could do the same thing with my writing, but the cash needed to hire publicists is actually more than I paid my lawyer to change my gender, more than I paid my surgeon for one medical act of kindness. I'm not saying publicists aren't worth the prices they charge. I'm just saying, someone else had to give me the cash to overcome these obstacles, and they were smaller hurdles with a one-time goal. Publicists charge more, and it's a recurring fee. To afford their ongoing rates, I would have to sell a few hundred copies of my books a month. If I could sell a few hundred copies a month, obviously I wouldn't need to hire a publicist. So my sales are currently closer to a few…copies a month.

BUT (And it's a big but), even if I don't have a publicist or a great sales approach, people are still reading me. That might mean they bought a book, or they surf this blog, or they're following me on Twitter. Every once in a while someone new shows up and says, "I started following you cause I read your rant on ____." I gain more new people by being passionate about other stuff than I do waving my books around and begging people to look at them. So I figure, why bother going back to the book begging when it doesn't work anyway?

Well, I've only been at this writing thing for serious for about 4 years. Before that, I was submitting stories to the publishers and agents, but I don't consider myself serious or fully committed to the plan even if I was trying to court the pros. These days, I have no desire to be a pro. I used to, but listening to other writers talk about collecting their paychecks, even the good checks, made me feel less like working for Teh Man. Reading news releases about the antics of publishers makes me like them even less, and then I find out that some of them are insisting that their authors agree in writing to "behave professionally." Yo, you first, fuckers. And that includes you stopping the habit of handing million dollar advances to reality TV celebrities while telling fiction writers not to expect any advances at all. Then, after that, I'll think about signing a piece of paper agreeing to let you put polite words in my mouth. I still won't do it, but I will think about it.

But this alternative-indie path I'm taking means I have to expect longer delays for results. Two years was a fast run for a gender transition, but four years is just the start of any publishing journey from obscurity into some rank as a paid writer. This is true if I'm paid as an indie working directly with my readers, or if I lose my last tattered shreds of sanity and submitted to working for Teh Man. And what I have to recall is, I'm not so obscure as I used to be. Sure, the readers still don't know much about me. But there's a lot of writers along the small and mid-press level who know me, either because they picked up one of my books, or because I asked them to read it and give a verdict. (A private verdict, not the same thing as requesting a blurb.) There's others who know me from my braver days when I attempted to seek readers in forums. Total fucking disaster, every time. Forums folks often react to my opinions like diarrhea in a hot tub. They can't get far enough away to avoid it. I digress, there's still others who found me on Twitter, and who've been following me in morbid curiosity ever since, just to see when the next trainwreck is coming. (April is the only one "officially" scheduled, but weather shifts could throw in some surprise trainwrecks too.)

And yes, it's true that I still don't have any connection to casual readers. I have some avid readers, but almost all my regulars are other creative peoples. They've all got their own projects, even if it's some amateur art hour project like mine. So when I reach them, it's because they've "been there, done that." They're willing to give me a shot because of that empathy we have as fellow artists. They may still hate my stuff, but they try a little sample because that's what they'd want if I'd stumbled across their work. And I really try my best to get out there and try other indies. Which is why when I stumble over something I like, I try to offer y'all a review here. It's me saying, "Hey I like this" as a reader, but it's also my token efforts as a writer to offer proof that I'm not just talking shit and I can't practice what I preach. I mean, imagine if I was shouting "Support the indies," but all of my reviews were for best selling authors. Or if I chided you to make an effort at reading both genders, but it turned out I was only favoring one gender.

But despite me talking about the things I'm most passionate about, I don't know how to create that same kind of empathy in readers who don't already want to care to some degree. No one online has explained how to break down cynical armor in a way that I can understand and use, and most of the marketing advice I've used has resulted in less than stellar…results.

I see a lot of indie writers with pompoms talking up social media, but I note that almost none of those indies are having mega success. So, being nice, I think those people are full of shit and that even if their "services" are free, they're still ripping other people off by pretending to be experts in a field that they know jack shit about. (Yes, that was nice. Believe me, you don't want to know what I really think about them.)

I don't have any answers in the place of their bullshit either. I'm just not going to lie to you and pretend I'm an e-publishing expert. I can tell you how to get published on KDP, Smashwords, or Mobipocket. I won't charge you a dime for that. But if you ask me how you sell that book once it's published, I dunno what to tell you. When I figure out how to sell to lots of readers instead of handfuls of artists and other writers, maybe then I'll write a book about how to have success in publishing. But despite four years in this publishing pool, this bitch still only knows how to dog paddle in the kiddie pool.

But, in the last four years, I've released a LOT of books. If I just buckle down and keep working, in another four years, I'll double my number of published titles. So, should a miracle ever occur that readers notice me, I've got a lot to offer them. If I finally collect my 1,000 superfans in, say 2014, their commitment to buy every book and read them all would net me…roughly 7K. Which is not bad at all for an indie with no help from publishers or publicists.

So that's what I'm trying to do now, to keep myself focused on finishing all my current WIPs and get ready for a new crop of stories. I won't know how to sell them yet either, but when I finally figure out how to sell shit, I'm going to have a huge inventory of stock to offer.

I don't know what I have to do to sell stuff, because I don't know how to define what my stories have that makes them enjoyable. I just know that like me, there's "something special" about them. To be successful, I have to figure out how to convince people who aren't creative artists to believe it.

Pink microscopes and fairy wasps…

I won't bother linking any story this time because I can do an easy introduction to this ramble without any spin in one direction or the other. A company has made a pink microscope. This has generated discussion online on many levels of feminism. Some are saying the idea genders science and so this color change is an insult to girls. On the other hand, other feminists are saying that there's an attitude that girls have to give up being girly if they're going to get into science. This strikes a chord with me because I very much love science, and I don't feel that has to change me. But, I'm not a big fan of pink. Thus, here's my ramble.

First, let me talk about pink. I was not allowed to have pink, nor think pink. Blue! Blue was the color everyone pushed on me, so much so that I even got to the point where blue really was my favorite color. Later on I made shifts over to green and brown tones in my wardrobe, but pink was that color I wasn't allowed to have. So I can't say that I don't like pink as a natural inclination. What I dislike is the institutionalized concept that pink is the default female color. The feminist in me wonders often "Why can't girls like blue? What would be wrong if a boy liked pink, but wasn't gay or even slightly bi?" I wonder what irreversible damage we might do to society if dudes wore pink just because they felt like wearing it, and not because it was supposed to mean anything about them or their orientation.

It's not hard to tell that I'm creatively inclined, or that I'm passionate in my opinions about creative writing. But it might not be so clear that I am a keen student of science, and I am always trying to learn new things, whether that be a revelation at CERN that could potentially validate one of my teenage math theories or a news article about a breed of "fairy wasp" measuring 7,400 neurons across, making it smaller than an amoeba. That kind of thing gets me really excited, the idea that there's tiny forms of life we still haven't discovered. I get just as excited when NASA releases another set of Hubble deep scans, so I can learn about new kinds of stars and galaxies.

All of these discoveries redefine the way we think. Take that fairy wasp; the adult lives with roughly 90% of its neurons lacking a nucleus. It shouldn't even be possible, and yet the wasps live for five days, able to find food, mate, and lay tiny eggs inside the micronized eggs of another breed of micro-wasp. And keep in mind, these are both insects smaller than a single-celled amoeba. That's incredible. It's damned exciting, and it's the sort of thing that can have girls rushing to look at bugs under the microscope. Really, imagine telling a girl that there are real fairies, fairies so small the human eye can't even see them. Then give them a picture as proof that this creature is real. You're creating an easy entry into science by playing on a love of fantasy.

So if you can get your daughter interested in trying out a microscope, is it bad if the microscope is pink? If a girl has a choice between a grey microscope and a pink one, and she chooses pink, is it bad? If she's still expressing an interest in science and learning, I don't think so. In fact, I think modern feminism needs to validate the idea that a woman can still voluntarily take on a femme persona and still take interest in other things not traditionally seen as feminine. For instance, it is possible that a girl can love sewing cosplay outfits while at the same time having a deep love of her microscope and various studies involved with said device. (Botany, entomology, biology, chemistry, geology…) She can love her girly crafts and her sewing machine just as much as her pink microscope. So if we have the chance to give girls the choice of enjoying science and still liking pink, why should feminism tell girls "No, you may only choose one or the other"?

This leaves out the problematic idea that girls might just be issued mandatory pink units, again reinforcing the gender divide and alienating everyone who falls in between. What if a boy asks for a pink model? What if a girl asks for the grey one? Do we slap them away because the color is wrong and risk pushing them away from science? I don't think we should make pink microscopes a standard issue for girls, but I don't think the idea of making pink models is offensive. And so, if a girl chooses to love pink and love science, I don't see why we have to turn it into an issue. I would feel differently if the girls were forced to have pink scopes, and if we reach that point, where science studies become gendered, I think we're crossing some threshold of shared ignorance that will only lead to more backsliding for feminism as a whole.

Another bullied child commits suicide…

It was just a couple weeks back that I mentioned the suicide of a ten-year-old girl who was bullied over being "fat" and a "slut." I didn't have much to rant on about that because this is becoming so common, and the public response is still to do nothing about bullies. Apparently people are confusing freedom of speech with the right to verbal harassment. They also think that me saying things like "bullies should be put in therapy" is restricting their rights, even though the victims of bullies are FORCED to sit through therapy. The victim is punished, and the bully moves on to another victim on their list with zero guilt and zero punishment. So the system rewards bad behavior while telling the rest of us to conform? And people wonder why I rarely listened to my teachers.

Well today, I get to update you with another death, an eleven-year-old in Massachusetts who was forced to hang himself after constant bullying from kids who thought he was gay. I'm going to guess that he probably wasn't even old enough to know if he was gay or not. I'm going to go even further out on a limb and suggest that 11 was probably too young for him to have permission to watch the "It Gets Better" videos online. A shame. If he could have just held out five years or so to be old enough to see them, he could have watched adult celebrities tell him to tough it out through high school as well, because that's the only help he'd get from most of these people.

I find it sad how "protecting" the children can be used as a shield for every single wedge issue in our society, but when it comes to actually protecting kids from real threats like bullies, politicians and voters alike are mum. So if some dude wants to fondle your kid's johnson, that's worthy of chest pounding, hair pulling, and the loudest howls of outrage possible. But if the victim was bullied to death by other children, your reaction is decidedly more muted. In fact, it's nonexistent.

So pardon me when I don't believe your fake outrage over the Penn State rapes. It's just, I've never once seen genuine concern from y'all for the kids. All I see is this moral posturing and finger pointing so you don't have to admit you're just as much to blame for this problem as the bullies and molesters are. Not because you do nothing. Because you do nothing for these kids while howling loudly that you're all about protecting the children. It is the dreadful hollowness of your constant moral posturing that makes me sick.

I'd hoped that one day as an adult, I could be an advocate against bullying. But I'd wrongly thought that adults just weren't aware of how bad things were. Now as an adult, I see that yes, you are well aware of the problem, and you choose not to think about it at all. All that bullshit about the welfare of children that you people spout is all lies. And the worst part is, your love of kids only extends to your own little bastards. Maybe you think I'm being mean, but parents, go back through your Facebook status messages, and see how you talk about your own kids versus everyone else's kids. Yours are little angels, and everyone else has emo demon spawn.

You've got to stop this Us VS Them shit. Go look at the pictures of other peoples' kids in the above links. Then think of your kid, and ask, "How would I react if my kid committed suicide over bullying?" Take that reaction, and do something with it. Feel something for other peoples' kids before they commit suicide, and let's PLEASE start talking about mandatory aggression therapy for bullies. Please, let's stop punishing the victims while allowing habitual abusers to hone their harmful anti-social skills.

And now, a rant on fashionable Twilight bashing…

So last night, I got in a long, long debate with someone about how Edward Cullen is abusive to Bella. I asked what they defined as abuse, and they gave examples that he withheld sex as "a weapon" and that he'd stripped the cables from her car to prevent her from seeing Jacob. Before I go on, I want to point out that Edward stripped her cables because Jacob was still in werewolf adolescence, and as Sam's partner shows with her clawed face, Bella WAS in extreme danger by being around Jacob during his "growth spurt." So what people are calling jealousy on Edward's part is actually him being protective of someone he loves. Which, according to a LOT of folks, is really, really abusive and sick, and girls shouldn't want a guy like this. Um…okay. Looks like you folks need a perspective check.

My mother had her jaw broken by my stepfather. She had to have her jaw wired shut for three months, and she ate everything with a straw. It was one of the few times she couldn't lose her temper because she became impossible to understand if she started shouting through her sealed teeth. Mom still lived with my step-dad for another seven years after he broke her jaw.

This was one of many injuries that my mother took from my step-father, and myself being an abuse victim, at a certain point, I even convinced her to go back for more. When my step-dad finally left, he tried to choke Mom on the way out. Later, Mom said he came back to attempt a drive by on her house. This is what an abusive long-term relationship looks like.

In my own life, I've dealt with physical abuse, and I was sexually assaulted. I've been in long-term abusive relationships, both cases of neglect and of emotional abuse. As a result of all the abuse I suffered, I abused others, and I abused drugs. Because of my dark past, I can say that I'm a real world expert of abuse in all its forms. So when I say I'm having trouble seeing the abuse, I'm not a sheltered young'un who doesn't know what she's talking about. I'm just not seeing how being protective in a typically male way is somehow now abusive in the modern era. Moreover, I'm no longer clear on what you people would call healthy. But, looking at the news and the rise of a rape apology culture, I'm going to venture a guess that you don't have a clue what "healthy" means anymore.

Let me move on, because the sentiment I really want to address is the frequently recurring theme that girls are too stupid to enjoy fiction without being influenced in harmful ways by reading characters who aren't "wholesome." I will totally agree that both Bella and Edward have issues. That's the conflict of their story, what keeps them apart. It's their struggle to have a relationship in spite of their individual flaws.

But let's set that aside, because what I want to know is why girls should only read about healthy, wholesome relationships. Do you want to train them to find the right man? No, of course not. That kind of goal would be sexist. And so would suggesting that people shouldn't read Twilight because it's not "the right kind" of relationship for girls to read about.

"But Zoe" some of you say, "Some girls are really looking for guys like Edward." You mean overly protective, domineering, manipulative, and frequently pissy when he doesn't get his way? People, that's the fucking male race. So if this is what you're complaining, that Edward is acting too male, then perhaps the problem is, you don't like the values Edward is reflecting back at you dudes and your ideals.

I've got a husband, and I can tell you, even though I love him, he's a man. Edward is a man, and he's a fine example of the stereotypical man who's trying to protect his woman. But Bella is not the typical woman, because not once does she listen obediently to Edward like a "good girl," even as he says things like, "This is for your own good." And maybe it is, but Bella is independent enough to accept the risks and defy her man. Again, and again, and again. So that character who everyone says is meek, really isn't. She's just not mouthy enough to say no right away. She's not "tough," so she's not good enough to some of y'all. She's got to go about her plans in a passive-aggressive way…you know, like a teen girl would, to avoid direct confrontations with someone she loves. (But feel free to explain why you think a character acting like a realistic teen is really bad writing. I'll ignore you, but feel free to try.)

The message going out about this book is, "Well we judge the relationship as unhealthy, and since the book is so popular, it's training girls to want to be in bad relationships." So dysfunctional people have no right to be in fiction where the intended audience might pick up the character's bad habits? Because using that logic, no teen boys should be given comic books because they promote violence. (No, I'm not really saying that. I'm saying you're full of shit for suggesting the opposite is true for girls reading Twilight.)

Reading Meyer's comments, I understood this to be a romantic comedy with an absurd premise. I thought the sparkles gave away the absurdity of the premise, but a lot of you took it seriously, and you've spent the last decade psychoanalyzing Edward and blaming him for the problems of the modern teen girls looking for abusive men. You don't blame the Disney Princesses, even though they feed into the same ideal, that a woman is incomplete until she finds her man. You don't analyze all the other YA fiction that lectures girls using slut-shaming speeches and enforcement of "good girl" stereotypes. No YA recently exploring rape or sex abuse has been broken down the way this one fluffy absurdist piece about a sparkling old-world vampire courting a girl from a dysfunctional modern family has. And ten years on, you still keep making the same claims. You're not really opposed to it…it's just so harmful to girls. So's the bible, and you keep pushing that shit on little girls at a much younger age.

If you believe what you claim you do, then you're saying girls who read fiction are more stupid than boys reading comic books. This is the advancement of the idea that Twilight is harmful to girls, but the current Teen Titans is not harmful to boyz for its lousy sexual stereotypes. (To keep this rant short I'm intentionally ignoring all the girls who are reading the new Starfire and going "What did the men do to our character?")

I'm not defending the Twilight books as high art or classic literature. I'm saying that a lot of you critics are bashing on the sexism in the book just because it's hip to bash it. You don't really have any clue of what a real abusive relationship looks like. You don't even have a basic understanding of which genre the book was, and you're judging it on the standards of an adult horror novel and finding it lacking. You might as well pick up The Pokey Puppy and criticize it for its inability to talk about modern animal abuse. Or pick up a copy of the Pokemon manga and complain that no one ever arrested Ash for animal fighting, even though we supposedly hate animal cruelty. It's okay to abuse animals in Pokemon, but there is no huge group of Pokemon bashers like the army of Twilight haters. You are unique in your fandom wanking inability to let go of a grudge.

Some of you adults are expecting way, way too much from this book series, and from your girls. You only want them to read "the right books." You don't want them getting any funny ideas about independence or empowerment. So every "empowering" thing you shove at them is instead a reinforcement of how good girls should act. Bella doesn't act right for y'all, so she's fair game for criticism. But watch a single woman attack your precious fucking male nerd hobbies, and you swarm like hornets. "A woman dissed Magic? HOW DARE THE SLUT! Let's get her guys!"

And yet ten years after the publication of Twilight, it's still kosher to make a lame as fuck sparkles joke. It's the hip version of the chicken crossing the road, the joke about the vampire who sparkled. It's still the de facto attack that any new vampire writer makes when releasing their shit fest that will never sell 1,000 copies, much less 10,000,000 like Twilight has. It's your pathetic passive-aggressive swipe at real success, the idea that the shit you write is somehow superior to the "sparklepires." But the vast majority of you pushing that line of marketing didn't come up with something original like Twilight. You aped your favorite horror writer and reworded their work in an effort to make money off their talents. (Talents you only wish you had.) You hold it up as being a story the "real vampires," because then people know it's nothing like Twilight. Which helps me avoid a lot of you. Really, I almost have to thank you for wearing your literary prejudice on your promos, so I know not to bother with you book.

Your vampire book will never be as successful because it isn't as engaging or entertaining. It's just your mental masturbation about bloody violence, and it will never be popular the way sparkling vampires are. And that's because Twilight, at its heart, doesn't take itself seriously. You, and your vampire story, both act like Twilight is an abomination that taints your art. But you don't have art. You have shit that you copied from someone better than you. You know it's copycat shit, and you need to distance yourself from the clones. So you prove you can stand out…by attacking the sparklepires and joining the club of "hip" writers who are too cool to bother coming up with a real marketing campaign highlighting the plot points of their work instead of making up a pithy comments like "My vampires don't sparkle, unlike those homos."

And let me close the rant out here, because this drives me nuts about men. Alla y'all sexist pigs calling Edward gay, fuck you, twice. Fuck you once because you're still using the word gay as an insult to diminish the credibility of men you don't like. It wasn't fucking mature when Eminem was dropping fag bombs ten years ago to diminish other rappers, but he was a cussing rapper who drank a lot while writing lyrics. You're sober and presumably not a rapper, so what's you're excuse for continuing to bash the gay community when you fucking know better?

And two, fuck you for suggesting that a male pursuing a female is somehow "gay". To be gay, Edward would have to court Charlie, or some other dude, possibly Jacob…ooh, hold on, good thought…oh, yeah, Jacob is totally the right dude for Edward. Nice contrat of dark tan skin, slick with sweat, sliding hot and wet over pale white, sparkling skin. Mmmm…happy place. (FYI: I'm neither Team Edward or Team Jacob. I'm for Team Bella should do them both.)

Where was I? Oh right. I don't give a fuck what problems you had with the number of adverbs in the books. I'm sick of the curt comments like, "I just thought it was shit writing." I don't give a fuck if you think Hermione is more empowering than Bella. I don't give a fuck if you've mapped out the full secret Mormon code hidden in the texts. I don't give a fuck why you hated the book. But after almost four fucking years of reading the same people complaining over the same book, over and over, I have to ask what's your major fucking malfunction? Don't you have a life, or at least some other fake delimma more recent to obsess over? You don't see me going online every week to bash Heart-Shaped Box. (And I won't, cause it's not that important.) If I'm still bitching about The Hunger Games four years from now, I pray that someone does me a favor and smacks the back of my head. I think someone needs to smack a bunch of you and say "Fer fuck's sake, get on with your miserable lives and leave the fictional, non-existent characters alone."