Sumiko Saulson's Blog, page 14
January 21, 2020
The Democratic Primary reminds me of the shitty last season of Glee.
Yes, I am voting for Warren, but I don’t have the rah-rah put door knockers out there enthusiasm level I had for Obama. The current political climate is something I find repressive and depressing beyond belief. There is an almost fatalistic belief that only Joe Biden can beat Trump. Bernie Sanders and his camp are now straight up low-blowing having jumped on the Biden camp about how a woman can’t possibly win.
Rachel Berry played by Lea Michele, repping for feminism, trying but not always succeeding at intersectionaliy, will portray Elisabeth Warren in this analogy.Pete Buttiggieg seems to have what it takes to become president in 30 years, since the American public has decided that you have to be over 70 to be a president these days. That and we’re probably 30 fucking years away from being able to have a gay president. We can’t even have a woman president, why would we able to have a gay one?
Kurt Hummel, played by Chris Colfer, a fresh faced clean cut young man trying desperately to humanize queer people for the American Public, represents Pete Buttigieg.People’s bullshit about how they weren’t into identity politics because you shouldn’t not vote for someone “just because they are a man” has moved straight (and straight-cis) over to “only a man can be president.”
Most of the POCs have left the race, and it now seems more and more like the final episodes of Glee, where all of the people racially self-segregated and the straight POCs stopped dating interracially, the disabled people were all villified and became grotesque caricatures, they tokenized a few Black and LatinX queers, the Asian girl became a running Asian karaoke f** hag joke so they could center Kurt Hummel’s character in the most objectifying and tokenizing way possible.
So Progressive! Blaine Anderson, played by Darren Criss, represents the appropriately clean-cut and mainstream acceptable love interest with which Kurt can be adorable and humanize gay people for Americans. He represents Chasten Buttigieg in this analogy.
Contrast and Compare: Actual Chastain and Pete Buttigieg, humanizing gay people for America while being in little to no position to actually win the contest.Elisabeth Warren is like Rachel, the supposed star of the show who goes white feminist evil and appropriates POC culture from time to time.
The Actual Elisabeth Warren: She doesn’t have two day dads like Rachel but she is very liberal on LGBT rights, Unfotunately, like Rachel, she sometimes crosses the line into cultural appropriation, white centering and white feminism.Bernie Sanders is Will Schuester, the hip older teacher who is relatable and they keep trying to make him the star but people lose interest.
Will Schuester, the hip older white dude who really seems to care about social justice and racial equity, but then suddenly moves over into white centering and making everything about himself and his cis white het privilege, represents Bernie Sanders in this analogy.
Actual Bernie Sanders, projecting working class accessibility and a college professor vibe but still weaponizing ciswhite male privilege.Joe Biden is Finn Hudson, a boring wooden character they keep trying to center the show on while more interesting queer folks and POCs dance around in the background.
Finn Hudson, played by Cory Monteith who died tragically of a drug over dose at only 31 after leaving rehab, represents Joe Biden here – an uninteresting milquetoast white dude who is the defacto star or heir apparent even though the marginalized people are much more talented and promising. They keep recentering things on him to maintain the status quo.
Actual Joe Biden – just here because he used to be a Vice President, plus we are now supposed to pretend Obama was never president and only a boring, milqetoast cishet white dude over 70 can defeat Trump and we can never have a marginalized president again.I guess Yang can be Mike Chang since he’s still on the show but gets virtually no airtime.
Mike Chang, listed as a major character, portayed Harry Shum, Jr, gets insultingly little airtime or speaking parts on the show Glee. He represents Andrew Yang in this analogy.
Andrew Yang,still a presidential candidate even though people keep forgetting he’s running and he says they turn his mike off so he won’t ask too many questions during debates.
And of course Pete Buttiggieg is Kurt Hummel, the cute young clean cut cisgender white gay boy over and over again like a mascot to distract people from what a mainstream bigoted shitshow it had become.
Season Six Glee Cast – Wow. So diverse-looking.
Original 2020 Presidential Election CastSue Sylvester must be Trump in this analogy, and I suppose that makes the First Lady and his many daughters and ex-wives the Cheerios.
Jane Lynch as Sue Sylvester represents President Donald Trump in this analogy.
Actual President Trump in a jogging suit, dealing with an impeachment hearing just like Sue, those guys aren’t the actual Cheerios.
January 13, 2020
Interview with M. Lamar
Interview with M. Lamar about the upcoming Vantablack show with Stagefright (my band), Protea and N-Retrograde. We talk about Afrogothic music and literature, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Gothic horror, American Gothic horror and its relationship to the African American community and slavery and the antebellum south. Losing Toni Morrison in 2019. “The Pieces that I Am” and Toni Morrison refusing white centering in literature. Black horror writers, Afropunk,
Whether or not we saw each other at Death Guild in the 90s and why I asked the club to change its logo. Galaxy Chamber and Omewenne and how Stagefright and Protea used to play with them in the 90s. What is Black Eldergoth? Europeans fetishizing Blackness and how that affects Black people in goth culture. My mother dating Gunther Ethan Palmer, son of Warhol Starlet Ivy Nicholson and Ciao! Manhattan director John Palmer. Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode) finding out that his dad was African American and if he should be invited to the Picnic.
Race as a social construct, and what that means? Interracial Blackness, white passingness, our historical relationship to the trans-Altantic trade route. My mother, Carolyn Saulson, Black Eldergoth and singer of Stagefright. Black centering during and outside of Black History Month.
M Lamar’s relationship to queerness, gender and his identical twin Laverne Cox (he acted as her preop in the series Orange is the New Black).
Loving Blackness and Political Race Theory.
This is a 40 minute interview.
January 8, 2020
January 2, 2020
Transcentric Y.A. Fiction Novella Contest
I am excited to announce that Mocha Memoirs Press is on board to publish the novelette for the contest winner! That means the winner will receive:
A Publishing Contract from Mocha Memoirs Press. Cover artwork featuring Your Character in the series style!Full license from me to create their own work with the spin off character in the Moon Cried Blood universe as an authorized charactr with complete creative controlEditing from me – I’ll be the editor – assistant editing by Tristissima and proofreading by my team
In The Moon Cried Blood, teen witches get their powers when their periods start, or at menarche. My friend who is a transwoman suggested a trans teenwitch might get powers when she starts taking hormones. There aren’t any trans characters in it but there should be.
So in an effort to make the universe of the Moon Cried Blood less ciscentric and to tell JK Rowling to kiss my enby ass, I am going to have a contest! The contest is to introduce non-cis characters of any kind to the series universe.
The work should be novelette length, between 7,500 and 11,000 words, so it is consistent in length with the original series. The deadline is March 20, 2020 which is my birthday and also Spring Equinox. Please send your manuscript to sumikoska@yahoo.com
December 23, 2019
The TERF J.K. Rowling can fuck right off, and here’s a contest
As you may know by now, I am enby and J.K. Rowling is a TERF. Which reminds me of review I got a while ago:
—
Lance S. Elliott – 4.0 out of 5 stars
Review of “The Moon Cried Blood”
Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2013
Format: Kindle Edition-Verified Purchase
This is an amazing book. I downloaded this book on the day it was offered for free.
This is not a Twilight or Harry Potter book. In my opinion, it’s better. There is a very complex plot that thickens with every page. The characters, and there are many, are quite detailed. You don’t know what’s going to happen, even as it’s happening. That has been missing with many books these days, and I’m glad to see it here. “
About the Series
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The series in an urban fiction world set in the 70s. The heroine is a biracial Black & Mexican girl named Leticia Gordon aka Tisha. Elevator Pitch: LA Banks Vampire Huntress meets Goosebumps.
I’m going enroll all the short books in Smashwords for free from December 25 to January 1 for their Kwanzaa aka end of the year holiday sale. Also the complied complete series book will do down to $1.50 cents over on Smashwords for their Holiday sale.
About the Contest
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In The Moon Cried Blood, teen witches get their powers when their periods start, or at menarche. My friend who is a transwoman suggested a trans teenwitch might get powers when she starts taking hormones. There aren’t any trans characters in it but there should be.
So in an effort to make the universe of the Moon Cried Blood less ciscentric and to tell JK Rowling to kiss my enby ass, I am going to have a contest! The contest is to introduce non-cis characters of any kind to the series universe.
The winner(s) will be licensed to create their own spin off characters in that universe which the control and will get free cover artwork and editing from me and my team, assistance with layout for eBook and print, and my permission to promote it as part of that universe.
The work should be novelette length, between 7,500 and 11,000 words, so it is consistent in length with the original series. The deadline is March 20, 2020 which is my birthday and also Spring Equinox.
The TERF J.K. Rowling can fuck right off, and here's a contest
As you may know by now, I am enby and J.K. Rowling is a TERF. Which reminds me of review I got a while ago:
—
Lance S. Elliott – 4.0 out of 5 stars
Review of “The Moon Cried Blood”
Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2013
Format: Kindle Edition-Verified Purchase
This is an amazing book. I downloaded this book on the day it was offered for free.
This is not a Twilight or Harry Potter book. In my opinion, it’s better. There is a very complex plot that thickens with every page. The characters, and there are many, are quite detailed. You don’t know what’s going to happen, even as it’s happening. That has been missing with many books these days, and I’m glad to see it here. “
About the Series
[image error]
The series in an urban fiction world set in the 70s. The heroine is a biracial Black & Mexican girl named Leticia Gordon aka Tisha. Elevator Pitch: LA Banks Vampire Huntress meets Goosebumps.
I’m going enroll all the short books in Smashwords for free from December 25 to January 1 for their Kwanzaa aka end of the year holiday sale. Also the complied complete series book will do down to $1.50 cents over on Smashwords for their Holiday sale.
About the Contest
[image error]
In The Moon Cried Blood, teen witches get their powers when their periods start, or at menarche. My friend who is a transwoman suggested a trans teenwitch might get powers when she starts taking hormones. There aren’t any trans characters in it but there should be.
So in an effort to make the universe of the Moon Cried Blood less ciscentric and to tell JK Rowling to kiss my enby ass, I am going to have a contest! The contest is to introduce non-cis characters of any kind to the series universe.
The winner(s) will be licensed to create their own spin off characters in that universe which the control and will get free cover artwork and editing from me and my team, assistance with layout for eBook and print, and my permission to promote it as part of that universe.
The work should be novelette length, between 7,500 and 11,000 words, so it is consistent in length with the original series. The deadline is March 20, 2020 which is my birthday and also Spring Equinox.
December 2, 2019
Irene McCalphin in #Writing While Black, January Edition
So this.. just so you know I am still interviewing Irene McCalphin about this and this will be in the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper‘s January issue in the #WritingWhileBlack column. We will be talking about the Pantheacon POC Walkout. It happened and cancelling the convention doesn’t change that.
About Irene McCalphin
Queer| Fat|Black| Femme
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writer, performance artist, model, witch , singer and eater of food in public
Irene McCalphin is one third of the diverse witchcraft ternion The Virgo Homo Thugs for the Revolution. As co-founder and massage therapist of A Sovereign Embodiment Healing Collective and Board-member of the Body Political Irene blends magic with massage, storytelling and performance art to liberate, heal and reclaim space for marginalized community. They’re currently working on a book and facilitating the creation a healing and retreat space for queer femmes in Grass Valley, Ca.
Here is their website: www.MammyIsDead.com
The Pantheacon blog says “That vision came true for many years, but as time passed it grew bigger and the viewpoints diverged. ” So to the yeah to the best of my knowledge. Some POCs asked people to stop culturally appropriating, so a bunch of white folks got mad and put curses and hexes on them, so the POCs walked out and a bunch o the queer community walked out with organizer Irene McCalpin who is Black and queer. So the “divergence” must be the part when butthurt white folks started hexing Irene.
Now they’re shutting Pantheacon down over the walk out, this will be the last year, and they are wording this in a way that creates further animosity. Considering that three different white Americans connected to Pantheacon referred to themselves as person of color while trying to try to shut me down. There seem to be a lot oppressed Italian Americans newly minted as POCs in defense of Pantheacon or some other problematic white dominated thing these days.
November 27, 2019
Book of Problematic Things
So, yesterday, I reposted this post on Mayor Libby Schaaf’s administration harassing the homeless:
Along with the following commentary about her breaking campaign promises.
And just after, I got this weird message from the Mayor’s Office offering me some Slayer tickets for club night at The Uptown I petitioned to remove its racist logo. It seemed like a troll but they were serious. Do I think this has to do with me reporting at the SFBayView? Yes I do.
My friend Blau, a local DJ in the car with me, laughed and said that Slayer was problematic as fuck due to their use of Nazi imagery and lyrics. Like they are as problematic as the shitty lynching logo. It seemed like they were trolling the mayor, the club, the venue, and me.
But I am a hood rat and used to this bullshit. I give zero fucks so I decided to get the fucking tickets and give them to the club, or another club, or perhaps hand them to some homeless folks to use or scalp. When I got there the Mayor’s aide was African American. I thought, this dude has to know I work for the SF BayView, I tagged the damned paper in the post!
So yeah, I get the inside joke now.
Kae Oz, the original poster, works at the Uptown, the Oakland venue for said club. Not a coincidence, in my opinion. Said club declined but I did accept on behalf of the Oakland venue and went to see what’s popping at the Mayor’s Office.
There were protesters there. I arranged to pick up the tickets like a good hood rat, and asked to get my parking validated. Then I handed out my business cards to the assembled and told them I work for the BayView. One of them told me this:
I am doing my best to get the inside scoop on this, so more later.
November 25, 2019
Please support our Kickstarter for Wickedly Abled
Incredible Start! 16% funded in less than two days! But remember, with Kickstarter, it’s all or nothing. Please help us meet our goal of $1000 before the 20 days are over.
The Kickstarter Link Is Here Please Click To Support Wickedly Abled!
Why Wickedly Abled?
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Tired of future worlds so-called utopias where disabled people have been erased by eugenic scientists? Dreaming of science-fiction that properly labels such depictions as dystopias for those of us who are physically and neurologically atypical? Are you sick of horror stories where mutation, mental illness, and deformity are signs of inherent evil? Are you interested in dissecting the way in which old tropes about disability informed the oldest of fairy tales and camp side stories? Do you want to demystify disabilities that have been considered by the able- bodied as signs of some sort of curse? Challenge the abliest and saneist realms which have plagued world-building in fantasy, horror, science-fiction and fairy tale mythologies since the dawn of mankind?
Wickedly Abled is a dark speculative fiction anthology challenging well-worn tropes depicting disabled persons in solely villain or victim roles by promoting darker themed works of fantasy, sci-fi and horror by authors with disabilities artists which feature disabled protagonists.
Wickedly Abled is the brainchild of Sumiko Saulson, the editor of and mind behind the best-selling horror anthology Black Magic Women, a showcase of eighteen different black female horror writers from the African Diaspora on Mocha Memoirs Press. The gorgeous cover artwork is by Lillian Rose Asterios.
We Have Come Too Far To Stop
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Thank you all so much! Thanks to the kind people who pledged a little money to get advanced release PDFs, discounted or advance release eBooks and paperbacks and hardcovers, and signed author copies, we have $165 pledged of $1,000 goal by 9 backers with 20 days to go! 16.5% Funded After Just 2 Days! But Kickstarter is an all or nothing thing. We need to get $41.50 per day over the next 20 days to make this thing happen!
That’s one hardcover reward level pledge per day, or 3 paperbacks a day, or 21 eBooks. What will happens if we get all our pledges?Then the authors will get $25 instead of $10. That’s a lot for some of the authors because some are on social security. Right now a few authors are tossing their $10 back into the kitty – they shouldn’t have to.
If we get all of the pledge money, the editor & publisher can be in the position to try this again next year, as we have already gotten a half a dozen inquiries about similar project moving forward. We will be able to afford local and national promotion for the book. We will be able to actually pay proofreaders and editors and graphic artists something.This will be Sumiko’s third independently published anthology.
The first one, Scry of Lust, an anthology of kinky writing by and for kinky people, raised about $100 for a local AIDSWalk group Team #5105 SFGoth. It was put together with students from her kinky writing group, and she used it as a way to learn how to work with other authors and run a small press publishing style operation where the writers get individual royalties through Smashwords (for Kobo, iTune, Nook and Kindle through the iStore, Kobo and Barnes and Noble) and offers print books at or near cost (at cost plus a small handling fee and where applicable additional shipping costs) but the publisher collects the print and hardcover royalties and Amazon eBook royalties and uses them for marketing. For this first book, all profit went to SFGoth AIDSWalk and the publisher and funders covered many marketing and other costs.
Her second collection of writing by other authors handled as an independent publication, Black Celebration: Amazing Articles on African American Horror was composed of reprinted blog articles by African American Horror Authors about Black Horror Cinema and Literature, was done similarly.Wickedly Abled is the first indie press anthology where she has paid authors out of pocket instead of having an established small press publisher print and pay the authors. (The previous updated misreported that it was her first indie anthology but that was written before Scry of Lust and not updated).
She will offer the authors the same royalty from Smashwords and at-to-near cost paperbacks and hardcovers with this book.
Please get the word out!
November 20, 2019
Yes Black Folks should be paid, by you, not other broke Black folks. Thank you.
So yeah – I probably don’t need to comment on the recent controversies about small press publishers not paying people or not paying enough, but I can. so why not? Everyone knows I’m very opinionated and have edited by now, four anthologies or collections of writing by multiple authors. One is on a reputable small press publishing imprint let’s leave them out of this.
The other three – Scry of Lust, Black Celebration, & Wickedly Abled, are self-published with Iconoclast Productions – the non-profit that puts on the African American Multimedia Conference. My mom and I started Iconoclast, and it’s a grassroots community nonprofit. It runs on a shoestring budget. I could have crowd source funded the books but I did not. I am really poor and on Social Security. i am paying people $10 out of my SSDI check for Wickedly Abled.
I get free food from pantries and give zero fucks about your respectability politics. I don’t care about the awards you aren’t going to give me because there are still typos or because I am a hoodrat and some dumb shit transphobe I blocked for accusing the trans community of bullying Daphne Dorman to death in his convoluted defense of Dave Chappelle is dumb enough to try to get other black folk to come at me.
I see you, Tim. I thought you didn’t even believe in people publishing books of Black-only authors just to get Black writing in the world and thought I should do blind submissions to make sure my writers “deserve” publication instead of preferencing the marginalized.
People who have white, economic, and other kinds of privilege shouldn’t complain about me paying my broke ass fellow authors $0 to $10 and offering them a cut of the Smashwords royalties and some at-or-near cost paperbacks to hustle.
Instead, you should affirm your commitment to Black writers and Disabled authors by DMing me asking for the Paypals and Venmos of all my authors so you can go into your damned pocket and send them the $25 or $50 you think they deserve personally. Then I can list you as a sponsor. Maybe you should hire me a staff of proofreaders while you are at it. Consider it reparations.
Also go subscribe to the San Francisco BayView Newspaper. They need money, too.
Or alternatively, you should kiss my black ass.
Have a nice day.
