D.C. Williams's Blog, page 12

It did get better.

My father is going to be eighty-six next month, and many of the details of his life seem to be getting a little fuzzy.  Not always.  An editor and educational writer for many years, he’s still capable of giving a rather sharp opinion about flow and the niceties of grammar.

Many of the little pieces are slipping away, though, and he has taken to going through old photos and random bits of ephemera.  Today, sandwiched in between various photographs in no order whatsoever, was my truly terrible report card from the middle of my junior year.

Ugh.  The best grade was a B, and there was only one of those.  I somehow managed to fail Driver’s Ed, and I can’t for the life of me tell you what I did, because I got an A the first marking period and I really don’t think the work involved much beyond listening in class.

I can remember being suddenly completely out of my depth in math, and deeply mired in a programming class attempting to drum Fortran into my head.  Uncomfortable in my own skin half the time, significantly depressed for months on end, fortunately not seriously suicidal for most of it,  and unbelievably miserable.

There were a bunch of things going on, and I’m sure some of it was just being sixteen.  I was one of those kids who got a very hard time in school, but that had actually eased up a lot by the time I was in high school.  I had friends, and an established place in the small universe that is high school, even if that place was with the other weirdos. Pressure to succeed academically was some of it.  I’m fairly good at math, but my head spins at the idea of myself in an advanced programming class.

As an adult and a parent I get that you want the best for your children, and want them to be the best, but that heavy academic load was at the expense of things I wanted to take and would almost certainly would have gotten better grades in, rather than feeling like the class idiot half the time.

I think a lot of what made that year so awful was the message that what I wanted and what I was good at weren’t important.  Someone else, with the best of intentions, had gotten a particular idea of who I was and what I should be doing, and that was what was going to happen.

I am not comfortable posting the details of most of my personal turmoil from that time in a public blog, but I spent a lot of that year walking around feeling like there must be something really wrong with me, and waiting to feel like everyone else seemed to.

Luckily, I made it out of that year alive, my parents eased up a little on the academic demands, I got into a state college by the skin of my teeth, and while it was NOT all smooth sailing after that, I’m still here.  I’m a whole adult, and I’m comfortable with who I am.

 

Because they are our kids too.

Many, many years ago in the town I was then living and working in, an assistant scoutmaster murdered his two children, apparently as a part of an ongoing bitter dispute with his ex-wife.  He also attempted, at least half-heartedly, to take his own life.  

The point of bringing up this sad, gruesome story is to illustrate that any organization, particularly ones dependent on volunteers, occasionally end up with the really screwy in positions of authority. Boy Scouts of America, this means you.  This guy slipped in.  I’m also quite sure he wasn’t the first scoutmaster ever to commit an uspeakable crime, and I’m aware that other leaders have betrayed the trust that parents, children, and the organization have put in them.

Any organization that serves children has a sacred obligation to keep them safe.  Why the Boy Scout organization seems to think that they are serving this purpose by ejecting a chapter that has chosen to keep an openly gay scoutmaster is completely beyond me.  It further disgusts me that many people seem to think that this policy serves to keep young boys away from sexual predators. Background  checks and a better reporting structure would go a far longer way in achieving that goal.

I read through many, many comments on the news story on Yahoo, and in addition to outright bigotry and a few sensible folks who pointed out that out gay men are fairly unlikely to be closet pedophiles, there were a whole bunch of people, some of them clearly fairly well-meaning, who were just plain confused on the subject.  Where are all these gay people coming from, why are they infiltrating American society, and why would gay men want to be Boy Scout leaders unless they had some hidden agenda?

Estimates of how many gay people there are range roughly from 1% to 10% of the population.  The number I’m personally most comfortable with is 4%-6%.  Even the lowest estimates are a heck of a lot of gay people.  And we’ve always been here.  We just used to be invisible.

It used to be possible for most people to pretend that they didn’t know any gay people.  That they didn’t occupy every segment of society.  We were there, you just couldn’t see us.

I can’t speak for the motivations of individual gay men who wish to be scout leaders, but I doubt a secret gay agenda is part of it.  And I’m pretty sure they’re not recruiting either.  More gay people are born every day.  

If I had to guess why a gay man would would want to mentor children, I would guess that it’s about being a role model.  Or sharing something they enjoyed as a child. Or participating fully in a larger society, and not being shut out because they just happen to be gay.

And probably sometimes being a role model for more than one way of being a man.  Because here’s another secret.  There are gay kids in those Boy Scout troops.  If you have a troop of 20, using the lowest estimate, there’s a one in five chance that there is a kid in that troop who either already knows he’s gay or will grow up to be a gay adult.  If you use the highest estimate, it’s an average of two kids per troop. This isn’t to suggest that straight men can’t be effective role models for gay boys, but I think it is hurtful for there never to be any gay ones.  Especially if the reason that there are no gay ones is that they are marginalized and unwelcome.

 

A New Release!

My second professionally published book, Closer Than Brothers, is due to be released on May 23 from MLR Press.  Words can’t describe how thrilled I am.  In many ways it’s more exciting than the first one was.  One could be a fluke, two starts feeling like a career.

I don’t have a cover or a link yet, but watch this space, because I’ll share those as soon as I have them.  I realize I seem to have nineteen fans, but anyone who’s familiar with my work may be surprised by this one.  It’s much lighter than most of my stuff and has NO RELIGION.  Just about none at all.

Personally I think it’s very sweet.  It’s the story of Drew, who’s a Kinsey one or one and a little bit, and his best friend Jeff, who’s very much in love with him.  There’s not a lot of message in this one, but it is about the families we create and their importance to us.

I also have a story in the works for the Goodread’s M/M groups Love’s Landscapes event.  It’s almost finished, I swear.  It’s a historical, set in the WWII era, and also at least partly about how we construct families and their enduring significance.

How process works, or taking little bits and pieces of this and that and turning it into a story.

Writers are magpies, gathering little shiny things up and hoarding them.  Everyone works differently, and I”m sure most of us have different ways of generating ideas.  Sometimes I’ll work from an idea I’ve had floating around, or from minor characters in something else.  The Price of Everything started that way with Nick’s brother from my Skylark/Unexpected Gifts series, which is only very loosely related.  Add some thoughts I’d had about orientation, conformity, and religion and we’re off.

Sometimes, though, I’m keenly aware that writers are observers.  Closer than Brothers, my next release, stemmed from a trip to a water park and some discussions I’d been following on flexibility and the plausibility of “gay for you” as a trope.  I have a Halloween story under submission that was largely spawned by a holiday themed solitaire game, ongoing construction, and some very pesky squirrels.

An author I follow refers to them as “plot bunnies” and there is something apropos in that.  I can see why they might be the mental equivalent of the dust buffaloes I find under my bed.  You thought it was clean, and suddenly, they’re there.  Eating your shoes, or in this case, demanding to be written.  

So I find myself pondering two teenagers on the boardwalk, obviously absorbed in each other and probably ditching school, a flier for very cheap and just slightly seedy hotel rooms, and some surfers.  We’ll see.  And did I mention that the slightly seedy hotel rooms are over the bar that started the idea for Companion on the Road, along with “The Carroll County Accident” and “Wreck on the Highway” and a couple of old car shows?

An open letter to my fellow writers.

Please, act like adults.  Act like professionals.  Respect the long and varied literary tradition that includes rigorous criticism and the assumption that readers are autonomous.  Readers have no obligation whatsoever to writers.

No compulsion to read books a certain way, or write only constructive reviews, or agree with other reviewers, or hold their tongues if they do not like something.  And unless a reviewer is paid by a publication or a website or another organization they have no professional obligation at all.  

We do.  We’re the pros.  We need to remember that.  We take the produce of our psyches, be it beautifully or terribly written and place it in front of the general public for their paid delectation.  After that it’s up to them.  To enjoy it.  Or not.  To give it lavish praise or rip it into small shreds as they see fit without fear of censorship or reprisal.

There are outlets for creative expression where the critical norm is gentler than in the paid marketplace, such as fanfic sites or your blog, because the assumption there is that this is an amateur endeavor, done for love rather than profit.   I love what I do, truly, but I am aware that I am also releasing a product for sale into a competitive marketplace.  The consumers of my product can do as they wish with it as long as they respect copyright law/  Incidentally, quoting from a published work in a review is almost always protected under “fair use”.   Readers or prospective readers are under no more obligation to say nice things about a book than the patrons of a fast food restaurant are about their dining experience.

A book’s being a deeply personal creative effort doesn’t exempt it from that.  It’s more removed, but the person who developed that hamburger recipe undoubtedly put a lot of energy into it, and was probably very proud of his or her finished product.

Incidentally, when a reviewer is a paid professional, their overwhelming obligation is to their employer and their audience, not to the author of the reviewed work.  It goes without question that the reviewer should not be employed by the writer of the item under consideration.  The only widely accepted constraint on a professional reviewer is that they should not veer into the realms of the personal.  This has not been considered appropriate in literary criticism since the early 19th century.  The only time a reviewer is substantially accountable to a writer is in certain peer to peer settings, ie. one writer to another furnishing a professional opinion, usually solicited.  Even in that instance, the accountability is usually confined to furnishing the rationale for the opinion.

Please, we’re all adults here, or should be.  

Modesty, how it’s largely been co-opted by conservatives, and why maybe liberals should try to take it back.

First of all, I’m a modest dresser but I wasn’t always one.  It’s sort of crept up on me over the last four years or so.  I am very comfortable in the clothes I wear now, and I think it unlikely that I’ll go back to a more “normal” standard of dress.  I was raised largely Episcopal, I have been a Christian for many years, I vote Democratic, and I hold many “liberal” views.  My upbringing was a little quirky, and my mother was not on board with things like make-up, pierced ears, hair dying, high heels etc.  She strongly felt that women should wear pants, and that if you were going to wear a skirt it should be fairly long.  It wasn’t conventional modesty per se, but feelings about appropriateness, lack of display, and a desire not to commodify beauty.

I broke with a lot of those ideas as a teenager and a young woman for a number of reasons, including that I just really like having dangly sparkly things in my ears.  I still do.  I don’t wear them everyday but I love earrings.  They make me feel pretty.

Looking at various resources and blogs of modest dressers on the internet it is clear that standards of modesty are extremely personal, as they should be.  I cover my shoulders and most of my back, but not my arms, and I don’t do cleavage, but I don’t necessarily wear my necklines as high as many modest dressers do.  I almost always wear skirts, at least to mid-calf, usually with shorts or leggings underneath, depending on the season.  Hose is dependent on the shoe, the season, and the length of the skirt.  On the rare occasions I wear pants, they’re “traditional cut”, usually elastic waist, and fairly loose.  I wear my hair, which is graying, long and almost always up, but I don’t cover it.  I always wear a slip, and usually double up on the shirt to prevent clinginess.

My appearance is conservative enough that I’m aware people make assumptions about me based on the way I dress, some of them correct, some of them incorrect, some of them possibly silly, and some of them objectionable to me.  Particularly that because I cover more of my body than many women and wear my hair a certain way, that I may hold certain political, religious, or social views that are frankly abhorrent to me.  Most especially about homosexuality, but not limited to it.  I have occasionally been tempted to get a little button made saying “Modesty, not Bigotry” or something similar.  

I find this infuriating.  I can also find the assumption that modesty is antithetical to various liberal ideas equally infuriating.  Particularly feminism, because apparently it is liberating for women to be ogled by strangers.  Or judged by their public presentation of their sexuality and appearance.  Or that women who choose modesty have it imposed upon them, because the motivation to starve oneself into a double zero and appear in public wearing collections of string and band-aids is obviously completely internal. 

And I think some of these assumptions make it difficult for women to choose modesty.  Fashionable clothes are very skimpy.  Adopting a particular standard of coverage usually means either dressing and shopping very, very carefully and wearing a lot of camis, or wearing clothes that are frankly unfashionable.  For me, it’s worth it.  Modest standards say “My appearance is not a commodity; my sexual being is private.”   They do tie into both my religious beliefs, and both me and my husband’s beliefs about what’s attractive and appropriate, but neither of those are paramount.

The real shocker?  I feel pretty most of the time.  I feel attractive, and I am closing in on fifty.  I think the general treatment I’ve gotten from men has become more respectful, but I haven’t become invisible, which is something many women my age complain about.  I get flirted with, but I don’t get propositioned, and very few people make off-color jokes in my presence unless they know me fairly well..

I’ve concentrated on women in this post, because it’s much more of an issue for them, but I do occasionally see a man (almost always young, and probably often gay) that I’d like to put some more clothes onto, and for pretty much the same reasons.  Beauty shouldn’t be a commodity, and the sexual self should be private, for yourself and whoever you choose to share it with.

Rant over, at least for now.

The perils of writing LGBT Christian fiction

Other than the funny looks, and trust me, I get those.

Paramount is the risk of offending both Christians and the LGBT community at the same time.  Which is a sort of two-for-one deal, but not what I’m after.

The other ever-present risk, and the one I’m actually inclined to worry about, is that I’m getting it wrong.  That someone will read my work and say to themselves, “No that’s not my experience, and what on earth has that writer been smoking?”

While I like to think my faith informs everything I do, I also write plenty of stuff that’s not overtly religious, some of it very light, and some of it more serious.  So why bother?

Part of the reason is that I believe very strongly that being gay, or bi, or trans, or whatever, is NOT a sin, but part of God’s plan, and just some of the ways he makes us in infinite and wonderful diversity and that God has opened a way for me to share this with other people.

Some of the rest of the reason, and the one that’s more selfish, is that every now and then I’ll open a pm or look at a review, and realize that someone else got exactly what I was trying to say.  And the last part?  The hope that someone, somewhere will read one of my books and not only understand what I mean, but gain comfort and self-acceptance from it.

Why book reviews aren’t like your Polyvore set.

Or your blog, or any number of other things where the rule is, if you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all.  This is an excellent principle to follow in general social discourse.

The minute you release a professional product for sale to the general public, it is no longer the case.  The reader of a book is a consumer, and like the consumer of any other product, be it hamburgers or lawnmowers, should be free to say anything about the product that they wish.  That it’s good, or it’s bad, or that they wish the pickles were pink, or anything else.

Additionally, the literary tradition is one of openness and freedom of speech.  Writers and readers should abhor censorship of any kind. As writers are free to write anything they wish, within very broad parameters, so do reviewers enjoy the same freedom.

A Foxgrove Wedding, and strange reader behavior

First of all, I love my readers, they get to do whatever they want, and I never, ever challenge or comment on reviews. Human behavior is just really funny sometimes. Currently “A Foxgrove Wedding” is #29 in Gay and Lesbian Fiction in the Amazon UK store. The PAID store, not the free one. I’m thrilled, don’t get me wrong. Absolutely tickled. And completely amused that this is a 23 page story that was available free for several days and had over a thousand downloads between the U.S. and the U.K. It’s number three in a series, it has no UK reviews, I historically review very badly in Amazon UK, and it’s a story set in England written by an American. Who’d figure?

More funny stuff. There’s a wonderful, thoughtful review of “The Price of Everything” on a blog, http://mmgoodbookreviews.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/the-price-of-everything-by-d-c-williams/ which isn’t the funny part. The funny part is that there is also a link to it on a Christian book site, which isn’t that weird because I do touch on Christian faith in the novel, but I’m a little surprised that no-one has broken out the tar and feathers, considering a couple of the comments I’ve gotten on Amazon.

Lastly, I now have some regular readers, most of whom I figure love my books, or at least think they’re okay., along with the folks who tried one and found it not to be their cup of tea. I seem to have at least one frequent flyer who regularly two stars them, which is completely his prerogative. What I find funny is that he keeps trying them. I don’t know if they’re just enough to his taste that he thinks he might like the next one better, or he’ll read anything if he’s bored, or what. I suppose he could just be assigning random ratings, but the lag between the “want-to-read” and the rating suggests to me that he is reading them. Who knows? People are strange. It’s what makes us wonderful.

I promised.

No more blogging “The Price of Everything”, no matter how happy I am with it.  I just finished a  Halloween story, and sent it off to betaland for feedback.  It’s for an open submission call, and it’s the first time I’ve dome one of those.  It’s also my first try at an m/m/m. And “A Foxgrove Wedding” is still free on Amazon, although it is not a typical romance, even for an m/m.  Here’s the link 

http://www.amazon.com/Foxgrove-Wedding-Hall-ebook/dp/B00I2ZSHS2/ref=la_B00CAQ7MBW_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391127564&sr=1-11

And I have an official author email, for my not yet legions of fans to contact me.  persimmonromance@yahoo.com