Year in Books: March

Behold, I read. Since the beginning of the year, mostly thanks to my freakish friend who reads approximately three books a week, I've been trying to make myself do more reading. FOR FUN.

On the left are the books that I've read so far: Good Omens, Milk and Honey, True Porn Clerk Tales, The Princess Saves Herself in This One, Blockbuster Plots, and Night Sky With Exit Wounds. (Not pictured: 1984, Affinity, and Howl's Moving Castle)

On the Right (under Harley Quinn): Hope in the Dark, Six of Crows, and Bone.

I've been reading a lot of poetry, and it makes me intensely happy. Some Tweet-poetry, some free verse, some experimental. Something about it speaks to the creature inside me, and it makes me want to write more and read more. It's a kind of self-care I've neglected for the past few years because it's always felt as though I needed to be doing something serious or important. And it's caused me to pick my own poems back up for editing, and write at least five new ones.

I really loved Milk and Honey. I just sit and reread. There was no point of flagging which pages I liked the best. I loved The Princess Saves Herself in This One, but I look forward to her next volume because this work feels very raw and fresh, and Lovelace should be quite amazing once she's matured as a poet. Night Sky with Exit Wounds I liked, but I am struggling with some of the poems and will be able to say more after I take the time to reread. 

I have to say, of all the books I've read this year, I was blown away by Howl's Moving Castle. I loved the movie, but the book is so, so much more. It's a fairytale, but not an old one. It's female led, and beautiful and weird, and dark in ways.

Since I'll be going out of town next week (and getting to see my girlfriend <3), I'm hoping to get Six of Crows finished on the plane, or sooner.

Uneducating Queer

Confessions of an Uneducated Queer
by Lauren Zuniga (trigger warnings)

"Everything I learned about being queer, I learned from poets.

Poets are cheaper than college."

Zuniga starts by talking about not understanding Judith Butler and mispronouncing Foucault at a party... It took me about seven years to really understand Judith Butler while I was reading her. I read Gender Trouble at least three times, and it wasn't until I'd spent a lot of time reading the French theorists that Butler is basing her work off of that I came back to GT and amazingly, shockingly, alarmingly, GOT IT. I pretty thrilled when I turned in a summary of Butler and got high praise for having such a good grasp on what Butler was saying, and being able to condense it so well. What a rainbow feather in my cap! Oh, I got the ideas long before because you can't hang around gender studies without absorbing the general idea, and even better, the trans theorists who critique her do a better job of breaking her down.

(FYI, Butler's early works are so difficult because 1) They were meant to be that way. Theorists sometimes torture language that way to help disassociate from meaning, and 2) She was working through these concepts as she was writing them. And as a teacher of writing, I'll tell you, that's when your prose falls apart. Read Butler's more current work and it's a lot more easy to parse.)

(Here, have a link of Judith Butler as explained by cats.)

But honestly, academic queerness isn't the only way to be queer. Queer studies exist to break down culture and concepts and study them. It's not supposed to be a way of shaming people. And as Zuniga points out here, it's not the only way to learn about queerness. The community is the best way, and reading is another way, both memoirs and fiction. Listening to other people.

My first experiences with LGBTQ characters: Mercedes Lackey's Last Herald Mage series.  

A series. About wizards. With talking horses. And gay people.

(Yay!)

Through multiple moves, and selling of my stuff to pay car repair bills and medical bills, and my ceiling literally caving in with water, I still have that damn book. I didn't come out until I was 19, and I couldn't conceptualize it really until then. I lived in a very small town growing up. That town still doesn't have a single Starbucks. It was a big deal when we got a Walmart. For a while, every time I thought about it, I pushed the identity aside. It didn't seem to fit. I couldn't wrap my head around that and me.

There were no gay characters on television, aside from evil lesbians on DS9. The only reason I was exposed to LGBTQ characters, the only reason I saw someone representing it as normal, even as a trait that heroes might have, was because of books. 

And I was a voracious reader.

It's so important. Our communities, and our literature. Our creations. We teach and change through the common channels, the ones that don't have pre-requisites. 

Welcome Post

Hello! Welcome to my first post!

This is the blog of writer Midnight Voss. Within the year, I'll be publishing work with my girlfriend in the genre of lesfic paranormal romance. (whoo!) 

On this blog, I'll tease publications, post links to other authors, and write some reviews on f/f content in books, films, and video games. Do know that I tend to be overly critical, but for indie books, I'm taking my girlfriend's lead: If I like it, I'll talk about it. If I don't, I won't mention it.

Additionally, if I get bold, I might publish bits of poetry and upcoming novellas. In the collective, my plans are pretty varied. I have plots upcoming for apocalypse stories, vampires and fairies, teen paranormal romance, and historical supernatural romance.

Lucky for us, my girlfriend is a good organizer. Can't wait to get started.