I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year. Except not really.

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, and, as happens every year at this time, the writing world is all abuzz.

I did NaNoWriMo once, a few years ago. It was pretty awesome. I didn’t actually sign up for it at the site the way you’re supposed to, because I didn’t think I’d actually be able to do it and I didn’t want to set myself up to fail (this is, sadly, a recurring theme throughout my writing life) so I didn’t get any of the support from other Nanoers that is really the reason a lot of people do it.

But it was the same year that I’d first decided to try this whole writing thing. All I’d managed to do up until then was write a lot of random scenes that I couldn’t figure out how to fit together. I’d read books on writing, I’d tried to learn more about my chosen genre (which at the time was adult chick lit), but the prospect of actually writing and finishing an entire book seemed a million years away. I had nothing to lose. So I tried it.

And I did it! I wrote an entire sequential 50,000 words that comprised a connected story arc and had an actual ending. They were terrible words, and it was an even worse story arc, but I did it. I knew within that first week that the book I was writing was going to be terrible — not something I’d ever want to consider submitting, or even revising — but I was determined to finish it, because I’d made a commitment to myself. And I did finish it. It was the biggest confidence boost I’d ever had in my writing up to that point, because for the first time, I felt like maybe I really could make a real go at this whole writing-books thing.

And as terrible as the finished product was, I learned stuff in the process of churning out those words. A lot of what I did with that book is still the same stuff that I’m doing now. Just like with my NaNo book, most of the novels I’ve written and planned since then have had two protagonists, who come from very different worlds. And, just as happened then, I often start out writing secondary characters who I start out planning to have serve as obstacles for my protagonists to overcome but who wind up being my favorite characters and threatening to take over the whole story with their awesomeness.

Since that first year, I haven’t done NaNo again. I’ve always been in the middle of a project when November rolls around, and I’m mired in my outline and to-do list.

This year, again, I won’t be doing NaNo, at least not in the traditional sense. But I did just embark on a new project, which I’m calling the Historical Novel.It involves a lot of research, which I’m still very much mired in, and which I need to do a lot more of before I can really start writing. But in addition to the research, I also have all the usual stuff I always do before I start writing — outlining, character development, etc. I have spreadsheets to fill in and plot points to figure out. And it would be awesome if I was done with all that and ready to hunker down and start writing by December 1st.

And so I have decided to do what I’m calling NaNoPreMo — National Novel Pre-Writing Month. Oh, I kill me.

So, while everyone else is pounding out words over the next 30 days, I’ll be reading memoirs and watching newsreel footage and spending still more hours at the library. Which will probably be more fun, albeit slightly less satisfying in the end.

Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year? If not what’s on your plate for November?

In Defense of Brittany and Santana

[ETA: My updated take on Brittany/Santana as of exciting new developments in March 2011 is here.]

It’s been almost two weeks now since this episode of Glee aired, so I’m late to the party here. But I feel like I keep reading more and more columns (and hearing more and more people talk) about how “inappropriate” it was for Glee to show two girls making out.

This is the clip in question:

Most people, aside from the “family” groups, aren’t phrasing it quite like I did above. Most of them are complaining that the scene is just too “explicit” or “exploitative” for “a show about high school kids.”

I’ve said before that I think it’s important for visibility purposes for the show to not shy away from showing scenes like this ― because there are so few images out there for teenage (or preteen) girls who are gay, or bi, or questioning, or whatever else, that represent them.

But I also think the storyline itself in which this scene played a part is good.

Some people seem to think this scene was put in the show just to boost its ratings, because poor poor Glee is obviously in danger of cancellation, or something (um, it’s not, not at all), or to stir up “controversy” (like this didn’t already take care of that for the week) or just to seem “edgy” (because up until now Glee has always been thoroughly pure).

I’ve also heard quite a few people say they felt like it came totally out of left field. These are people who either didn’t remember the split-screen phone scene from last season or assumed it was in jest:

Why the ‘It Gets Better’ Movement Matters

There has been much discussion today, what with it being “Spirit Day,”[1] about the “It Gets Better” campaign. Most of it, of course, has been overwhelmingly positive, aside from a few crazy anti-gay people who aren’t worth listening to (for those of us who have the luxury of being able to shut out those kinds of voices, and sadly those of us with that option tend not to be the targets of it in the first place).

But there have been adults who’ve questioned how helpful the videos really are to kids.[2] I will admit that I kind of wondered that a little at first. I found the videos moving when I watched them ― the one with the Texas city council member in particular ― but I wondered a little bit if the project was more about adults trying to deal  with the gut-wrenching series of suicides themselves.[3]

But then I thought about it some more. And I realized that the It Gets Better videos would totally have helped me when I was a kid.

Last weekend I got into an argument with gay male friends about the latest episode of Glee because (spoiler alert) a scene showed Brittany and Santana kissing in their cheerleader outfits. My friends thought it was exploitative because it was fulfilling a stereotypical straight male fantasy about cheerleaders, and because it was sexualizing children. But as for me, all I could think when I was watching it was, “Damn, I wish this show had been on when I was seventeen.”

Because kids need role models. I started watching Buffy purely because I knew it featured a young lesbian couple. I used to comb through AfterEllen.com obsessively looking for other shows with gay women characters that I could watch. When I was in high school I would sneak off to the video store to rent bad movies like Go Fish and, even worse, Chasing Amy (don’t get me started on Chasing Amy) because I needed to see myself represented in whatever way I possibly could.

But the “It Gets Better” videos have real, live, nonfictional role models. Real men and women (yeah, mostly men) looking right at you and telling their life stories. People from all parts of life — celebrities, sort-of celebrities, and lots and lots of regular people. People just like the ones the kids watching the video could grow up to be.

There were nonfictional lesbian role models available to me as when I was a teenager, but they didn’t help me much. Back then, people like Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell and even Melissa Etheridge seemed so different from me. (And I very clearly remember when Ellen first came out, when I was in high school, and how all anyone wanted to talk about that week was how gross it was. Ellen’s coming out made a big impression on me, and it was not a positive one.) If there had been women just a few years older than me telling me ― even through video (although obviously YouTube did not exist back then) ― about their lives, and what I had to look forward to… I can’t even imagine the impact it could’ve had. I didn’t suffer from bullying or depression in high school, but I spent a lot of time struggling with my identity on several levels, and I had very little help in working my way through that.

There are no easy solutions to any of this stuff. There never will be. I don’t think society as a whole will ever eradicate bullying. It’s human nature to pick on each other, and it’s in some individuals’ natures, especially some kids’, to keep going past the point when you know you really should stop. Will we ever get to a point where bullying someone for being LGBT, or for being possibly LGBT, is taboo, the way bullying someone for their race is (theoretically) taboo now? Maybe. It’s tough to imagine, but you never know. Ten years ago it was tough to imagine the U.S. having a black president.

But the reason I think the It Gets Better project is so important ― besides the selfish reasons I mentioned about how it would’ve helped me personally ― is that it’s an inherently positive message. It’s people telling kids that life is good. That they’re having problems now, but they will be loved and accepted. I feel like so much of the dialogue around LGBT issues is argumentative and negative ― “Stop taking away our rights!” etc. When you start an argument, even if you’re on the right side, you automatically give the other side a platform to argue back with you. Which leads to more gay kids having to listen to people on the news, people in their schools, people in their churches, and sometimes people in their homes talking about why gay people are bad. And often, when that’s happening, it doesn’t matter what “your” side is saying, because all you hear is the other side telling you you’re evil.

So positive messages are essential. And that’s why I think regardless of any criticisms, the It Gets Better project is a freaking amazing thing, and I hope it continues to be in the public consciousness for years and years to come.

And now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go reread the opening scene of Boy Meets Boy (speaking of positive messages, and things that I wish had been around when I was seventeen…)

---

[1] By the way, yes, I wore purple today, even though I have mixed feelings about that sort of campaign (I’ve been in nonprofit activism for my entire adult life and have been through many, many, many “Wear _____ on ______ day” and “Post ______ to your Facebook status” and “Give a dollar to ______ cause every time you shop at ______” campaigns).

[2] And also about the fact that the videos also aren’t as diverse as they could be. Which is a problem. But I agree with those who have pointed out that, since the recent suicides have all been carried out by boys, it makes sense that a lot of those immediately inclined to respond were the gay men who saw their past selves in those kids.

[3] Which, by the way, is also important, because the last thing we need is for the LGBT community as a whole to slide into a mass depression the way we did after the 2004 election. Man, that still gives me PTSD every time I think back on it.

History is Scary

I’m currently trying to write a historical novel. Everything I’ve ever written has been firmly contemporary, and for that reason and others, I’m terrified of this undertaking and not at all sure that I’ll be able to make it work. But I’m resolved to try.

That means I’ll be writing from the point of view of characters whose lives take place in an era pre-women’s lib and pre-civil rights. Every time I’ve tried, it’s been nearly impossible for me to imagine what the world was actually like before those things. That’s really why I’m so nervous about this ― because I just don’t know if I’ll be able to accurately capture that consciousness.

And because my protagonists are always LGBT (it just happens that way, even when I don’t plan for it to), I also have to think about what it would’ve been like to be queer in a time where not only were 99.9% of all queer people closeted, but where the fact that queer people existed wasn’t even acknowledged, and so kids growing up weren’t even aware that there was such an option available in life.

I love love love the idea that I have for this historical novel, which has as its working title “Historical Novel” (because I am a Creative Writer!), and that’s why I’m so determined to give it a fair shot. But up until now, history has simply never seemed that appealing to me as a writer. It’s largely that I think American teenagers now live in such an interesting time and place. I was first inspired to write LGBT YA several years ago when I was volunteering at D.C.’s annual Youth Pride festival, when I found myself talking to high school student after high school student who had stories about school-endorsed Gay-Straight Alliances, walking down the halls holding hands with their girlfriends, wearing T-shirts that say “Challenge Your Gender!” ― all stuff that would’ve been unthinkable at my high school when I was there in the mid-90s. But even when I was in high school, stuff was happening there that would’ve been unthinkable a couple of decades earlier ― interracial dating, reading The Outsiders in English class, wearing flip-flops to the prom. I think 2010 is a fascinating year to be sixteen, and I’m glad that I at least got to be sixteen in 1995 instead of, say, 1945. Or worse ― much, much worse ― 1895.

But at the same time I’ve always wondered how different my life would’ve been if I’d been born just a few decades earlier. I mean, the life I have now ― I’m 31, I’ve never been married, I live alone in a condo that I paid for out of my own money, I support myself through a full-time professional office job, and I never managed to learn to cook ― would’ve been unthinkable to both of my grandmothers. (And that’s even aside from the gay thing.) So it’s interesting to try to view the world from the eyes of an earlier generation. Especially knowing that every generation before now thought they were the cutting-edge ones. That their times were new and shocking. I wonder what my grandmothers thought of their grandmothers’ lives.

So the other night, I was out having dinner with my awesome writer friends, and talking to them about how I had this historical fiction idea that I loved but that I didn’t feel qualified to write because I didn’t understand the era well enough, and they were (very nicely) like, “Uh, have you tried, you know, going to the library?” And then they proceeded to give me lots of helpful advice about why libraries are good. And then they went home and looked up resources and emailed them to me, and one of them, who in addition to being a fabulous YA paranormal writer is also a far better Googler than me, found and sent me a link to a library exhibit just a metro ride away that was on the exact topic of the Historical Novel.

So that’s what I did yesterday. I spent all day hanging out in the library being helped by extremely helpful librarians. (Seriously, I don’t remember librarians ever being like this when I was in high school and college and doing research for papers and science projects and the like, but these librarians were very “You just sit here at this nice comfortable table with your laptop and we will bring you some stuff to read! And it will be exactly what you’re looking for! No, no, don’t get up, I am going to go look on the computer for some more stuff for you and then I will go find it in the secret back room! NO WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T TRY TO RESHELVE THAT BOOK, YOU WILL JUST DO IT WRONG, LET US DO EVERYTHING FOR YOU!” I kept waiting for them to offer to run out to the Starbucks for me, but sadly even the extremely helpful librarians have their limits.)

So since apparently everyone, from writer friends to mysteriously generous librarians, is determined to help me write this book, I am going to try really hard to write this book. I’m now sketching out my first notes on the protagonists and their families. I’m going through my notes from the library and doing more web research. I currently have 13 Firefox tabs open with potentially useful research info on them, waiting to be read. (This is in addition to the 8 Firefox tabs I always have open regardless of what else I’m doing. The fact that I ever managed to survive prior to the invention of Firefox is in retrospect astonishing.)

(Another life benefit the teens of today have that I just bet they don’t appreciate!)

Hanging out with other authors is AWESOME

So the other night I had dinner with two DC writer friends, Caroline Richmond and Jessica Spotswood. We found each other because we all signed fairly recently with the same agent and we all write YA/MG. This dinner was the second of what we’re hoping to have be a regular thing.

I know everyone says this and it’s not exactly a groundbreaking revelation but it’s still fantastic to actually see it for myself ― that having writer friends who are going through / have been through the same thing you are is SO INCREDIBLY AWESOME. Talking to them makes this incredibly intimidating thing called the “submissions process” seem a lot less scary, and makes my anxieties about it all feel a lot more normal. Plus they have great book recommendations (which reminds me, I need to go get the Kindle edition of The DUFF as soon as I hit Post on this).

Plus Jessica and Caroline were both super-encouraging and had extremely helpful suggestions about my idea for what could be my next book (if I can figure out how to make it work ― it’s a historical, which is extremely terrifying as it involves massive amounts of research and learning how to write 60,000 words without including a single “dude” or “like” among them, and I’m not sure which of those scares me more, and there will probably be a post entirely about this coming up soon so I won’t go into it all now).

And all of this is also to say that it’s why, at long last, after years of learning about writing and publishing mostly on my own via proficient lurking, I’m now blogging and tweeting and otherwise attempting to participate in the larger writing world. And I registered for SCBWI in New York this January too, which I’m really extremely excited about, because hanging out with writers in person is pretty much amazing.

With all of this, up until really recently, I’ve constantly been struggling with myself to justify it. Conferences are expensive. Social media is time-consuming. And I felt like, since I wasn’t yet a “real writer,” I had to conserve my resources.

It also took me what felt like forever to finish my first book , and while I was still working on that I didn’t feel like I was a “real writer,” because real writers HAVE ALREADY WRITTEN a book; they don’t wibble and write and rewrite the same mediocre eighty thousand words over and over, which is what I felt like I was doing. And then, once I had finished that one, I still didn’t have an agent (I wound up signing with my Awesome Agent for my second book, which took me approximately 1/12^th as long to finish as my first book, because… uh, that’s going to have to be a future post too, I think.) But so, because I didn’t feel like a “real writer,” I didn’t think I could indulge in writerly stuff that wasn’t actual writing.

Which was all just self-flagellation, really. Ironic, because as everyone knows, real writers are the best self-flagellators of all!

But now I’m going for it. I will do all that other writerly stuff, because now I know for sure that it really is helpful to the actual writing. Which isn’t to say I won’t find plenty of other things to punish myself for as this weird thing that I’m still wary of calling my “writing career” continues.

Because that’s how I know I’m doing this “writer” thing right!

I Need Stories; or, Why I Didn’t Like ‘Inception’

I just saw Inception, which made me about the last person in the U.S. to do so. (But on the off chance that you have managed to miss it as well, be warned that this post is loaded with spoilers.)

Inception is a pretty cool movie, in a lot of ways. The effects are great, the performances are good, and there are not enough movies these days naming their characters Ariadne. Also, the central idea is very compelling, even if it didn’t feel particularly revolutionary.

So I wanted to like it. But, by around the time Ken Watanbe explained his Macguffin-esque “goal” to Leo, I sort of gave up and sat back to watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt be funny and Ellen Page’s hair fly around prettily.

It made me think, a little bit, of that awesome video review of The Phantom Menace, in which the reviewer pointed out, among other things, that the movie’s central flaw was its absence of a protagonist. Inception, in contrast, has a protagonist. We know he’s the protagonist because he’s the most famous actor in the movie. And the protagonist of Inception has a character arc. And if I saw the movie two or three more times I could probably articulate that character arc pretty well, but based on my one viewing all I can tell you is that he sometimes got confused about which was the real world and which was the dream world.[1]

So, it’s not a wholly character-driven story. That’s okay. Inception opens with a big, cool action sequence, and that’s great. I like me some big, cool opening action sequences. I like watching people try to fight in zero-gravity too. And I liked the suit Ellen Page wore in the generic-high-end-hotel layer of the dream. All that stuff can be awesome.

But there needs to be a story thread to tie it all in together. And Inception’s story thread was revealed too slowly and wasn’t compelling enough even when it was all there. The story of the movie is, presumably, the real nature of the relationship between Leo and Marion, but that isn’t made clear until about 2/3 the way into the movie, and there are still revelations happening in the last possible moments, but by then I had given up on developing any sort of connection with either of them, because all they had done for the whole movie was look meaningfully at each other and talk about stuff I didn’t understand.

Not to mention that, as Marion finally pointed out, the “real world” the characters inhabited didn’t feel particularly real. I kept waiting for a big reveal at the end that the whole thing was just another dream layer, and that Marion’s interpretation of what “reality” was had been right all along. In the non-dream-world, Leo kept flitting from country to country, being chased by generically-named corporations, engaging in mad dashes through crowded places that entailed elbowing innocent bystanders in the face and squeezing through random narrow corridors, having way-too-cute phone calls with his too-perfect children who never aged, and getting told how amazing he was by everyone who’d ever known him, including his randomly British father and randomly French, occasionally dead, wife.

Even the effects, which normally would have drawn me in on their own, felt pointless here because they weren’t real. I love effects sequences in otherwise bad movies like 2012, because they’re premised on the idea that, for example, California really is falling into the ocean right now, and that’s a scary scary idea because I know there are fictional people down there who are going to have to swim to Vegas and they aren’t all going to make it, and gosh I sure hope John Cusack’s plane doesn’t run out of gas before they get to China! Etc. Sure, Inception changed its own rules halfway through and announced that getting killed in the dream world, which was previously a good thing, was suddenly bad. Okay, fine. But am I really supposed to have an opinion about buildings crumbling into the sea or the Champs-Élysées folding in on itself in the dream world when I know for a fact that there are no buildings and there is no Champs-Élysées? It felt like I was just supposed to be sitting there, not caring what actually happened, but simply being impressed by all the fancy things movie computers can do. But I already know what movie computers can do, because I saw The Lord of the Rings. But in Inception it wouldn’t have mattered if Legolas climbed an oliphaunt, because the oliphaunt would have existed entirely in Legolas’s head. (Or Cillian Murphy’s, I guess. By the way, how awesome would it have been if Cillian Murphy’s dreams has been about Legolas and oliphaunts, instead of getting kidnapped and chatting up bottle-blonde sex workers? Maybe then I really would’ve seen the movie a second time.)

Even Avatar, which was far more effects-driven than Inception, had a compelling story. It wasn’t earth-shattering ― it was the same story used in Dances With Wolves and Pocahontas and a hundred other stories about the complications of colonialism. It was there, mostly, to prop up the scenes of aliens running around in funny outfits and kissing with their ponytails. But that’s fine, because it was still a strong story, and because we’d been introduced to a protagonist whose central problem was introduced early on and clearly, and because we got to meet the other important characters through the protagonist’s point of view, which made us start to care about them the same way the protagonist did.

To bring this back to publishing, and YA in particular, for me, this gets to the whole “high-concept” idea that’s always getting thrown around. Inception would certainly qualify as high-concept. But there’s a reason that the most successful high-concept series in recent YA memory, Hunger Games, had people going to war on message boards over how its love triangle subplot would be revealed, instead of gushing about its insights on reality TV and desensitization in modern society. (I mean, not that people didn’t talk about that, but as far as I could tell they pondered that for a second or two, and then they went back to looking at fanart of Peeta.) But did anyone really care whether Leo and Marion somehow found a way to be together by the end of Inception?[2]

Story concept alone doesn’t do it for me. Not without strong characters and a strong story that’s about those characters. I’m surprised that formula ever works for anyone. But Inception was a big hit and got good reviews.

So maybe I was just having an off day. Any Inception fans want to weigh in? I’m worried that I just missed something really obvious.

---

[1] There was a lot that I missed in my single viewing, by the way, because the plot points got thrown out so fast and offhandedly in between the long, long sequences in which buildings crumbled and Ellen Page moved mirrors around. Did we ever find out what Marion Cotillard’s big secret that she locked in the safe was, by the way? Did I miss that too?

[2] And hey, if you did, more power to you; it’s entirely possible that it just flew over my head, the way the plight of all the poor kids in Rent did when I saw that movie. (I just kept trying to puzzle out how Mark and Roger hadn’t already starved to death, what with the lack of any apparent interest in getting jobs. I walked out of that movie feeling older than I had ever felt in my life. And I was 8 years younger than most of the principle cast.)

On Coming Out Day and LGBT YA

Today’s National Coming Out Day. Huzzah!

I used to work for a gay rights organization, so Coming Out Day was always a really big deal there. Now it’s easier to forget when it’s coming up. Because it’s so different now than how it started out in the 80s. Now, I doubt that many people really come out because it’s Coming Out Day. Because that’s not really the point anymore.

Now, Coming Out Day is more about recognizing the fact that “coming out” isn’t a one-time thing ― that you come out throughout your life. Which feels very normal by the time you’re an adult, but when you’re a teenager, it’s a foreign and, in many cases, terrifying idea.

If you’re a teenager, “coming out” might mean the first time you tell another person that you’re lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, or elsewhere on the spectrum.

Or it might mean the first time you tell a particularly important person. Say, your best friend who you have a crush on. Or your best friend who stops being your best friend after this. Or your best friend who’s an even better friend after this, because now, for the first time, you can really be honest with each other.

Or it might mean the first time you tell your parents. Maybe they already suspected. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they care a lot. Maybe they care a lot, and not in a good way.

Or this might be the first time you acknowledge who you are to yourself. People forget about that step sometimes, but it’s the most important part of the whole process, and for some people it’s the hardest. It can take a day, or it can take years. For me, my sexual orientation was something that very slowly seeped into my awareness while I was busy doing other things. But a friend of mine swears he knew he was gay when he was in kindergarten.

Coming out as a straight ally counts as coming out, too. And it can be a big, big deal. You never know who you might be inspiring just by casually noting that you may not be LGBT yourself, but you’re cool with people who are. It could make someone want to open up to you who’d been scared to do that before. Or it could make someone who hasn’t given much thought to this stuff before realize that they could, and should, start talking about their support for their LGBT friends, too.

But no matter who you’re coming out to, the circumstances depend on how old you are, where you live, your religion, your ethnicity, your political beliefs, your personal support system, and a hundred other things. They depend on what your friends are like, what your family is like, what your community is like. No two coming out stories are ever the same.

It’s been said that coming out stories are over now in young adult fiction. That they’ve been done. That teens aren’t interested anymore.

Even without getting into the whole question of whether anything in YA has “been done” to the point where it can’t be done again,[1] I don’t see the logic behind that argument. Every story I’ve written has had a teen LGBT protagonist, and each one has included a coming out ― or outing ― element, but I wouldn’t call any of them “coming out” stories. Nor do I think I’ve ever read an LGBT YA I would call a “coming out” novel, if we’re defining “coming out” stories as those that focus only on a character telling people that they’re gay. Annie On My Mind and Keeping You a Secret are romances. Geography Club and Rainbow Boys are a coming of age stories. None of them is any more a “coming out” story than Hero is, even though Hero is about discovering you have superpowers and the others are about being gay in high school (and, in AOMM’s case, the dangers of ear-piercing).

Because the thing is, if you’re writing about queer people,[2] then your story has to be a coming out story, at least a little bit. Because coming out is just a part of life. Someone’s always finding out you’re queer. And someone’s always expressing their opinion about it, whether you want them to or not. If you’re queer, or even if people just think you are, you’re constantly brought into conversations about what your sexual orientation or gender identity means to someone else. Sometimes these coming-out conversations are informed and respectful. Sometimes they’re not.

An LGBT teenager doesn’t just come out once. With that first coming-out experience, they’re starting a process that will continue for decades. When they get asked whether they’re going to the prom, and who they’re going with. When they choose their “interested in” option on Facebook. When they hold hands with their boyfriend or girlfriend at the mall. When someone sitting next to them on the plane strikes up a conversation and asks about their family.

Because teens aren’t the only ones who deal with this. I just started a new job and met a bunch of new people. Sooner or later, somehow or other, the word is going to trickle out that I’m gay. I have a little control over how it starts, maybe, but most of it is out of my hands, because that’s just how these things work. And that’s fine, because I’m lucky enough to have a workplace that’s very accepting of these things, and because it isn’t a big deal to me either way. But I still know people will be talking about it, and I have no choice but to live with that knowledge, regardless of how I feel about it.

So even though Coming Out Day is definitely a “Huzzah!” occasion, it makes me think about this stuff. Especially with all that’s been going on over these past few weeks. Sometimes coming out is a lighthearted tweet, and sometimes it’s a conversation you spend years rehearsing. Sometimes it makes no difference at all, sometimes it has life-changing consequences. But either way, coming out is a big, big deal.

Congrats to everyone who came out today, for the first time or the fiftieth time. Know that wherever you are, however you did it, you did an important thing.

Huzzahs all around!

---

[1] Which, obviously, I don’t agree with.

[2] Who live in the real world, I mean ― fantasy worlds like the one in Ash are another post entirely.



So It Begins

Hi. My name’s Robin, and I write YA.

Damn. That sounds too much like I’m walking into a twelve-step meeting.

Okay, let’s try this again:

Hi. I’m Robin Talley. I am a writer of fiction. Someday hopefully some of it will be published and perhaps some of you will read it.

No, that just sounds lame. Not to mention that it’s very badly written, thus casting doubt onto my aforementioned claim of being “a writer,” whether “of fiction” or otherwise.

So, how about this:

Hi. I’m Robin, and I’m a lurker. I’ve been hanging out in the shadows of the writing/publishing universe for years, on various email loops, publishing blogs, author sites, and writing forums, not to mention Twitter, Facebook, and anywhere else on which I could figure out a way to lurk.

Occasionally in the past I have come out and posted something. Then I would promptly stick my head back in a hole for the next six months.

This lurkerdom wasn’t by design. It was guilt, mostly. I felt like I wasn’t a “real” writer yet and as such I shouldn’t be spending time doing stuff like hanging out on blogs and forums. I should be writing. Write, write, write. Be a writing machine! Never stop writing! Hey, what are you doing watching that West Wing rerun? You already know what happened! Toby was the leak and Jimmy Smits is the new president and Zoey had Pete Campbell’s secret love child! Now, go write some more!

But now I am trying to cast off my lurkerdom and enter the world of posting. I recently became agented and am preparing to go out on submission with my first YA novel, and I realize that I can’t keep hiding forever. Nor do I want to. All of those non-lurking writers look like they’re having a much better time than I am, what with the tweeting and the commenting and the posting of photos of hanging out with other writers doing writerly things like drinking copious amounts of coffee and/or alcohol and talking about how scary copyedits are.

None of which is to suggest that the guilt has gone away. It’s still there. I feel like I should be writing right now. Which, technically I am, but you know what I mean. Writing on the Internet doesn’t count. I should be writing about fictional people doing fictional things in secret on my hard drive until months from now when they’re ready to be unleashed upon the world, at which point the world can tell me why all those fictional people, and the things they’re fictionally doing, suck.

But, nonetheless, here I am.

Pippin, in repose

Anyway, me in 100 words:

I write contemporary young adult fiction about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender characters (because my goal is to become a bajillionaire and, obviously, given the current economic climate, writing novels about queer teenagers is the most likely method of achieving that); I live in Washington, D.C., and work for a non-profit organization (because see above re: aspirations of becoming a bajillionaire); and I have a cat named Pippin whom I am slowly attempting to transition to low-fat cat food (because I don’t want the neighborhood cats to tease him through the windows, as I can tell they’re a nasty sort).

So, hi. Here we are. I’m looking forward to getting to know folks. Let the non-lurking begin!