The Equality of Differences – QRM post

Hey all — my blog post for Queer Romance Month is out and I wanted to mention it here because I think people might be interested in it. I called it The Equality of Differences and I don’t think I can totally copy the whole post over here (since that wouldn’t be fair to QRM) so instead I’m showing you just the beginning of it below.

Follow the link at the end to read the rest.

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I have spent most of my life feeling like an alien on Earth. The main reason for this is because it has often felt like, at every step of the way, I was different than what society expected.

My earliest memory is of being at recess in elementary school and running up to a teacher to ask, “What’s a lesbian?” I know I asked that question because somebody called me one, but I don’t remember exactly what they said, nor what the teacher’s response was. All I know is whatever the teacher said gave me the impression it was something very bad, because I remember running back and yelling at the other kid that I wasn’t a lesbian at all.

I was too young back then to know I actually was a lesbian, and way too young to know I was asexual as well. Maybe if I’d known I wouldn’t have denied it to that kid, because later I would grow up to realize how important it is to be myself. Even when that means I feel like I don’t belong.

For anyone who’s interested, I wrote a blog post earlier this year called An Asexual’s View of Love which talks about how, to me, romance can seem like a fetishization of love. I don’t want to be repetitive so I focus on different topics in this post than I did in that one.

The topic of having romance be accessible to everyone is something very dear to me, as a woman who is definitely a romantic at heart but who also happens to be both asexual and a lesbian. I’ve often felt that the things that are expected of human beings, and especially female human beings in the US, are things that are utterly foreign to me.

There are different ways of feeling alienated or consistently “not normal.” For me, it’s always been a whole lot of little things that added up to me feeling like a freak of nature as far as mainstream is concerned. Stereotypes shouldn’t be expectations, but in aggregate they are.

Women are overtly sexualized in the US (which creeps me out as an asexual), with the expectation that men should get the most out of her and have some control of, or accessibility to, her beauty (which creeps me out as a lesbian), and with the further assumption that her end goal in life must be to have children, marry and settle down (which creeps me out as someone who didn’t like kids as a kid and doesn’t want to be around them any more as an adult).

In short, if you imagine what is assumed to be “normal,” I was almost always the opposite.

CONTINUE READING: http://www.queerromancemonth.com/ais-lin-2015

ICoS questions, mostly related to sex + ace things – SPOILERS FOR FADE/AFTERIMAGE

On tumblr, boydbaeulieu had some questions about ICoS, mostly related to Afterimage and Fade. The questions/answers are SPOILERS for people who haven’t read at least midway through Fade. So I’m putting everything behind a cut, just in case. Also because, as usual, I wrote THE LONGEST ANSWERS EVER.

If you want to read bae’s whole question post, you can here: http://boydbaeulieu.tumblr.com/post/131304627515/all-right-ais-thanks-for-giving-me-the-green 🙂 For this post, I tried to summarize the questions in order for my answer to make sense to other people, but definitely read her whole post if you want the full context 🙂 Especially in case I accidentally misrepresented anything. I am directly addressing bae in a lot of this when answering so that’s what all the “you”s are for the most part, unless it’s a generic ‘you’ anywhere.

I ended up putting this only on my blog instead of tumblr because the answer became SO LONG that it felt like it would just look utterly insane on tumblr XD Plus this way I got to use pretty colors and various sizes 😀

NerdCon: Stories (NerdCon 2015)

I made the trip to NerdCon: Stories, the first year of this new convention originally created by Hank Green and then done with Patrick Rothfuss and a whole lot of other authors. As they put it:

Nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. When people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all.  — John Green

NerdCon is here to celebrate the enthusiasm of the Nerd! We want to capture some of the most important and exciting cultural institutions in physical spaces. We started on this goal in 2010 when we launched VidCon, but it just wasn’t enough for us. Now, NerdCons celebrating all sorts of important, fascinating, and vital things will arise. We are starting with NerdCon: Stories.

Story-telling is as old as humans. In fact, it might be one of the things that helped us become humans. NerdCon: Stories is here to honor that institution with a diverse gathering of story tellers.

I heavily debated whether I would go when I heard about it, because it was expensive ($100 for tickets) and I wasn’t sure. But my friend and I were both interested, and I thought it would be cool to be there the first year of something that might take off in the future, so we went.

I am so incredibly glad we did. It was amazing. Amazing. Seriously, it was my favorite convention I’ve been to in… as long as I can remember, actually.

Inktober & Story 1: John the Wizard || October 5, 2015

I heard about inktober and thought it sounded fun to try. But then, being me, I complicated things. I thought it would be fun to draw a picture for inktober, and then write a story inspired by/about it, using The Writer’s Toolbox to give myself random prompts I would have to incorporate. This is what I did for my first story/inktober combination. I listed the prompts at the end of the story for anyone who’s interested. (I also decided, for whatever reason, I had to do minimal to no editing of the story)

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The only way John could pass the exam was by cheating.

He wanted to become a wizard with the hopes that he would be able to see the world, but it hadn’t been going so well for him. He was in his finals at school, everything resting on this last full day of skill testing, and he hadn’t been doing well. His first attempt at conjuring darkness had somehow resulted in silver glowing smoke trails, and when he tried to fix it he ended up with a pool of blood. No one was sure where it came from, and everyone very specifically Did Not Ask.

He hadn’t known how he was going to pass the test, the one that would give him his Wizarding License At Large. Trying to distract himself, he looked all around and saw her. Laurie, the supermodel student with the large cat. It was another one of those things people specifically Did Not Ask About, which was fine with him. John liked cats, for all that he was allergic to them. Something the wizarding world hadn’t yet fixed.

The thing about Laurie was that she was brilliant; she’d passed all her tests faster than anyone else, and she was nice as well. So nice that she was the only one to walk over and talk to John as he hovered at the back of the class, worrying over what to do next.

“Want help?” she asked him, and he looked at her in surprise.

“Why would you?” he asked.

A yellow bus full of wizards-who-had-already-passed-the-test flew by, making such a racket he almost didn’t hear her answer.

“I was like you, once, except in a different way. People made assumptions. I kept acing all my tests and no one believed it was possible that I’d done it. They thought since I was a girl, I had to have gotten help. When I told them it was just me on my own, I heard: There you go, making up lies again.” She paused. “That’s what they told me.”

“So… you feel bad for me?”

“No, I want you to see your own potential. You’re really good. I’ve seen you in class. You never mess up. What’s holding you back now?”