I didn’t know before June 4th, and I don’t know now. :)

But in case you wanted the NYC experience, there are now two live podcasts of our performances: one at Le Poisson Rouge and one at Book Thug Nation with the lovely people from Moonshot Magazine.

Additionally, the more I see of Topside Press, the more I like them – and not just because they’re publishing me and at least one of my Facebook friends. Since I’m probably the only trans person on earth who isn’t writing a novel with a transgender main character, I’m passing this along for signal-boosting purposes: Topside Press 2012 Novel Manuscript Competition.

I think my favorite part of the guidelines is this bullet point:

[The novel should be] about adults. Trans writers (and writers writing about trans people) seem to want to write about being children a lot. That’s cool, but its not what we’re looking for. First of all, it is very difficult to write well in a child’s voice (notable exceptions aside). Second, we think that this drive to write about trans kids comes more from an impulse to justify trans people by saying we were “born this way” and that’s a tired scene.

Other than this, I haven’t had much news to report.

If you live in Chicago, perhaps you’ve heard the news story about the staffing company that abruptly shut down, stiffing almost 2,000 people out of their last paychecks and leaving only a shady and rude handwritten note in the window of their office? Yeah, I worked for them. They owe me about $300 and I’ve filed a claim against them with the IL Department of Labor.

I’m also working on some new material. It’s an autobiographical story about two queer people working in a corrupt and dying hotel bar. And that’s all I say for now…

I want to show all you other aspiring writers something. This is a screenshot of my Duotrope account:

Yeah, that’s right. I have a 2.4% acceptance ratio and I should consider that pretty good.

The other day I was reading Bonnie Jo Campbell’s blog, and she mentioned that her acceptance rate, prior to publishing American Salvage and Once Upon a River and becoming recognized as a rock star, was about 1% as well. As for the other end of the equation, I have a rejection letter from Zyzzyva taped to my wall* in which editor Howard Junker lets on that his editorial rejection rate is about 99%.

Only in the world of traditional publishing could a system exist in which a 1% acceptance rate is considered normal, and in which everyone wishes the circumstances could be different.

*Howard Junker’s form-feed rejection letter is one of the best pieces of mail I have ever received, and I urge those of you based on the West Coast to get your own copy.

Yesterday, I accompanied two friends to a local high school, to give a presentation to the Gay-Straight Alliance about being genderqueer, and a few people talked me into a writing a recap for this site. I’ll be writing this post to try to make it accessible to a broader audience, hence all the hyperlinks.

So, today I understand myself as a person who isn’t a man or a woman but rather a blend of both. It’s been a complicated path.

People are always asking me if I’m going to write a book about being non-binary. I always say no. For one, I’m hyper-conscious of the struggles I’ve had with the trans narrative*, and I worry a lot about inadvertently setting up an equally repressive counter-narrative to that. My feelings about being seen as a spokesperson or representative or role model are extremely complicated. (Had I been the only non-binary person invited to speak on this panel, for example, I’d have probably refused to do it.)

Also, if I were to write a book, I’d be a lot more interested in writing about how a person moves through the world while living in a gender that is not legally or socially recognized as valid. And that’s what I tried to give the audience on Thursday.

I started by telling them about a conversation I had with a close friend: I was angsting to her about not knowing whether I was a man or a woman, and she said “I think you’re one of those people who’s both.” And I answered, “I know, but how do I live like that?”

I told them a little about going from F to M to WTF: how I first came out to myself and to almost everyone I knew as a transgender man, and started attending a FTM support group. How I met all kinds of trans guys, from meat-and-potatoes guys to skater punk guys to tough guys to sensitive guys to glittery gay guys, but I could never shake the feeling that these guys were guys, and I was something else. Then I talked about coming back to Chicago, where I met a handful of people who were actually out as genderqueer in their everyday lives, and how they inspired me and supported me.

I explained a little about the dynamics of being non-binary on a day-to-day basis. For me, I’m generally very invisible as a gender-variant person. When people pass me by in the street, they see me as either a preppy-looking guy with stud earrings on, or as a woman with short hair, and neither of those things is all that shocking where I live. My negative experiences with bathrooms have mostly been limited to staring and rude questions. (The two other folks I was with are both generally perceived as either extremely flamboyant gay men, or as highly visible trans women, and their experiences of being in public are very different from mine.) On one hand, I feel largely insulated from gender-based harassment and violence, but on the other, I am constantly verbally coming out to people. I spend a lot of time deciding whether and when to tell people, anticipating and managing people’s reactions, and generally doing 101. (Which I hate doing. Here’s the righteous and pissed off 101.)

I also told them that my decision to be out, in my life as a writer, was largely about what I needed the audience to know about me in order to get a sense of where I’m coming from. It’s about coming from a place of authenticity, about understanding.

However, at my night job (waiter), I’ve chosen not to out myself, because even if I were certain that no one would respond with hostility, I can’t wait tables and also have that conversation over and over at the same time. The sheer volume of people I interact with each shift precludes it. So I simply don’t correct people when they misgender me. About half the customers call me sir and the other half call me ma’am, which amuses me.

I explained how my name works: that both Katherine and Scott are my first names, that I have no preference as to which one people should use – pick one, switch them up, compound them, it’s all good. (Yes, I often wonder if I wouldn’t be better off just picking a gender-neutral name, instead of dragging around two heavily gendered ones, but those are my names, and I feel really strongly about them.**)

The kids asked great questions, like “What has your experience been with the main LGBT community centers?” (generally between mixed and good), and “How do you handle public restrooms?” (Ex. Hold it. Start making mental maps of where all the single-stall bathrooms are. Pee on anyone who bothers you – though I don’t recommend this one.) And, of course, the ubiquitous “How did your parents take it?” (The jury’s still out.)

All in all, it went really well, the kids were totally interested in what we had to say, and even the teachers took note. I ended my segment by reminding everyone in the room that they had the right to name and define their own experience, the right to change and grow, and the final say over who they are.

And even though living like this can be really difficult, I go through the world with a sense of personal integrity and authenticity, and I feel present in my own life for the first time, and that makes it all worth it to me.

*I couldn’t find a neat enough link, so let me define this one really quick: “The trans narrative” refers to the life story in which every transgender person was aware of their trans identity ever since early childhood, always despised living in their assigned gender, and always displayed behaviors and identifications stereotypically associated with another gender. It fits some people better than others, and some people not at all. The problem with it is that for 60+ years, it’s been the story every trans person had to tell to gatekeeping medical professionals in order to access medical interventions, such as hormones and surgeries, and is still widely used as a litmus test in order to determine whether a person’s gender identity is “valid.”

**Fun Fact: I modeled my full name after Rainer Maria Rilke… who I’ve always wondered about.

A few weeks ago, I read a very interesting article about a study done on music performance students in a prestigious university program. It contrasted the study habits of the best students in the class, the ones the teachers most admired and expected to go on to have successful careers in music, with the average, pretty-good, or technically proficient students in the class.

The top-ranked students spent an average of 2.5 hours a day engaged in focused, deliberate practice that they broke up into regular periods – a couple hours in the morning, a couple in the afternoon seemed to be about normal. They maintained very clear boundaries between “working” and “not working” and spent a surprising amount of time chilling.

The pretty-good students? They spent about the same amount of time, but spread it out in scattered periods throughout the day and night. They also slept much less, and probably spent a significant amount of energy stressing about how they weren’t being productive enough.

As someone who aspires to Category A but was heavily socialized into the habits and mindset of Category B, who learned to see constant “ambient” work as virtuous and productive, and R&R as lazy and as symptomatic of unearned privilege, this study really intrigued me.

Then, recently, I stumbled across this video:

Tony Schwartz: The Myths of the Overworked Creative from 99% on Vimeo.

which corroborates a lot of the musician study, in ways that make sense on a body-deep level.

So with both in mind, I’m changing up my writing process in the following ways:

• Bring a lot more focus and structure to my writing time. I’ve been experimenting with a method of spending 45 minutes engaged in intense and purposeful work, then resting for 15 minutes, then making the decision as to whether to begin another 45/15 cycle. So far, it’s been very successful. Bonus: prevents RSIs. (I know about the Pomodoro Technique, but a 25/5 ratio is way too Twitter for me. I actually suspect my 45 minutes needs to be 60.)
• Shift my personal goal from quantity of writing done to quality of writing done. I used to set a minimum daily word count for myself (1000), which was sometimes useful for breaking blocks but overall a lousy indicator of how I was progressing as a writer. It led me to rush over difficult problems in order to meet an arbitrary goal instead of spending time working through them. I also suspect it led me to waste a lot of energy on endless rewrites instead of getting it right the first or second time. For example, if the full number of Have You Seen Me drafts I’ve composed in my life was near the triple digits, I would not be surprised.
• Maintain a very clear boundary between “working” and “not working.” No more watching I Survived online with my notebook open on the desk next to me, or checking Facebook while editing. I use Chrome, so I finally downloaded the StayFocusd extension, which  can not only limit your total daily time spent on Facebook and e-mail, or keep you off them during certain hours of the day, but also block up to 100 percent of the internet for a set amount of time, if that’s what you’re into. It’s an awesome program and I should have started using it years ago.
• Value rest and sleep much more than I do now. Stop viewing chill-out time as wasted time. Don’t work so late into the night that I need 3 glasses of wine to drop me. Be really territorial about “me time.”

And that’s it for now. I plan on reporting back in a month and letting you all know how it’s going…