#nonbinary writers

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"i know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful."

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

[seventhofcrows]

Does any other writers on the autism spectrum when writing things repeat themselves or concepts over again without knowing? Its becoming an issue since I write an lot like that for fictional stories which is sort of pissing me off because its coming off really redundant thanks to how I personally am. But I also have that tendency in speaking in general, too.

If somebody does, is it okay to be that way? What advice would you give if somebody on the spectrum was to try and improve on it? Am I alone with this. Please let me know.

I have been quite dead off the face of the earth, but perhaps I will respond back to you. Or not. Its not like I'm being rude, I am just really busy.

[sapphicchickens]

essay by sof sears on their substack “heartmouth” (heartmouth.substack.com)!!!

[inclusivefuture]

Why we pay professional rates to contributors

It is not unusual these days for literary magazines to charge submission fees and/or to offer publication without payment. There are myriad reasons for this, many outlined in a great opinion piece by Joy Lanzendorfer (link in the reblog), but one of the most basic and prevalent being that it takes money to run a lit mag, even a very small one. (Example: it costs us about $250 a year just to maintain our ad-free website.) Many lit mag editors are already volunteering their time and energy to the project and literally can't afford to fund it.

Being writers ourselves, we recognize that it is a privilege to be published - a privilege often denied to those of us who are from marginalized and underrepresented communities.

But as editors, we recognize that it is an even greater privilege to publish work we love and want to see out in the world. Especially when we are soliciting work specifically from marginalized and underrepresented voices. Especially when people from these marginalized and underrepresented communities are often under physical threat and psychological duress simply for being who they are. Especially when people from marginalized and underrepresented communities often face employment discrimination, including reduced job opportunities and lower wages.

And especially when our contributors are undertaking the important - we believe, necessary - emotional and intellectual labor of developing a collective vision for a sustainable and socially just future. Labor that benefits not just marginalized and underrepresented communities, but all of us who want to live in an inclusive future that recognizes, validates, and celebrates the vast diversity of human experiences.

Therefore, one of the earliest and easiest decisions we made about this anthology project was to pay professional rates for contributors' work and to charge no submission fees.

As a speculative fiction publication, we're using the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) guidelines. As a professional organization, SFWA requires its voting members to have professional credentials, and one of those requirements is that a member needs to have been paid professional rates for a certain amount of their published work. Every so often, SFWA reviews and may change what counts as professional payment; currently (August 2023), that rate is 8¢ USD per word for prose.

Paying a SFWA professional rate allows our prose contributors to count work published by Inclusive Future Magazine toward their SFWA membership requirements. More importantly, however, paying our contributors professional rates is the right thing to do.

Submissions for Issue 1 are still open until October 6th, 2023! We're still looking for prose pieces inspired by our cover art and by Al Hess's illustration, a movie poster for Unbreakable Butch, political cartoons or comics, and fake advertisements. See the pinned post on our blog for more info!

[adventurerswritingguild]

Join us for our first ever OPEN MIC WEEKEND featuring members of the Adventurer's Writing Guild & Poetry Orchard communities!

🍍Friday, May 5 @ 6:30 PM EDT | 11:30 PM BST hosted by @nashira 🍓Saturday, May 6 @ 2:00 PM EDT | 7:00 PM BST hosted by @shylovrs

🍊Lineup subject to change ⚔️Sign ups close May 4

[liminalflares]

When one of your favorite humans is also one of your favorite writers (not to mention favorite poets) and they publish a new short story, it's cause for celebration no matter what the state of the world or the state of myself.

I'll never forget the first time I read one of Sonya's poems, from Salt is for Curing, long before that magical little volume had a list of print editions accumulating behind it. My breath caught in my throat as the raw resonance of their words drew me in while everything went still and quiet around me.

We hadn't met each other yet - I had no idea that we one day would - but I felt like they were speaking to intensely personal aspects of myself, as though they knew me through and through. Years, adventures, and many miles later, they do know me far, far better than most. 

And each time Sonya publishes something new, I relish the awareness that the engrossing scenes they set, the palpable incantations they weave, the emotions they so vividly and potently conjure, will find and speak to the innermost parts of others too.

So here we are, and "Here are the Ones That Went" is an achingly mournful marvel:

It’s Sunday and we are standing, as we do every Sunday, in the small kitchen of your apartment. There are the white-and-blue cups we gulp tea (and sometimes wine) out of. There is the Soviet kitsch rug, slightly off-centre, nailed to the wall behind the couch. An electric kettle hisses assertively on the Formica counter as an easy silence unspools in the soft space between us. Yet I have no idea where any of these things came from. You didn’t own them when you were alive. 

Today marks three months—thirteen Sundays—since I received the brochure outlining my new government benefit: how many Visits are covered, what to expect, what I should do to promote ‘accelerated healing’. In the centre of the tri-fold is a stock photo of two women laughing. I return to it again and again, searching for a sign that one of the women is less real than the other. That one of the smiles doesn’t quite reach the eyes. I want to know which one represents me and which one represents you and I want to know about laughing—alone, together, or at all. 

The first time I saw you after your death was also a Sunday, warmer than this one, slashes of blue in an overcast sky. I was feeling nostalgic in a way that was probably clinical, drifting numbly past flowers and baked goods at the co-op down the street. The situation called for ice cream, I thought. But what do you like? I couldn’t remember for the life of me. For the life of me, I whispered to myself. Ha-ha. At the self-checkout I scanned a carton of Neapolitan, literally nobody’s favourite. Outside the air was thick with possibility, like something you could climb. A trio of street performers gyrated to a hideous tune.

Read the rest of "Here are the Ones That Went" in ANMLY #36.

(long-exposure Holga photo by me)

[fragileswift1313]

Need for Speed Unbound!

Or as I like to call it, High-speed Head-on Collision Simulator 2022

Kia ora, friends!

This is gonna just be a short one this week due to ongoing mental and physical health issues, but on that front I have some news: I think I’m slowly but surely getting better!

But anyway, I wanted to talk a little bit about Need for Speed Unbound this week because I have been playing it a lot over the last few weeks (when I have had the energy) and I can’t think of a game in recent history that has made me rage quit and want to throw my controller so many times but still is able to pull me back in. I love a good arcade racer; my favourite series in this genre is obviously Forza Horizon (and to a lesser extent Forza Motorsport, which I am still excited for in October), but I have been known to dip into Need for Speed now and then. This latest entry, launched last year, recently came to Xbox Game Pass, so I decided to check it out.

My first dive into this game was via Xbox Cloud Gaming and y’all, that service is great for some games, but for a game as fast-paced as Need for Speed Unbound, I absolutely do not recommend it 😅. Playing it this way, I was constantly crashing into things that I didn’t see because the frames fell out, so it didn’t take long for me to decide to make some space on the tiny Xbox Series S internal storage and download the game to play locally. Once I got that out of the way, I started to have a blast… for a while. My TV, which was 1080p, died a couple of months ago, so since then I’ve been using a TV I borrowed from my sister, which is 720p, and let me tell you, again for a game like this, it’s… a less than optimal way to play. Once I started getting into faster and faster cars, I started crashing into things again. A lot. This isn’t a failure of the game itself, I don’t think, I’m just playing it in a really stupid way 😭.

Apart from all the technical stuff I just mentioned, Need for Speed Unbound is really fun. I think my favourite part, though, has been customising my character, as well as the paint/wraps on some of my cars.

I wish I had more pictures of the different outfits I’ve had my character wear, (I haven’t had the time to go back to the game before writing) but I still really like this look. And oh boy do I love that car. It’s one of the cars the game gives you in the beginning, a Nissan GT-R from I want to say 1997 (or thereabouts), and it’s fast, great at drifting, extremely hot, but the best thing of all: I made it look queer and non-conforming as fuck.

The game limits what you can write on your cars, I assume because it’s possible other players could see it, so it wouldn’t let me write ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ or ‘bitch’ or ‘fascist’ - those first two are kind of bonkers considering the amount of queer representation this game contains, but I digress. So I substituted ‘fascist’ with the succinct ‘fash’, and instead of ‘basic bitch’ I wrote ‘basic beach’, which the latter is honestly kind of better anyway.

The racing is fun, though frustrating sometimes thanks to the game only giving you a maximum of retries per in-game 24-hour period, but what really stands out to me is that there is so much queer representation here - like way more than I’d have ever expected from a Need for Speed. There’s one NPC racer you meet and race against named Justicia who is from Mexico and is openly transfem. There are signs around the city that say things like ‘love is love’, or simply have the pride flag on them. And as you may have noticed on my car in the pictures above, you can just put the pride flag and trans flag all over your car if you want - and not just that, they have every single type of pride flag I could think of, which blew me away. Seriously, more games need to be this open about supporting queer communities. There’s also a bunch of representation for people all over the world - the music in Need for Speed Unbound includes tracks in Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, French, and a few I couldn’t nail down just by listening, and it’s honestly super refreshing.

Anyway, that’s all from me this week. Sorry if it feels a bit like it was put together at the last minute because, well, it was, but I wanted to make sure I had something for you.

Thanks so much for reading, y’all, I appreciate it. As always, if you have any comments or questions, hit me up on the social links at the bottom of the page, or flick me an email! If you want to read more stuff from me, you can check out my Letterboxd reviews! This week I reviewed Robot Jox (1989), which I believe may have inspired some of the aesthetics of things like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Pacific Rim.

Stay safe and warm out there (or safe and cool, if you’re in the northern hemisphere!) y’all, and I’ll talk to you all again really soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚

Rebecca

| Mastodon | Bluesky | | Cohost | Substack | Facebook | itch.io | | Letterboxd | Instagram | | Carrd | Email |

[nonbinaryresource]

https://www.defunktmag.com/submissions

Defunkt Magazine is looking for submissions on queer pride! Deadline is March 31st!

About ECLIPSE

“I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.” - Audre Lorde, Sister, Outsider.

People who are biracial, nonbinary, multicultural constantly find themselves not being able to fit into the mold of what our society expects of them. Michelle Zauner in the essay/memoir Crying in H-Mart speculates on her mixed-race identity following her mother’s death. Audre Lorde in the essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” published in Sister, Outsider, talks about her inability to fit into the “mythical norm”—a knowing at the edge of our consciousness that says ‘that is not me’” when we look at what our society reveres as “normal” (i.e. straight, white, cis-het men). Rachel Charlene Lewis, a mixed-raced queer essayist-poet writes in the essay "Queering Gender, Queering Genre," published in Electric Lit, “There is, for me, validity to be found in space less easily labeled.” All of these great writers, thinkers, and creatives recognize that they do not fit on the binary scale of life and seek to break that scale. While society might reject our outsider status, within our work, all the many parts of ourselves are allowed to live freely and without judgment or definition. We want to read the parts of you that are not easily defined. We want all your facets, all your sides, all of your phases. No longer will we eclipse the parts of ourselves to better fit into a binary, we will become the sun, the stars, and the moon, all wrapped up into one.

Those chosen will have their pieces published online and in print as well as receive payment. Payment varies based on our Patreon subscriptions. Volume 10 contributors received $8.50/person and ANATOMY contributors received $13, and we expect that number to increase or stay the same for this volume.

Requirements

<4,000 words

If submitting flash (<700 words), you can submit up to 2 pieces

12pt Times New Roman or Garamond font

doc., docx.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us immediately when a piece from your submission is accepted elsewhere.

Submit by Mar 31

[gor3sigil]

Before starting T, when I socially transitionned, I was surrounded by radical feminists who saw masculinity as gross and inherently evil, something to avoid, something to make fun of, something to destroy. The other transmascs in my friend group, sometimes, told me that they didn’t knew if they really were non-binary or if they just were scared shitless of saying “I am a man”. Because they saw this as a betrayal to their younger self who had been SAd and abused.

I saw many of my masc friends and trans men around me hate themselves, not outing themselves as men because it would imply so so much, it was like opening the Pandora Box. Even when we were just together, talking about our masculinity was always coated with bits like “I know we’re the privileged ones but…”, “I don’t want to sound like I have it bad but…”, “Women obviously have it worse, but last time…” and we were talking about terrible traumas we experienced while taking all the precautions in the world in the case the walls were a crowd of people in disguise waiting to get us if we didn’t downplay the violence we faced, or like crying and being upset and being traumatized and afraid and scared and to say it out loud would make us throw up the needles we were forced to swallow every second of every day living in our skin.

Most of us weren’t on T yet, some of us were catcalled every day and harassed in the streets or in abusive relationships nobody seemed to care to help them get out of because they were “strong enough” to do it by themselves.

I was using the gender swap face app and cried for ours when I saw my father looking back at me through the screen. The idea of transforming, of shedding into a body that would deprive me of love, tenderness, and safety, was absolutely terrifying. I knew I couldn’t stay in this body any longer because it wasn’t mine, but I also knew that if I was going to look like my dad, my brother, my abusers, it would be so much worse.

5 years later and I’m almost 2 years on T, and almost 2 months post top surgery.

I ditched my previous group of friends. I was bullied out of my local trans community. But let me tell you how free I am.

I was scared that T would break my singing voice: it made it sound more alive than ever.

I was scared that T would make me less attractive: it made me find myself hot for the first time in my life.

I was scared that T would make me gain weight: it did. But the weight I put on is not the weight I used to put on by binging and eating my body until I forgot that it even existed. It’s the weight of my body belonging to me, little by little. The wolf hunger for life.

I won’t tell you the same story I see everywhere, the one that goes “I started going to the gym 8 times a week, I put on some muscles, I started a diet and now I look like an action film actor”, in fact if you took pictures of me from 5 years ago vs now I’d just have more acne, I’d have longer hair and still look like I don’t know what to do with myself when I take selfies.

But the sparkle in my eyes, my smile, tell the whole story way better than this long ass stream of words could ever.

I want to say some things that I wish someone told me before starting medically transitionning.

It’s okay to take your time. It’s your body, it’s your journey, if you don’t feel comfortable taking full doses and want to go slow, the only voice you need to listen to is your own. Do what feels right.

If you feel overwhelmed, it’s okay to take a break, it’s okay to ask for support.

Trans people are holy. Everyone is. You didn’t lose your angel wings when you came out because you want to be masculine. You are not excluded from the joy of existence, from being proud of yourself, from being sad, from being scared, from being angry. The emotions and feelings you allowed yourself to feel while processing what you experienced when you grew up as a girl and was seen as a woman are still as valid as before. Nobody can take that from you. If someone tries to, don’t let them.

It’s perfectly normal to grieve some things you were and had before you started to transition, like your high soprano voice or even your chest. Hatching is painful. You can find comfort in things that don’t feel right, so making the decision to change can be incredibly scary and weird and you deserve to be heard and supported through this. Wanting top surgery doesn’t make the surgery less intense, less terrifying, less painful to recover from. When it becomes too much you have the right to take a break and take some deep breaths before going on.

You don’t have to have a radical, 180° change for your transition to be acceptable or valid or worthy of praise. Look at how far you’ve come already. It doesn’t have to show, you’re not made to be a spectacle, you’re human and it is your journey.

Oh, and last thing, you know when some people say “Oh this trans person has to grow out of the cringy phase where you think that you can write essays about being trans or transitionning or just their experience because it’s weird” ? If you ever hear this or see this online, remember all the people whose writing you read and, even if they were not professional writers, helped you more than any theorists did ? If you want to write, do it. It won’t be a waste. It can help people. Or it won’t, and even then, if it helped you, that’s enough.

Love every of my trans siblings, take care of yourselves. You deserve the world.

[this-world-of-beautiful-monsters]

both this book and the song it's based off fucking ruuuuuuule

The Deep

Rivers Solomon

Yetu holds the memories for her people--water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners--who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly is forgotten by everyone, save one--the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu. Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities--and discovers a world her people left behind long ago. Yetu will learn more than she ever expected about her own past--and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they'll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity--and own who they really are.

(Affiliate link above)

[tommy2020]

I’m a boy and I kiss other boys.

I’m a boy and I was not born a boy.

I’m a boy and I use unconventional pronouns.

I’m a boy and I want to live as a boy.

I’m a boy and I want to be free to say that out loud.

I’m a boy and I want to live without fear of being hurt.

Just like the other boys.

My friend is a girl and she likes boys.

My friend is a girl and she was not born a girl.

My friend is a girl and uses she/her.

My friend is a girl and she wants to be called a girl, not a slur.

My friend is a girl and she should be allowed to live as a girl.

My friend is a girl and she shouldn’t be assaulted because she is a girl.

Just like the other girls.

My sibling is nonbinary and they like every gender.

My sibling is nonbinary and they were not born that way.

My sibling is nonbinary and uses whatever pronouns they feel like.

My sibling is nonbinary and wants to be perceived as a person too.

My sibling is nonbinary and should be allowed to choose what they call themselves.

My sibling is nonbinary and shouldn’t be shoved under the rug because their gender identity “doesn’t make sense”.

Just like other people.

WE ARE PEOPLE.

TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"i want to raise a city behind his teeth for all boys of choirs & closets to refuge in."

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

[charliejaneanders]

Writing any kind of story is a scary proposition, especially if it deals with personal stuff. And writing about trans people during a bogus moral panic is especially daunting -- it's easy to either pull your punches, or feel as though the burden of good trans representation weighs on your shoulders. The good news is that we are living during a time of extreme riches when it comes to trans stories, and a ton of wonderful authors are writing trans tales that defy categorization and bust through boundaries. So please write the story that speaks to you, the story that only you can tell about your own obsessions and dreams. It can be scary or funny or comforting or escapist, or all of the above — don't worry that what you write will be singled out as the One True Trans Story, or seen as a representation of all trans people. Just write your story.

Writing Trans Stories For Fun (and Liberation) --- My latest newsletter!

[incaseofwriting]

Not a spam bot - just a new side account for @augmentedampharos/@incaseofart/@goldenworldsabound! For posting my writing and writing resources/memes/etc, as well as occasionally reblogging relevant art.

AO3 account is organized by series - each series is focused on a different OC (typically with a romantic pairing with canon as well). Feel free to ask anything or reblog anything posted here.

[future-crab]

It's been said before, it will be said again, but it's still worth saying: the fact that art centering on straight romance is allowed to just be bad, but art with queer romance in it always has to be indicative of A Serious Problem With the Way We Tell Queer Stories makes being a queer person making queer art deeply stressful

[maveras-posts]

🤡ART IN BED🥵

Art in bed would include:

Ok for starters…A JACK RABBIT

This man can do the deed five times a day

Contrary to belief although he can be selfish in bed, he also will want his partner to feel pleased so expect not to walk ✨WhEeLChAiR MoDe✨

TOYS anything you can think of he has

Art has a collection of toys you could only find in Davy Jones’s locker(It is outrageous)

Ropes, whips and every other dastardly object you could think of 🎶Chains and WHiPs ExCitE MEeEe💃

Expect to wake up with head and go to sleep with some head (Think about facepaint spread all over your inner thighs)

This man ✨EATS✨ like a demon man frfr what that tongue do tho?ALOT—

His aftercare is also very top tier, he’ll stay with you until you fall asleep (He don’t ever sleep tbh)

Art is all about quickies too, he’ll fuck you anywhere a chance presents itself

But the damn horn will go with him everywhere INCLUDING the bedroom 🥲

I swear you’ll be laying down post fucking and you’ll hear the ✨HONK✨ in your ear😭

He’ll try everything and anything as well, this man is truly a wildcard

ANYTHING you wanna try he’ll be apart of👀

For AfAB: Be prepared if your on your period he’ll wanna fuck you even more (I swear the man smells blood like a damn shark 🦈)

All in all he’s a FREAK but you’ll never be dissatisfied that’s for shore💅😜