Last week I found out that one of my oldest friends has become a father… and a woman.
Professor Evan Smith is now Professor Vivienne Ming.
It took me awhile to get my head around that. Someone once asked me what Evan was like and I said, “He’s like me, times ten.” Stoic and logical with a dry sense of humor, I guess that was a cover.
Other than upper body strength, the sexual parts and their effects on our desires I’ve always felt that gender-behavior was a series of affectations imposed on us by our upbringing. And that male-to-female transgenders were, to some extent, gay men who couldn’t deal with being gay men, usually because of their religious upbringing. But Vivienne’s an atheist and is staying with her wife. Nothing about my assumptions apply.
This is one of my own logical short comings: Politics, culture, economics, I know that the behavior of groups of people rarely has just one rational or reason. I have a harder time thinking of individuals as equally complicated. I think this is related to my biggest problem in problem solving; latching on to the first solution that comes to mind.
I lost some sleep thinking about this, but it wasn’t Evan’s transformation that bothered me, it was the fact that I didn’t see it coming*. If Evan wants to be a woman and his wife’s cool with it then that’s all that matters.
But if he’d become a Furry instead of a woman he’d be dead to me.

*This won’t happen again. I now suspect all of you of potentially becoming transgender. Not me though, I’m all man.

I’m finally on board with the His Dark Materials series. The pending movie made me do it. I once posted a list of tings that annoyed me about popular fantasy which became the manifesto for my novel. I’ve only read the first book but The Golden Compass has been pretty good about avoiding these narrative ruts.

But, now having read the book I’m a little worried by some of the things I see in the trailer, which you can watch at their Official Site.

I had to modify the promotional wall paper though:

I’m trying to put together a writer’s workshop for people working on 200 to 400 page books.

I need some critical feedback on Picking Up the Ghost and I don’t feel right asking people to read 284 pages for me unless they have a project requiring equal effort from me.

I’ve dropped in on the writers groups at meetup.com and sandiegowriters.org and while I’ve met some nice people I haven’t met anyone with a project of this size. So far it’s me and Justin with large projects (Justin’s writing about his time in Africa) and Melissa, David and maybe Tina who are either look for an incentive to start writing again or just interested in offering feedback.

I think we could use one or two more nearly finished books in the mix so if you know of anyone in San Diego who might be interested in workshopping please let me know.

406 books read

I’m kicking all your asses.