I’ve been thinking about liminal spaces. Ah, the hallways between life’s moments. I’m not comfortable in these spaces, particularly the space between knowing something is coming and experiencing the event. I hate getting in the shower. Once, I’m in the shower, I hate getting out. When I wake up, I want to be on the couch with my coffee and my book, the way I typically spend my mornings. I do not want to be making coffee and peeing and feeding the dogs and letting the dogs outside and eating breakfast. It’s not impatience per se. It’s not laziness. But a secret third thing.
There was a year between the day I told my wife I was trans and the day I told everyone else I was a woman. It was difficult being in the space of so many others not knowing, but while sharing my gender with others was exciting and freeing, a small part of me missed this thing that had only been known by a select few, a secret.
My gender was never quiet. Even when I thought I was a cis man, I wore loud jewelry and bright red lipstick and dresses and lacy bras and glitter on my fingernails, but all that was different when I realized I wasn’t a man. It hefted a weightier burden, like every time I put on makeup, I was making a statement instead of playing around. It felt better and worse at the same time. Lots of trans people have talked about this (including me) but when you realize you’re trans, dysphoria spills onto places it’s never been before. When I put on lipstick after I came out, the stubble on my face grew loud. When I wore a dress, I could only see the hair on my legs. I wanted dysphoria wiped clean. I didn’t want to go through the process of changing my body. I wanted to have transitioned.
When I started my daily estrogen intake, the emotional and mental changes were nearly instant. For the first time ever, the ground felt solid beneath me. I woke up with a clear head. My body was mine. The physical changes were slower, a little over time. Breast buds turned into tits. Chest hair lightened and nearly disappeared. My ass grew fat. Skin soft.
It took years, and at the time, it felt too slow. I wanted to be there, on the other side of second puberty.
Then one morning, you wake up and simply feel like you’ve arrived at hotness, like yourself, like gender is a program that runs quietly in the background, updating itself periodically and not drawing CPU.
Now that my gender has settled, I miss the messiness. I miss the excitement of learning what kind of woman I was, of the discovery that hormones made sex so different and so much better, that food tasted different. I missed the feeling of vastness, openness, of frightening uncertainty.
This is all on my mind, because I turned a corner with the novel this week. I’ve been writing it for two and a half years, but for the first time, I saw it as a whole. In the first few years writing a book, it’s a lot of exploration, trying on different hats with plot and characters and tense and POV. I always have a destination but in the early stages it is only a scene or two ahead of where I am. Eventually, I reach a point where I see how the book ends. I’ll sit down and write the ending then and there, even if there’s a lot that must happen before my characters get there. With The Boy with a Bird in His Chest, I wrote the scene where Clyde finds Owen in a coffee shop two years before I finished the book. Six months ago, I wrote one of the final scenes to this next book. Andrew Sean Greer once compared writing novels to doing a crossword puzzle. You fill in the answers you know and then go back and fill in the gaps, using the scenes you already have as clues as to what happens next.
This next book is a doozy. It takes place over a very short time span, only four weeks. (My last novel spanned seventeen years.) It follows five characters and has other books/lore woven throughout. I knew what I wanted it to be when I set down to write it, but of course, it’s grown bigger than what I imagined. I’m not quite good enough to write it now, but I will be by the time I’m finished. It’s fun. It’s frustrating. Books teach you how to write them.
Anyways, last week I saw all the gaps missing from the novel. I wrote down a list of all the scenes left to write, maybe fifteen in total and I got to work, crossing them off the list one by one. As always, the novel’s beginning has been eluding me, but yesterday I woke up and saw the book’s structure for the first time, how I need to set up certain events earlier in the book, and how others shouldn’t play out until much later.
I can feel myself leaving behind the exploratory phase and I’m sad. I imagine I’ll finish the few scenes I have left in the next two weeks. I’ll print it up, mark it to high heaven, and rewrite the whole thing in a couple months.
The last month and a half has been grueling. I’ve felt this chapter in the process of writing the book closing. Back then, a few weeks ago, I just wanted to be here. Now, I miss being there, sad I didn’t cherish the mornings where I was writing funny scenes with characters whose connections were unknown to me. Of course, I was in that space for two years, but still, I miss it.
I’m trying to do this less, trying to enjoy liminal spaces. I want to embrace the unknown. Something, something, it’s about the journey. *cue eye roll*. I’m realizing that these in-between spaces are all we have, that that thing over there is always shifting. All we have is here. All we have is now.
A Spell for Being Here
OOOOOOOHHHHHHH, GIRL YES! CAN YOU FEEL THAT EARTH BENEATH YOU?!? I am so pumped you made it here! Your soul was swirling around with the pulse and then it zoomed down to Earth and now we’re together. Doesn’t it feel good to be together? That’s what this is all about. Feeling sad. Feeling bad. Laughing. Fucking. Crying. Waiting for the bus. Eating a fig. Smiling. Sitting on your ass on the couch for seven hours, binge watching Love is Blind. These are all the things you can only do if you have a body, and we only have these bodies for a short period of time. Use it before you lose it! OH ME OH MY! OH HELL YES! Holy shit, it’s so cool, we’re on this planet together. I’m so glad you’re here. Fuck, I’m so glad everyone is here. It’s a pleasure to be here with you all. I’m crying. Thank god, I’m crying. I love you.
A Note:
I’m super excited to be teaching two virtual courses with Writing Workshops Dallas this winter.
The first is called “Pushing Through: Carrying Your Manuscript Over the Finish Line.” It starts on January 19th and runs four weeks, Thursdays 5pm pt - 7pm pt. It’s going to be so much fun! I’m going to be finishing up my own manuscript alongside the students. The course description: “Part-support group, part-craft class, this four-week course is designed to help you finish that draft of your manuscript. We'll read craft essays about drafting a book, set aside time each week to discuss problems we're having with manuscripts, and design a schedule for each student to ensure everyone addresses the issues specific to their draft.” Class size is super limited because I want the space to feel intimate and want to provide room for us to address problems as they arise. The class has been filling up quickly.
For the second class, I’m resurrecting my class on place and setting! “When New York’s a Character: On Writing Place and Setting” begins February 4th and runs for four weeks, Saturdays 11am pt -1pm pt. I taught this class last summer and the feedback from students was super positive. Course description: “Over the course of four weeks, we will explore place and setting in writing, learning how to capture the sights, smells, sounds, and feelings of our world, exploring everything from grassy meadows to paved cities. We will learn specific research techniques for capturing moments in the past in places we can no longer visit as well as well techniques for catching details in the spaces we inhabit.”