Technically, I started working on my current project in 1995. The genesis of the tale was a short story that I wrote in the summer of that year, then thought I'd lost in one dead laptop or another. I found a hard copy in the bottom of a file cabinet drawer in 2007, and it turned into The Book. I don't think there's more than a paragraph of that original story left, because it's been revised out of existence. But those 2,800 words turned into over 75,000.

But that's not the drawer I'm talking about. I'm talking about a drawer...of the miiinnd! (I'm waggling my fingers at you and making spooky eyes.)

There comes a time when you just can't think about a story anymore. I call this the God I Hate This So Much Now stage. Me, I've spent the past two months a) revising the first 187 manuscript pages and b) writing the last seventy pages. I'm lucky if I can get through two pages without throwing my hands up in disgust and running sobbing from the room.

This is where the drawer comes in. It's where you put the story, figuratively, so that you don't have to deal with it anymore. It's defined temporally, rather than spatially: right now, I've put The Book in a drawer that's a week long. I'm not working on it, reading it, or thinking about it.

That's the goal, anyway. It's difficult to avoid thinking about a story that you've lived with for so long. Last night, for example, I ran through a whole alternative scenario for a chapter before remembering that the story was in the drawer.

But then! Ahhh. Relaxation. No need to fix anything, or tweak a sentence, or try a different word out for mental mouth feel.

So nice.

Of course...things percolate anyway. But I don't have to pay them any mind. This is the beauty of the drawer.

Thanks to Prashant Sharma, the asshole who runs the IMBrat.com spam site, comments will be closed until further notice.

I suppose I ought to crank up the Fanfare Box. Why, yes. I do believe that would be appropriate--some extra noise. Perhaps even confetti. Streamers! And semi-naked dancing girls, and an open bar with a strong-jawed tender! Because I have finished the first draft of The Book.

I haven't done that before. Not on this book, or any book at all. It is an entirely new-to-me thing, this thing that I have done! The dreaded 25,000 word mark? Passed. Fear of never finishing at all? Conquered. The manuscript currently weighs in at 75,139 words, a respectable heft.

I suppose, too, that I can now tell you my elevator pitch, first positing that the hypothetical elevator is going from one floor to another floor very quickly, because it's not really a full pitch. More like a movie pitch--such as, "It's Die Hard...with elves!" Call it The Enticement:

Myra Breckinridge meets The Great Gatsby in a pre-Apocalyptic New York.¹

So there it is. Would you read that? I would, but that's because I wrote it.

Needs work, you say?

Well, yes. The whole book still needs work. That's the trouble with this first draft business: yes, finishing it is a milestone I've never passed before, but it's by no means the end of the work. Now I'm into the nifty revision stage. I love revision. It's the polishing process: knocking off a bit of roughness here, working this piece up to a high sheen, reshaping that piece to give it just the right proportions, building unity and a sense of flow into the whole endeavor. It's probably my favorite part of the whole writing endeavor. I think it suits my non-linear nature, because it requires jumping from place to place in the narrative. You buff up one portion to a fine gloss, then realize that the shininess needs to be reflected in another, related portion earlier on, and so you take your soft cloth and rubbing compound over there and get to work. Very exciting. Much more exciting to me than the actual writing of the thing, which requires long solitary stretches of sitting in one place and doing one thing at a time until you pass out.

And that, my friends, is the big big news! There is other, even bigger news in the offing, but that particular piece of bigger news is also secret, and I shall tell it to you when the time is right.

---

¹Oh, the pretension! No, I am not comparing myself to Vidal and Fitzgerald. I'm being flip, see.

The fine folks at dispatch litareview have published my short story, "The Test."

Shelley sat alone in a dark-leathered corner booth at Cartwright’s, sipping his tumbler of icy vodka and appreciating the separation between those who wanted to be seen dancing and those who wanted to be seen having a drink or three. The dancers reigned on an acoustically isolated dance floor, insulated from the rest of the club by technological sleight-of-hand. On Shelley’s side of that invisible barrier, the low murmur of conversation floated above a soundtrack of one-hundred-and-fifty-year old jazz standards.  He couldn’t hear the music that accompanied the flickering rainbow of laser strobes on the dance floor. The dancers were silent, like darting tropical fish.

Read the rest right here. I'm on page 25. (Note: it's in .PDF format, and it takes a little while to load.)

I've been off mucking with my fiction instead of paying attention to you lovely people. This I attribute first to the length of time it takes the earth to rotate--which is too short--and then to my mammalian brain's need to shut down for eight hours out of every rotation, and finally to my complete lack of access to chemicals which will either shorten the need for the second reason or significantly change my perception of the first.

Despite these celestial and neurochemical handicaps, I have in fact managed to eke out more chapters--thrilling, yes, I know--and am mostly succeeding in keeping the terror of The Suck at bay.

The Suck. I use that term a lot, but I don't think I've ever defined it.

The Suck
Function: noun

Date: 21st century

1 : a state of being that is qualitatively sub-par, wretched, completely unworthy of any acclaim, and generally boring, despicable, and awful.
2 : the personification of that state, usually amorphous. Wears a hat that does not inspire confidence.

Every writer fears The Suck, whether they admit it or not. It's what makes us rewrite the same sentence a dozen times, then throw up our hands and douse ourselves with gin. It's what yanks us out of bed in the dark and wee hours to scribble down a line of dialogue, only to discard it in despair at breakfast and have another Bloody Mary. When you've published your first story, The Suck is at your ear, whispering, It's a fluke, it'll never happen again. As you package up your queries and your sample chapters, The Suck sits in the corner, shaking its head. The Suck is omnipresent and smells of old rubber erasers and failure.

The joy is in overcoming The Suck, pressing onwards in spite of it, getting to the end of the chapter or the story. Sometimes you can defeat it outright, with an honest You know, this is pretty good. But it comes back, lurking in old drafts. There's always more of it to stamp out.

If that sounds terribly neurotic, well, it is a bit, but a writer free of neurosis simply isn't trying very hard. I use it as motivation. I usually know when my arrangements of words aren't as good as they could be, because that's where The Suck hovers. If I'm on my game I can rearrange things so that they're better, passable, or at least entertaining. But how would I know to revisit those rickety corners of the tale, if not for The Suck? It really provides a service. The key is to not let it take over and overwhelm the entire project. Nobody wants The Suck to take up residence on a manuscript, sitting atop it and smoking its cigarettes while it mocks you with the sheer volume of work you'll have to do to banish it.

That's why I've found that it's best to deal with The Suck as soon as I can, whether it's creeping around a word, a sentence, or a paragraph. Wait too long, and it'll get ya.

And nobody wants that.

Over at Sully's place, Patrick Appel is puzzled by Christian Rudder's contention that 80% of the OK Cupid users who identify as bisexual are really only interested in one gender, based on the number of messages that such users send to one gender or the other.

OkCupid is a gay- and bi-friendly place and it's not our intention here to call into question anyone's sexual identity. But when we looked into messaging trends by sexuality, we were very surprised at what we found. People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect.

[...]

This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous to their (straight) matches.

Actually, what it suggests is an unrealistically rigid expectation of what a sexual preference categorization actually indicates. "Bisexual" does not indicate a 50/50 preference split. It does not indicate an absence of preference. It is not a constant.

I get irritated by people who create their own definitions and then accuse other people of lying when they don't fit into the categories they've invented. And yes, that's exactly what Rudder is doing--the title of his post is "The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating." For someone who claims that it's not their "intention here to call into question anyone's sexual identity," he's certainly done a piss-poor job of not calling anyone's sexual identity into question.

The implied argument is an expression of ignorance. The assumption is that if someone is not messaging to both male and female OK Cupid user at a given level of frequency, they're not "really" bisexual.

Suppose I only use OK Cupid for seeking online dates with women? Suppose, if I'm in the mood for a bit of man-to-man, I have other sites I use--say, a site specifically for same-sex contact? Furthermore, the underlying assumption that bisexuality is a fixed value is ridiculous. If I haven't been on a date with a man in five years, does that mean my bisexuality membership has expired? If I'm in a long-term relationship with a woman, does that mean I'm all paid up on my straight club fees?

This sort of crap is why I don't really lay claim to any of the three Officially Sanctioned Preferences™. Each one is loaded with its own social baggage, none of which matches, and none of which belongs to me. This isn't my attempt to adopt some kind of more-exotic-than-thou persona. Some people are perfectly happy trading on the sexual misconceptions of others, which is its own sort of delicious little game, but I've run out of patience for that sort of thing. There's always someone on either side of the fence--or directly astride it--who thinks that they've got The Way Things Are all figured out, and who will want to put you in one of their three little boxes.

I'll sort myself out, thanks very much.

Okay, so it's not the end of The Book (hence the absence of "frabjous day") but it is the end of the first round of revisions, and that I am quite happy about indeed. In the process I added thirteen new manuscript pages. Seven percent new stuff! That is a fine New Stuff Rate, and I can say that because I own the New Stuff Rate algorithm.

Now I am once again in the territory of writing all new stuff, a 100% New Stuff Rate for those playing the home game, roughly five chapter's worth, or 15,000 words if you want to think of it that way. Part of the reason I stopped writing new stuff and started retyping the entire existing manuscript was because I wanted to immerse myself in The Show So Far. It's easy to forget the little things in Chapter Five when you're barreling through Chapter Twenty-Two, especially if you haven't quite mastered the Ass In The Chair Every Day style of writing-fu.

That said: I don't think I want to do it this way again. Too haphazard. I think, for the Next Book, there will be a) more of an outline, and b) more Ass In The Chair more frequently. This stop-and-go nonsense results in writerly whiplash. And my thinking is, the more consistently you spend time in the world of your Book, the less need there is to stop everything and retype the manuscript to get that whole immersion thing going.

Part of that, too, has to do with keeping the head screwed on securely (notice I did not say "straight;" it can be crooked, but it has to stay on). So much of the first book--and thank whatever culturally constructed fiction deserves thanks for such things that there will never be another first book--is spent neck-deep in uncertainty. I still have no idea what the end result of all of this will be, but at least when I start on the second book I'll know how the first one turned out, so I will have just that much less uncertainty to deal with. Even so: any amount of uncertainty is more difficult to deal with when the head is wobbling all over the place. External factors impede the progress of the Art, you see. So if Art is the priority, it then behooves one to make sure that the wobbly-headedness is minimized, and that means doing mundane things like eating properly and exercising and drinking the correct amount and avoiding soul-crushing depression (unless that's key to your art, in which case, crush away).

And that is why I am happy that I got a little package of California roll sushi to eat late this evening, instead of my usual bag of Jack in the Box or pint of ice cream or other foodstuff that fills the synapses with sluggish bad fat. All of that crap makes it so much harder to get the words out, and it also means that the words that you do get out are also sluggish and full of bad fat, so that they require more attention in post-production. Part of the purpose of revision is going back through it all and making it seem like it was written in a single state of authorial intent with the clear genius of consistent devotion! And that process is made more difficult if you're fighting the head-based wobbliness, because then you've got to go through and eliminate the wobbliness that doesn't belong in the story.

So! Eat right, write more, know your algorithms.

LATER

Man, was I punchy when I wrote this.

Yeah, you heard me. I said that. (Actually, Saboo said that, but I appropriated it which makes it mine.)

Crunchy have been my dreams of late! But my fingers remembered their old strength better once they'd grasped my keyboard, so that's what I've been up to. The mighty revision process! More of a proto-revision process, because the first draft of The Book isn't actually finished yet. I'm just revising what I've got (which is 187 pages of manuscript) so that I can write the last five chapters or so knowing that they'll actually match up with the previous twenty-three. I solved the broken world problem by adding two decades to the timeline. This may turn out to be too much, so I may bump it back to fifteen years or ten. Because I am the master of time and space, God to my characters!

They've been behaving, which pleases me, because that means that I've portrayed them with enough depth to really know them. It's a bad time for an author when a character goes flat--they lose direction, then, and wander off to do unpleasant things in the corner. I've come to understand "resistance"--that phenomenon where the story grinds to halt and refuses to be written in a way that feels right and proper--as a problem of character. If things aren't going well, look first to the members of your cast, and find the one who's not well drawn and three-dimensional. If they're all nicely rounded, then identify the one that's being forced to do something out of character. And if everybody's got depth and is doing what they'd naturally do, then perhaps you don't have enough conflict for a story. Have them start hitting each other with sticks until something presents itself.

The routine itself isn't particularly interesting: put thirty pages of manuscript in the manuscript stand, commence typing, pause occasionally to chew on a particular word or phrase, and--even more rarely--enjoy the opportunity to rewrite an entire scene or add a new one. So far I've added about seven new pages out of 157 or so, scattered throughout the story in various paragraphs and sentences. I think it's working, but I'm looking forward to finishing this part of it and getting on with the final wrap-up. It's new territory, for me: The End. I wonder what it will be like...whether I'll have pure satisfaction, or experience the terror of The Suck, or some combination of the two.

I'll let you know when I get there.

So admonished Ipu-wer some 4,200 years ago. Nobody knows much of anything about him, except that at some point he spouted off a bunch of such things, prophecies in the Biblical sense, which means they're not so much about the future as about one fellow standing before Pharaoh and saying nasty things about the past and present governance of Egypt. All cloaked in metaphors about sinking crocodiles, Rivers of blood, grieving nobles, and fumigation via incense. The last two columns of the papyrus--described by the translator as being in a state of "lamentable destruction"--tantalize us with the words, "Once upon a time there was a man who was old and in the presence of his salvation, while his son was still a child, without understanding..."

Actually, that's not very tantalizing at all, but that's all we get. Nothing else is heard from Ipu-wer. I wonder if, in his own time, he was held in the same regard as the tentative prophet in Life of Brian, who prophesied that "At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer, and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock."

"Ipu-wer?" they'd say. "Was that the guy who went on about men sitting in bushes and robbing people, and about how the go-spells and enfold-spells don't work anymore because nowadays any old tosser can say them aloud? Pfah!" Who knows? Maybe all the good material was in missing bits of the papyrus. Maybe all that stuff about not having enough cedar for the mummies was just Ipu-wer warming up, a prophetic throat-clearing before he laid into Pharaoh with raging holy fervor and let everyone know that the gods were really displeased with his corpse-buggery or whatever it was that Middle Kingdom Egyptians found scandalous.

But now all we've got left of him are a few columns of unremarkable cryptic metaphor and stories that defy consecutive translation, barely enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry, and really only noticed at all because some of his scribblings might possibly refer to a small group of wandering Semites whose own collected prophecies and tales later became part of the best-selling book of all time.

I suppose the lesson here, if any, is that if you can't write your own deathless prose, write about somebody else who's bound to be fabulous and important so that you might at least survive as a minor point of interest appended to their fantastically dramatic and splendid life.

Here's to the Ipu-wers of present-day Earth! May you lot of hangers-on choose your subjects with care and diligence, and may the inevitable loss of most of your work be described in a footnote as "lamentable." 

There is now no reason to be fearful, because He of the Holy Wealth & Hellfare Department is come in a big ship of light bearing hundreds of pairs of black sneakers. Look, it's on the flickering box! With a 1-800 number and a website.

We are talking some SERIOUS SALVATION here, Saints! This is the kind of offer that only comes oh once every two thousand years or so. Time to jump on board the big MESSIAH SHIP and flitter off to the throneroom of Heaven!

god@eternity.com

Plus, if you act now, you get this free set of steaknives. They'll cut through a tin can and still slice a theologian like this! and that! and...that!

But wait--there's more!

Yes indeed! Try Judeo-Christianity for thirty days risk-free and receive Islam for only $4.99! Complete your collection and save a Whopping Eighty Percent! It's a small price to pay for COMPLETE COVERAGE. Act now!

Quality of experience may vary. The distributor assumes no liability implicit or implied and is not responsible for misinterpretations, wars, sloppy thinking or mistranslation of original supplied texts. Manufacturer's warranty does not cover damage to exterior buildings, the smashing of temples, or the success of an ethnicity. Your results may vary.

But wait--there's more!

Occasionally I have an urge to post nothing but scat.

No, not that, you filthy person. You know--Ella Fitzgerald bee-doodly-op-bopping for 32 bars on "It Don't Mean a Thing." That kind of scat, hep cat. Skiddly-diddly-oh-no!

That sort of thing doesn't translate well into pixels, though. It's more of an expression of a generally positive and somewhat overflowing creative urge, a sort of writerly, procreative yawp. Meeeee I'm making word-worlds! Thickening plots! Sharpening characters! Bee-deep-bop-oh-whoahh-zaaa!

Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series-style thing I wrote are also going to be posted on Girls with Insurance, "a magazine focusing on humor, silliness, stilted declarations, sly foxes, fiction, poetry, pop culture, and everything which causes orgasms the world over."

Presumably you've read them here, but even if you haven't, do have a look at GwI. I'll just wait here...

Yes, yes, I hear you say, that's all very interesting and you're a clever chap who uses big words and quotes Aristotle and posts pictures of Simone de Beauvoir's ass, but what does it mean for the storytelling? (Or, I might be hearing the voices again...mustn't rule that out.) I can only tell you what it means for my storytelling, which is fortunate, because this little solipsistic corner of the web is in fact largely about me.

There's a certain kind of character arc that deals with a person who's coming to grips with his own transgressive nature--coming out of the closet, for example. The tale centers on the internal struggle, the external hardships, and, if everything goes well, at the end of it all the character stands revealed as whole, fully clothed in his new personhood.

I'm not interested in that kind of story.

At one point when I was figuring out my own freakiness it was good to hear tell of others who were doing the same thing, but now that I've got all that settled such stories just don't move me the way they used to. I'm interested in characters who have normalized themselves, who are surrounded by people who've done the same. No tortured internal conflicts about identity, no confronting a hostile world from a place of uncertainty. What I'm interested in are the freaky characters who meet the world from the same solid place of courage and conviction as non-freaky characters. Most of the heroes of contemporary popular fiction don't suffer from questions about their heterosexual white male- or femaleness while they're fighting wizards or making out with vampires. As far as the fundamental facets of their identities go, they're settled. This frees up story space for more important things like spells and fangs and explosions.

It also frees up space for extraordinary things to happen to people just because they happen to get caught up in events, rather than because of who they are. A fine example of this is what Joss Whedon did with the character of Tara Maclay. Sure, she was a lesbian, but that was less important than the fact that she was a kick ass witch, and when she got shot and killed, it was because she was in the path of a random bullet that had nothing to do with homophobia. She died a fine and senseless death, just like any of Whedon's other characters might.

That's what I'm all about right now: characters for whom their transgressive nature is simply part of who they are, as unremarkable as the most whitebread citizen living in the most ordinary town in all of flyover country.

Which sounds dull...until you think about about what polyamorous, bisexual, and transgendered characters who have completely normalized their sexual proclivities might be like. Now, I'm betting--and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong--that most of you aren't rampaging bisexual polyamorist transsexuals who would greet such characters with a profound Meh. These are folks who have made the unusual usual. They're perfectly happy, except insofar as they've got the same problems as anybody else--firebombings, destruction of major cities, living in a surveillance state, that sort of thing.

The reason I'm doing this is simple: I've had enough of people being defined by what they do with their genitalia. I'm tired of gay, straight, bisexual, and the whole LGBTQI letter salad. I want to read stories about people who've moved beyond the sexuality-as-identity framework, so that's what I'm writing now.

In other words: I want to normalize transgression.

Which pretty much means I want to do exactly what the Falwells and Robertsons of the world say The Homosexuals™ want to do with their pernicious agenda.

And that amuses me to no end.

[Part One is here]

As an idea, transgression for transgression's sake does not resonate in a pleasant way with me, and while I believe that pushing against and breaking sexual boundaries is a thing to be encouraged and celebrated, it seems to me that there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

To explore what these ways might be, I turned first to the archetypal transgressor: the Marquis de Sade. As a comparative, there is no greater extreme to be found, and I am aware that my own petty thinking, if not thoroughly examined, leads straight to Durcet's château. That's nowhere I want to be, and nowhere I'd want to encourage anyone else to go. But there must be a broad expanse of reason and emotion between the Victorian prude and the murderous libertine, and somewhere on that well-trod ground lies the personal boundary that causes such unpleasant resonance within me.

I gathered ideas about the nature of that boundary from Sade's work itself, and from Simone de Beauvoir's essay "Faut-il brûler Sade?" ("Must We Burn Sade?"), first published in Les Temps Modernes in 1951 and 1952. While working towards her final critique of Sade's understanding of the erotic, Beauvoir writes:

It has rightly been pointed out that there is never any permanent bond among Sade's libertines, that their relationship involves a constant tension. But the fact that Sade systematically makes selfishness triumph over friendship does not prevent him from endowing friendship with reality. Noirceuil is very careful to let Juliette know that he is interested in her only because of the pleasure he finds in her company; but this pleasure implies a concrete relationship between them. Each feels confirmed within himself by the presence of an alter ego; it is both an absolution and an exaltation. Group debauchery produces genuine communion among Sade's libertines. Each one perceives the meaning of his acts and of his own figure through the minds of the others. I experience my own flesh in the flesh of another; then my fellow creature really exists for me. The shocking fact of coexistence eludes our thinking, but we can dispose of its mystery the way Alexander cut through the Gordian knot: we must set ourselves down in it by acts. "What an enigma is man!—Yes, my friend, and that's what made a very witty man say that it's better to fuck him than to understand him." Eroticism appears in Sade as a mode of communication, the only valid one. We might say, parodying Claudel, that in Sade "the penis is the shortest path between two hearts."

The question asks itself: is eroticism the only valid mode of communication between individuals? Is the erotic, in and of itself, genuine communion? The problem with that idea, Beauvoir writes, is that while Sade's critiques of the abstractions that distract us from the truth about the human condition were undeniably concrete and authentic, they were heavily derived from his own experience. His position of privilege--he was a Marquis, after all--allowed him to project his individual experience onto humanity, and to assume that his solution to his own existential and ethical crisis was the only valid solution for everyone else. The ultimate value of Sade's work, therefore, is not in the answers it provides, but in its ability to disturb us, and to force our re-examination of what she calls, "the basic problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation between man and man."

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy takes "Must We Burn Sade?" and places it within the larger context of Beauvoir's thought:

Centering his life in the erotic, Sade missed the truth of the erotic event. This truth, Beauvoir tells us, can only be found by those who abandon themselves to the risks of emotional intoxication. Living this intoxication we discover the ways in which the body turned flesh dissolves all arguments against the immediacy of our bonds with each other and grounds an ethic of the appeal, risk and mutual vulnerability.

"Emotional intoxication," then, is what elevates transgression from the simple smashing of personal and social boundaries into something that approaches transcendence. From this it follows that the transgressive relationship needs to be capable of supporting such intoxication.

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle extensively describes the perfect form of friendship that exists between good people who resemble each other in virtue. He writes, in part:

Such friendships are of course rare, because such men are few. Moreover they require time and intimacy: as the saying goes, you cannot get to know a man till you have consumed the proverbial amount of salt in his company; and so you cannot admit him to friendship or really be friends, before each has shown the other that he is worthy of friendship and has won his confidence. People who enter into friendly relations quickly have the wish to be friends, but cannot really be friends without being worthy of friendship, and also knowing each other to be so; the wish to be friends is a quick growth, but friendship is not.

I would argue that similar qualifications apply to any erotic relationship, but are particularly important in relationships that involve sexual transgression, whether the boundaries crossed are set by society or by the individuals concerned. It is not enough for partners to be self-aware, to have integrity, and to be honest. Transgression is the exploration of a territory that may be entirely new to one or more partners. One partner might lead and another follow, and those roles can switch during the course of the journey. At times, no one will have any idea at all about where they are going, and therefore each must be worthy of the other's trust, and each must know that the other is worthy. This implies a form of partnership that transcends the boundaries of an individual's isolated virtue.

Aristotle's Greek does a much finer job of expressing this. But there are clumsy English words for that kind of worthiness. "Friendship" is one. "Love" is another. True transgression without either of those frameworks in place feels like exploitation to me. Therefore, it seems to me that the key differentiator between transgression as simple license and transgression as freedom can be found within the quality of the relationship as expressed and experienced by the people living in it.

Next: Fiction

The time has come to stake out some territory here: the space within which I write my fiction, the sensibilities that inform my characters, the ideas that underpin my current project.

No, really. I've got this whole Thing™ going on. Aren't you just thrilled? I know I am.

For those who will find this all too long, pedantic, and dull, I'll have a short, pedantic and dull summary of all three parts in a few days. 

Part One: Transgression

transgression:

1426, from O.Fr. transgression (12c.), from L.L. transgressionem (nom. transgressio) "a transgression of the law," from L. "a going over," from transgressus, pp. of transgredi "go beyond," from trans- "across" + gradi (pp. gressus) "to walk, go" (see grade). The verb transgress is recorded from 1526. Transgressor is first recorded 1377.

Normalcy is a primate thing. Get too weird and the troop will kick the crap out of you and run you off, to fend for yourself and forage for your own berries. If you've got behavioral or intellectual proclivities that put you at either end of the bell curve, you’ve got two conventional social choices: hide them from everyone, or find other people who live at or near the same end of the distribution. That’s it. Both choices serve the same purpose. The first normalizes via concealment. The second normalizes via association.

Most of us know what hiding looks like. It’s the closet. The pleasure wrapped with guilt. The deep dark secret that gnaws at us. In our media-saturated culture, we see the consequences of exposure almost every day. The Congressman whose pages did a bit more than coffee runs and filing. The evangelist who swears he only paid for massages from that nice young man. We also see what happens to those who are pulled from hiding: shame, ridicule, jail...even death.

The second choice--finding your kindred at the narrow end of the distribution--seems a better solution. You gather with other people who share your particular brand of quirk, and you've got a troop that makes the primate bits of your brain happy. There's support, and acceptance, and all of those other warm and fuzzy things that make us feel safe and content while we loll in the sun and poke sticks into termite nests for a tasty snack.

A wise villain who killed Captain Kirk once said, "Normal is what everyone else is and you are not." That was supposed to be evil and oppressive and make us feel bad for Geordi LaForge, but in point of fact it's the truth. If you're into getting wrapped up in latex, hog-tied, hung from an eyebolt screwed into a dungeon's ceiling joist, and flagellated by dwarves, you're not usual, not ordinary, and certainly not normal.

And there's not a damn thing wrong with that.

When you find yourself a group of dangling latex-wrapped hog-tied whipping boys or girls to hang out with, what you've done is stack your local deck with people like you. You've created a little bubble of normal, but that bubble remains aberrant within greater society. The normality is an illusion, and if you happen to find yourself outside of that bubble, thou art Freak once more.

There's a phenomenon of justification that often finds expression in such bubbles which, I think, hints at an underlying problem of self-acceptance. There seems to be a need to make certain things acceptable by trying to shoehorn them into some existing form of social normalcy. A popular example these days: "Homosexuality is okay because it's biologically determined." But that's not why it's okay. Because the Jesus Jumpers have framed it as chosen sin, they've forced many of the sane among us into a rhetorical corner, where "choice" is equated with "unnatural" and is therefore evil. God forbid someone should do something simply because it feels good and right, instead of being compelled to do it because their DNA has been coiled up in a certain way.

This is the root of the problem. There are plenty of people who believe that God has, in fact, forbidden that very thing. "Transgression," in modern parlance, carries with it more than a hint of sin and the overwhelming connotation of violation--of moral codes, of law, and so on. That's why I began this with the word's etymology rather than its definition. It's the Latin root that is of greatest interest: transgredi, to "go beyond." The word, for me, has to do with identifying boundaries and moving beyond them.

Pushing boundaries is exciting. But people in all sorts of situations back away from that, seeking safety in numbers or in rationalizations. There's nothing wrong with seeking community; far from it. But first?

Make no apologies. Adopt no bluster. Offer no excuses.

Normalize yourself, by yourself, with yourself.

Next: Friendship and Love