Jordan S. Brock

I write queer romance. Lots of queer romance. So very much queer romance.

[unabating-deactivated20190408]

It’s pronounced Bouquet.

[emperorevan-deactivated20191211]

😂

[tankaramo]

pride month is during strawberry season and you think it’s a coincidence? think again, strawberries are gay

[shiraglassman]

Where I live in Florida strawberry season is around January so I vote we now have two pride months

[jordansbrock]

We can have three pride months. In Arizona, most Pride events are held in March because June in Arizona means the floor really is lava.

[wreathmoon]

[theintrovertnation]

[jordansbrock]

The joys of having a service dog who’s still in training mean he periodically decides to nope out from under the table at restaurants when he’s bored and wants to go elsewhere.

The joys of living in Arizona in June mean that when he gets to the front door and realizes it’s 200 degrees outside, he’d rather nope right back under the table.

[tastefullyoffensive]

That’s cool. (via bmo1234)

[plavoptice]

[jordansbrock]

That’s the current forecast for my neighborhood, 6/21/2017.

[lgbtqreads]

Do you know any fantasy or sci-fi books where the protagonist is bi?

Yep! Everything on here marked with a B plus a bunch under Queer Female Protagonist: https://lgbtqreads.com/sff/ (I haven’t read the adult books so not sure which of those are bi vs. lesbian, but a quick scan of the blurbs usually makes it clear. I know Snake Eyes by Hilary Monahan and False Hearts by Laura Lam are for sure.)

[jordansbrock]

Peripheral People. Bi protag, engaging SF world-building, great social commentary.

[inkededucatednnerdy]

[nuggsmum]

Truth.

[dominatrixeditrix]

Things that make my therapist amused, part 2

My validation and acknowledgement of his fear of certain insects, and offering to bring in scientific literature about these insects because we should confront his anxiety and fear in a positive way

[jordansbrock]

I will pay you to do this with dinosaurs next time.

[selinakylebat]

Raise your hand if you want to be an Amazon, live with the Amazons or is just happy that we finally have a superhero movie where the lead is a woman.

[whelvenwings]

so when you say 'because not feeling sexual attraction doesn’t mean not feeling sexual arousal' and 'sex is fun' - that's why nobody takes ace seriously. that's not a sexual orientation, is just having a low sex drive. some people love sex, for others it depends on the partners or moments, and others don't need it all that much. why do we need to label everything? just accept you're a normal person and move on.

OK.

first of all, I’m going to answer the issues you raised in good faith. I just want you to know that I’m not trying to convince you of anything, anon, I just want to put my perspective on these issues out there, since you’ve sent them my way.

yes, asexual people can feel sexual arousal. I’d like to refer you back to the analogy I gave in my original post about being ace - the one where you’re hungry, but can’t find anything you want to eat. wanting to eat something and being hungry for it are different experiences, right? sometimes it’s the other way round, and you really want to eat something even though you aren’t hungry at all (see: me at the end of a meal, considering getting a dessert). arousal and attraction are as different as that. linked, but not the same.

and yes, sex can be fun for an asexual person. is it fun in the same way as it is for an allosexual person? no, of course not. having sex with someone you’re not attracted to isn’t the same as having sex with someone you are attracted to - but it happens all the time, outside the ace community, too. straight friends of mine have experimented with girls, and then realised it’s not for them, they’re not attracted to girls - but they don’t regret their sexual experimentation, and found it fun. likewise, a biromantic lesbian acquaintance of mine is currently in a relationship with a guy. she’s not sexually attracted to him, but they have sex and she finds it fun because she loves him; she finds the relationship completely fulfilling. I feel that to define the fun one can have during sex purely by the level of attraction you feel to your partner isn’t taking into account the wide variety of factors that go into the experience; it’s too narrow a view.

as for why we choose to use a label - that “no need for labels” thing is old as the hills, anon. let me lay something out here. categorisation - i.e. the grouping of objects into a class, based on shared traits - is a fundamental tenet of western thought dating back to Plato and Aristotle (source), and it’s been put forward that our brains are literally wired to require the labelling and categorising of the things around us (source, source, for example). at the very least, we can all agree that when we see something we don’t understand, we feel uncomfortable. if you see a puddle of unidentifiable black goo on your floor/a strange shape flying through the sky/a loud sound in the middle of the night, likely the first question you will ask is “what is that?!”. your first instinct is to label, to understand through naming and categorising. you seek a word for it; from it, you seek to know good/bad, safe/unsafe, normal/abnormal.

and so to ask asexual people to exist without their label is asking us to cut ourselves off from one of the most basic aspects of our cultural philosophy, and is also asking us to live constantly and closely with something we would have no name for, something about our very bodies that we therefore couldn’t categorise. you want to make our own physicality an enigma to us. good or bad, safe or not safe, normal or abnormal - how do we decide, if we don’t know what we are? labels help us to group ourselves; when we group, we can make those decisions together. good or bad - well, together we can be good. safe or not safe - together, we can be safe. normal or abnormal - together, we can feel normal. what you’re demanding when you try to enforce a lack of label is a lack of visibility, a lack of community, a lack of safety, a lack of self-knowledge. in my opinion, that’s not OK.

you seem to think asexual people are trying to set themselves apart, or above, anon… you say that we should accept we’re “normal” like it’s an insult, a comedown. like we’re all snowflakes trying to make ourselves special. that hasn’t been my experience at all. almost every asexual person I’ve met has been frankly hungry for normality, sincerely wanting to feel at home and at ease and typical and among peers. it’s why we often group together like big flocks of ace penguins.

finally, at the end of this post that got a lot longer than I intended, I’d just like to point out that there are one or two people I know who do take asexuality seriously. just one or two.

[clucku]

And lemme also add that being ace does not necessarily equal having a low sex drive. Or no sex drive. Or a high sex drive. Or anything in between. Just because an ace person never experiences sexual attraction doesn’t mean they can’t be horny/want sex a lot. There are in fact hypersexual aces, and they’re just as valid as sex-repulsed and sex-neutral aces. So OP’s wildly inaccurate statement is actually even more wildly inaccurate than previously pointed out.

[jordansbrock]

Chiming in here.

For the first 40+ years of my life, “asexual” was a word that applied only to single-celled organisms. I used to joke that I was jealous of them, not needing to have sex to reproduce -- not that I wanted either sex OR reproduction. (My view of pregnancy is best summed up by the chestburster scene from the original Alien movie.)

If I’d had a label, my life would have been SO DIFFERENT. I wouldn’t have made some terrible decisions that led to things like promiscuity (in an effort to “fix” myself), pregnancy (because who needs to learn how to use condoms? Not school kids! amirite?), domestic violence, and multiple divorces. I wouldn’t have seen doctors and therapists, had blood tests, and taken hormones, all in an effort to, again, “fix” myself.

On the plus side, I learned how to fake an orgasm like a champ. Oh wait. That’s not a plus. That’s something that should be totally fucking unnecessary.

If I’d had a label, I wouldn’t have gone through most of my life thinking I was broken.

So yeah, dear anon. Fuck you and your “why do we need to label everything?” We need labels BECAUSE WE ARE NOT FUCKING BROKEN. And those labels are the words that we use to tell the world -- AND OURSELVES -- that we are valid.

[3rdeyechakra]

Reblog to make a white gay big mad

[sigilseer]

The Sigil of Covfefe

Using only the letters in “covfefe” 

Because every great antagonist eventually provides the key to their own demise. The statement of intent is “corruption is destroyed, peace and joy are restored.”

I initially made this as a joke and wasn’t planning on sharing it here, but it came out feeling weirdly…right…so, here it is. 

[acutelesbian]

A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life. Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.

[fat-thin-skinny]

this fucks me up every single time

[acutelesbian]

I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.

[beepbeepbeepbeep-deactivated202]

Charlotte’s WebMD

[riptidepublishing]

So it's bi week sale now, yeah? Woo! Seems to be. Honestly though, I have a question; how many of those books with bi protag's (wait is the bi sale all bi protags or just books with any bi characters?) actually, well, USE the flipping words bi or pan and can you point me right at 'um right now? 1/2

For the last couple years, we’ve only used an ID tag for a main character. In the past, we’ve used the ID tags for both main characters and significant secondary characters, but we’ve done our best to remove secondary characters from the ID tags. So probably something like 90 to 95% of the titles listed in the bi sale have one or more main characters who are bi, though there may occasionally be a title with only a significant secondary character.

As for those who actually use the word bi or pan? That I can’t say definitively. Most of the contemporary ones certainly do. As a company staffed almost entirely by people who ID as bi or pan, we’re all sick to death of “well I just don’t like labels,” so you can be pretty sure those harmful tropes don’t show up in our books. That being said, it’s also very likely that you’ll see at least a few books where a character simply is bi or pan and this is shown through them, for instance, talking about prior relationships, without them going on to use the word–but when that happens, it will not be because Harmful Trope.

[jordansbrock]

In Change of Address, the word “bisexual” is  used, both in narrative and in dialog, four or five times, both by Josh (the bisexual character) and his dad. :)

[ukulelekatie]

Idea for a game show: it’s a cooking competition with no recipes, just a lil old granny judge telling the contestants how to make dishes that have been passed down in her family from generation to generation. All the contestants have to follow along as she talks, and her instructions are super vague. There are no actual measurements, just things like “Add the basil. How much, you ask? Just enough.” or “Put it in the oven until it’s done.” Every week it’s a different judge with recipes from all over the world until the finalists must face the Ultimate Grandma™

[bigmammallama5]

“-now a pinch of salt.”

“One fourth of a teaspoon or one eight of a teaspoon?”

“No, a pinch.”

[chuckleshan]

@fairytaleslayer

[technicalzombie]

10/10 would watch obsessively

[jordansbrock]

I’ve trained for this show, because this is EXACTLY what happened when I phoned my stepmother to ask her for a recipe for chicken soup to include in Change of Address.

“Take a chicken and some water, then throw in some salt, onions --”

“Wait, how much?”

“How much what?”

“Start with water.”

“Enough to cover the chicken.”

“How big a pot?”

“Big enough for the chicken.”

“Uh. Okay, how much salt?”

“To taste.”

“But I can’t taste it yet. It’s still raw. It hasn’t cooked.”

“Yeah, so to taste.”

“But... salmonella.”

“It’s fine. Then you throw in the bundle of stuff.”

“The... what?”

“It’s a bundle of stuff they sell. It’s got herbs and sometimes a turnip and it’s all tied up with string.”

... and so on.