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Mike Driver

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KIROKAZE
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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@sosaidvictoria
link to original tweet
anyway shout out to transhet men and transhet people in general. you're amazing and you didn't "betray" anyone or "abandon" anyone or "become the enemy" - you deserve love, respect, and happiness
Trans men have been demonized completely by the very community that’s sposed to protect an love them.
It's unfortunate. I genuinely think they're joking and don't realise how much some people actually believe that shit and how it actually changes how trans folks view themselves.
I actually don't really think they're joking. I think that a lot of people in the queer community don't realize how much the political lesbian/radfem simplistic view of "men bad" has infected the community as a whole.
You see it in the "my sexuality is every girl and precisely one man" which is hugely widespread in the way m-spec women discuss their sexualities. (Which is not to say that a lot of women don't feel that way, just that when I've pointed this out to my friends, and how shitty it made me and other transmascs/men feel, a bunch of them went 'oh shit, you're right.') You see it in how m-spec women are made to feel like they should apologize for being attracted to or involved with men/mascs, and how lesbian/sapphic/queer spaces eject -- sometimes violently -- m-spec women in "straight-passing" relationships. (This also happens to m-spec mascs/men, but not so loudly, and in a different way.)
You see it in the long and storied way that transmascs and trans men have been treated in our community. This isn't the first time that trans men have been told they are 'giving up womanhood' and how dare they. There's a scene in The L Word, a show that ended 12 years ago, which has a character literally saying that to a trans man, that he's 'giving up the most beautiful thing' by transitioning, and that thing is 'being a woman.'
This isn't a new message, that men are the enemy, and that anyone who voluntarily chooses masculinity or manhood (whatever form of masculinity or manhood they choose) is a gender traitor, "joining the enemy," deluded, attempting to "opt out" of misogyny, or any number of other loathsome ideas. This spills over into the idea that transmascs/men have "aligned interests" with TERFs, that we don't actually face societal transphobia, that we aren't targeted by institutional transphobia in any way, that we're 'collateral damage' of the "real" transphobia that transfems face, that we magically just gain male privilege the moment we start transitioning, that we're never targeted by misogyny, that we don't face physical violence, that we've "joined the oppressors" and are somehow capable as a class of being the oppressors of transfems rather than simply another oppressed class (which is its own topic that deserves like, a whole-ass essay, but whatever) that transmisandry isn't a "real" thing and transmascs don't face any sort of specific-to-us discrimination or issues... and all of those ideas damage our ability as a community to discuss and ameliorate these sometimes-fatal and always-damaging ideas.
Hell, to listen to people within the community talk, you wouldn't think that JK Rowling's horrible essay didn't spend a huge chunk of time misgendering and gaslighting transmascs, or that one of the big "bibles" of TERFery (Ab*gail Shrier's 'Irreversible Damage') wasn't targeted very specifically, fucking laser-focused, on transmascs, including non-binary transmascs. And this all spills out from the idea that we don't face any 'real' oppression because we've 'joined the majority/oppressors,' and "men are bad," which is such base-level 1970s retro radfem nonsense.
And honestly, at the end of the day? It doesn't matter if it's a joke, and I'm pretty displeased with "oh they don't understand that it's serious and they think it's just a joke." These sorts of "jokes", levied at transmasc people, aren't okay. Maybe if it's just you and your buds who have given each other permission to shit-talk each other, and you know each other and have personal context with one another, sure. But in this sort of open, parasocial context where you have people who don't know these two transhets, it is always damaging, and saying "gosh I think they just think it's a joke" does the opposite of excusing it.
This lateral aggression shit is terrible and damaging to lots of people -- I honestly think there's no segment of the queer community that this doesn't directly damage, and we should challenge it whenever we see it, not make excuses or permission for it in the slightest way.
We are way, way past "I was being an ironic bigot." The idea that can be a thing needs to be permanently buried.
Yup.
And so one by one the Dalloway Five died – each in mysterious circumstances, each horribly. Flora Grayfriar’s ritual murder was avenged with their blood.Â
a lesson in vengeance by victoria lee
Sorry for this but I'm in need for some comforting fluff rn... Is there something Bethany ever does that just makes Ames incredibly endeared? (also completely irrelevant but aliv is officially released in a little more than a month, how excited are you on a scale of 1 to 10?)
i'm so behind on my asks....there are asks in here from like 10 months ago...welp
im just kind of replying to them in random order so if i haven't gotten to yours yet it's probably not because i don't want to answer it, haha.
bethany organizes her books by color and always matches her fingernail polish to her clothes and has strong opinions about what kinds of birds can be viewed from the level iv windows and watches autopsy videos for fun. ames loves all of these things.
how did Dara's eating disorder begin to develop? do you have any headcanons for him beginning to recover from it (although, i suppose it isn't headcanons if you're the author, but i don't really know what else to call it)? does he ever explicitly tell someone, and if so, how does that go? does Leo find out and just go "oh the baby gay has another issue and i'm sure as hell gonna try to help him with it"?
tw: eating disorders
it's a mix of things but
- lehrer loves to cook and dara started feeling sick every time lehrer would make food for him, and would have a hard time actually eating it
- dara started fixating on food as a distraction from other things in his life, and this mostly took the form of imagining food as gross things, or seeing people eat and fixating on the mechanics of it in a way that ultimately grossed him out
- dara translated that into a 'need for control' thing where he started making up weird rules about his food intake
- lehrer made comments about dara gaining weight/being soft
- dara started losing weight, and lehrer commented on it, and dara was pleased
- dara lost even more weight, and lehrer commented on it, and dara kept losing weight just to spite him
- losing weight and controlling his food intake replaces health coping mechanisms, and dara starts needing to hyperfixate on it more and more as the abuse escalates (because there is increasing need for distraction)
- a part of dara starts to wonder if he could ever not-eat enough that it would kill him, and discovers he kind of likes that idea
- somehow all of this snowballed into an eating disorder, which is a very complicated diagnosis and can mean lots of different things for different people, but for dara it was the amalgamation of all this.
As for recovery, he sees his therapist post-TEH. But also in TSAEIB he ends up going to rehab at the end of novella, and while in rehab he gets further help for his eating disorder. and yes of COURSE Leo is incredibly helpful! so is Bethany. the two of them are perfect 'found' parents haha.
Hi I just wanted to congratulate on your third book being released soon!! The feverwake dualgoy is one of my favorite series and it's reached the point that I will use any any excuse to rant about it to my friends in an attempt to get them to read it. I mean it's been months since I first read it and I still haven't stopped talking about it. Anyways both me and my best friend are looking forward to reading aliv, and thank you for writing a Sapphic book!! I love reading wlw books (to be clear I mean this in a I'm a bi grayce girl who loves feeling represented way not a straight guy who fetishizes wlw way) this got very long but tl;dr you are very cool!! And I can't wait to read a lesson in vengeance!!
THANK YOU i hope you loved ALIV if you've had a chance to read it!
Hi! I remember you saying Noam will wear glasses in the future, but will Bethany fix his eyes as fixed Dara's cat allergies?
I really wish this would be possible in the real life, to be honest!
she absolutely could, but noam insists he is fine as-is!
JUST WANTED TO SAY I NEED AMES X BETHANY CONTENT IM OBSESSED
me too, who is gonna give the people what they need???
In the pink, Gordon Hart
it’s been a while since i posted my face but i got to meet the incredible @sosaidvictoria tonight at an event for their newest book “a lesson in vengeance” which is the witchy gothic dark academic lesbian book you’ve been needing in your life. so support your local independent bookstore or library and get ur hands on a copy and then come join the victoria lee discord server: https://discord.gg/2ydksYgjX6!
It was so nice to meet you! Everyone go join Alex's discord!
I hope you can all make it to my event with Holly Black tonight! Especially if you like talking about villains.
Hello again! I've just reread The traitor's crown and I was wondering what happened to Raphael!
Btw I'm really excited to see you on the virtual launch tomorrow!!!
Have a wonderful day!
Lehrer kept Raphael in his administration for maybe ten years, then had him quietly assassinated. Partly because he thought it was risky keeping him around considering Raphael knew so much about Lehrer's past, but mostly--if we're honest--because he hated that someone was still alive who had seen him so vulnerable.
thank you so much for writing Dara the way he was, i struggle with a lot of the same things he does and his arc resonated me so much. i've never seen a character like him (and/or like me) portrayed in a book or movie without them being a ridiculous stereotype. it just really meant a lot to me /gen
sdlksdl thank you so much for writing to me, it means a lot. i'm so glad he resonated with you. i love him so much.
Hello, how are you?
I was wondering something. If Noam is The Electric Heir and Lehrer The Fever King, how Dara would be called?
And why did you choose opposite color for the covers? The blue of Noam, but the title referring to Lehrer and the orange but the title for Noam?
Thank you in advance!
oh man i have no idea i'm so bad at titles, these took me forever
probably the something Prince.
A Lesson in Vengeance comes out ~tomorrow~
That means today is your last chance to preorder, and to enter the ALIV preorder campaign! You can submit your receipt here: https://forms.gle/C7CxSxRi1sXj6QzN9
Damn
[Image description:
Cropped image of medieval-stylized printed text, focused on a line which reads: “This wenche thikke”
/end image description]
Thank you for adding this image description! Just wanted to clarify that it’s not stylised, but actual Middle English. The text is from The Canterbury Tales.
Okay, had to track it down. It’s from the Reeve’s Tale, and it’s a description of a 20yo young woman:
This wenche thikke and wel y-growen was, With camuse nose and yën greye as glas; With buttokes brode and brestes rounde and hye, But right fair was hir heer, I wol nat lye.
In modern English (had to look up “camuse”, so that’s as good as my source, but I know the rest)
This wench was thick and well-grown With a pug nose and eyes grey as glass; With buttocks broad and breasts round and high, But right fair was her hair, I will not lie.
The fact that Chaucer had “big butt” and “I will not lie” within two lines of each other is causing me disproportionate amusement. Also the fact that “this wenche thikke” works equally well in Middle English and in modern slang.
Time is a flat circle, indeed, and Chaucer knew as well as us that a thick ass is A+++++++
you're the best. can i ask you why are responses to queries sooo slow? im and MG author and it seems forever to get a response...I would think that coming out of a pandemic editors would be hungry for new material.
I'm going to be as calm as I possibly can be because I know this is probably a sincerely meant question, and you may be new, and you haven't seen the year+ worth of discourse about agents and editors and what is happening in the pandemic within the book industry (and that despite lots of people "coming out of a pandemic", for us, these things are still very much ongoing!). A brief Pandemic Publishing history, from my perspective:
March 2020. We realize that the "pandemic" is officially happening. The Bologna Book Fair is cancelled, travel is cancelled, everyone has to work from home, it's confusing, schools are closed, nobody has child-care. We expect this to last a couple of weeks.
April 2020. It does NOT last "a couple of weeks." Now just for background -- publishing is already an extremely slow process with a lot of lead time - like, we are currently selling/acquiring books for 2023/24 publication. So that means that when all this hit, there were lots of projects in the pipeline already, things that were in various stages of progress and were delayed in Spring/early Summer 2020. They were delayed at that time bc of the combined factors of: the pandemic shutting down everyone's office, not to mention schools, libraries and bookstores, which meant no place to SELL books -- PLUS there are layoffs -- PLUS there are printing/shipping/supply chain issues meaning problematic to make or ship books -- NOT TO MENTION, people getting sick and dying all over NYC, which is where most of US publishing is headquartered.
Early Summer 2020. Shaken, but rallying, all editors and the entirety of publishing are now getting used to working from home. There is a huge learning curve here -- publishing is very much a "face-to-face meetings" and "paper trail" kind of industry and *nothing* about the office life was really set up for remote work. (Most publishers didn't even used to allow DocuSign for contracts, we had to send multiple hard copies all over the country before the pandemic!) -- People learned how to work zoom, and did meetings virtually. They quickly realized that electronic contracts and payments are a blessing.
Now, there are still problems -- like, editors having to work from tiny flats with their children crawling all over them, and designers having to be at the kitchen table instead of, like, a whole studio with the proper lighting and every kind of material available, and contracts people having no files at their fingertips -- but hey, everyone is muddling through.
Of course - bookstores and the like are still closed, and there are still big supply chain issues - and that's a HUGE problem for the actual publication part. But on the agent/editor side, we are all working on future books, so that work simply has to continue, or there won't be any books two years from now!
Summer/Fall 2020. Everyone is absolutely scrambling like mad to do all the work that didn't get done in Spring. There is now a backlog of projects in the pipeline, but OK. Everyone is feeling quite literally traumatized by the things that have gone on, but OK. Some people are still recovering from having gotten sick themselves, or are mourning family lost to the disease. But OK.
This time is as busy as I have ever seen it, for everyone - pretty much a non-stop whirlwind of work. (Both because of the things that didn't get done before AND the fact that nobody can travel or do anything else!) -- There is also, to be honest, a lot of crying. We all desperately need a vacation, and it shows.
Winter 2020/2021. Now mind you -- Aside from that very very rough few months at the beginning, which was just a very confusing time -- books WERE coming out, and WE WERE ALL WORKING, selling, acquiring, creating new books. All of our authors were ALSO working and creating new books. MORE, in fact, because a lot of them were at home for the first time in a long time! But remember -- there's already a backlog, right? So, ALL of these new projects have been slowed/delayed both because of the pandemic, and the backlog of already existing projects, creating a larger backlog of existing projects. At this point we are running on fumes.
Spring/Summer 2021. We are slowly coming out of pandemic pandemonium in personal lives. People are getting vaccinated. It's great. Some people might actually get to go on vacation! Amazing! But it's not actually "normal" yet in publishing-world, because again, there's still that backlog, and everyone is STILL working from home, which is ok, but honestly, still makes things slower for a number of reasons, and look, everyone is just exhausted, okay? It's been a lot.
So anyway that's, in a ginormous nutshell, why you might find that editors and agents are not quite as "hungry" as you might want us to be coming out of a pandemic. IDK. We are just people, my friend.
ETA: I realized that this explainer was JUST pertaining to burnout because of what was happening IN-OFFICE. Combine ALL of this with what was happening in the real world -- like, for example, the horrific brutality against George Floyd and others, and the subsequent intense social justice rallying in Summer 2020 and beyond -- climate disasters, like California being ON FIRE -- a lot of *spicy drama* in the book world -- and A GINORMOUS FLIPPING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION... yeah omg. I think there could literally be a book about this, but I can't write it or read it tbh.
ETA x 2: (AND I didn't even touch on the fact that a huge problem for everyone I know was A LACK OF ABILITY TO READ during the worst of this! Which as you can imagine is a huge problem for somebody whose job involves READING BOOKS. I mean seriously there were MONTHS where I could not get through a single book, and I know for a fact I'm not alone. I'm JUST getting the ability back and I'm still scared.)