Illustration by Liam Eisenberg. Art direction by James Iacobelli.
Synopsis:
From the nationally bestselling author of Chef's Kiss and A Lady for All Seasons, a COVID-conscious trans romance in which a cryptid hunter searching for a mythical lake monster finds love with a grumpy skeptic.
Twenty-something Nathan Camber is fresh out of both grad school and ideas on what to do next. Dealing with a dire job market is hard enough as a gay neurodivergent manâso he doesnât. Instead, he decides to pursue his lifelong hyperfixation: cryptids. Leaving the city behind for the rugged, pine-scented landscape of upstate New York, Nathan sets his sights on the Salamander Man, a Nessie-like local legend with none of the Loch Ness clout. (Start small, his therapist always tells him!) But Nathanâs new fifty-something landlord, Mack, is a grumpy, grizzled, handsome skeptic who wants to protect his peaceful isolation and hard-earned safety deep in the woods.
Nathan refuses to settle for a lackluster, normie life, though, and convinces the stoic recluse to help him find the creature. As the hunt (and their growing attraction) heats up, Nathan and Mack realize thereâs more than one mystery to uncover in the lake. But if the secrets theyâre keeping from each other come to light, they might both get dragged under. Kinky hijinks and monstrous mayhem abound in this queer, trans love story for our bizarre modern age.
Preorder at your local shop or retailer of choice.
This Bookshop link gives me a tiny bit of $.
You can also order a signed, personalized copy from my local nonprofit bookstore Word Up Community Bookshop.
Corporate Glossary: every Friday, learn the secret meaning of common corporate words
âTheyâre trying to discharge her constructively. Do you know what Constructive Discharge means?â She asked.
As soon as I heard the term âConstructive Discharge,â I knew Iâd never seen it on a vocabulary quiz.
âNo. What does it mean?â I asked.
She explained.
âConstructive discharge is a fancy way of saying âbeing forced out.â Itâs not good. And if youâre not a lawyer or in human resources, youâll probably learn what it means when itâs happening to you.â
âOh my God. Iâve seen this my entire career and never knew it even had a name.â I thought.
Youâve seen constructive Discharge too. You may have experienced it. Weâve all made choices to avoid it.
Constructive discharge defined
âWe canât fire you, but weâll make you so miserable youâll quit, and then we wonât have to pay your unemployment.â
Then thereâs the textbook definition:
âA constructive discharge occurs when your employer has made working conditions unbearable, forcing you to resign.â
Or as one person put it.
âI didnât get handed a pink slip, but when youâre not wanted, people have a way of letting you know.â
HR isnât always the secret police.
Employees arenât always victims of evil-doers.
However, employers push employees out all the time to maintain and protect the, âWe didnât do anything wrong, YOU did,â power structure.
Constructive Discharge looks like this:
â Meeting invitations slow to a trickle, and youâre excluded from emails and generally looped out of whatâs going on.
â People stop talking to you or stop talking when you walk in.
â Your emails donât get answers, or they arrive too late to be of value.
â Suddenly, your work is not good enough, though nothing about your work has changed.
â Reviews, once good or even glowing, are now mediocre or bad.
â Instead of a bonus, you get a Performance Improvement Plan.
â Warnings and write-ups start so they can justify your eventual termination with documentation of your âpoor performanceâ
â Your work, clients, assignments go away, or they overwhelm you with work.
â The words âSet up to failâ were practically invented to describe this scenario.
Constructive Discharge is illegal
It isnât easy to prove youâre a target, and itâs even more challenging if you donât even know constructive discharge is a real thing.
If youâve ever experienced this and donât fully understand whatâs happening to you beyond knowing youâre in the process of being excommunicated, it can be hell. Itâs not uncommon for the experience to leave long-lasting scars.
Talk to anyone whoâs ever been through it. Theyâll tell you.
Knowing constructive discharge exists and how itâs used gives you power to predict whatâs coming and to protect yourself.
Seeing the endgame helps you in two ways.
You know what to expect. Having a sense of whatâs coming next is enormously empowering.
You can go on the offensive and protect yourself. Constructive discharge works to crush your ego, making you feel you did something wrong and deserve this treatment.
Without strategy, you end up being a miserable pawn in your employerâs endgame.
Remember, theyâre almost certainly building a case to fire you in the event the hellscape they create for you doesnât persuade you to quit.
If youâre getting pushed out, and you know what to look for you can prove constructive discharge and you can get unemployment benefits, be released from payback obligations on a signing bonus, and protect your mental health.
Youâre not crazy, incompetent, or a failure. This is real and itâs carefully executed to leave you holding the bag and feeling like you did something wrong.
If they force you out, in addition to feeling horrible, you lose your paycheck, benefits health insurance, and possibly owe them money.
The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
"On the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea. It was a country of rolling moors, lonely and dun-colored, with an occasional church tower to mark the site of some old-world village."
If you're a romance reader in the USA, this Saturday, August 15 is Bookstore Romance Day
It's a day for indie bookstores to celebrate that oft-slagged moneymaker of a genre and treat readers of kissing books very nicely. You can find virtual and in-person events across the country. Many stores are giving away free gifts or having big sales.
I'll be in Portland OR and online for several events. Come hang if you're in the area!
you're allowed to step on a joke's punchline if 1) you are providing genuinely interesting facts that, while undermining the joke's premise, are illuminating enough to please me or 2) you are able to be funnier than the original joke (risk level high) otherwise i think just let it go, mate
hi there, this is gonna be kinda rambly but i hope it makes sense. idk if you've been in this position before, but you're like. a Cool Internet Trans Uncle, so i hope it's okay to ask for advice anyways. i'm a 19 year old trans guy (or at least heavily guy-adjacent), and i've been wanting to go on hrt since i was 14, but i haven't been able to due to bullshit laws and then bullshit finances. but all those years have given me time to overthink it (like, way overthink it) and i guess i'm really worried that it's... not gonna work for me? or something? like, right now i'm seen as Young Woman (Fairly Pretty), and i'd give just about anything to be seen as Young Man (Fairly Handsome), but i'm scared that going on hrt will end up with me being seen as Young Adult Who's Not A Man But Also Who Is Far Away Enough From Cis Womanhood To Abuse. which would just result in dysphoria AND people treating me badly, which would be even worse than where i am right now. i guess the fear is that there'd be enough changes to take me away from safety but not enough to cause any comfort or joy? like, what if i'm just permanently fucked? i can't exactly take my skeleton back in and ask for a do-over. so yeah. like i said, this is rambly, but i'm hoping that you or your other followers might have some advice. i hope that you and your spouse and your cats are doing well and having a good day :)
Lemme break down some thoughts:
HRT has profound mental effects for a lot of us that is separate from, "I like what I see in the mirror". My brain is calmer on T and I am overall much more emotionally regulated. This is a huge, huge benefit for me and 100% internal.
You are going to get clocked throughout your life. It will happen a lot as you begin transition and it will happen in surprising ways when you think you pass. It's a thing we have to always be prepared for.
On HRT, you will more likely be seen as teenage boy than anything else. This may last years.
If you are white, thin, and/or able-bodied, you are still going to be invisible to a lot of people.
Cis-passing is not a guarantee against transphobic violence. You may be safer from random street violence, but you are still subject to violence from the State. All bets are off once you are outed and paperwork trails are everywhere. Passing privilege is extremely easily revoked.
Be very aware how much the desire to look conventionally attractive in a cis-passing way is influencing you. Be ok with the idea of just being Some Guy. Be especially ok with looking like some of the men in your family. And never equate your value with beauty. Even if you achieve it, it's fleeting.
If you are worried about safety, start mitigating that now. We all have to do risk calculus every time we leave the house. Look to community as your safety net. Be very picky about who you choose to bring into your life. And of course, if you have the means, look for work and a home in progressive areas and always have a Plan B in case you lose your job or housing.
A lot of cis people honestly do not give a shit in either direction about trans people. There is some safety in that ambivalence.
You can always stop HRT and even detransition. Some effects are permanent, but if trans women can voice train and laser their beards, so can you.
Make more friends with visibly queer trans/nonbinary/gnc people. Consume more queer art. go to queer meetups and other events. Recalibrate your brain to celebrate visible transness & gender fuckery, instead of seeing it primarily as a threat to your safety.
hey anon I'm a 40 something part time guy who went on hrt a year ago and if you're worried that trying it will only cause problems I can only tell you that, for me, the problem of feeling worse with every passing year was enough of a reason to take the chance.
Yeah, it's possible the T might not give you any positive benefits.
It's also possible that it will.
Can you imagine that possibility with the clarity and vividness you're imagining the reverse? It's a worthwhile exercise. Good luck â€ïž
Oat milk was discovered much more recently than you may have known. Like many now-familiar technologies, it was found by accident during the Apollo program when NASA learned what a zero-g environment does to goat milk.
trying to communicate ideas through language and it doesnt suffice so you turn to the abstract image and then people want to be talking to you about the images NO!!!!!! ! ! ! ! ! !
straight white people making a romance movie: haha what if it was illegal to have sex? wait what's lawrence v texas. wait what's mclaughlin v florida. wait what's loving v virginia
As preposterous and stupid as this fucking movie's premise sounded (for a light-hearted rom-com, and not The Handmaid's Tale) I didn't want to think about it too much until the movie actually came out, and then I could see if it was somehow more intelligent and subversive than the trailer let on, but guess what, it's even worse!
If this is what it takes to get a rom-com greenlit these days, maybe we should just let them die.
Sex workers are thrown under the bus, shown only as thieves who fleece men in the woods at night, while queer sexuality is relegated to a few scenes with Allieâs roommate (a woefully underused Quintessa Swindell) and a handful of pans past blurry same-sex extras making out in the background. âThis night is for the straights,â Swindellâs character says to Allie, before saying that queer people have worked around straight laws for centuries.Â
This is supposed to be a nod to queer resilience, but largely comes off as straightwashing the history of anti-LGBTQ legislation in this country that led towards raids of queer clubs and incarceration of queer people in the not-too-distant past (let alone the current barrage of anti-Trans and LGBTQ legislation currently in the works and on the books). Itâs also ignorant of the long and fraught fight for the normalization of age-of-consent laws, which, by the way, did not happen in all states in this very country until 2003. Yes, thatâs not even thirty years ago.Â
By the end, our intrepid protagonists have not had sex with anyone, because this is a film about Romance with a Capital R (and I guess sex is not part of romance!) and for that very same reason they ultimately embrace the fascist state of things. They arenât the only ones who refuse to fight back. No one in this cursed film is protesting this mandate beyond ârepealâ signs in various windows and some creative graffiti (...)
(...) If we are supposed to believe that the film is making some subversive statement about the state of sex and bodily autonomy in this country, it cannot end with its leads embracing their chains. Thatâs just warmed-over conservatism running around in sheepâs clothing.
yeah i wrote this post having only seen the trailer, but jesus christ. was this movie a psyop LMAO??
also, for the unaware: mclaughlin v. florida was a 1964 supreme court case that struck down a florida anti-miscegenation law that criminalized cohabitation (and thus, as implied, sex) between white people and people of color of opposite genders. anti-miscegenation laws made marriage and sexual relationships between white people and people of color, most often specifically black people, a FELONY in several states in the united states up until the 1950s and 1960s. though it was already struck down by the supreme court, the state of alabama didn't repeal their law until 2000! there were THREE ATTEMPTS at codifying anti-miscegenation into the us constitution!
like yes, the issue here is partially straight white people's ignorance on the united states's history of homophobic policy, but it's also really important to recognize that arguably the majority of the issue here is straight white people's ignorance of the united states's history of codifying eugenics and antiblack racism.
the premise could have been interesting as a serious dystopian story, especially taking that history into account, but it wasn't written that way at all. this movie should never have been a fucking romcom making light of the violence the united states (and many other countries) has enacted on any kinds of sexual relationships it deems undesirable.
