I had a short interview with Dan Damon from the BBC World Service. We discussed asexuality and my book. The questions are cursory and basic, but it’s a tight little spot and pleasant.
Listen to the podcast starting at about 22:40 for my segment.
Category Archives: News
Featured and Quoted: The New York Times
In Op-Talk, a feature of NYT Opinion, an article about asexuality heavily featuring quotes from me and my book has appeared!
“Why Asexuals Don’t Want to Be Invisible Anymore”
It’s a lovely little piece without the usual naysaying that so many journalists feel is necessary for “balance,” and there are several other asexual voices mixed in so it isn’t entirely a piece about me or my book. I’m quite pleased with it. Please read!
Interview: Weekend Sunrise, “Attracted to No One”
This weekend I was invited on an Australian morning news program called Weekend Sunrise. Happily, I did not have to travel to another continent for a less-than-five-minute interview. They piped me in from a TV studio in Tampa.
Here is the television piece:
Interview: Salon, “You’re about as sexually attractive to me as a turtle”
An interview with me in Salon was posted today in Q&A format. It was an excellent chance to discuss some of the political aims of the asexual community (which we almost never get to talk about!), as well as my own experience discovering asexuality for myself and the best and worst things about it.
Read the article in Salon now!
For me, the worst thing about being asexual is other people trying to fix me all the time. They develop this completely inappropriate obsession with my sexual and romantic life, which can manifest as anything from aggressively propositioning me for sex to searching for what’s “really” wrong with me through invasive questions. Some of them maintain that these attempted interventions are about my health and happiness, apparently unaware that they’re compromising both by refusing to respect my identity.
Unfortunately the comments are full of invalidation, as they generally always are on articles about asexuality published in mainstream media. This one has everything from “this isn’t SCIENTIFIC” to “asexual people are heartless and cruel if they date anyone but other asexual people,” ignoring that actually people can agree to date on any grounds they like and nobody’s the arbiter of what amounts of sex must be promised before dating is fair.
I’ve also been assigned mental illness and misanthrope status, and it’s only been up for a couple hours as I post this! Doing great.
I think there’s a book some girl wrote that these people might benefit from reading. Don’t remember, though . . . what was it called?
Review (Library Journal): The Invisible Orientation
I got a starred review in Library Journal!
Decker, Julie Sondra.
The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality.
Carrel: Skyhorse. 2014. 240p. illus. notes. bibliog.
ISBN 9781631440021. $34.95;
ebk. ISBN 9781631440175. PSYCHThis is the first substantial book for the nonprofessional to emerge from the small but growing community of individuals who identify themselves as “asexual”—i.e., not sexually attracted to anyone; a portion of the population quoted as being approximately one in 100 people. Decker (contributor, Huffington Post; Salon), who writes in the introduction about her own asexuality, emphasizes that this is an orientation that has to do with feelings, not actions. The author stresses fluidity and inclusiveness: asexuality may change over time; some asexual people enjoy romantic relationships while others have no interest; libido may be high or low; and some are happy in partnered relationships while others enjoy the single life. The language and concepts are clearly modeled on those of the LGBTQ community, with an emphasis on asexuality being a healthy orientation, rather than the result of a mental or physical illness. The final chapter addresses friends and family members of asexual people.
VERDICT
This title is an important resource for readers of any age who are struggling to understand their sexual orientation, or those who would like to better understand asexuality.—Mary Ann Hughes, Shelton, WA
I’ll link it to their site once it’s posted. This is great for me and my publisher!
Review (Kendra Holliday): The Invisible Orientation
Kendra Holliday of The Beautiful Kind has posted a sensitive and personalized review and reflection of my book The Invisible Orientation. I especially love her discussion of diversity within the community, and how she seemed excited about the new terminology, not overwhelmed by it.
Read Kendra’s review here!
My biggest takeaway reading this book is that we shouldn’t make assumptions about anyone’s orientation. Be understanding and appreciate diversity. If you find out something you weren’t expecting, don’t blurt out something stupid and insensitive. Instead, nod and process.
Guest Post: DiversifYA
Marieke of DiversifYA was kind enough to accept a guest post from me in honor of my book’s publication. I wrote a short essay discussing the importance of inclusive literature—including for asexual people—and spotlighted my experience of never finding myself in a book.
Read the guest post on DiversifYA!
I’ve never seen myself in a book.
And others have never seen me in a book, which is why they started laughing at me when I was eleven and haven’t stopped yet.
Completed New Short Story: “After She Comes Along”
I actually wrote this story on a plane on June 27, but I’d left out a couple details because I needed to research them, so it wasn’t “complete” until now. It was inspired by my book of choice on the plane–Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman. His weird collection of short stories made a little whirlpool in my brain, and I ended up coming up with something that probably feels a little bit like one of his stories.
I’ve decided to call it “After She Comes Along.” It’s just a contemporary fiction that takes place in the woods, and even though it’s not fantasy, it kind of has a fantastical feel.
It’s only about 550 words, making it my shortest story ever written in my adult life. Woo-hoo!
Pitch Wars: The Feedbackening
So it’s done. After having chosen a mentee and an alternate, I gave my feedback to 103 people who entered the contest, in individual e-mails, with around a page to a page and a half of personalized commentary.
It came to about 60,000 words, and some people are like YOU BASICALLY WROTE A YA NOVEL WITH YOUR FEEDBACK. (Well, an awfully critical, disjointed YA novel, but yes, word-wise, it was a lot.) And honestly, this is one of my favorite things about the contest: giving people who didn’t get picked a ladder to climb so they can leave with bright prospects.
Though please let me state and reiterate that MENTORS WERE NOT REQUIRED TO PROVIDE ANY FEEDBACK AT ALL and most of the mentors could not spare time to draft more than a form letter or some abbreviated feedback. The fact of the matter is that qualifying as a mentor means you basically have a writing-related or editing-related career, even if you’re not full time, and many of us are working multiple jobs, parenting multiple kids, and juggling multiple responsibilities. For most of the mentors in this contest, their own deadlines and other responsibilities just had to take precedence. I really, really don’t want the fact that I happened to have time to draft this feedback to make anyone in this contest resent that other mentors didn’t or couldn’t do the same.
And you folks who received feedback from me: Wow, everyone’s been so gracious about it. Even for the people I was really hard on, I mostly received effusive thank-yous and appreciation, with a few requests for clarification mixed in (which I generally don’t mind, though if you see this, please don’t ask me to read a new version of your query unless I’ve volunteered explicitly to look at it; I think I’m burned out on queries!).
“But Julie,” say some people who didn’t submit to me, “what was this glorious feedback like? What did you tell them that has them cheering for you and screaming your name on Twitter?”
Most of my “pass” mails focused on the query letter. I yelled at people for lack of trajectory or too much/too little detail, mostly. I gave specifics in each case and a push in the direction I’d like to see it go. For some, I suggested picking up a couple paperbacks in their genre and modeling a query synopsis after the back-of-the-book description. And when I commented on pages, I would talk about whether I connected to the character, why I thought their language was too passive or inundated with unnecessary speech tags or adverbs, and how I’d like to see them reconceive their opening if I thought it didn’t work. If I didn’t read the whole first chapter, I sometimes told people so and explained where/why I disconnected.
And, of course, I screamed about grammar. Dashes, mostly, and curly quotes/straight quotes. (This is not what kills you, though. Obviously. Since I said that kind of thing to my mentee.) If you didn’t know there are differences between hyphens (-), en dashes (–), and em dashes (—), you may have gotten yelled at by me. If you didn’t know that some quotation marks and apostrophes get “curled” by certain programs and others are left straight (and you used more than one program to show me your document, including Scrivener), you may have gotten yelled at by me.
But getting yelled at by me isn’t always bad, and it’s not terrifying. I tend to be kind of informal and even occasionally funny when I offer critique. I constructed my feedback as I read each submission (which is why it took me so long to get through them), and I reread them before sending to make sure a) I hadn’t been too mean, and b) to adjust where appropriate when I wanted to tell someone how close I’d come to picking them or comment on if they got chosen as mentee or alternate by someone else. In rereading the stuff I wrote in these slap-happy late-night editing sessions, I found the following silly, creative, and plain weird pieces of advice or commentary. My apologies if these were said to you. I have to do something to keep myself entertained.
You need to set off an adverb repellent in this manuscript and start killing some of these suckers. Don’t make it such a sprawling metaphor, or we start to think you’re going to wander away from us into this guy’s head and forget you’re supposed to be pitching a book.You want this ending to punch, and it’s just too sprawled out all over the bed right now. With a bunch of pillows and stuffed animals.
I suggest times a hundred that you wait wait wait to tell us how things work.
That’s pretty long for one sentence, despite the cunningly used dashes. (I’m very fond of dashes.)
You write likable sentences; I’d sit with your sentences in the lunchroom.
I’m going with something that hits me in my sweet spot and your subject matter is slightly behind and over to the right of my sweet spot.
I like present tense (though it’s terrible in the wrong hands). Fortunately, yours seem like pretty good hands.
I felt it was mostly spent setting the scene instead of getting me invested. Like the props were still being put on stage at the start of the play. Tell us what the person loses, not just “control.” I want it to be a lot tighter and really smash us in the face.
Word-count-wise it sounds a little on the short side? But I guess that’s because I’m used to hulking fantasy books.
I really love this beginning and it’s honestly a relief to read something that knows how to give exposition I can hang my hat on.
Dialogue tags should tell us things we can’t tell by what is being said (like volume, as in whispered, or like tone, as in sarcasm if we couldn’t detect it from context). When you switch them up so often, they become very noticeable instead of invisible, and those are not the parts of your writing you want us to notice. They’re road signs, not attractions.
It’s like you went from microscope to binoculars with nothing in between.
The answer to “Can X do Y?” is almost always yes, and if we’re reading because we want to know the answer to that question, we’ve already answered it. “X must do Y or else Z” is much better than “Can X do Y?” Even though it’s actually quite a well-written query, it lacks meat. I just want to eat the meal, not be told what it tastes like and what its ingredients are.
This sentence and others like it should be banished forever from your querying vocabulary. I’m only yelling at you for this because you have so little else to scream about and I want you to be perfect.
Some people will probably tell you that starting with prologue-like italics is a bad idea and I will tell them to go sit on it.
Most really good queries hint at complexity while displaying simplicity.
Our protagonist is doing her thing, acting in the midst of the stuff we need to understand, getting on with her life rather than posing for a Chapter One Centerfold.
And I’ve got to admit that the sudden random boner at the end of the chapter threw me off.
So there you have it, folks. The kind of advice Julie Sondra Decker gives to people.
::bows::
My mentee and alternate are in for some wacky comments. I can feel it.
Pitch Wars Contest: Team Chosen
After receiving over 100 applications from prospective mentees in Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars contest, I have chosen my team of one mentee and one alternate. I wrote nearly 60,000 words of feedback and critiqued every query letter and set of sample pages that came into my inbox, but when all was said and done, there could be only one.
Congratulations to Megan Paasch, whose New Adult fantasy CHARLOTTE ELEMENTAL impressed me with its premise and melted me with its heart. I will be reading her entire book, shining up her query letter, and helping her craft a short pitch for the agent round of the contest.
Congratulations also to Natalka Burian for becoming my alternate. Natalka is the author of EVERYTHING IS FLOWING, a rather strange and beautiful literary novel with speculative aspects, and its evocative prose has already moved me to tears twice. I will be helping her with her short pitch and first chapter for the alternate showcase.
You can see all the mentors, mentees, and alternates here.
Hopefully, like last year, I will be able to post with agenting news for my team before long! But for now, it’s back to work.