The smart and quirky literary/blog zine Drunk Monkeys accepted my short piece “Asexual, Aromantic, Partnerless, Childless – and Happy.”
It’s a personal essay about how other people’s obsession with changing me has actually been more of an impediment to my happiness than anything these folks can attribute to my lifestyle and inclinations.
Several asexual people, with me among them, gave an interview to Toronto-based writer Iris Robin for an article in The Varsity. It’s a lovely overview of asexual experience and terminology. My book is mentioned as a resource.
Elizabeth of Prismatic Entanglements has offered a thoughtful, comprehensive, gently critical review for The Invisible Orientation.
An excerpt:
This is the Asexuality 101 book. It’s for laypersons, but I think it should also be required reading for professionals looking to better serve their asexual clients. It’s a starting point for real understanding, and one that outsiders looking in just can’t provide.
Books are prone to becoming quickly outdated as societal understanding deepens, and even less than a year after its release, there are already some passages beginning to show their age. But that’s more about how fast our high-level community discourse moves! On that level, it makes sense to forgive the subtle nuances rooted in older discussions. Here, we find the community’s foundation, preserved by someone who has been part of it much longer than most of us.
On such solid ground, we can now take steps toward further progress.
Hey, remember when I wrote a queer story for a submissions call? And I expressed doubt about the story being good enough to get into the magazine?
I was right. It wasn’t chosen. Surprise!
But. I figured it’s not very often that a person has a chance to submit to a special issue that’s looking for submissions from a small sliver of the population that you happen to fit into, and I wanted to take my chances one more time before the deadline and submit again.
So I thought . . . what appeals to me in science fiction? What cool questions do I like seeing explored? What concepts blow my mind? What do I love about this genre?
I thought about one of my favorite short stories of all time, Joan D. Vinge’s “View from a Height,” and remembered how compelling the protagonist’s situation was to me. It’s about a woman with an immune deficiency blasting off on a one-way trip into deep space, and how she reacted when she was far enough from home that she could no longer receive signals from other people. I decided to take a similar concept but do it with a different dynamic–with two people in a spaceship going to the stars for a different reason. The dynamic changes a lot with two.
So I wrote a short story that was primarily about the protagonist and her partner trying to get chosen for the space mission and dealing with prejudice that comes with being in a queer relationship. My protagonist, Becks, is my first ever aromantic asexual protagonist. Her partner, Austin, is gender fluid, and is also on the asexual spectrum (being graysexual and demiromantic). And they’re in a queerplatonic partnership. It was interesting to write partly because there were “rules” attached to Austin’s gender and what pronoun I used had to match. I enjoyed being subtle about that in the narration, even though there’s some very explicit stuff about the gender fluidity in the story.
I hope I’m not too much of a failure when it comes to the actual science, though. I’ve read a lot of stuff that happens on spaceships but I don’t know a lot of theoretical science that would make what I wrote realistic, and it’s not super advanced because it’s only set like a little more than 100 years in the future.
Anyway. “Aquarius” is 7500 words and is going to be submitted to the same submissions call. I like this story better than the previous one and if Lightspeed doesn’t want it then I actually think I’ll have a good chance of selling it somewhere else.
Evening Assam, Morning Pu-Er gave me a really nice review for my book on Tumblr. An excerpt:
More than anything this book arms the reader with the vocabulary, and confidence, to start in depth discussion and exploration of their (or their loved one’s) asexuality. I can think of no better place to start.
The writing manages to be simple and clear without ever patronizing, even when addressing all manner of different groups. Decker maps out an impressive understanding of those identifying on the asexual spectrum that gives context desperately needed for such an underrepresented topic.
Read the whole review on the blog post!
In the same vein as my previous post about less frequently asked questions about querying, I’m now posting the follow-up: Not-So-Frequently Asked Questions about submission for agented authors.
In the video, I answer the following questions:
I published my first blog in Psychology Today, where I’m now installed as a blogger. (See my profile there if you like!)
Because of the nature of the magazine, I decided to tackle health professionals’ responsibility to asexual clients and how they should be educated on this subject if they’re going to treat us.
Please read “Asexuality and the Health Professional.”
A Spanish magazine called Yorokobu interviewed me for an article called “Los asexuales reivindican su hueco” (“The Asexuals Claim Their Space”).
Jaled Abdelrahim sent me a list of interview questions in English, which I also answered in English, and then the translated version was published on the site.
My friend Claudia took a crack at a more accurate translation than Google Translate can provide, which you can read below the cut.
I’ve got a new video on querying literary agents . . . and this time, I’m addressing the not-so-frequently asked questions. If you’ve got the basics down but have some lingering concerns, check this out and ask your own!
In the video, I answer the following questions:
I have a short interview in the December 22, 2014 issue of Maclean’s, a Canadian national weekly news magazine. The article about me is on page 75 of the issue, under “Help,” and its title is “No sex please—it’s boring.” (Not sure who titles these things! I wouldn’t know if sex is boring, though I guess conflating “boring” with “not interesting to me” isn’t that far off.)
The limited preview on the Maclean’s site
The interview is in the print magazine–which is only sold in Canada–and you can buy the digital edition through the newsstand online here. An online version was later posted here.
The article is pretty super basic with one page of content. It has some nice little tidbits and didn’t sensationalize asexuality or make fun of me or anything. But as is almost always the case with media articles that do not let me check them before they print/post, there are little things I would have preferred to be presented differently, most notably the sentence “Just as some people are born gay, straight or bisexual, Decker says she was born without the desire to have sex.” I do not in fact say that. Because I hate the “born this way” narrative for many reasons, so I’m not keen on being represented as making that claim as if those are the words I’d use or the sentiment I’d express.
There’s also a place where it quotes me as saying some asexual people do decide to have sex and then they finish the sentence for me by claiming it’s “to please a partner,” and I think that is misleading, though of course it’s sometimes true. It also kinda oversimplifies the whole “asexuality is not trauma, it’s not hormones,” etc., but that’s not surprising given the space allotted.
They also made reference to the Apositive site and a post on it, but misspelled its URL as “appositive.org.” It’s supposed to have one P, not two. Maybe spellcheck decided to hit it and no one caught it. The print version has this issue but the online version does not.
My own book is secretly in the photograph, sitting on my desk in the background under some papers. That’s kind of meta.