I finished reading Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing and it’s a heck of book, loved it, can’t recommend it enough.
I think this is the first novel I’ve read in a long time. I’ve got shelves full of the usual fantasy and sci-fi novels I read in the late eighties and early nineties. Looking through them now, quite a few written by women, for some reason (some reason) I guess their books appealed to me back then.
I didn’t get to talk to people a lot earlier in life. It was hard to pretend to be a boy, and I wasn’t very good at it. (I had no idea how bad at it I was until now looking back!) I suppose I always sort of assumed the novel thing where everyone is always talking to the protagonist, telling them stuff, was just a writing trope. Gives the reader something to read. It’s how you write a story. But really the part of the fantasy novel where the protagonist is talking to other people was similar to the part with the dragons or the time travel gates or whatever, depending on the story.
Now, as a woman, I actually talk with people. All the time. It’s weirdly easy. People at work keep me informed, tell me stuff, seek out my input, credit me for my contributions, and just hang out and chat with me sometimes. Women just…say things to me these days, since I’m a woman too. And I can just…respond, it’s weirdly easy now that I can just relax and ‘be myself’ and somehow as a girl being myself goes over well.
So, that part of the story feels so much more realistic now! Like maybe that talking to each other thing wasn’t really meant to be part of the “fantasy” part of the fantasy novel!
Also, I have emotions now, on estrogen. Like, yeah, I always had emotions, to a degree, sometimes. I could sure as hell feel anger and people made goddamn sure I felt fear sometimes. But I wasn’t reading a novel, or looking at a painting at the art museum, and feeling strong emotions. If I was feeling strong emotions it was because something fucking bad was happening to me. It is such a different experience. I had all these feelings reading this book. And now curious, I found my old, very yellowing copy of C. J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel and now forty-odd pages into rereading it I’m pretty sure it did not fucking feel like this reading it the first time decades ago. Did cis people feel emotions reading novels when they were teens?
The general concept of Wrath Goddess Sing is it is a story set in the world of the Iliad, the Trojan War. Our protagonist, Achilles, is a trans woman in this story. For me, as a trans woman, this is an extremely interesting story, and Maya Deane is a trans woman, this was written by one of us. And wow does it show.
And so Odysseus tracks her down and finds out she’s a girl now, and drags her off to war as in the older story. Honestly the reactions people have to her being a girl now in the book feel so much like the reactions I get, people vary, but, mostly, people have heard of this, oh, one of those people.
She meets a ton of people in the run-up to the war, and, again, now that I talk to people, feels pretty realistic. And, yes, the thing where she’s trans and meets so many people who knew her in the old days, I am old and have a long history full of people who knew me in my old days, and her meetings feel not just possible but entirely realistic, relatable, even familiar. There’s the people who were terrible to her. A lot of us, we were bad a pretending to be boys, and there were guys around us who were downright eager to volunteer to take on the task of making sure we knew, good and hard, that we were not doing it right. And others who were not terrible. Maybe you wish they could have actually defended you, but at least they didn’t join in on calling you slurs, better than the rest anyway. People who didn’t know her. People who didn’t know her back in the old days and honestly she’s not sure if anyone at some point mentioned her past to them or not. That’s an interesting situation, when you don’t know if someone you are getting to know better knows. Should you mention it? Is it better not to? It’s not at all clear what the best choice is sometimes. There’s the guy who fucking wants to talk about genitals. I’m going to remember her response to that, I might use it someday. Make them regret bringing it up! Somewhere in there was a scene in which someone said, I don’t remember exactly what it was, ’that thing,’ to her, I’ve been there, someone said exactly that thing to me, I too had to decide what to say in response, and now the demigoddess Achilles also has to pick from the range of possible responses! The fun knowing jokes with real friends, about how you somehow happen to know certain things, or your abilities as a shape-shifter. (Back at one time I was not much of a shape-shifter at all, and then, somehow, I suddenly became a very good one, I have no idea how to express how weird and amazing that is. Achilles had a goddess help her out in the story, I mostly had my electrologist, it’s not the same magic but it’s magic all the same.)
This novel is very fantasy, very supernatural. It is not at all a sort of lightly fictionalized memoir of growing up in Joliet, Illinois in the late nineteen-eighties. And yet, for all the gods and goddesses showing up in this story, it’s the first one I’ve ever read where I’ve been thinking, oh, I’ve been there! I know what that fucking feels like! I’ve had to come up with a response to that, what response is our protagonist going to have! It’s genuinely weird for such a very fantasy story to be by far the most specifically familiar, relatable one I’ve ever read in my life.
We had a power failure the other day (car crashed into the pole!) and the five-year-old APC UPS on my computer only had a couple minutes of battery. The sealed lead-acid batteries aren’t really expected to last any longer than 3-5 years so that’s not unreasonable. I ordered a replacement and installed it today, seems to be working fine again. I decided to just order the “official” replacement pair of 12V batteries linked together into a 24V pair with connectors and straps to lift them out of the well in the UPS and so on for $100 instead of trying to be creative because it’s just not worth it to me. For the Linux people like me, you want to then stop the apcupsd service and run apctest as root to reset the date on the battery and run the battery calibration and the the self-test, then restart the daemon.
I just saw another Facebook “memory” from literally a month before what I later came to think of as my “coming out” as some sort of trans, in which I was saying something like “as a man, (I identify as a man, seriously I do) I just don’t understand…” and like, sweetie, dear, really, you’re a girl. Really you are.
The local filk gang has been holding basement gatherings and I went last night. It’s a group that is at least aware that COVID exists, and while it’s the worst air quality room I’ve spent any significant time in since pre-COVID days, they do require a negative COVID test before attending. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one using a nucleic acid amplification test (I use Metrix) and a negative on a rapid antigen test is pretty meaningless, but at least we’re trying to avoid people who are just obviously ill showing up, which is more than pretty much anyone else is doing, and I wear a Flo Mask and bring my portable Clean Air Kits Exhalaron air filter and friends don’t hassle me about it.
Also bonus to wearing the Flo Mask is I could play with these adorable kitties without any allergy problems!
Anyway it’s super nice to actually see people and get to chat in person and to hug friends, it’s really nice to get some touch. And hang out with one of my old trans friends from way back and have that kind of chat you can have with someone who really knows.
And of course singing, I’ve been away from it for a while. Aside from needing more practice making music I’ve realized I used to try to sing as far down toward the bottom of my range as I could, because, uh, you know, but as a woman now I don’t really want to do that so I’ve been doing some exploring of where in the range I want things.
It was super nice to hear some songs I hadn’t heard in a long long time, and do some singing again. I think everything I sang was written by Cat Faber, what can I say, she’s written a lot of good ones, everyone likes them!
I always feel a bit uncertain about how to relate to this sort of thing, because, after, uh, literally a decade now of trying transition stuff, I guess I’ve figured out that I’m pretty much a woman. We women, we are all unique individuals, though, to be fair, some of us, maybe more “unique” than others… But also I spent much of the first Trump administration (fucking hell I have to say which one) going about life as, I’m just gonna say it, a dude in a dress, so, like, I’ve got some very real genderqueer enby experience.
Also a reminder that I guess I’ve never kissed a boy. I mean, I’m basically a lesbian, but, like, if you are a queer boy who has known me a while and might want to kiss a queer trans girl, like, if you asked nicely I’d consider it…
I saw a Facebook memory from seven years ago about my trip to Arizona to take care of things when my mother died. By then I was far enough into transition to be wearing dresses at work and so I had decisions to make about how visible I was going to while traveling and in unfamiliar places, and I figured it would be easier to dial back on the femininity and attract less attention.
And then I had a series of mostly basically nice, occasionally confusing, sometimes baffling, experiences in which I was clearly getting noticed. I was not very good at boy mode, and honestly had rather little idea how people perceived me. I guess if you have long hair, wear a floral print shirt and bright colored pants, carry a purse, and have a beard, you still get noticed, even if back at work I’d probably be wearing a dress and compared to that I felt like I was being much more careful. I figured wearing a dress at the airport would be taunting the TSA! But I still got a comment expressing some sort of surprise (though no actual problems going through).
I’d look at the other women around me and not really know what to expect my experiences might be like. As much as the Tumblr enbies wanted to insist that “passing” is bullshit, and as complicated a thing as it is, it still is really a thing. The cis women around me overwhelmingly got seen differently from me, that one guy who was so feminine he was more-or-less an honorary woman. And now that as far as I can tell I’m nearly always seen as an actual woman rather than a man who is sort of an honorary woman, I can tell you, it really is a different experience. As well as the honorary woman experience went for me, it’s a different experience.
I don’t think I’ve ever written a link in markdown correctly on the first try. It’s brackets and then parentheses, because it’s backwards from what you might think from the usual precedence, right? First the link then the text, or the other way around?
This time of year there is a short bit of road on my drive to work where, if the sky is clear, I get the bright rising sun glaring into my peripheral vision from the left and the bright reflected sun off the windows of a building glaring into my peripheral vision from the right! It’s an experience!
We’ve had some clear mornings lately and I noticed I was not being blasted by the sun from both sides like this, and it’s because of the whole thing with the seasons and now the sun is rising farther to the south and it doesn’t line up with the windows like that anymore!
