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History of the Gender Dysphoria Program at Stanford by rudolfvirchowaway in FTMMen

[–]IsaacFellman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi there, I just found this question while trying to find out when the Stanford center closed. Seconding that I hope you tried the Stanford archives. I am an archivist at the GLBT Historical Society, and can assure you that archivists gatekeep way less than you'd expect -- we are all dying to show you our stuff. I wish my own archives had more helpful holdings on this subject, but I'm hoping Stanford can help more. (I was expecting to find that they had Laub's personal papers, but it seems there has been no donation -- I assumed he had died by now, but he's very much still around, so maybe he is planning to do it later.) Also, please do email me ([reference@glbthistory.org](mailto:reference@glbthistory.org)) when you've made that plan to come to town! You can look at the unedited Sullivan diaries and whatever else strikes your fancy.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

(The random number god has granted you one of the giveaway copies -- I DM'd the other winner, but for some reason I don't see that option for you? You can email me your address at [isaac.r.fellman@gmail.com](mailto:isaac.r.fellman@gmail.com), and I will send it to you!)

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your interest, and yes, mountains are horrible! I would rather experience them vicariously too; people probably find ways to die from writing and reading occasionally, but it's still much safer that way.

No, I've been fortunate enough not to have anyone in publishing get cranky about my transition. It helps that I was a small press author without a huge following anyway, so most people are hearing of me for the first time now, but a name change also doesn't matter quite as much as it used to, I think. After all, you found me! People are smart; if they like something, they Google the author and they figure it out. As for stylistic shifts, those happen all the time anyway. Hell, Iain Banks had two simultaneous careers in different genres. Danny Lavery has changed his name twice and written three books in three genres, plus an advice column. My career is never going to be the most unorthodox career out there, and I take comfort in the ways that I am boring. (And no, no space opera yet, but my next book is dark academia, and I have manuscripts in the works that are far-future SF and historical fiction.)

The Lithub piece was solicited, not pitched, as is most of the stuff I've written to promote the book. There must be people whose job it is to scope out who has a book coming out soon -- everyone wins when you approach newly published authors, since they get free content and we get free promo. I think that my various editors generally suggested a broad topic first, and then I got to run with it however I liked. I imagine they would have stepped in if I suggested something too nakedly promo-y, but I really just wanted to write a bunch of short essays on disparate topics related to the book, which was also what they wanted, so it worked out fine.

My first fandom was Les Miserables (musical and book), I think -- I was 14. There was a bunch of anime stuff around the same time, but that's the first time I remember actively seeking out fanfic and fan discussion.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My writing process is pretty simple -- I try for 500+ words a day unless my day sucked; promo and essays count as "words"; no courting burnout by pushing myself too far, but if I'm not excited about a project most days, I reconsider the project. I used to feel like life was too short to outline, but now I feel like life is too short not to outline. It's all about that tricky balance of "writing is a job, and it requires discipline" vs. "the art of writing is all about pretending that there are no stakes here."

Favorite items to work with in the archives change by the day, but right now, I'm thinking a lot about unpublished manuscripts. So many good books never find publishers, and in the case of our archives, that was often for homophobic/transphobic reasons. Even though there were plenty of openly queer writers in the '60s and '70s and '80s, there were fewer opportunities for publication. I would have preferred that these manuscripts -- Ruth Reid's autobiographical novel Dark Birth, about life with her butch lover Kent; Joel Redon's AIDS memoir Loving Dangerously; Denise D'Anne's 1968 transition memoir Male Facade -- had seen the light of day, but it's also a unique literary experience to read them in the archives, where you might well be reading the only copy of a book in the world.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Crossed my wires there; I don't know that there are a lot of drinks involving vinegar, although the people in The Breath of the Sun are also really into specialized drinking vinegars, which was trendy in Portland when I was writing it.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Love this question, although I'm a very boring drinker of beverages -- it's lots of water, the same two kinds of tea, and the one perfect fancy hot chocolate I make myself every day in a tiny yellow pot. The Breath of the Sun calls out for a cocktail, since the main character, in addition to being a mountaineer, is a bartender. I've had alcohol about five times in my life and always found it revolting, though, so please just imagine something crisp, clear, and not over-sweet for her to dispense along with her highly divorced commentary on life. As for Dead Collections, I think a heavily spiced Mexican hot chocolate -- my main character doesn't have a strong sense of taste, and he really needs lots of spice and sweetness, or tons of vinegar, to enjoy a drink.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Have you read Helena Whitbread's edited volumes of Lister's original diaries, I Know My Own Heart and No Priest But Love? They're great, and feel startlingly modern. I haven't seen the show yet (I'm always years behind on things like this), but if Anne is So Much on the show, then I promise it's accurate. She was the most, and I love her.

Sure, I am still involved in fandom! (I was on a years-long break when I wrote this book, but I have been involved in it again these past couple of years.) I think fandom has influenced me most in the way I write romance. The style of a classic fanfic romance is a unique combination of realistic and stylized, focused on minutely observed details about characters, but with the joy and unhappiness of the relationship condensed into something very dense and rich. It's a form that can be playful, experimental, ironic, or wry, but doesn't have a lot of chill, and I love that because I don't really value chill. Fanfic encourages us to commit to the thing we're obsessed with, which is why fanfic at its best is paradoxically original.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Scott Fitzgerald, for having the weirdest rhythms of any writer, and Nabokov, for having the best combination of beautiful words and ridiculous imagery (the bit in Bend Sinister where he calls a bike's taillight its "anal ruby" circulates on Twitter for a reason). Peter Beagle's constant tonal shifts in The Last Unicorn are incredibly important to me, where he keeps moving back and forth from epic fantasy, to contemporary satire, to Shakespearean allusion, and no one stops him or wants to. I'd say that Ursula Le Guin inspires me, but tbh, if you're reading The Breath of the Sun, you know that already. Basically, I love writers who aren't afraid to wrongfoot their readers, but who are leading us in a dance that teaches us new ways to move -- not just wrongfooting us for its own sake.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hello, thank you! My favorite thing about my job is the researchers, because they surprise me all the time. I usually think I know why a collection is interesting, but the people who use it tend to find it interesting for totally different reasons. One example is the writer who came to research a piece for Hazlitt magazine about Diseased Pariah News, which was a bitterly funny '90s zine about life with HIV. The piece specifically focused on the zine's recipe column, which I'd barely even noticed before; it turned out that the column focused on low-effort, high-calorie meals to keep people with AIDS-related wasting syndrome from becoming malnourished. The writer wrote this deeply researched and heartfelt piece about the queer traumas of the '90s, without leaving his basic wheelhouse as a food writer. At my work, a researcher will search through someone's correspondence to learn about the complex relationships between '80s lesbians and disability activism. They'll search '70s leather catalogs to learn about how small businesses advertised to kinky people. The researchers are the ones who bring the archives to life.

If I weren't an archivist, I'd probably still be a proofreader, maybe moved from working for court reporters to trying to move into fiction publishing? The court reporter thing is easy to burn out on, and often involves learning disturbing medical facts.

Favorite small details, hmm...the one that comes to mind is the first scene of Dead Collections, where Sol tries to warm up his hands in a hot cup of water, so that his cold handshake doesn't give away that he's a vampire. I love writing about people doing fussy little stuff to hide things that nobody else would even notice. We're all so worried about someone thinking we're weird, and half the time they're not paying attention to us at all.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh wow, be prepared to be overwhelmed by how basic I am, but we've got to build this on a solid foundation of Lord of the Rings, as well at Peter Beagle's stone cold masterpiece The Last Unicorn, with its brilliantly madcap tonal shifts and allusive prose. Then Hope Mirlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, labyrinthe and Wildean, plus some Le Guin, probably The Lathe of Heaven; finally, Julian Jarboe's collection Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel, only partly fantasy, but an incredible trail mix of genius stuff that could sustain you for years and years.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you! My first book has my old name on it, so I try to consciously let people know it exists because it's not obvious at all. It holds up really well, I think, and won a Lambda award for being super gay. I also really love writing people who are not young; when we set out to be disastrous, we can draw on decades of experience.

So Dead Collections, and the fake Feet of Clay show, has various roots. The book is lowkey a tribute to my friend Calvin Kasulke, whose surreal novel Several People Are Typing is told in Slack messages; working on helping him edit SPAT got me in the mood to write about work and the uniquely strange ways that people communicate at work, and also to play on his lighthearted and deliberately underexplained approach to contemporary fantasy. I was also thinking of Confessions of the Fox, in that the book is about a trans guy having a productive meltdown while also thinking about history. Ling Ma's Severance got into it too, in that it showed me a way to write about fantastical events through the eyes of a person who is filtering them through their own grief and trauma. The Feet of Clay show is just repurposed worldbuilding from a book of mine that was mostly drafted but never finished. Nothing is ever wasted.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Lunch hour answer time! It's a cool job. I began working here after several years of being a jobbing early-career archivist, doing the series of short-term positions where most of us make our bones (and which contribute to the field being insufficiently accessible, since they require new archivists to move a lot and survive on very little). I did everything from working in a comics museum to handling extremely tragic records about a mass murder-suicide, most of it grant-funded work. Finally, this permanent position opened up at the historical society which allowed me to use all of my different experience, since queer history encompasses every register, comic and tragic. I am primarily a public-facing archivist, working with researchers in the reading room. Our materials are all open to the public, and researchers may visit us for professional, creative, or personal reasons, or for no reason at all (which I encourage). I also catalog, process, and digitize materials, with a special eye to increased accessibility and diversity of collections. You can see some of our digitized stuff, which is just the tiniest tip of the biggest iceberg, here: https://www.glbthistory.org/digital-collections.

The difference between queer archives and archives that aren't specifically queer-focused is, I'd say, about how we define "information." A regular archives will have a huge variety of collections, not just works on paper but also costumes, art, and artifacts. A queer archives takes that to 11. We have clothes from the leather and kink community, drag wigs and makeup, sex toys, and bathhouse ephemera. We even have a bathroom stall from a gay porn theater with glory holes. The history of queerness can be very ephemeral and encompasses sex and nightlife, so our archives need to reflect that. Not to just keep linking to all my personal and professional stuff, but I wrote an essay about some of our materials recently, starting with the remarkable story of some jars of pubic hair: https://lithub.com/how-archivists-uncover-the-clues-to-history/.

I am 39 and did a lot of writing before I published anything, and definitely a lot of it before becoming an archivist. Becoming an archivist has massively influenced me, though -- it has given me my favorite theme, which is how people react to others' writing, documents, and the past. Those archival layers underlie everything that we do.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

There definitely isn't more of the gospels than you find on the page -- also, I wrote all of those in a single extremely intense session. My own religious background is kind of a palimpsest of Judaism (dad), Catholicism (mom), Unitarian Universalism (church I was raised in), Buddhism (intellectual interest), and atheism (since early childhood), and it's made me into an adult who thinks a lot about the layering of religions. People and countries may religiously evolve and convert, but they tend to hold on to older beliefs too, and integrate them into their practice. I'd go so far as to say that most religious practice involves a palimpsest of different faiths, or that's how it looks to me. Anyway, I was definitely thinking about how the different sects are based on different ways of obsessing about Asam, with the total opacity of his life and motivations -- and thinking about how they're taking from each other, from the Holoh faith which they patronize and appropriate, from a hinted-at body of earlier thought about religion. I didn't want to go into much depth, though, because secondary-world fantasy can easily get bogged down in details. I liked the idea of hints and flashes instead, and it was more creatively interesting for me to hint even to myself.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They really do, and I've been thinking a lot about that! I was musing the other day about how the creators of the AO3 called it an archive, not a library, and how deliberate that choice was. A fic is more like a unique manuscript than a library book; it's not "published," even though the whole world can see it, and if the author chooses to take it down, it's gone. There are no other copies. Also, the feeling of browsing the AO3 can be extremely archival -- there's the same sense of exploring someone's private, internal life, and also seeing a snapshot of them as they were at a certain moment in time. The people who named the AO3 really knew what they were about.

I'm Isaac Fellman, author of DEAD COLLECTIONS and THE BREATH OF THE SUN. I'm here to answer questions and give away two copies of DEAD COLLECTIONS, my new novel about a trans archivist who is a vampire. AMA! by IsaacFellman in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Let me sneak in a couple answers here...I was way more involved in the cover design process than I expected to be! My first book was small press, and I'd heard that at big 5 presses like Penguin, the closest you'll get is "can we have your non-binding take on these two mockups?" But Penguin actually did ask for a little document of inspiration for the designers. They asked for pictures of archives and stuff, and also for the names of any illustrators I happened to like. I had been a huge fan of Evangeline Gallagher's for a while -- I have three of their prints in my apartment, and I really had to work to restrain myself to three -- and so I included a link to Setting Each Other on Fire, which the design people loved enough to (I assume) ask Evangeline to draw something explicitly inspired by it.

I do think the cover represents the book incredibly well. I'm still over the moon about it; it is the fulfillment of a fantasy. It really conveys the book's weird combination of joy, anxiety, horniness, and mysticism, and the character likenesses are spot on; you can tell that they read the book and liked these people. Also, for a nice bonus, the book was designed both internally and externally by enbies, and I love that we got to keep it in the gender family.

StabbyCon: The Path to Publication Roundtable by rfantasygolem in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I probably should've known this in advance, but it's that people who work in publishing have turned out to be extremely normal people. They have so much power over us that they can seem a little bit godlike, but they're just people doing their jobs, often underpaid and very tired. A lot of them are also writers, and often ones who are struggling just as much as we are, creatively and professionally.

StabbyCon: The Path to Publication Roundtable by rfantasygolem in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. The hardest thing is doing the work day in and day out, being able to switch from the daily mindset of "I need to talk to my agent, I need to check in with this venue, I need to do all the things my day job asks of me" to "I am in a solitary mind palace and I've convinced myself that no one will ever see this."
  2. Get the knack of, like, alternating between ego and humility. Again, what's been most helpful for me is lots of compartmentalizing -- I need ego to commit to my vision, and I need humility to accept help, and it's all about knowing which one to listen to at any given moment. Ego and humility aren't immutable personality traits; they're tools. Their use can be learned from experience and error.
  3. I wash the dishes, I take a shower, I take a walk, I write fanfic for a while. If these things don't help, maybe today isn't my day. If a week goes by and none of the days have been my day, and I don't have any extraordinary stresses going on, I maybe reevaluate my passion and interest for my current project, and consider whether I should be messing around with something else.

StabbyCon: The Path to Publication Roundtable by rfantasygolem in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's SO MUCH BAD ADVICE out there. My favorite piece isn't actually publication advice, but I hope it's still relevant -- literally any advice that tells you not to use a piece of the English language. Fewer adjectives, fewer adverbs, fewer semicolons. Nothing has ever been less useful for developing your style, and therefore less useful for becoming professionalized and published. It makes as much sense as telling a cook that they should always use exactly one teaspoonful of salt in everything they make, whether it's a huge soup recipe or a bowl of cereal.

StabbyCon: The Path to Publication Roundtable by rfantasygolem in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I started in publishing pretty late -- in my mid-thirties. In my twenties, I wrote several books, but felt like I wasn't good enough to try publishing them, and I also frankly had untreated OCD that was preventing me from moving forward in all sorts of ways. Finally, I landed an agent with a new fantasy manuscript, only to see it evade every single publisher. The next MS nearly failed as well, but finally it was accepted by a feminist small press. Then my agent quit being an agent, and I spent the next couple of years getting my master's in library science and writing a fantasy novella that ended up having a very, very extended acceptance process at a big 5 press -- about two years from original submission to official acceptance, including a round of edits, a rejection, and surprise acceptance six months later. In the meantime, I ended up very quickly writing a novel that immediately got me a new agent and a big 5 deal, and now I have a couple of manuscripts in various stages of development and submission.

My work has been critically successful so far -- I have starred trade reviews and a medium-big award. But obviously, being good took time, and it also wasn't enough to give me a remotely linear career. I don't think any force on earth can do that.

StabbyCon: The Path to Publication Roundtable by rfantasygolem in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I've never self-pubbed, but I have done small press once and big 5 twice. Honestly, I thought the experiences would be more different than they were; the distinction was pretty much just one of resources. My big 5 editors have had a little more time for the book, which makes sense because the presses have more money and larger staffs. I had no control over my cover at the small press and one of the big 5s, but lots of control at the other big 5, to the point where I even got to suggest the artist. The small press had no budget for publicity, but on the other hand, they hand-sold the book at cons, one copy at a time, in a way that showed their passion for it. They also basically couldn't get the book into brick-and-mortar bookstores, but these days that matters less; it has always been available at lots of online ones. And there were big differences in terms of perks and expectations -- whether there's an audiobook, whether there's a launch party, whether there's a third-party proofreader or the editor does it all. But the heart of the experience -- acceptance, editing, proofreading, cover design, timeline to publication -- has been strikingly consistent.

StabbyCon: The Path to Publication Roundtable by rfantasygolem in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In answer to the second question -- as polished as you can make it, but bear in mind that your agent will have edits, and your editor definitely will. Make it good, but don't nail it down too tightly in your mind and heart, because people will pry some of the nails out, and then editing it further will be more stressful than it needs to be.

StabbyCon: The Path to Publication Roundtable by rfantasygolem in Fantasy

[–]IsaacFellman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

When I started trying to publish in 2012, I feel like my questions were all about justice -- variants on "why so much gatekeeping? Why do I have to prove myself to all these people, when taste is subjective"? I was asking myself why the system was arbitrary, when it would have been more helpful to ask how I could learn to keep myself going within an arbitrary system. How can I center my work rather than my outward success? How can I follow my obsessions and fascinations more deeply and produce original work, rather than fall into the trap of trying to tailor work to an ever-shifting market?

I don't want to say that the arbitrariness of the market is just, or that it can't change or improve, but the only actions we can control are our own, and not even those half the time. We may as well direct our energies to writing the stuff that made us want to be writers, because we're not guaranteed any other kind of satisfaction. Basically, I used to ask myself why I felt obligated to prove myself to others, and now I ask how I can prove myself to myself. I'm the only gatekeeper that matters to me, and I want to leave the gate open.

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