Tag: LGBT

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summer comes

I’ve always dreamed of getting to watch the sunrise over Stonehenge on the Solstice.  While I’ve seen Stonehenge, it was closer to the Winter Solstice than the summer version.

I’ll admit, summer isn’t my favorite season.  The heat and the sun don’t treat my worn out old body kindly.  But I do enjoy the sunsets and sunrises, when I get the chance to see them.

It’s also the time of the year when I’m the busiest.  This weekend is Pride, and I’m excited for that, especially because I’m bringing my niece to her first Pride.  I don’t mind the busy, but by the time this weekend is over, I’m going to need a really long summer nap!

When I get home tonight I will have a small, impromptu little ritual to honor the turning of the wheel and invite the burning light of summer to clean out the cobwebs, burn out the dark that has collected in the corners (and everywhere else) and bring forth the growing things that have lain quiet in the earth.

I may even try to get out and find a spot of sun this afternoon, though looking at the gloomy skies outside my SF office window, I’m not sure that there will be any to find!

Blessed Solstice, Readers.  May it bring forth a bounty in your life!

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othering others

When I first started writing the story that would become the Shades and Shadows series, I began with the idea that as a nation, the United States had a tendency to not only other people, but to foist our fears and anger onto those others and I followed it through to what I thought could be the outcome, if ever it were discovered that there were people who could heal and kill with some kind of power that we normal folk didn’t have.

But once I’d gotten the story written, albeit in a much shorter form than it exists today, I looked at where the political aspect of the story had gone as a result of that original premise and I considered it to be too unbelievable.  I looked at where we were at the time, where we had a person of color in our highest office and we had abolished (in theory at least) the othering of LGBT people and women were making gains politically and otherwise.  I thought to myself, who is going to believe a story that takes all of that away now, shoves it into a dark corner and returns us to the darkness of our own past?

I set the story aside, and went on to work on other things.

It wasn’t until the election in 2016 that I realized I was wrong, and that the othering hadn’t stopped at all, in fact for some of our US citizens, othering was still the lens through which they saw the world and those others were where they laid the blame for everything that they thought was wrong with their lives.

Since the release of Through Shade and Shadow, so much has happened that makes the politics in this series nearly pale in comparison.  This saddens me in many ways.

I hope we, as a nation, can navigate our way through this hurricane and come out stronger and better on the other side.

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radio silence

Wow, it’s been a while.  Sorry about that!  It turns out that working a full time job, working a consulting gig for Pride, editing an anthology and writing a book all at the same time can keep a person ridiculously busy.

Who knew?

It also makes a person forgetful.

 

But, Pride weekend is upon us and soon my life will go back to it’s normal breakneck speed, at least until the following weekend when I will be utilizing the long holiday weekend to escape the heat of the East Bay and head up into redwood country with my mother on a photography trip.

There will also be a fair amount of people watching and character collecting.  I look forward to the smell of nature and the cool shelter of the trees.

But when I come back I’ll have story ideas and pictures to share!

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and just like that, it’s June

I’m not really sure where January, February, March, April and May have all gotten themselves off to, but I hope they’re having fun.  It seems like just a day or two ago I was struggling to remember to write 2017 on things instead of 2016 (or the inexplicable occasions where I wrote 1996….what?), and here we are on the first of June.

We sent May out with a bang though.  My niece graduated high school on Tuesday.  She is the youngest of my brother’s kids, and I couldn’t be more proud of the woman she is becoming.  The school she graduated from is one of the top 1% of schools in the country and her classmates are all amazing students, most of whom will be attending four year universities and colleges in the fall.

I got back from all of that frivolity last night, and when I woke up this morning it was June.  Already, my calendar is jam packed for the month.

babf_logoStarting this weekend when I will be at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, California signing (and selling) books.  I will have copies of my two novels, Forever and Through Shade and Shadow as well as my small collection of poetry.  Sale pricing is $12 each for the novels and $2.50 for the poetry collection.

I can take cash, credit cards and paypal.  It should be a fun day for the whole family.  With all of the vendors and authors, there should be something for everyone!

San Francisco Pride is at the end of the month, for a completely different festival to bookend the month.  Pride likewise has something for just about everyone.  If you come out to one or both days of Pride remember to wear sunscreen, dress in layers, wear comfortable shoes, and please consider dropping a dollar (or more) into one of those pink buckets.  Every penny goes to support the organization that creates the festival and/or the organizations that take care of our community.

Somewhere between those bookends, I will be taking a couple of days to head out to Yosemite with my mother, to enjoy some nature and some truly breathtaking views, like this one, which I took on my last trip to Yosemite in 2010.

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But for now, I should go pour my second cup of coffee and get to working the day job.  Hope you all have a pleasant day!

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be the future

I love my weekend mornings.  They start with coffee and words.  It’s my time to write, or in some cases, edit.  The first few hours of the day are peaceful and quiet and I get to step out of the world I live in to inhabit some place filled with magic…well, mayhem as well.  What good is a story that doesn’t shake things up a bit?

Anyway, I’m enjoying that part of my Sunday morning, working on the closing chapters of In Shades of Sage, the second book in the Shades and Shadows series.  It feels good to be writing again.  I’ve been stuck on the same chapter for weeks. Yesterday I worked out where it was going wrong and re-worked it, so I get to write fresh material today.

But, my time is short today because in a few hours I need to leave to head out to Stockton, CA to spend time with family.  Not only is it Memorial Day weekend, but my niece is graduating from High School on Tuesday.

On the one hand, it doesn’t seem possible that she’s even old enough (forget that she turned 18 in January), on the other it’s kind of amazing to see the person she turned out to be.  I vaguely remember my own high school graduation. For the most part, I was just glad to be done with it.

I was a very different person then, and I really didn’t see much future for myself, if I’m honest.  I was surviving.  For Vae, I’m hoping she sees a brighter future for herself.  I hope she has dreams and ambitions beyond just surviving high school.  I hope to see her shine as she moves into the life she creates for herself.

No matter what that future is, no matter what roadblocks get in the way.  Don’t let anyone else tell you what your future is meant to be.  Make it your own way.  Be the future you want to see.

I’ll be over here with my pompoms cheering you on.

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donations, community, partners

Sometimes I think that the Mondays that follow productive weekends are harder than the ones that follow lazy weekends. We’re heading into the time of year when I have little time for lazy.  There are obligations and volunteer duties, family time and other crazy stuff.

I have volunteered with San Francisco Pride for better than ten years, working in the Donations Partners department.  Essentially, we are the people who greet festival goers with big pink pickle buckets asking for donations to help support the parade and festival. This year I have stepped up to manage the Donations Partners.  It’s a huge task, and a lot of responsibility, but I confess that I love the challenge.

You may wonder where that donation money goes.  And who are all of those people with the buckets anyway?

We partner with community organizations, non-profit groups that work with the LGBT community in some way.  They come from all sections of the spectrum, from groups that work with the homeless, to social organizations, from youth groups to cheerleaders, from churches to other religious groups, from local community centers to drag queens and their courts. Each of these organizations provides volunteers to do the bucket thing.

It’s a long day of work, but each hour that a volunteer works earns money for their organization.  At the end of the festival, the donations money is tallied up, and some of it goes back to the Pride organization to help pay the bills.  The rest is divided up into an hourly rate, and each of the partner organizations gets a grant based on the number of hours their volunteers put in.

Unfortunately, the work puts a bit of a quash on my writing.  Which was my long winded way of saying that I didn’t get much writing done this weekend.  But I did get to take my 68 year old mother to a tattoo shop for the first time in her life.  We took my niece to get her ears pierced.  It was an experience, I’ll say.

But no writing.  I guess I’ll have to try harder through the week.  I need to finish my short story so I can start editing for the anthology, and then I can get back to the world of Shades and Shadows.