Time for the second version of this poll, now with blurb! Based on the following blurb, which cover do you prefer?

Also, if you're interested in this book, it'll be launching on Kickstarter soon! Best way to keep up to date on it is to follow me or join the newsletter at the bottom of my website: https://www.Katy-L-Wood.com

Rep wise, this book includes multiple queer characters (including a nonbinary character, though they won't come out as such until book 2), and canon autistic rep.

Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites

In a world of dwindling hope, love has never mattered more...

Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites by Joy Demorra is a queer, paranormal, gaslamp fantasy romance novel featuring enchanted forests, gothic castles, and just a smidge of industrial coal dust, and is the first book of the Hunger Pangs slow-burn polyamorous romance series. Join Vlad, Nathan, and Ursula as they navigate a magical world torn asunder war and politics as they work to restore balance to the world and find love along the way. Book one is available now in ebook, paperback, and audio.

Why are there two versions, and what's the difference between them? Glad you asked! You can also check out individual content tags and heat ratings on my website at www.joydemorra.com

Self Portrait I’m calling “Twink Death” and is about me learning to accept gaining weight and my body shape as the Italian stallion I am😔

Basically trans male fatness is something that has been on my mind as it feels society puts such a pressure on Ftm people to be either effeminate and twinkish or perfectly passing and fit to be desirable, and where self love and attraction comes in for trans mascs who are neither of those things

There's more I could wax poetic about but alas I'm sleepy.

book abt a twink and a lesbian who are roommates and just went through bad breakups and swear off sex until they realize they’re both incredibly horny so instead of going out to get their hearts broken again they just fuck each other since there’s zero chance of falling in love.

book ends with them both finding good partners and coparenting kids together. no IVF necessary bc that shits expensive.

"lesbian"

fucking twink? male?

?

me when i am too square to understand the nuances of queer identity and existence and prioritize twitter definitions over ppl’s actual lived experiences.

AND SHE PEGS HIM!!!!!!

I’ve absolutely met a queer cis couple in apparently heterosexual pairing. Like, they didn’t even strongly identify as bi.

They had a shared experience of being queer and Buddhist in a predominantly straight Christian society. They formed a bond, and built a life together. And that’s ok. They didn’t hand in their queer cards. They weren’t bowing to societal pressure. They were just living their lives.

This is one reason why queer is an important word in our community. Because it can reflect the shared identity that all the letters have in addition to the very real differences. It can unify without creating uniformity. It can allow for continued exploration of self without having to constantly redefine terms of identity: (am I a man? Am I non-binary? Both feel true and false, everyday is different. Fuck it, I’m genderqueer and getting on with my life tyvm) It can describe the spaces in between the labels, because even though we keep adding new vocabulary to try and recognize and honor all the marvelous ways people can identify with themselves, their sexuality, and their relationship preferences, there will always be people who find themselves outside one of those boxes, quite often in more than one way.

And that’s good. That’s beautiful. That’s to be celebrated. That’s queer.

i post for the girls who used to read obsessively but can no longer pick up a book and also are no longer girls

Real homies respect trans people!

I think this is an incredibly important video to watch

We’re winning.

I found his bio on societyofpresidentialdescendants.org and it was so delightful I had to copy paste the whole thing:

“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.

“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.

“Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President’s last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president’s eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.”

And frankly, the novels sound like they slap:

Desmond was nominated for a Lambda Award.

“With his husband of 45 years.” You kids don’t know ... they got together before AIDS, at the peak of the Gay Glam Life. They stayed together as their generation died around them, and made through it to the point where they could marry and have a legal family. He looks like a chipper preppie who never had a serious thought or care in the world, but it took *incredible* determination, commitment, and also luck to get here.

I know why "prefered pronouns" and "prefered name" were retired from the vocabulary (it's way more than a matter of preference) but in retrospect it feels like a successful psyop to make transphobes sound absolutely incoherent.

Griping about people having "prefered pronouns": legible, clearly indicates what they have a problem with (trans people existing and being respected), makes you a huge unreasonable asshole but one whose grievances can at least be parsed for some kind of meaning.

Griping about people just having "pronouns": Incoherent, you are angry at a part of speech. Old man yells at cloud moment. Your hatred is so blinding that you can't hide that you have no idea what you're talking about and you look like a child throwing a tantrum except a child has probably been in an english class recently enough to know what a pronoun is.

Anyway we should do this with more stuff. Let's just call transitioning puberty exclusively until we get right wing grifters saying that puberty is unnatural and if you've gone through it you're a freak on their shitty little youtube channels.

"Prefered Puberty" is honestly already an incredible way to refer to HRT. Let's do it.

"genre-savvy" no i want a genre-unsavvy protagonist. scratch that, i want a genre-deluded protagonist.

i want a protagonist who is convinced until the last possible moment that they're in a lighthearted romcom--despite the proliferation of slasher murders. give me a soccer dad who is just so determined to enjoy family vacation, despite the fact the kids summoned an eldritch deity from the lake. a preteen who is experiencing a coming-of-age saga and annoyed their parents aren't emotionally present (the parents are distracted by a literal zombie apocalypse). endless possibilities

genre-dysphoria

do you think a dude ever had sex with another guy

it might be difficult to figure out. consult the scriptures

these scriptures just have pictures of dudes kissing and groping each other

Penetration, my liege?

not now my dearest advisor i need to read these scriptures

weird that we treat autism and ADHD as intrinsically linked due to high rates of comorbidity but no one talks that way about autism and schizophrenia or autism and OCD or autism and bipolar disorder etc etc even though those are also often comorbid. gee I wonder why

pink in the night

If there is a time I don’t reblog this it will be because the apocalypse got me

also the creator confirmed the brunette girl is trans!!

I graduated high school in 99.

There was a student at our school named Wayne.

Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.

Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.

The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.

Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.

He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.

Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.

So... no.

No one in my school talked about being trans.

Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.

Description: [A video of a woman riding a galloping horse bareback while holding a large rainbow flag.]

i felt like these tags really added to the experience, thanks @cynderxdustypaws for your knowledge

This is one of the most powerful images I have ever seen, and I will reblog it every single time because every single time it brings tears to my eyes.

I like how teens are too young to figure out their sexuality unless its heterosexual

Idk how people find this old post like once a week but I will say as a closeted 15 year old nothing can describe how much confidence it gave me that everyone agreed with me. That it’s all bullshit. I was so angry and frustrated at the world not taking me seriously, and the thousands and thousands of people reblogging showed me that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t crazy and heteronormativity is all bullshit. Being queer is as natural as breathing air.

A wonderful and topical column from a respected queer columnist! How refreshing!!!

I would give the link but you know how Tumblr hates links.

I personally find the pulled quote "I am not entitled to a perpetual state of comfort" to be a) the wisest most comforting shit I've heard all year and b) a maliciously abdicated concept in most young reactionary gays. Also known as tenderqueers, or purity police, or puriteens. So here I go.

JP is an immensely cool guy. We went to college together (generally, not personally). He doesn't play in fandom, or at least doesn't write much about it, so we are now seeing fandom purity culture bleed into "real life" asks and columns and I for one am exhausted. The sheer ignorance of gay history is the bulk of the problem and I don't know how to make younger queers understand that we've always been kinky, we've always been weird and outside and rejected, and while ITS COOL THAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE THAT NOW(?), you have ZERO rights to try and cringe-cancel and sanitize a culture of survivors triple your age. Because of les uncomfix, or anything else.

(TW: small fandom-centric story involving trauma dumping re: sexual abuse and incest)

It reminds me of when I received a comment on a chapter of Bandages and Bravado, accusing me of (here we go) promoting/adoring incest for? Midnight making a joke that Aizawa needed a "daddy".

That was it. I also tagged for it. It was a joking sort of tag, because it was ONE SENTENCE, ONE THROW AWAY CONCEPT, like ha ha we are referencing living/classic gay culture in a story about stupid Japanese heroes.

Then.

This person was deeply upset and triggered and trauma dumped, semi-graphically, in the comments on a BDSM-centered fic with nearly exhaustive tags, about how their father sexually abused them and how they have to walk through life knowing that people do this thing that I referenced, and why would I ever do that. This thing that, according to the level of their deep grief, I invented (???) and wrote into a very unrelated story (????) for callous and ignorant laughs.

There is so much wrong with this ahistorical, ignorant, unhealed and reactionary approach to kink and sex and I am still so very sorry that this person stumbled upon that one sentence, or concept, and it was enough to provoke that kind of pain.

I also know that it had little, if nothing, to do with me.

I said (paraphrased), "I am deeply sorry you had to live through that. You should probably not be reading this fic. While it is still your choice, I would not recommend it, because the fact you didn't expect to see basic gay kink content/context in a themed fic overly tagged as such probably means you're not mature enough for the complicated contents to come. It will probably lead to more distress, and I don't want that for you. I will be deleting your comment within 24 hours, due to the fact that others have not consented to your graphic descriptions of your very real abuse. In sharing in public spaces, you may trigger someone else, and I'm certain that was not your intent."

And I did. I was shaken, and sorry, and mad, mostly at the idea that young people (I'm assuming they were young) are irresponsibly barging into pieces of fiction and destroying themselves like this. And, in terms of their comment, possibly harming other people who had come into the space responsibly and weren't at all expecting to encounter an accusatory first hand account of incest and abuse in a story actually WHOLLY unrelated to such things.

I'm just tired, y'all. You are not entitled to perpetual comfort. You are entitled only to maintain your own sense of comfort and your ability to enter and exit spaces that you believe violate your comfort. You cannot do this at the expense of others, and not everything on this green earth is engineered to harm you. Some things simply are.

And if you metaphorically walk up to a rock in the middle of the road and bend over to bash your head into it, not even have the excuse of TRIPPING on it, then you need to take some time with yourself and figure out how to effectively champion your own internet safety. It's your most important responsibility out here, and if you show up with gushing head-wounds more than once, you may not have your own best interests at heart.

Enjoy the good. Block the bad. Curate your feed. BUILD YOUR BUBBLE. MAINTAIN YOUR ARBITRARY CONCEPT OF SAFETY.

And please, PLEASE stop self-harming on my, or anyone's, accurately tagged content. Because did you know? That's what you're doing.

In honour of disability pride month, we made a disability Pride Knight! Stay proud! ⚔️🌈