Tag: boston author

Reading A Couple Chapters Of the New Book By Jymi Cliche

Presenting : two videos of me reading from my upcoming book. It’s an autobiography about my life as an intersex person with Bipolar Disorder and Complex PTSD. The majority of the book takes place before my transition. I am now living as a non-binary trans man. These two chapters take place in the 90’s when I was in high school. I will be showing the second of these two videos directly on Facebook and Instagram Monday night, to get ready for my upcoming book release, which will be somewhere in the next 3-25 days.

I was gonna add photos to the book, but I don’t think I’m gonna be able to, so instead, I’ll put a couple of the photos here, showing what I looked like at the time these chapters were written.

This first chapter I’m sharing is from the end of 1993, when I was fifteen years old and was first put in the psych ward after years of being badly bullied, abused, and giving up on life. I had already made my first suicide attempt a couple years earlier and was still suicidal while also trying to get sober from my early addictions, so my church told my parents to put me in a notorious psych hospital I call “Claymore,” and I dropped out of public school and went in-patient. That is what the first chapter here is about. I made it psychedelic looking to go with the theme, and I decided not to put this one up on FB and Instagram since it is incredibly triggering. Just be warned there is talk of all kinds of triggering shit in this chapter. It’s about an adolescent psych ward, and it’s real.

This is a photo of me at the age I was in the psych ward. Technically, this photo was taken a few months after I got out, but it’s still pretty close to that time.

If you choose to watch both videos, this is the one that comes first. They are around 23 minutes each.

This second chapter, which will be up on Facebook and Instagram, was about a year and a half later, when I was attended my alternative high school. I try to use them as an example of a better functioning, although still flawed system than the main public system.

It’s called Rumors because it starts off with me talking about some of the rumors I heard about myself and why I left public school. I also talk a lot in this chapter about the things I loved at alternative school, including being part of the Boston Pride celebrations as a newly queer person, and finding the LGBTQ world that was still so taboo in the mid 90’s.

The picture was probably a few months before this chapter took place, but still that same time period. I was 16. That photo is from my 16th birthday party.

My book will be out soon. Thanks for your interest. I hope you enjoyed the videos!

Heard Back

Well, I heard back from the publishing company who wanted to read my book, and they said that 1. they can’t publish it as quickly as I hoped, so it wouldn’t work anyway…2. that in the future I probably shouldn’t try to rush a publisher (oops… but, of course I was only trying to be fair and tell them I was already planning to self publish and had already sent out press kits announcing it, so if I didn’t hear from them by the 20th, I would need to begin uploading to Amazon. I sent the query to them 5 months ago….but I get it, and knew it was a risk to attempt it) and 3. right now publishing companies almost exclusively only accept memoirs from subject matter experts, celebrities, and popular social media influencers. They did not end up even reading it, so no feedback on the actual book, but I’m proud of myself for getting the callback response from them. It is a sign that I am a good enough writer, with an interesting sounding book to get the attention of a publisher. Most never get this far, so I will take the achievement and move forward with the regularly scheduled programming…

I’m really not too upset that I’m gonna be self publishing again. A lot of people say it’s actually the best option for mildly successful authors who write the kind of books that speak to a certain type of people more than mainstream society. It’s not like a blockbuster film or summer reading…That kind of stuff does well with a publisher but indy type authors can get totally taken advantage of by publishing companies sometimes, and while I know the place I heard from was a legit small company, I don’t have a clue what going with them would look like, or if it would even be something I could make work. I already know how to self publish even though I’m planning to use my own ISBN’s this time and have to figure all that out, but I’m in control and I mostly know what I’m doing and what to expect, so it’s a lot less anxiety right now to just self publish anyway, and I can release when I said and not be like Kanye.

I’ve been doing a lot of editing, and tonight I made a video of myself reading a chapter from my book, about my first time in the psych ward, and I will post that in a couple days. One day at a time, one thing at a time, I am getting there.

Here’s a picture I took of my street art. It’s hot as fuck out there.

Getting Ready For “I Write the System”

I’ve been working on some promotional art and my book cover. Here’s what I have so far. The first picture is something I made using the art of the original book cover in which I decided not to go with, but I put a lot of time into it and thought I could still use it to promote…

“I Write the System” explores how society forces us into separate, binary genders. Intersex people and others who don’t fit into society often fall through the cracks and suffer great trauma, which for Jymi Cliche led to a life of dependence on the very system that abused him from day one, when he was operated on at birth and conditioned to believe he was female.

The book begins with Jymi at age four, exposed to the system for the first time through nursery school, where he knew right away that he’d never fit into this world. The story follows him through school, friendships, addictions, the mental health system, and too much trauma to handle at times. It wasn’t easy for him to rise from the ashes of the constant disasters going on around him and begin to put his life back together. He has dreams of being successful one day, but is still fighting Complex-PTSD, Bipolar Disorder, and a number of other severe diagnoses, along with being a non-binary trans man in the binary system.

Using dark humor and inspirational stories to balance the trauma and struggles, Jymi offers ideas for change and a message of hope. His memoir encourages the idea that in time, things can get better, even if it feels impossible.

Here is the cover… It’s an androgynous baby photo of me in the late 70’s and the layout is meant to resemble a political campaign poster, as well as a classic rock concert poster, and the colors are meant to resemble the pink and blue on the trans flag, but I don’t really like pastel and didn’t want it to look like a baby book, so I darkened it. It is also sort of meant to loosely resemble the American flag, which really doesn’t mean all that much to me, so I am okay with altering it, but I am talking mostly about the American government system when I talk about “the system”.

I’ve done about 14 edits on it and plan to do one more before I prepare to upload it for its September 11th release date…