Tag: i write the system

A Week In “I Write the System”

It has now been one week since I released “I Write the System.”

So far, so good.

There have been a couple minor issues like the fact that my cover is slightly off center and there are no page numbers, and Amazon ads were down all week, including their contact team who I still need to get in touch with after trying several times last week, but people are buying and reading it. I had a surge of buyers the first few days, which had me in the top 20 books in my categories three days in a row, but I’m not ranking since my surge of buyers went down and my ads aren’t up due to a glitch.

Here are a couple pictures from Day 1, when I ranked in the top 10 in Gender Studies and LGBTQ Biographies…

I’ve been having severe anxiety with people reading my book, because of how personal it is, as well as just the general state of the world lately. It’s been rough; but I’m meditating, relaxing, listening to records, doing art, taking baths, cooking, talking to friends, and whatever I can to get through it, and I invited one of my artist friends over to hang out for my birthday.

Here is some digital art I’ve recently done…I need to start doing more stuff by hand, but these are fun to fuck around and make art with…

I made this list of my 50 Favorite Rappers, and someone I met in a hip hop group who’s never said anything else to me informed me that Apollo Brown was not a rapper. Ooops. Well, it’s an honest mistake. He’s a producer who works with a ton of great underground rappers and everything he produces is fire, so he’s one of my top hip hop artists, but I gotta replace him with someone who probably should’ve been on the list already… MF DOOM.

Here is the list though. The rest of them are rappers, and all worth checking out…

It’s been a hectic week and I suspect it’s only gonna get worse for a bit unfortunately. Hang in there. Maybe read my book for inspiration. Put it down if it’s overwhelming, but you can check it out here…

I will leave you with some new music by local artists I really dig and was excited to see them work together, Walter Alice and Brandie Blaze…

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…

Do You Think You Are A Good Writer?

Someone in a writing group asked a question to the group, “Do you think you are a good writer?”. I thought I’d blog my answer.

Growing up, writing was the only thing I did that people took positive notice of. I was always in the mid-level classes and was failing most of them due to the trauma I was going through, which had my attention spent on other things. I had a reputation as a “bad kid”, yet was also considered one of the best writers in my town, which wasn’t really a small town and there were several famous people from there, including a famous author who once taught English at the public high school… (not to me, but my mom had her).

I had a difficult life though, and after a few years of community college, I had to drop out of school. I spent much of the next couple decades in and out of psych hospitals and hanging out with street gangsters while on high doses of court ordered anti-psychotic injections and going through ongoing abuse that I only just partially escaped a few years ago. All the stress and trauma and chemicals have done so much damage to me, and I’d becoming lazy with texting and social media being the majority of the writing I did. When I wrote my first book in 2013 out of a desperate need to tell my story, the writing was awful and I’m kind of embarrassed by it now, especially since I only just released it a year ago.

However, I spent the last few years as an artist in an art gallery showing my art, performing my music, and talking about intellectual things that got my brain working better. I started reading more and meditating and writing and memorizing songs, I had to learn to self-publish and make web sites and press kits and send query letters and so on. It’s been a hell of a year in growth. I like to think my writing is getting back to the point where I can confidently say it’s not bad. My new book is a huge improvement from the stuff I released last year and I’m feeling grateful to have some of my magic back, but I think the biggest thing that makes my writing decent isn’t so much the writing quality, but the way I simply and honestly explain things in ways in which people can learn from. I present new information in a manor of speaking which helps people to understand perspectives they never considered before. I may not be the best writer to ever live, but I’m decent. It’s something I was born with, and I’m improving day by day as I write so regularly now.

There are still days I think my writing is shit, but I belong to a writing group on Facebook, as I mentioned, and it appears from the questions and feedback I see in there, that 99% of the people in there have no writing skills whatsoever, although some of them are not writing in their first language, but the majority of people in the group are Americans, and they make up about 95% of the authors of millions of self published books on the internet that I compete with to be seen in a sea of available books out there. Anyway, no disrespect to them. If you love to write, then write! It’s okay if it’s not good. It might get better, it might not, but writing is good for the soul no matter the quality. If I have to compete with a sea of terrible books, I know mine will stand out at least a little, and they’re getting better… but like I said, no matter your skill level, I think people should always write or sing or do art or whatever you love, as long as you aren’t driving your neighbors crazy with five hours of vocal exercises every day!!! Live your life your way and try to be proud of everything you create because it wasn’t here until you made it.

I recently got these funko pops of Alfred Hitchcock and Spike Lee, two of my favorite filmmakers. Some day I wanna write and direct a movie.

Anyway. That is that. Here’s a few songs about books that I love… (songs I love, about books, I should say)

Arting Around with Friends

I’ve been busy with a number of things this week. I had the art show Saturday, an appointment with Nikki Sunday, I think I cooked and cleaned Monday, the nurse came Tuesday and I had a friend stop by that night, I had a call with Nikki Wednesday, and yesterday I had a zoom with the nutritionist. Tomorrow I have Jen coming by for what I think is my last appointment with her, and then I was supposed to go up to see my parents this weekend, but it looks like that’s not gonna happen due to the weather, but they might be coming to see me, and then I’ll see Nikki again Sunday, yadda yadda. Time just keeps flying by. I made these stickers a couple nights ago and offered 6 for $10 and a new friend ordered a pack. I made a few more that I didn’t take pictures of and am sending them out later today.

Today is my boyfriend’s birthday, and we talked more of our plans when he comes to visit in July. I’m looking forward to that. I had fun with my friend the other night too. He is an artist I know who I relate to a lot and had a great time hanging out with him. There is also someone in my neighborhood I’ve been meaning to see again too. There are a number of new people in my life I’d like to maybe see now that we can hang out with people but I also don’t wanna do it so early on with the restrictions.

He brought these cool beers and we just hung out talking, which I need. It helped lift my mood a lot to have the social time with him and the event Saturday.

I’ve been busy with all sorts of projects, including the fact that despite the fact that I keep saying I finished my new cover, I keep changing things.

That’s a photo of it on my computer screen. It won’t be blurry like that, and I have to center it better and possibly change the font, but I think that’s what it’s more or less gonna look like.

I finished my 8th edit of that same book and it’s shaping out nicely. I’m getting ready to start writing a one page description of the book to send out as a press release with stickers and business cards. They won’t be as big of packets as I did for The Godchild… no 8 pages of reviews and quotes, probably no prints, and then I’ll do one original sticker and I’ll possibly buy cool random fun stickers in bulk, or if I can get professional stickers of my logo made in bulk for fairly cheap, I may do that instead.

I’ve realized I probably won’t get around to my next book for a couple years. I wanna redo and re-release the first Godchild book first, and I’ve actually been going through that and taking notes on what to keep, what to purge, and what important things I need to keep in the story from the stuff I purge. I plan to completely redo the beginning. There’s so much unnecessary shit and so much important shit I somehow managed to leave out completely, so I’ll give the first 1/3 of the book a complete makeover.

Here’s me and Moo. Aren’t we cute?

Don’t mind my ADD. I’m listening to jazz right now but I did a couple new hip hop videos for tiktok. The link is through Instagram though since that’s where I have more followers. I’m trying to get ready for the upcoming open mic.

and another…

And yeah. That’s about it.