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…
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!
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…
Today could’ve been incredibly stressful. I won’t get into all the details, but often times, days like these wreck me, yet I chose to laugh about it and shrug it off today. Maybe my weekend away helped, maybe it was the “LA Confidential” weed strain which is good for Bipolar, PTSD, anxiety, and pain. Maybe it was seeing my family or being showered with hugs now that my parents and I had our vaccines. Maybe it was a little sun and fresh air or the somewhat inspiring movie Nomadland that we watched. It was likely a combination of it all. I also found out I lost weight, I got to eat some good food, be social, got some help with my blog, and all kinds of good stuff. Today I got a book in the mail that I thought would be kind of like a how-to book about how to self publish a children’s book on Amazon, but it wasn’t quite as helpful as I was looking for it to be. I skimmed the whole thing, looking for the specific info I wanted, and it wasn’t in there, but he did have a few helpful suggestions. Honestly, I was a little turned off by the fact that even though he kept giving his wife credit for ideas, he kept saying “women are always right” which just rubbed me the wrong way because it reminded me of something my father would say to imply “I don’t actually think women are even close to always right, but my wife makes me feel like I have to say they are or we’ll argue about that too.” I didn’t enjoy that part, but I got a little bit of helpful advice, and one of those things was to make a YouTube channel to use for the books, and so I made a video of myself reading my favorite chapter from my first book, “The Godchild” and uploaded it to my YouTube… Here is that…
I trimmed my beard after I made the video. It was getting a little wild…
better
And here is an interview a blog called TZSBlog did with me awhile back about my Godchild trilogy…
1. Tell us about yourself:
My name is Jymi Cliche. I’m a 42 year old intersex trans man from Boston, Massachusetts in the US. I’m a newly self published author, an artist, photographer, poet, rapper, and human rights activist. I’m Bipolar with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and more than ten other psychiatric diagnoses. I spent twenty years of my life in and out of psych wards. I studied Psychology and Art in college and am still interested in both, as well as popular culture, especially music, but also books, movies, and TV, even though I’ve hardly had time to watch anything lately, or read for fun. I collect vinyl records and listen to music in some form all night while I work on my creative projects. I sleep during the day. I have a cat named Moo who’s been living with me for over fifteen years and I come from a large, close, chaotic family, many of whom live in the Boston area. My art is hanging at Out Of the Blue Gallery where I regularly do art shows and perform poetry and hip hop. I enjoy cooking new and old recipes and doing local Open Mics which have moved to Zoom during quarantine. I spend most of my time alone, which is what I usually prefer, although I do enjoy seeing friends and family and I text people or chat on Facebook, so it’s not like I don’t like people. I’m just somewhat agoraphobic and have severe social anxiety, so not having to go anywhere the last nine months has helped me be more productive. I love swimming at sunset, looking at the stars, enjoying live music, and dancing to shake the bad energy off my soul. I don’t do those things enough though.
2. How did you get into writing and publishing? Was this something you always wanted to do?
Yes, I’ve pretty much always wanted to be a writer. It’s been my goal since I was nine years old, and while I’ve written almost every day of my life, it took a long time before I was ready to write my books. Technically I wrote my first book when I was nine, but it wasn’t very good. I wrote another when I was eleven, and that was terrible too. Both were hand written and were pure childish fantasies, but I enjoyed the hell out of writing them, and I think that’s what was most important. I loved creating something. I had many ideas for books and screen-plays I wanted to write over the years, but they were fictional and I’d come up with a bunch of ideas but not know how to get started and make it work. When I began writing “The Godchild”, it was different. I went through some life changing and eye opening experiences in 2008 and 2010 and I knew since 2010 that I had an epic story to tell… my own. I knew that if I could just tell my story with all the details I could remember, that I’d have mind-blowing book. I started writing it in 2013 and finished a year or so later, but I wasn’t ready to publish. I was scared of the world reading something so personal, and honestly, I still am.
“The Godchild” gets off to a slow start because I didn’t even know where to begin, and I decided to start with where I was, at and go back and forth. It takes about the first third of the first book before the story fully gets going. The majority of the publishers I sent query letters to only wanted the first five to twenty pages, and I knew that even though I was sure the book got better and was worth reading, that they wouldn’t know that. I’m basically a nobody, at the bottom of society, so I expected to be rejected by most, and I was, even though many of the rejections were complimentary. I debated on whether to keep trying, but I wanted the whole trilogy to be released by July 2020, so I decided to self publish and I don’t regret it. It’s still selling and getting great reviews. I just wrote another book this past year which I’m hoping will get the attention of a publisher.
3. How was the writing, editing, and publishing process like for the first book?
It took seven years to write the trilogy, and part of that was because it was written as a journal. In the first book, I went back and forth from current day and into the past to tell the story of my life, so it only took about a year, but the following two books were both about the current day as I wrote them, so I had to actually live my life to find out what was going to happen, and I had to wait until enough happened to make it worth writing down. It was kind of a trip though, because everything that happened was perfect for the story. The books just wrote themselves. Of course, as I was writing my third book, I had extreme anxiety. I had faith that the universe would give me the perfect, epic ending for my trilogy, but I had no idea what that would be. I drove myself crazy with fear about the end of my trilogy coming. Was it the end of my life? The end of the world? I started to fall apart again like I had before I wrote the first two books, but it ended up bringing the trilogy full circle, providing the perfect ending as I had faith it would.
4. How has writing and being an author helped you as a person?
As a person who lived most of my life as a professional lab rat with different psychiatric treatments and medications tested on me since 1993, in and out of psych wards for 20 years, and the last decade slowly recovering after being broken, it’s nice to feel like I did something big and important, and that I count. I’m grateful that my story is being told and heard, and that people get it. It’s given me the ability to say that I’ve got a job and show people that I’m not lazy or stupid or whatever they think when they hear I have mental illness. I didn’t waste my life. It may have been far from conventional, but that’s what makes it such a great story. I have far less shame about existing and sometimes needing help than I once did now that I’ve put out my books. I hope the books will help heal the world, but I’m grateful that they started to heal me first.
5. What advice would you like to give to aspiring authors?
Just write… and live. Don’t compare, just create.
6. How long does it usually take to write a book?
It depends on what kind of book. The book I wrote this past year only took about six months for about three hundred pages.
7. Out of the five books that you have published so far, which is that one book that holds a very special place in your heart?
If I had to pick just one of the five, it would be the first book of “The Godchild” trilogy. It works alone as just one book, where you can’t really pick up part 2 or part 3 and just read those without having read the first one. It was originally going to stand alone, but I realized I had more I needed to say and life provided me all kinds of new material, but the first book of the series is probably the one that means the most to me.
8. What is your favorite place to read and write?
As much as I’d love to sit out on a deck overlooking the ocean or something perfect like that with fresh air and the sound of crashing waves, I do my writing wherever I may be. My books were all mostly written on a laptop computer, facing a corner wall on an extremely messy desk with music playing and my cat staring at me. Similarly, I will read wherever, but last year I found a green leather chair and ottoman tossed out in the trash, so I took it and put it in my bedroom, which is where I like to read before bed when I get a chance.
9. What kind of books do you like to read?
I like a variety of stuff, but memoir is probably my favorite genre.
10. What are you currently reading?
“On Writing” by Stephen King
11. If you could recommend only one book to anyone which book would that be?
The DSM-5. That’s the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for mental disorders currently being used to diagnose mental illness in the US and other parts of the world. I think people would be surprised how many descriptions they relate to and maybe question what “crazy” even means anyway.
12. Are there any upcoming launches that you can share with us?
I’m getting ready to publish my next book, hopefully in September of this year, and then my first children’s book around the winter holidays. I’m also doing a photography and art show about my mental illness from May-June at The Armory in Somerville MA.
13. Do you have any message that you want to convey through this interview?
The world is struggling right now and these are some uncertain times. Almost everyone is questioning their sanity from time to time, and I hope that my story will bring comfort to those who are. It’s an inspiring story of survival and it’s my honest guts and tears. I put myself out there to help others feel less alone.
