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…
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)
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.
