Tag: lgbtq books

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…

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!