This time last week, I was settling in with my boyfriend on our first night together in two years when he came to visit for 5 days. It was a great opportunity for me to take a break from the stress, socialize, get out, do some fun stuff, listen to some of my favorite albums, watch my favorite movies, and eat my favorite foods…and share them with him, of course. We had a blast. At first my transition back into the daily grind was off to a difficult start and I had a meltdown three days in a row, but the Universe sent me a little sign at the very least, if not some great news, that one of the publishers I sent a query to wants to take a look at my full book. I don’t know if I’ll go with them or not, if they even choose to go with me, but if they do, it will depend on a number of things. I wrote down all my questions tonight, just in case, but I don’t know what to expect. I’m just grateful I got a letter back that wasn’t a rejection. That’s a good sign I’m doing something right.
The rest of this post will be the manipulated photos from my staycation… I took and altered all of the photos, except for the ones of me in the water, which were taken by Koda but altered by me…
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)
It’s been a busy few days. There’s been some stress over the possibility of Out Of the Blue Gallery losing our space at The Armory, and so I’ve been posting about it and yesterday I wrote letters to the mayor and the art council in Somerville to urge them to take a look at the new gallery and the time and effort put into it. I also mentioned how OOTB has helped me as a disabled person who otherwise had no access to the art world, and how far I’ve come in the last few years because of the gallery.
Today was my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. They also have the same birthday…
I’ve been trying to set things up for when I put out my next book, including making a new LinkedIn and Twitter account. You can find all of my links here…
I also made new business cards with my web site on them
I was gonna use this image, but it would have been too small…
I didn’t get out for a walk to take photos as I hoped, but here is a photo of my cute cat…
and a photo of the chair with the canvas that I’ve been staring at for weeks, trying to figure out what to do with it…
Of course, as usual, I forgot to take a picture of the old painting before I painted over it. It was basically just the background. I added the hand and arm today, as well as a few minor editions to the background.
I’m calling it “Holding Onto My World”
I also recently decided to try the free app Duolingo to learn Spanish in memory of my good friend Randy who I recently lost to suicide, and he was big into taking online classes for all kinds of stuff, including many languages.
I’ve been practicing the keyboard, eating healthy, put some of my records that I wanna show Koda into chronological order, I met with my mental health worker yesterday and played the Igor album by Tyler the Creator for her on the record player because it’s one of her favorite albums and it’s one of the many albums that sounds a lot better on vinyl. She wanted to know what the difference was between vinyl and just listening to an mp3, so I wanted to show her, and now she wants a record player of course, haha.
Last but not least, I got some much needed sleep today and wasn’t even too grumpy.
I’m grateful for my day… Here’s a random video from the early days of Youtube that is still the first video to pop up on my YouTube page because I need to edit it, but it’s cool…
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.
