I just realized that lately I spend most of my days playing with dirt and plants, and most of my nights playing with paper, scissors, glue, glitter, jewels, and such. Obviously, I have achieved my near-lifelong ambition of regressing to age 5.

In other news, Peter Straub has selected my story "Pansu" for Fantastic Tales: American Stories of Terror and the Uncanny, which he's editing for the Library of America. The volume is due out in October 2009. (Because I am lazy, I just stole those two sentences from greygirlbeast, who also has a story in the book, and substituted my title.) I'm pleased by Peter's choice of "Pansu," as I'm pretty sure this is the first love the story has received since Camelot Books first released it as a chapbook -- no reviews that I can recall, no reprints except in my own collection -- and I do have a certain affection for it. As I wrote in my foreword to The Devil You Know, after a lot of difficult nonfiction pieces and fiction that was grim in every sense of the word, "Pansu" showed me that I could still thoroughly enjoy writing. Between this anthology and Small Beer's release of Second Line (the Value of X/D*U*C*K omnibus), this October is shaping up to be a big month for me.

Years before Harlan Ellison became my Uncle Harlan, I was fortunate enough to see him do a public speaking gig at the University of North Carolina. At one point he went into a deadly riff about our wingnut senator, Jesse Helms.

"Hey, you don't have to live with him!" someone in the audience shouted.

"Neither do you," Ellison shot back.

But unfortunately, those of us who grew up partly or entirely in North Carolina did have to live with "Jesse," as haters and lovers alike called him, since we could never muster quite enough opposition to vote the old bastard out of office. He may not be burning in Hell today, because it seems to me that a person should be able to state and live* his fucked-up convictions without being condemned to eternal torment (if eternal torment there be), but if he did make it to Heaven, he is surely due for some surprises there.

*Short of slaughtering, interning, etc. the people you don't like, obviously, though I expect Jesse wouldn't have minded setting up a few concentration camps if he had been able to.

Not sure what that earlier, incoherent post was all about. Some sort of LJ glitch. I hate and despise this new "Restore from saved draft?" feature.

Anyway, I killed my Flickr account today. Please don't e-mail asking me to reconsider; the decision is irrevocable and the pictures are irretrievable, though I still have a few on my hard drive. All the pictures of Shell Beach, the images of destruction in New Orleans, the celebration of Mardi Gras in spite of it all, the silly cat photos I so enjoyed sharing with you ... all are gone. Why? Because I was stupid enough to post a few seminude pictures (I think they showed a total of one boob), and because, once in a while, a few assholes really can ruin things for everybody.

A few weeks ago, the site Consumerist.com swiped two of my Flickr photos to use in an entry that made fun of my Amazon blog. (They also claimed that my Amazon blog linked directly to the "topless" photos, which was a lie and which they've since reworded.) When I politely asked them to remove my copyrighted material, Consumerist webmaster Ben Popken responded, and I quote, "We must respectfully deny your request for your photo and/or the post to be removed. That's not how we roll. Sorry. If you want to know why, look up hiphop, collage, remixing and duhn da dunnn.. free speech and freedom of the press."

Yup. I love the reference to "hiphop." I think someday I'll write a novel made up of random sentences from other books I admire and call it my "hiphop novel." That "duhn da dunnn" is pretty priceless too ... the mild-mannered Ben Popken is secretly Batman, I guess.

When you steal someone's copyrighted material, the question isn't, "Will I have to remove it?"; it's "Am I going to do the decent thing and just remove it, or am I going to force the copyright holder to spend money forcing me to do so?" Mr. Popken chose to do the latter. I consulted an Internet copyright lawyer, and Consumerist.com was ultimately forced to remove my images. Unfortunately, I wasted a lot of money I couldn't afford on this legal venture.

And motherfucking Flickr can't even answer simple questions about its own TOS.

This morning I discovered that another site had stolen the same images. So I just said, "Fuck it." I'm not a photographer. I enjoyed taking and sharing these pictures, but I can't afford to keep throwing money away protecting my copyrights. I'll save my cash and energy for the people who steal my prose, if such should come along -- at least my agent can handle that.

So I'm sorry. The assholes won this round, and I seriously regret that. But I don't need this crap, not when I'm trying to write something good that will pull me out of the morass I've been in since August 29th.

Harlan Ellison taught me a long time ago that there are tiny, shitty people in the world. They can't do anything on their own, and so they'll do anything within their power to tear down whatever you do. I understood him in a theoretical way then, but it has taken me 40 years of life on earth (and particularly online) to really understand what he was talking about. Fortunately, there are good, huge-hearted people too, and on my best days, I still think they outnumber the shitweasels.

On a slightly more cheerful note, this is my reply from a discussion on prime_liquor in which one poster (I'm not quoting him! I'm not!!!) suggested that transsexuals not undergoing hormone therapy or considering surgical reassignment sit down and evaluate why they have made these choices. I thought some of you might find it interesting.

For me and for now, this is why:

Harlan Ellison once said something to the effect of, "If you don't absolutely have to be a writer, if the words aren't spilling out of you to the point where you can't control them, then please don't do it. You'll just put yourself through unnecessary agony, and probably fail, and anyway the world doesn't need any more writers."

This doesn't apply perfectly to my transgenderism (and I definitely think the world needs more trannies way more than it needs more writers!), but it's been sort of a working model for me. For now, anyway, I know I can live in a reasonably happy fashion with the body I've got. It doesn't suit my self-image at all, and I wish I had a different one (as do most people, I suppose, but I don't think they usually go as far as wanting a completely different gender). As long as I can live decently with what I am now, though, it seems unnecessarily painful and expensive to go the hormone/surgery route. I admire the hell out of people who do choose that route, and should I ever reach a point where it's what I have to do, I think I'd be brave enough to pursue it. (I pretty much know I'd be brave enough, but you don't ever really know until you get started, do you?) It's also good to know that, should this ever become necessary for me, I have a life partner who would fully support my decision. He already thinks of me as male, and I don't think the physical changes would be very problematic for him.

I realize that in the eyes of some transsexuals, this makes me less of a tranny, not a real tranny at all, a mere fag hag, etc. They can bite my fat one. I can't imagine a stupider reason for transitioning than peer pressure.

Oh, and if anyone out there is kneejerk-PC enough to be offended by the use of my Klinger icon when discussing these matters, they can bite my fat one too. (It's going to be nothing but teeth marks pretty soon.) It amuses me, and that's all the reason I need.

I wasn't going to drag greygirlbeast into it, but since she's gone and dragged herself in, I guess that frees me up to say a few more words about the quivering heap of moronicity that is Faye S. Lewis:

Poppy gave up the ghost when she started listening to the voices of her friends and not those in her own head. After Cait Kiernan upbraided her for using sex as a plot point, Poppy has set out to live by rules created for her, rather than by her.

It honestly makes me wonder whether Lewis has ever, in fact, read a book. Does she truly believe in this cabal of writers who go around telling each other what to do, and then doing it? Does she believe that I've written not one book, not two books, but AN ENTIRE SERIES OF THE GODDAMN THINGS because Caitlin told me to?

Which, if you think about it, is sort of like writing a book (or a series of them) filled with purple prose because Ernest Hemingway told you to ... or something. Caitlin has stated often and publicly that she does not believe in writing about eating, that the act of the characters' eating slows down the story's action in an awkward and unneccessary fashion. The Liquor books aren't only about eating, but they revolve around it; I hardly think they're the sort of thing she would counsel me to write if she had her druthers. For the record, I think authors who are close friends almost always learn a lot from each other, but the only direct advice Caitlin has ever given me about my work was that Jay Byrne had to die at the end of Exquisite Corpse. She'd read an earlier draft in which he lived, and she said it didn't work, and she was right.

Gee, if that's really how things work, then I guess I never moved back to New Orleans because Harlan Ellison told me I shouldn't, and the Liquor books must have been published under the name Poppy A. Brite because Neil Gaiman suggested that might be a good idea, and obviously I've never written about gay characters because all sorts of famous writers told me I'd never get anywhere if I did that ...

So. Faye, you are a pinheaded wad of rancid fuckjuice, and furthermore, you're a clueless one. Dislike my books all you like, but don't you fucking dare tell me why I wrote them, or why I didn't write the ones I should have written according to the Gospel of Faye, or that I'm no longer writing in my own voice. THIS IS THE VOICE I HAVE TO WRITE IN. THIS IS THE VOICE THAT SAVED MY LIFE. It's fucking well MINE. It's not something anybody gave me or told me to do, and if you still think it is, you're even stupider than your review suggests. It's been pointed out to me that you may, in fact, be an ex-alt-books-pzber, and if so, I'm not surprised; I remember how the person I'm thinking of was always sending me little behind-the-back e-mails telling me that new posters had "caused trouble before I was there" and "couldn't be trusted" and all manner of other political bullshit. I also remember that person telling another poster -- an admittedly annoying one, but not an outright troll -- that she hoped the poster's two young children would be raped and tortured. Later she claimed she'd just said it "for the shock value." If that's the kind of person who writes me off as a sellout because I'm not writing books like Exquisite Corpse anymore, then I'm damned happy to be a sellout.