1. Twitter: Follow me (@nick_krieger). Yes, I did it, finally. My adventure to arrive here felt epic, really, at least internally. As my life (or just my to-do list) shifts toward self-promotion, I’ve found that I have to both hear and block out the “shoulds” of agents, publicists, writers, and friends. I try to absorb not what these people are doing, but why and how they do it, so that I may engage with my own integrity, discover my own sustainable why and how, and most importantly, keep my sanity. It took a long time for me to let go of my luddite anger and desire for simplicity, and to accept this tool that an excellent journalist friend (and super early adopter–his handle is @mat) claimed “improved his writing tremendously.” As the last bits of my resistance faded, I signed up for some free “Zen Peacekeeper Guide to Twitter” emails by the writer, human rights advocate, and yoga teacher Marianne Elliott. Finding a like-minded person to ease me into the chatter and noise was invaluable. And now, I’m ready to “Join the conversation,” as they say in Tweetland.

2. Nina Here Nor There (NHNT) received a super awesome review in Booklist. It’s the April 15th issue, so it’s not technically out yet. My book is referred to as a “humorous, moving, and engagingly authentic journey.” The reviewer calls it “liberating.” I know that relying on book reviews to feel good about my writing is dangerous territory. But this is my first overwhelming positive review ever, and I want to take a second to celebrate the joy of a stranger understanding and connecting with my story.

3. I’ll be the guest blogger on Mondays for Original Plumbing starting April 11. I’m stoked. OP is a trans male quarterly print mag, the print part a huge accomplishment in and of itself. It focuses on the sexuality and culture of trans guys, and “documents diversity with trans male lifestyles through photographic portraits and essays, personal narratives and interviews.” Amos Mac shoots the photos–his work is downright brilliant. Rocco Kayiatos (aka Katastrophe), rapper, producer, and writer is the other creator. Anyways, blogging should be fun. I’ll have a lot of creative freedom. And I really enjoy writing to and for my people, because it means I get to crack insider trans jokes.

4. Events – these are starting to unfold. You can keep up on my site (nickkrieger.com) on my book Facebook page and Twitter (@nick_krieger). But here’s what I got so far:

• May 17, 7:30pm: San Francisco Book Release Party, Castro Books Inc (2275 Market St)
  
• June 1, 7:30pm: Bookshop Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA)
• June 4, 6 – 8pm: Philadelphia Trans Health Conference Book Expo (Philadelphia, PA)
• June 7, 7pm: Bluestockings (New York, NY)
• June 14, 7pm: Eureka Valley Library/Harvey Milk Branch (San Francisco, CA)
• June 18, 6pm: Laurel Bookstore (Oakland, CA)
• Up-to-date event info is here.

As if writing an entire memoir and a half-dozen short bios wasn’t self-absorbed enough, last week I wrote a “Long Bio” for my author site. I’ve been questioning whether I want to keep it up. Maybe it’s because it’s housed on my author site instead of here on my blog in between a ton of other posts, but something about my long bio is so painfully definitive, or maybe just painful. I read it and ask myself: Is that really your life story? There was so much more potential, space, a thousand different ways to tell the story before I attempted to summarize the last thirty-something years of my life in a couple pages. This is the challenge with any writing, I suppose. And yet with a bio, locking it down seems even harder than usual, as if I’ve given up the power to reinvent my past and reshape my history.

Well, unless I give my bio another go around… Until then, here it is.

“Will my mom be mad at me if I show up at a wedding in this?” I asked the sales guy.

“No,” he said. “It’s your standard, plain, affordable suit.”

That was exactly what I was looking for at H&M on my lunch break from work. I took a black jacket in the smallest size and a pair of black pants in my size, as well as a white shirt and purple tie I had no intention of buying to the dressing rooms. Accessories weren’t allowed inside, which meant that I’d have to put on the tie in the common area, a problem because I can’t really tie a tie.

I was once able to do so, for about a week, several years ago, after an incident on the train platform. A performance artist on the way to a show had asked me to help with her tie, and  embarrassed by my butch ineptitude, I later watched how-to videos on the Internet. But without a reason to practice, I promptly forgot what I learned.

Then whenever I needed my tie tied, I simply asked my roommates to help. There’s something so perfectly submissive that I love about standing completely still while another is focused intently on the task of dressing me. Now having to do it myself in the store, I hoped that like driving a car with a stick shift, I could get the job done in a pinch. But when I wrapped the purple silk around my neck, it was clear I needed a refresher course.

I was annoyed, and although I was unable to determine the main root of my frustrations, quite a few cropped up: I hate traditional weddings for numerous reasons, including but not limited to my feeling that publicly declaring your love for another does not warrant a juicer or a tea set; a tie can be a great accessory for a person of any gender, but I’ll take jeans and a t-shirt over a costly noose and the mandate to look respectable any day; I’m bitter that in certain settings my failure to tie a tie and perform man could out me as trans and put my safety at risk; I’m ashamed that I am unable to do something our society and culture believes I “should” be able to do based on my gender presentation.

A lot of trans guys I know are thrilled to dress up now that it’s on the “right” side of the man/woman divide. Not me. I spent too many years futzing with pantyhose, and now I’m too old and disinterested to be futzing around with cuff links. In the end, perhaps, my challenge is my resistance to learning something new, to change, or my fear of throwing change into the faces of my family and my father, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in over two years.

When I was a kid, I attended a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs with my family. Whether it was because I was deeply uncomfortable in a dress or cold in short-sleeves, my dad often lent me his suit jacket. A half-dozen sizes too big, it covered me, protected me, kept me warm. To me a suit jacket has always signified the generosity of my father. Now it is part of a uniform signifying the cause of our rift.

I waver and shift and change the main explanations for this thing people like to call my “gender transition,” but my reasons always surround instinct and comfort in my physical body, especially when it comes to sex. My reasons never surround the roles and expectations for men–I could do without them. I could do without the institution of separation that is Gender in our society. And yet, I will be socialized as a man, for safety, for obligations (like weddings), and maybe even for my own simple pleasure of one day offering my jacket to my cousin’s kid, a niece, and you never know, a daughter.

I ended up buying the jacket and pants, and along with a shirt I owned, I carried my outfit from my studio over to my old roommate’s house. From his closet, he pulled out a sharp tie with black and gray stripes and tied it for me. He tucked the extra length on the short end in between two shirt buttons and recommended a tie clip to hold it in place, showing me a new trick. “You look handsome,” he said, offering me another lesson I resist learning.

I like to write semi-personal book reviews. The Rumpus has a great forum for this. The opening to my recent column for The Rumpus is below. Go here to read the whole essay.

“During the writing of my own transgender memoir, I sent in a submission to the anthology, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, edited by S. Bear Bergman and the original gender outlaw, Kate Bornstein.

Despite having a book deal in the transgender genre, I apparently was not a gender-fluid rebel, a gender-variant gunslinger, a hard-as-nails genderqueer. My personal essay was rejected. When I eventually found the book in the store, it was with a slightly bruised ego that I scanned the table of contents looking for a friendly fight. “What do ya got?” I challenged Shawna Virago as I turned to her story, ‘She-Male Rising.’”

Read more…

So, that’s not exactly what happened. You know how I have this book coming out on May 10, well, *I* created an author site, my virtual web home. As long as you can remember, “I before E, except after C” the URL should stick into your brain: www.nickkrieger.com.

My site is where I’ll put all my event listings, reviews, videos, new projects, and inappropriate sundries. And this blog will remain here, as is-ish, for me to share news, rants, rambles, and of course, a yoga post or two.

Back to the creation of my site and the *I* of which I speak. I learned a great deal about web design in the past two months: I am capable of spending more time spinning around web copy than my actual writing; I can tweak html, css, and php files, effectively implementing one random bit of code in about 3 hours time; if I sit down on Friday to work on my site, there goes the weekend; decorating a website is as stressful and anxiety provoking as decorating my apartment, which is why I have a mental block on the latter.

But mostly I learned there’s too much I cannot do, like logos, graphics, design, actual coding, making my site beautiful, or even deciding how to best brand or represent myself in conjunction with my book and my writing. Most importantly, I learned that sometimes you need a professional. Enter Jenn Cole Design. Basically, Jenn performed one of those acts of sheer design magic in which she knew exactly what I wanted before I even knew to think of it. After each idea she proposed, I’d mull it over, come up with a handful of alternatives, and then decide to go with her original visual or copy suggestion. You should really check out my author site, because Jenn made it rad.

For those of you who’ve seen me, or a picture of me, in the past couple years, you may notice the sweet, young, boy version of me in the upper right corner. To show a pre-hormones picture was a decision I made for a few reasons: it accurately reflects me as the character in my book, which is, in part, an homage to my boyhood; the picture is from a photo shoot the week I started hormones, and for me, that day, that shoot, was the closest I came to having a ritual of good-bye; there are current pictures on my author site, and there will be many more down the line, and I don’t want to consciously and concretely divide my life into before and after when that is not my experience of it. Change is a constant for me. Some changes are just more visibly obvious.