Narrative – May Peterson Books

8 03, 2022

Breaking the Trans Bubble (And How You Can Help Do It)

By May|2022-03-08T22:13:31+00:00March 8th, 2022|Narrative, Publishing, Representation|1 Comment

CW: discussions of homelessness, transmisogyny, anti-trans racism, transphobia, persecution of sex workers, suicide, violence, trauma

The past several months have forced me to rethink my life. A major curveball has been the introduction of a spicy new fact to that life—

I am a homeless trans woman.

This is That Thing I’ve spent most of my life afraid of becoming. There’s a link between the two sides of this thing, like between an anchor and the ankle it’s tied to. How’s that for an on-the-nose image? And it does feel—always has felt—like sinking. Don’t come out because you might be disowned. Don’t […]

The Effeminacy Double Bind (Transfem Coding In Fiction)

By May|2019-11-15T06:22:18+00:00November 15th, 2019|Narrative, Representation|Comments Off on The Effeminacy Double Bind (Transfem Coding In Fiction)

Content warning for frank discussion of transmisogyny

Let’s talk about coding. Not every message is spelled out unambiguously. Fiction in particular tends to deeply integrate the implied, messages expressed behind the text. You may already be very familiar with a common form of this: queer coding.

Queer coding is when a character isn’t explicitly queer, but seems queer, with characteristics that suggest it through cultural association. A typical form of queer coding is for a character to have no sexual or romantic relationships on screen but to be gender non-conforming. Queer identity is largely predicated on variation from sexual and gender […]

Meet Each Demon As You Go (Inspiration in Despair)

By May|2018-12-02T19:32:06+00:00December 2nd, 2018|Narrative, Writing|Comments Off on Meet Each Demon As You Go (Inspiration in Despair)

Art is hard.

At least, it’s quite an undertaking. It’s generally harder to create something than to destroy something, and that art is a particular labor of creation: creation from the disorganized substances of the artist’s life, hopes, memories, beliefs. Numerous little deities of sorrow, passion, and fury people the halls of our imaginations, and they lay hands onto whatever we create, to be marked by them for good or ill.

But art seems to be especially hard right now. Nearly every artist I know is presently staring down horrors that shadow the horizon enough to freeze every delicate, artistic inner […]

The Sacred Dark Trilogy

Romantic Fantasy with ghosts, gays, and grandeur.