I have a tattoo on my forearm. It reads: scribe. Because I scribble, you know. Because I put things down on paper, on screen.

It’s half past one, and I should be asleep. (That subject is an inside joke to myself. I’ve used “scribes should be sleeping” before, maybe on LiveJournal a million years ago. I’m sure Google can scare it up, if I look.)

I’m writing a story. Rewriting a story, but it’s a dramatic revision, the kind where the POV flips and the things you had one character telling another character in the rough draft, now occur on-page, in real time. And some of that? Is a young genderqueer person of male pronouns trying to figure out sex and selfhood. And damn, you know, there’s a reason I don’t write nonfiction.

I don’t handle literary intimacy well from the inside. I stop and start too much. There’s no flow to it. I keep writing this kid, and even one step removed, even from someone else’s perspective, he’s a little too close. So I’m full of fucking doubt, which is brutal, in writing. More stories die before they’re ever born because some damn feckless writer thought “I can’t possibly” one too many times and started to believe it.

So this is a general call out to the genderqueer and trans* folk who read fiction: I could use a couple of readers, when the time comes. I’m not worried about causing offense, I’m more worried that I’ll miss something obvious, some opportunity to play with a concept relating to gender, and that someone else will see it and say, “But why didn’t you do this, here? I was waiting.” I hate getting excited about something, only to be let down by its execution. If you’re down for reading a little erotic fiction with mostly gay menage (hinting, but not yet fulfilling, on polyamory), with some gender-fluid fucking thrown in, drop me a line: krisATkrisripper.com.