My life as an author

I am an author. I have been writing since I was about seven years old. I wrote a few short stories and then got into writing this story that came to be known as An Involuntary King. Along with various other writings, I became published in 1991. That was when I wrote Loving the Goddess Within, which was published by Delphi Press. Many years later in 2008 I wrote, using ghost letters, An Involuntary King, a tale of Anglo-Saxon England. Soon after that I wrote the first version of Beloved Pilgrim. That version had a lesbian main character. Thereafter I became transgender, and after publishing Where My Love Lies Dreaming I decided it was high time I wrote Beloved Pilgrim as a transgender character novel. I wrote short stories for two anthologies, and finally I wrote A Fine Bromance for Harmony Ink Press.

Now to go on with the rest of the story. I was born with fundus flavimaculatas, a hereditary and congenital eye condition that causes one's central vision to deteriorate; that is my rods and cones do not work or even fully exist. I didn't know this until I was 25. In high school I started noticing problems with seeing what was written on the board. My father did not pay for us to go get glasses. It was when I was 25 years old and living in Iron Mountain, Michigan, that I went to an eye doctor and found out that I had a severe and permanent eye condition that he called Stargardt disease, a form of macular degeneration. I was told that my eyesight would continue to fail until I got to the point that I had simply overall poor vision. The last I checked my eyesight was 20 over 2400. Since that time I had a stroke when I was 60 years old, and part of the impact is that I now also have he me anoxia. That means that the vision being taken in by half my rods and cones is not making it through my optic nerve.

Since I learned at 25 that I am legally blind I have gained a number of devices that help me immeasurably. The department of services for the blind supplied me with a computer and magnifying and speaking software. I have some other devices, including a pebble that I don't use that often, and the da Vinci which reads aloud anything you put under it.

Now clearly since I have four or more novels I must've figured out how to use all these devices to their best advantage. The fact is, however, that since the he me anoxia began my eyesight has taken a turn very much for the worst. Every day I sit at my desk and use my adaptive equipment on my computer to write. The trouble is that now, and this has been going on for at least 6 to 12 months, I don't seem to be especially well served. I have added Dragon to my suite of helpers, trying to learn to dictate rather than to touch-type my manuscripts. At this point that is proving only mildly helpful.

What I want to do right now is describe the experience I have when I sit down to write. I come into my office and sit down and turn on the computer. When the adaptive software, ZoomText, opens I used to be able to get to work right away. Now since I can't see the screen very well, I don't really see the screen enough to read. For instance, I am looking at the previous paragraph that began "Now clearly," and I cannot read those words at all. In fact I just guessed that the first two words for the ones I said. If I notice and underline or other indication of poor spelling, I can't see what it says. If I have to read something that I listen to on my Kindle, I have to open Kindle for PC but I can't really read the print on the screen. It's patchy. This gets me very frustrated. Even if I can sit like I'm doing now and narrate what I want to say, I am not 100 percent sure that what I said made it onto the screen. Perhaps you as the reader can guess from any non sequiturs in what I'm writing.

The way I read what I've typed or spoken is I highlight the text, and then press Control-Alt-X to save it to the clipboard, then Control-Alt-C to make my computer read it aloud.  It takes less time than it sounds except that it is clearly more steps than a sighted person would need to take.

In addition I don't seem to have the technique I referred to as "christen mind." I am not even sure this sentence made any sense at all. I used to be able to imagine sequences from books I was writing that helped construct the narrative that doesn't seem as easy for me now, although that may just be that I am not wrapped up in any particular story. I have been trying to write during 2016, but a combination of my decreased vision and whatever is going on with my stroke-addled brain seems to leave me feeling unfocused. That is an unfortunate but accurate use of that word.

I am very frustrated. I am trying to convince myself that if I focus on work I will be able to sit down every day and write for at least three to four hours. I honestly don't know what it will take to get me to do it. I am distracted by e-mail, by Facebook, and buying games. I recently cut out some of my work, specifically writing book reviews, to force myself into filling the time with actual writing. Just now I suspect all I'm doing is keeping myself writing so I stay in the habit. I don't know if that will work. During the days I as often as not feel like taking a nap.

So what do I do? Is there anyone I could talk to or get help from? I am having a very frustrating time figuring out who that would be. I know that the organization I used to work for, Sight Connection, seems to be falling apart. I honestly don't think that they have anything at all to share with me. I thought about attending Department of Services for the Blind, but I am not sure they know what they're doing either. Given that I am nearly 65 years old, I doubt they would take me on as a client anyway. Their clients are there to be given skills so that they can get jobs. I don't know that they would take my having a job, being a novelist, very seriously, and I don't know if they'd have any clue what to do to help me.

I don't feel like I am at the end of my career. I know that I have the ideas for a number of novels in my head. I know that to be a viable novelist I have to write a lot more novels. It amazes me when I realize how many novels other people do while I am barely turning out one a year.

I know that Jim is frustrated with my progress. He is not critical of me per se, when he does try to give me advice, and I feel at a loss to be able to really take the advice. When I sit in front of the computer it just seems like I can't do what I used to be able to do. There must be some sort of solution, right? I can keep trying to explore it, but I don't even know where to look. My stroke-addled brain prevents me from really thinking it through properly. I don't know if I talk to anyone at rehab or to a doctor if I would get any help at all.

I sometimes think I should just accept retirement. The problem is that I don't know what I do with my time. Right now I'm wasting it. Would I be wasting it as I was trying to write book? I know if I could just get novellas out, I might be fine.

As I always say, onward and upward. So the solution still eludes me.

Some Old Photos

Click on image for larger picture.

Disneyland in the 1950;s

Pacific Ocean Park

Our  neighborhood on Third Ave.

coming soon

Griffith Park

Children's Orthopedic Center

April 15 Ain't Just for Taxes Anymore

Two years ago on April 15 2014 I had a terrible headache.  It was not like any other headache  I had ever had.  I was resting on the couch ad actually did go back o sleep.  When I got up to go to the bathroom the telephone rang.  I went to answer it, and that's the last thing I can remember.

Jim remembers it from there on.  I did not answer and he left a message.  When after about 15-30 minutes he called again and left another message.  When I did not call back he realized something must be wrong. Unlike most couples we are very close and are never disconnected from each other, so he told his boss Julie he had to come home to see what was wrong, and she just saint, "Go!"

He got home in record time, then looked around the living room.  He was about to go upstairs to find me when he noticed MacDhui was on the table and Mr. Hata on the floor by it, also looking in the same basic direction.  That is when  he saw me.  I was sitting against the wall on a Rubber Maid container.  He tried to communicate with me, but I was out of it.  He immediately called 911 and go t paramedics on the way.

Almost a month later I came home on May 26.  I had been in the hospital, Evergreen to be precise, for a month.

I had had a stroke, the hemorrhagic variety.  There was no certain reason for the stroke, my blood pressure had been high, but just the Friday before I had had it read and it was fine.  If I had to guess it would be that it was my being on testosterone for my gender transition that may have caused the stroke.  That is, after all, what the class action lawsuit has been about with men who want a return of their virility.

Jim told me that Mr. Duck was so enamored of the paramedics that Jim had to put him in the garage, and he was pissed!  The men asked me and Jim some questions.. I was starting to fall to sleep, but they kept me awake.  The checked my blood sugar and it was fine.  It wasn't until I was in the hospital and had an MRI they knew I had had a srke
.  As I said it was a hemorrhagic stoke and affected my caudate nucleus.  I had to have surgery to allow a stint to be put in to drain the brain fluid.

For Jim that began two weeks minimum of anguishing fear.  He had to watch me sedated and in bed, hooked up to oxygen and various other monitors. on paralytic drugs and not all that sure who I was, where I was ad who he was.  I told the paramedics at home that Jim's name was "Sheriff John", a TV personality from my earliest years in La Puente.

Jim spent the time I was unconscious mostly at the hospital.  He would go home long enough to feed cats and scoop their litter box and to d some laundry and sleep a little.  The rest of the time he was at the hospital with me.  They had me on the paralytic to keep me still and unconscious, unable to pull at my tubes or the ties to the hospital bed.    He would do what he could to help me... He rubbed ice into my scalp under the bandage because it itched s badly.

He told me he read to me while I was barely if at all conscious.  He read of all wonderful things AN INVOLUNTARY KING, my first novel.  ht must have been a precious knowledge for me, as it is my sentimental favorite, my earliest set of friends.

I don't know how he stayed sane or sober for that matter.  He didn't know if I was going to die.  He didn't know if when I finally woke up I would be able to speak or understand or reason at all.  I could have been at best incontinent and at worst a vegetable.

I apparently started to wake up once after two weeks they had moved me to the Ambulatory Rehab Unit, after I had spent the first two weeks in the ICU and a couple days at a midrange rehab nt.  I don't remember anything much before the next Friday.  That would have been  about May 2.  The next day Laurel came to see me and I met Tiffany for the first time.  She and I had a grand time discussing my dreams about Julian Assange and some notion I had that one of my nurses was named Marianne and was somehow connected to the French Revolution. 

I had two very memorable dreams while I was still pretty out of it, though conscious.  I dream I was on a merry-go-round in a park listening to Julian Assange, then a dream about wanting to go to a nearby clinic staffed at night by two of the nurses who looked after me.  One of them was Rasi.  I wanted him to let me stay at the clinic so I could seek more drugs, and he was going to have to fill out a lot of paperwork.  I remember I had peed on my night gown.

I will continue this narrative with Jim's help over the ext coupl of days.

 

The Latest News on Me

I just got this email from a delightful friend who lives in the Midwest of the USA.

"I haven't heard from you in a long time.
How is everything over there?
"Hugs Hugs
"Gabbo"

My reply should update everyone.

"How lovely that you want to hear from me!  I know I want to hear from you.

 "I don’t even remember when we last exchanged emails.  Do you?  I could launch into a narrative, but it would be nice if I knew where to start.  I am pretty sure you didn’t know I had to have spine surgery, but I am healing now and expect to be finer than I was before it in about a month.  ANGEL EYES, my novel about the Mexican War has been out for five months.. I have not done the marketing I should, so I need to do that this fall if I expect to sell any books.

 

"I was working on a sequel to WHERE MY LOVE LIES DREAMING but had to stop since my doctor only wants me to sit at the computer for a half hour at a time and then get up and change position.. I am using my new Amazon Echo to time me.  So I will very happily get back to that in about a month as well.

 

"I had a real low point about two weeks ago where I went to my husband to tell him I was feeling suicidal, but I know that was my smart way of getting myself back on track to the usually cheerful person I am. I think you and I are similar in that way.  I am just overwhelmed with all the challenges in my life due to disabilities but most of the time I don’t even think about them or find ways around them.  I am either stupid, crazy or really really smart.

"So how is your stupid, crazy or really really smart  life treating you?  What is new?  Did I not mention anything you might have wanted to know about?

 

"Kit"

I Go to School: Autobiogrphy of Kit Moss

Valinda Elementary Scchool, La Puente, CA

The next part of this story is my elementary school.  You can see it above.  It sort of looks familiar and sort of doesn't but given it's probably at least 60 years old, that's no mystery.

My first teacher was Mrs. Barcalow, a kindergarten teacher.  I don't remember a lot from that class.  There was a fat girl who used to punch people.  The principal once brought us all real orange juice Popsicles.  I remember there was one of those Brio train sets.

My first grade teacher was Miss Dorius.  She divided us up into three reading groups, Chocolate, Strawberry and Vanilla.  I was pissed when I was not in Chocolate.  I had a crush on a boy, my first time, and once kissed him on the arm.  He had beautiful eyes.  The less said about the teacher's reaction the better.  I remember the Dick and Jane reader with that little asshole Sally.  I did not like them.  I once took my toy Calico Cat and Gingham Dog my mother made me for show and tell.  I brought the dog another time and insisted it was a horse.  I used to daydream my mother was the teacher.

My second grade teacher was Miss Rose Cotton.  She had breasts out to here, and the fathers of the kids loved her.  I just didn't see it.  She also taught the summer school with one other teacher.  We did things with paper plates and sand, but I don't remember what.

I do remember Paul Grenier.  We played Roy Rogers endlessly.  I remember when recess was over we would ride our "horses"  back to class to the strains of "Happy Trails to You".  Joel, the boy who was the bad guy, always rode away when I approached him.  I wish I could tell you Paul once kissed me, but for reasons I cannot divulge, he didn't.   I guess you can say I pretended he did when I asked him on the school bus what he thought I should be when I grew up, and he said "A ghost!"  Paul had had polio, wore a brace on one leg, and I heard he died not long after we moved away.

That summer we moved to Juneau, Alaska.   My father got a job with the Department of Personnel at the State of Alaska.  I remember drawing a picture of what I thought my new home would look like, complete with igloo.

Not my original drawing.

I Am Born: An Autobiography of Kit Moss

U.S. Naval Ammunition Depot, 1952

I decided one technique for accepting oneself as male is to rewrite one's life as a boy and man.  I plan to start this on this blog with the birth of Christopher Hawthorne Moss on January 3, 1952, in Hawthorne, Nevada.

 Kit's parents, Merle and Louis, had one daughter already, Denise, who always was a bit perplexed by her little brother. He was cute but cried a great deal, given that he had colic.  His mother put whisky in his bottle of milk to help him sleep.  Heaven only knows what affect that had on him.

His family moved away from Hawthorne when he was only five months old.  His dad had gotten involved with one of the officer's wives at the Navy facility where the man worked.  They moved back to Los Angeles, California, where his mother had grown up and his father had moved in the late 1940s after his years in World War II.

There are stories I can tell you about Kit before his family moved to La Puente, CA, and I will.  But for now, let's just look at some of the photos I can find of this sharp little boy.

What Do You Call a Straight Man Who Stays with his Transman Partner? Jim.

You hear about straight women who stay with their transwoman partners, preferring, perhaps, the continued friendship with a woman over being single.  But how often do you hear about straight men who accept their wife's transition and stay with her?  Is it that men can't handle being partnered with another man?  Do they not want to appear gay?  Or was it just that their partnership lacked loyalty and commitment and a genuine desire for the good of the partner?  I have to conclude it is the last, since Jim Tedford, my partner of 33 years, has stayed with me even though I insist I am a man.

Did I consider this choice he would have to make when I came to the conclusion I am a transman?  Yes and no.  I was so fixated on who I am that I think I was willing, at least I thought I was, to accept whatever decision Jim made about staying with me.  Or perhaps I just thought he would stay, for whatever reasons.  I can't say that expecting him to stay was not one of the most selfish, most self-absorbed things I have ever done.  I am ashamed of myself, except that I feel I had to make the choice, or, barring that, I just did and I am beyond grateful Jim had the grace to accept what I chose.

I have known for a while that Jim accepted my assertion that my brain is male.  I suspect my Aries moon would just make me rush ahead, but what should surprise me is that he still loves me.  He was baffled at first, asked questions like: "What does it mean?"  I have had various explanations to his decisions, (when I stopped to think about it) primarily that Jim just did not want to be alone and that we have all this shared history.  I called it everything to myself from petty to arrogant that I assumed that was the main reason.  I have had occasion to think more deeply more recently.

In April, possibly because I went on testosterone, I sustained a hemorrhagic stroke, a brain bleed.  Jim came home early to find me sitting on a box on the floor with our cats sitting by me watching me, perhaps guarding me.  He called the paramedics who came quickly and took me to the hospital.  An MRI showed them I had had a bleed in my caudate nucleus.  I was completely out by then, constantly drifting off to sleep, unable to communicate.  Jim sat by my side, uncertain whether I would live or die, or whether if I did live I would be compos mentis, just what he could expect to see happen to the person he had shared his life with for more than three decades.

But Jim stood up for me from the first moment.  He told the hospital I was Christopher Moss, a man.  There is nothing about me that says "man".  I have large breasts.  I have a vagina.  I have no facial hair at all.  If my face had begun to take on a more masculine appearance, no one at the hospital would have seen me before to judge.  I was silent so my lower-toned voice was unheard.  The hospital had to take Jim's word for it.  What would happen to me if I lived would be another matter.

I was unconscious, unable to speak with the respirator tubes down my throat.  My wrists were lashed to the rails of the bed to keep me from pulling out IVs and the tubes.  I was more or less incapacitated. After the doctors first tried to prepare Jim for my death, then for my being impaired, then to staying in the hospital for months, and having the respirator installed for weeks, I surprised everyone by getting better.  Within two weeks I was off the respirator and able to begin relating to people.  Jim could not tell if I recognized him at first, but then I must have.  

When I was first able to speak I insisted my name was Nan Louise Hawthorne.  Every time I was asked I stated it emphatically.  Jim was surprised, but he decided to accept whatever I came to identify myself as.  That should have told me everything that he loved me and wanted me to be whoever I was.

Then one day I answered the question about my name, "Nan Louise Hawthorne... but something tells me gender is important."   Jim told me the first time I answered the question with "Christopher Hawthorne Moss" he was pleased.  He knew I was truly returning to him.

I have already written about Evergreen Hospital and how they almost to a person respected my status as a transgender person.  Happily the days of gender segregation are over, but that in itself shows respect.  My records were correct, my doctors and nurses used the right name and pronoun, in my case "he", and no one ever questioned me as to my choice.  

I know to a huge extent I owe this to Jim.  He was loyal to a degree that is astounding.  He did not take advantage of my disability to return me to being female.  He stated emphatically that I am a man and that he was my husband.  He did it, he says, "Because I love you, whoever you are."

If I ever took that for granted I do not any  more.  I have been acutely aware of opportunities for discomfort for him, but now I  know he completely accepts me as I am.

What makes Jim so special?  Let me count the ways:

1.  He is realistic... he looks at his life with calm and perception.  He does not veer off into the realm of self-serving interpretation or coloring.
2.  He is fair.   He learned young from dysfunctional parents that their notions of what is right in the world was dead wrong.  He questioned, and being intelligent, he figured out the truth.
3.  He is intelligent, intelligent enough to know when he is bull shitting himself.
4.  He is empathetic.  He knows, and what's more, cares how others feel.  He knows when what they feel is true and right.
5.  He is fair-minded.  He doesn't judge without all the evidence or at least an intelligent stab at it.
6.  He is real.  He does not have a façade that he believes in to his own detriment.  He sees himself clearly, and that is what he presents to the world.
7.  Jim is compassionate.  He knows when I am less than fair or generous and he forgives me for it.

Is he perfect?  Of course not.  It takes a lot of effort to be all these things, and it gets to him from time to time.  He copes with it as he can.

One thing Jim said is that over the past two years since I came out he has watched me become a serene and happy person, stable, untroubled, that I don't "chew" on things any more.  He figures that has to mean I am who I am supposed to be, that the consistency of my brain and body is no longer important, that my brain is me.

And he loves me.  He is attending the Gender Odyssey conference this year with me to, as I put it to a friend, "babysit my addled brain."  I am sure he will be uncertain, uncomfortable, but a weekend with all the trannies will get him more used to what I came to accept two years ago, people just following the personality of their brains.  He will relax almost immediately.  Yeah, these folks are different... so what?  They are being enormously true to themselves.  That is, after all, what he has done by coming to accept that he loves me.

I am astounded by him, by his growth, but his deep and abiding love for me, by his sheer completeness as a person.  I have tried to return his love, his loyalty, and I am not that convinced I have achieved what I hope to attain.  He knows me well, knows how focused on myself I can be.  He sees somehow in me though the earnest person I am however childish or selfish I can be.  He knows, somehow, how much I love and appreciate him.

I just hope he feels it.  My top priority in life now is to deserve his love