alex_beecroft | Post Christmas retrospective

I have emerged from Christmas, and yet I still don’t feel as if it actually happened this year. It’s an odd feeling, comparable to going through some frightening initiation rite and coming out the other side completely unchanged. Something ought to have happened, but it didn’t.

One of the things that didn’t happen was a blazing family row, so that’s a plus. I also got a wonderful haul of presents including a new tuneable whistle in the key of D. (My previous one was untuneable, which meant that everyone else had to adjust their expensive, complicated instruments to sound nice with my simple cheap one. Now I can adjust my, still relatively cheap and easy to adjust, whistle instead and much annoyance is spared for everyone.)

This close to the end of the year, with nothing much due to happen between now and the beginning of 2012 it seems like a good time to look back on 2011 and get an overview of what that year was all about.

Although all I’ve published in 2011 was By Honor Betrayed, a single novella, it’s been a busy year behind the scenes.

I have written, sold and edited Under the Hill: Bomber’s Moon and Under the Hill: Dogfighters, which are coming out in April and May 2012. I’ve also written, sold and edited a second novella due to come out from Carina in June 2012, which is still going by its temporary title of Poison and Poetry, but will have a new one soon. (I’m waiting for its new name before I give it a page on my website.)

So 2011 was a productive year, writing wise.

In personal achievements, by June 2011 I had completed my task of losing 3 stone (42lb) in weight, and I’ve now kept that off for six months. I had three days of “eat ALL THE THINGS!!!” over Christmas, because it is a feast and it’s only right and proper to pig out on important feast days. But I’m now back on the diet again to shed whatever I put on over those days. They say that after losing a lot of weight 95% of people put it straight back on. I am trying to be one of the 5% who don’t.

This was the year I got my first (and second) tattoo.

2011 was also the year in which I learned to play a melody instrument. Like everything else, this turned out to be a matter of putting the effort in every day and just not giving up.

Other achievements: after many years of avoiding pigeonholes altogether, because I could never find one that fitted, I slowly came to some conclusions about my gender and sexual identities – I am genderqueer and asexual. I can’t remember who introduced me to AVEN or if I just stumbled upon it myself, but frankly the fact that I have lived this long without knowing about this stuff indicates to me that it would be a good idea to pass the link on here for anyone else who feels like they just don’t get this obsession with sex at all. We may be weird, but we’re not alone.

As if to crown all that achievement with a reminder of death, late this year I began the change from Mother to Hag. I’m looking forward to it, on the whole, as the hag is the only female archetype I actually feel I vaguely understand, and I would far rather be considered scary and powerful than “nurturing” any day of the week. Even if it does mean I have to be on the lookout for mobs with pitchforks, and children who want to shove me in the oven head-first while they eat my house.

2011 was quite a momentous year, now I think about it.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

What a wonderful retrospective. I discovered AVEN in 2010, I think, and though my relationship to the concept of asexuality is still shifting, I find myself returning again and again to the general idea. It feels like...not a life-preserver, exactly, but a pier or dock I can return to and hang on when I get tired of swimming.

Sorry--weak metaphor. I need to give that one some thought. But what I really want to say is that is is wonderful to have a term, a community, and even some numbers to go with this lifelong strange feeling of not really grokking the whole sex thing.

Anyway, happy New Year! It sounds as if 2012 is going to be full of exciting accomplishments and publications for you! \o/

To me it was just an enormous relief to come across something that unified so many of those places where I felt out of step with everyone else - all those places I felt wrongly made - and discover that no, I'm not just imagining it. There are other people who feel exactly the same way and it's a recognised thing with a name.

I'm quite glad I didn't find out until this late in life, or I might have let it become an identity. It's good to know it describes me without allowing it to define me. But yes, I do feel a lot of relief and a sense that I'm better equipped to own my own POV now, if you see what I mean? It's nice not to be alone.

Thanks! I've got to try and keep the productivity up now, so that 2013 isn't a lapse back into nothingness :)

I'm quite glad I didn't find out until this late in life, or I might have let it become an identity. It's good to know it describes me without allowing it to define me.

That's an excellent summation. Sometimes I do regret not having had access to the asexual category earlier in life, because it would have solved some rather painful mysteries, and might have opened some doors. But it simply wasn't available. I hadn't thought about the problematic side of self-labeling early in life. Heaven knows other, less-useful labels were the bane of my early existence.

Thank you for the perspective! And for being open on this subject. It helps us all.

I come from a very middle class, suburban background and the only categories I had were "normal" and "weird". So I was fairly satisfied with just calling myself "weird" and leaving it at that. I've only come across the more detailed labels in the last 5 years or so of Livejournal activism, and 'asexual' is not one of the ones that's easiest to notice even then.

But because I didn't know, exactly, and I am not aromantic, I didn't see my weirdness as getting in the way of getting married, and I've been happily married for the past 20 years (discounting a bit of 'OMG, why am I so frigid?' angst.) I think if I'd had the lable earlier, it might have got in the way of that, which would have been a disaster from my pov.

Crivens, a Wee Hag!

I didn't much like the memory holes of menopause, but every time a hot flush started I'd take a swig of chocolate soymilk, and that seemed to ward them off. I like 'crone' a bit better than 'hag,' but I'd rather be Granny than Magrat. Though Nanny Ogg probably has more fun than either. And.. How about "powerful and usually benevolent, but someone who deserves respect?"

I'm bi and have always seen the fascination with sex .. but having a stable, good relationship has made it far less critical. An important part of life, but a part, not the whole of the thing.

Hope things go well with the new books.

For me it's manifested as crushing exhaustion and constant headache (since October). Christmas intervened, but in the new year I think I'm off to the doctors to try HRT, because this is not really endurable for much longer and it's showing no sign of easing up on its own. I'm looking forward very much to the process being over! I could definitely go for "powerful and usually benevolent, but someone who deserves respect." Although, apart from survive for 46 years, I'm not sure what I've done to deserve respect.

I always used to think I was just prudish, or maybe repressed - weird, anyway - for not being interested in taking part in sex myself. And really it's not that I've changed, it's just that I've found a slightly more respectable lable ;)

Thanks! I am really excited by UtH, so I'll be very sad if it goes down the pan. Which probably ensures that it will, of course. /Eeyore moment.

You've got two decent kids and you're one hell of a writer -- that's more than a lot of people ever manage.

I hope the hormone stuff goes well,but if you haven't tried acupuncture, it's worth investigating. I had a serious "female problem' resolve through traditional Chinese medicine.

*g* Well, the kids are the ones who deserve the praise for turning out OK (and they still have plenty of time to run off the rails.) But thanks!

I'll hold off on the thought of acupuncture until I've tried the HRT. It's not that I don't believe you, because I have a lot of time for alternative medicine, it's just that acupuncture is *so expensive*. I'd have to be without other options to be able to afford it.

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