What they all have in common is that they’re exhilarating and they’re taking a lot of doing but I feel pretty firmly like my feet are pointed in the right direction.  It’s a good way to feel going in to a new year, honestly.

I don’t know the half of what the new year will hold for me.  But one thing I can tell you for absolute sure is that 2012 is not going to be just another year like any other, at least not around here.  I mentioned this morning on Twitter that I am limbering up… because I’ll be burning hotter and brighter and fiercer than ever before.

I know, I know.  Don’t you go rolling your eyes at me, Missy.  I realize it sounds like the kind of thing that people are supposed to say at this time of year, and perhaps like I’ve been hitting the sweet sweet New Age “abundance mentality” crackpipe a little too hard.

So what I’m going to say instead is: watch this space.   Take your vitamins.  And fasten your seat belts.

And while you’re at it, three things you need to know:

January 18 at 7 pm, New York City
We have a date, you and I, at the bar at the Museum of Sex in New York City.  C’mon out.  I promise I’ll wear cute shoes, fantastic lipstick, I’ll make you laugh, and maybe I’ll let you buy me a drink.

January 27 from 9-10:30 am, Baltimore
Join me for Let’s Get Some Things Straight, a workshop on the history of heterosexuality that I’ve created especially for LGBT activists, debuting at the Creating Change conference here in Baltimore.   It’s where I’m launching my exciting new book! Here’s the scoop:

Far from being an eternal human constant, heterosexual is only as old as the typewriter and the light bulb. When it comes to giving queer community new tools for activist thinking, this is a good thing. Author and historian Hanne Blank, author of the new book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, provides an overview of the history of straightness  geared toward helping LGBTIQ activists speak deeper and better- informed truths to power.

If you’ll be at Creating Change you will find the location listed in your program book.  Let me know if you’ll be there!

Name Your Place, Name Your Time
I am booking talks and campus visits about Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality as well as Big Big Love, Virgin, and my other work.     I’m especially excited to offer a talk I debuted at Harvard University last spring, called “Virgins and Other Indefinite Articles: Thinking Historically about Sexuality, Definition, and Experience,” which builds bridges between my work on virginity, my work on heterosexuality, and the task of writing history about sex.

I’m also offering a brand new program, An Evening With Hanne Blank, an uncensored, funny, radical evening of history, storytelling, and humor about sex, bodies, and culture that runs the gamut of my work from the erotic to the erudite… and may even include a song or two.  So talk to me!

                          

Beloved editor, artist and writer Terri Windling is in need, and we are asking for your help in a fundraising auction to assist her. This auction will combine donations from professionals and fans in an online sale to help Terri through a serious financial crisis. Terri is the creator of groundbreaking fantasy and mythic art and literature over the past several decades, ranging from the influential urban fantasy series Bordertown to the online Journal of Mythic Arts. With co-editor Ellen Datlow, she changed the face of contemporary short fiction with The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and other award-winning anthologies, including Silver Birch, Blood Moon, and The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest. Her remarkable Endicott Studio blog continues to bring music, poetry, art and inspiration to people all over the world.

Terri Windling and her family have been coping with health and legal issues that have drained her financial resources at a critical time. Due to the serious nature of these issues, and privacy concerns for individual family members, we can’t be more specific than that, but Terri is in need of our support. As a friend, a colleague and an inspiration, Terri has touched many, many lives over the years. She has been supremely generous in donating her own work and art to support friends and colleagues in crisis. Now, Terri is in need of some serious help from her community. Who better than her colleagues and fans to rise up to make some magick for her?

That’s where we come in. Until December 15th, we’ll be bringing you auctions (and vice-versa!) of art, books, collectibles, music, and more amazing offers from the awesome fantasy art and literature communities.

I, too, am a fan of Terri Windling, someone who has benefited from her work, someone who has been blessed by the love and the sorcery and the delight and the insight she’s shared with so many of us.

I’m offering two items in this auction, and if you like, you may go and bid on a signed, personalized copy of Big Big Love or a signed, personalized copy of Virgin: The Untouched History.  Bid early, bid often, but most importantly, bid high if you can.

And oh, don’t neglect to look at the rest of what’s on offer.  There is some utterly astonishing stuff up for bid, and you’re really going to kick yourself if you miss this.

                          

I would be remiss not to remind you all that signups for the Commie Pinko Writing Contest are still open.  We’re about halfway full on fiction, so if you’re thinking about being a fictionaut with us, now’s the time to get in while the getting’s good.  There are scads of nonfic spaces still open, as well, so perhaps you’ll be brave and join us for that.

Yesterday we went to the Mayor’s Christmas Parade, which winds right through my neighborhood, Hampden.  I failed, stupidly, to take my own camera, but my Belovedary managed to snap a few pictures at my request, and I share some of them with you here.

First, the float that made me gasp open-mouthed:

Why yes, that is indeed a giant wooden cross on top of which the holy family is perched, with angels above them waving to the crowd.  Had I been in charge of giving these things names, I would’ve called it “Manger Danger,” because that thing has a serious slope on it and had the blessed infant — who was made of plastic in this instance, mind — taken a tumble, the Lamb of God would’ve been gyros meat in a nanosecond under the tires of whatever lurks beneath that old rugged crossy shell.  I must not have been the only one who half hoped for some excitement of that sort, but none transpired.

Best of all this float had brass-looking placards on both ends, like bumper stickers.  The one on the back said “Jesus is coming, be prepared!” and I was not the only one who mentioned wanting to alter it to end with “…look busy!”

The divine lovelies at Ma Petite Shoe pulled out all the stops per usual, and their Mrs. Claus was sort of a Marie Antoinette Claus, with a giant headpiece wig that incorporated a fully functional fishbowl-sized snow globe.

Among the other highlights, of which I have no particularly good pictures, were the well-costumed members of the Maryland chapter of the 501st Legion — Star Wars cosplayers, with an imposing Darth Vader in a Santa hat — and some delightful New Orleans-style mummers, whose presence in a Christmas parade somehow worked better than it should’ve.

There were also furries.  Including a blue plush-suited dragon with bondage straps on his tail, which we all thought slightly the wrong kind of festive, somehow.  I’m not sure how it works that furries end up in the Christmas parade, but welcome to Baltimore, how’d you like the show?

Later on that evening there was a nice pot of chicken and dumplings, thanks to my having scored a couple of fantastic, flavorful, lives-well-lived stewing hens at the farmer’s market.  You can take the girl out of the Midwest, as I am occasionally wont to note, but you cannot take the Midwest out of the girl.

And no, before you ask, there is not a recipe.  It’s chicken and dumplings.  You just put things in until it looks right.  Including lots of onion and parsnip, because chicken and dumplings tastes best with plenty of onion and parsnip.

                          

What is the Commie Pinko, you ask?  Well, it’s a writing contest I dreamed up a buncha years back, on the premise that writing contests would be a lot more fun if you actually got to read what other people wrote, and if the opinions of the actual people participating in the contest counted in helping to decide who won.

Furthermore, I decided it’d be fun if the prizes — rather than being done by having people pay entry fees and then divvying up the pot or whatever — were also done by committee, with every participant sending in a prize, forming a pot of really fabulous stuff that would then be divided amongst the winners, each of whom would get a magnificent Lucky Dip box in the mail.  Along with bragging rights, and such.

So that’s the basics of the Commie Pinko.  And I decided to revive it, after several years’ hiatus, because, well, it’s fun.

There are two categories this year, short story and creative nonfiction or essay.  There will be themes, generated prior to the writing period, by our all-star Politburo.

And perhaps there will be YOU.  Check out the link, read the details, and, if you like, join me!

                          

(For those of you who do not live in 200-year-old houses: the point in autumn where the nights start to get cold is also known as Mouse Season.  There are always, but always, little tiny mouse-sized ways for mice to get into old houses, and they do, and this is the secret True Reason We Keep Cats Around.  We conjecture that the BeloveDad came upon one of HRH Fez’s kills and decided to dispose of it.  The answer to the burning question of why this activity then turned into shoving said dead mouse into a snack bag and shoving the conveniently packaged mouse snack into a bureau drawer is, of course, Alzheimers.)

On a thankfully unrelated note, I wanted to thank all of you who took the time to comment with kind thoughts and wishes about my mom’s cancer diagnosis.  She underwent surgery last Thursday, where they discovered that there was more cancer in there than they thought.  No cancer diagnosis is ever a happy thing, and hers is no exception.  The good news that the surgical team did a wonderful job and that there is reason to think they may have gotten all of it out is tempered by the fact that it is a “high grade” cancer and that cancer is an unpredictable and insidious thing.  Mom will be recovering for a while yet, and as with all chronic conditions, we don’t know what the future will hold, but for now I’m taking comfort in the fact that she survived surgery, the surgery went as well as possible under the circumstances, and her doctors seem hopeful.

Onward, then, and upward!  A coupla announcements…

Announcement The First:  ATLANTA!  I will be all up in your sweet tea next month, doing a reading/signing of Big Big Love at Charis Books on the 11th at 7:30 pm.  I’ll happily sign any of my other books, as well, if you bring ‘em or buy ‘em there.

I’ll also be at the National Women’s Studies Association conference that weekend… giving a paper, hanging out with my speakers’ agency Soapbox, Inc. (taking bookings for spring!), and generally causing trouble.

Speaking of which, some of y’all need to tell me what the good date restaurants are near the downtown Sheraton.  There’s a hot butch philosopher down that way I want to make blush, so help a sister out.

 Announcement The Second:  The last copies of Inappropriate Crush are now up for sale on Etsy.  There are 15 copies left in this limited, numbered, and signed edition.   When they’re gone, they’re gone forever.  Read a sample, then go buy your copy!

                          

I’m having a grand time this book tour, blessed with wonderful audiences and beautiful weather in some of my favorite cities, seeing friends and meeting so many lovely, brilliant, funny, and good looking people. (How is it that so many of you are so damn cute?)

Thank you a thousand times to each of you who has come out to a book event (or who will be at the one in Northampton at Oh My! at 5:30). You’re fabulous.

I don’t know how other writers feel about touring, but as much as it’s a pain in the ass to plan travel, and coordinate all the sundry crap that has to be coordinated so you can travel — a level of coordination that I have to say skyrockets when you have to factor eldercare into the equation — there’s still something unique and precious and wonderful about getting to connect with the people who read all the stuff you write when you’re all alone with your notebook and your typewriter and your laptop.

So thanks for coming out to play, y’all. It’s good to see you.

                          

Intelligence the First: The Return of the Commie Pinko!

Several years ago, I founded and ran a writing contest.  It was a great deal of fun, but other things intervened and I stopped doing it for a while.

And then a dear friend of mine asked if maybe we couldn’t do it again.  Because I am an immoderate softie, I said that of course we could.  And so we are.

It’s called the Commie Pinko Writing Contest, signups will begin in December and the writing period will be in February, and if you want to know more, you just go clickie on the link.

Intelligence the Second:  Inappropriate Crush

I have about 25 copies left of my shade-grown fair-trade limited edition collection of prose (fiction, nonfiction, and a recipe) Inappropriate Crush.  Copies are numbered and signed, which makes them collectible, I suppose.  But mostly it means you can prove you got your hands on a copy of something of which there are only 75, and it’s all stuff that isn’t available under other covers, so.

I will happily bring you a copy if you will be attending one of my book events this week, if you let me know before 2 pm today (for Philadelphia) and before Wednesday at 5 pm (for New York, Boston, and Northampton).  Copies I deliver by hand are $15 each, payable in cash or by PayPal — email me at crush at hanneblank.com to reserve yours and let me know if you need PayPal information or will be paying in cash at the venue.

I will also happily mail you a copy if you can’t attend one of the book events.  S/H raises the total price to $20 for US addresses, non-US addresses will be calculated when I ship the book.  Again, crush @ hanneblank dot com is the way to get your hands on one.

Intelligence the Third: The Invisible Library

A few of you will know immediately what a Lexicon game is, and probably even fewer of you have played in one before.  (Hi, everyone from Green!)  Others of you will need to go look at the Wikipedia entry and then at, let’s say, the Macropedia Terradoma, which is a completed Lexicon game.

As a birthday present to myself, I’m going to be running a Lexicon game in 2012.  I’m aiming to begin it in March.

I’m calling it The Invisible Library.  

The Invisible Library is known only to those who are employed by it, and to those few mostly nameless, mostly faceless, instruments of government, industry, science, and other more esoteric disciplines who have reason to know that it is there.  The Invisible Library is responsible for handling, storing, and archiving all manner of documents and ephemera that the rest of the world simply doesn’t need to know about but that are, for one reason or another, too valuable to simply destroy.

Most of the Invisible Library’s staff have never seen one another face to face.  They wouldn’t know one another if they saw one another in a crowd, or at a party, or even across the dinner table.  They are known to one another by code names and they work together via a heavily secured electronic network.  Together, they work to create a compendium — strictly for in-house use, of course — that thoroughly describes the  nature and provenance, history and access records, of the incomparable collection held by the Invisible Library.

I am recruiting 24 players to begin The Invisible Library in March.  If you would like to be one of them, please drop me a line at crush at hanneblank dot com.

                          

First, we start with two very different but equally relevant and good interviews… BBL in the Jewish Daily Forward, and BBL at Xojane.com.  Check ‘em out!

This coming week will find me in Philly, Brooklyn, Boston, and Northampton, MA (town of my birth).  C’mon out and say hi, buy a book, get it signed… and you’re always welcome, by the way, to bring other books of mine along for signing too.

Monday, October 10 at 5:30 pm
Giovanni’s Room, Philadelphia
Reading, Q&A, and booksigning

Thursday, October 13 at 8 pm
Re/Dress NYC, Brooklyn
Reading, Shenanigans, Treats, Books, and Surprises!

Saturday, October 15 at 3 pm
Good Vibrations, Brookline, MA
Reading, Q&A, and booksigning

Sunday, October 16 at 5:30 pm
Oh My! A Sensuality Shop, Northampton, MA
Reading, Q&A, and booksigning

And, for those of you who listen to satellite radio, I’ll be on the Tiffany Granath Show on Playboy Radio on Tuesday, October 11, around 3:40 pm EST (12:40 pm PST) — I encourage you all to call in at 1 (877) 205.9796 if you have the slightest inclination.  It’s always fantastic to hear a friendly voice when you’re doing call-in radio!

                          

And speaking of Big Big Love, I am honored to present to you this wonderful, heartfelt, touching fan video about the first edition, made by the one and only Sugar Monster.

Big Big Love Q&A from The Sugar Monster on Vimeo.

(If you make a fan video about one of my books and tell me about it, I’ll put yours up in this blog, too!)

                          

In other important news, those of you in the mid-Atlantic might wanna know specifically about a few upcoming events that are happening this weekend and next…

On Saturday night (the 24th) I’m moderating a panel on Diversity in Genre Fiction at the Maryland Romance Writers stage at the Baltimore Book Festival.  Panel starts at 7 and like all Baltimore Book Festival events, it’s free and open to the public.  There will be books on sale, including Big Big Love and Virgin and Unruly Appetites, and it looks like a great panel of writers so I’m anticipating a fantastic and insightful conversation.

Next weekend is my hometown doubleheader.  I am blessed to live in Hampden — I say that if you’ve gotta live in Baltimore it might as well be in Hampden — and because my neighborhood is just so damn awesome, I’ll be doing two events within walking distance of my house.

Friday night, September 30 at 7 pm is the official authorized Big Big Love launch shindig at the one and only Atomic Books.  Free, open to the public…and I’m  bakin’ cupcakes ’cause nothing goes better with a book launch than homemade cupcakes.   Vegan ones and dairy ones ’cause that’s how I roll.

Sunday, October 2 at 6 pm I’m teaching — one time only! — my (in)famous Big Fat Sex Workshop at Sugar.  Tix are $20 (at the store, or click the link!) and there’s a cap on the number of folks they can fit into their space, so sign up ASAP if you want to get up close and personal with some big big love action.  Will there be cupcakes?  Depends on how much time I have on Saturday!

Muchas gracias to Rachel and Benn at Atomic and to Jacq and her staff at Sugar for making these happen, and I hope to see you all there!  Don’t be shy, now!

And!  I know I’ve been talking a lot about BBL in this space lately, but I’m gonna link you out to one more thing:  Illustrator Liz Tamny’s blog entry about the book’s release.