03.06.08
Posted in Books & Publishing, publishing at 9:09 pm by Hanne Blank
In the past few days I have had several e-mail requests from people looking for copies of my first book, Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them.
Big Big Love is currently out of print. It has been out of print for a year or so. There are no current plans to bring it back into print.
Best Transgender Erotica, which I coedited with Raven Kaldera, is likewise out of print.
What this means:
- The only copies of Big Big Love or Best Transgender Erotica currently available for sale are copies which were either a) purchased by booksellers prior to the time that the book went out of print, or else they are b) used copies.
- This means that they are being sold outside the publishing-industry loop of in-print books that involves the author, the publisher, and the distributor. They are being sold in the out-of-print sector of the book business, to which neither I nor the publishers or distributors have any connection.
- Neither I nor the publisher have anything to do with the prices being asked for remaining copies. When it comes to sales of out of print books, booksellers are free to ask for whatever they think the market will bear.
- Neither the publisher or I are receiving any profits from sales of the remaindered or used copies, regardless of how much you may pay for one, so please do not assume that it is my greediness, or that of the book’s publishers, that is to blame for the rather elevated prices that are apparently being asked for copies of the book. I repeat: I do not see any income from sales of the book at this point. The high prices being asked are not connected to me.
- I am sorry, but I cannot help you find a cheap copy of any of my out-of-print books. I don’t know any more than you do about where such a thing might lurk.
Thank you for your interest in my work. I hope that you will be sufficiently intrigued to purchase copies of my other books that are still in print. On that note, I point out that my most recent book, Virgin: The Untouched History, has just come out in paperback.
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01.12.07
Posted in Virgin book, publishing, squeeeee!, writing at 4:38 pm by Hanne Blank
Virgin just got a starred review in Publishers Weekly!
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6407200.html?nid=2286
Virgin: The Untouched History
Hanne Blank. Bloomsbury, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-1-59691-010-2
“By any material reckoning, virginity does not exist,” writes Blank in this informative, funny and provocative analysis of one of the most elusive—and prized—qualities of human sexuality. Blank, an independent scholar, has pieced together a history of how humans have constructed the idea of virginity (almost always female and heterosexual) and engineered its uses to suit cultural and political forces. Blank has no shortage of fascinating facts: since Western virginity was symbolized by the color white, missionaries viewed nonwhite peoples as sexually immoral; late medieval and Renaissance moralists thought they could detect whether a woman was a virgin by examining her urine (”a virgin’s urine was clear, sparkling, and thin”). Blank also has a pleasing, highly readable style that allows her to convey large amounts of information with wit and agility. But she becomes most animated, and political, when she probes contemporary ideas about virginity. Taking on a range of questions—why is virginity considered sexy? how does the idea of virginity fuel violence against women?—she makes the case that contemporary culture is as obsessed with, and benighted about, virginity, as those of the past. Thoroughly researched, carefully argued and written with a sly sense of humor, this is a bright addition to the popular literature of women’s and cultural studies. (Mar.)
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12.04.06
Posted in administrative, calls for submissions, making book, publishing, women at 3:10 pm by Hanne Blank
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Breakthrough Bleeding:
Essays on The Thing Women Spend A Quarter Of Their Time Doing, But No One’s Supposed To Talk About
Edited by Hanne Blank and Moira Russell
Forthcoming from She Devil Press, an imprint of Suspect Thoughts Press (www.suspectthoughts.com); scheduled publication date Fall 2008.
FINALLY, a book that isn’t afraid of a little blood!
Between puberty and menopause, most women spend close to a quarter of their lives dealing with menstruation. But except for coming-of-age stories and the occasional Stephen King novel, all this spilled blood hardly creates a blip on the cultural radar. It’s as if someone has removed it all with a super-duper magic cleanser… ironic, considering what the rest of us go through to get the stains out.
Breakthrough Bleeding is here to change all that. Thoughtful, challenging, political, and maybe even sexy, this collection of essays looks at menstruation from the inside and the outside, a super-maxi size dose of heavy-thinkin’ menstrual mojo.
We are looking for essays and creative nonfiction that analyze, question, and explore all aspects of menstruation and menstruation culture. Potential topics include:
- menstruation and gender – how does menstruation fit into (or conflict with) experiences of gender?
- menstrual products advertising & the “sanitary products” industry
- menstruation, personal relationships, and sex – from phobias to fetishes
- menstrual education – what do we learn and how do we learn it, what do we teach and how to we teach it?
- menstruation as a human rights issue – how are women’s periods dealt with in prisons, shelters, mental institutions, long-term care facilities, and other institutions?
- women who voluntarily/intentionally stop menstruating
- men’s experiences with / attitudes regarding menstruation
- menstruation humor
- menstruation and ridicule/shame
- transmenstruation – what kinds of issues come up around menstruation for intersex, transsexual and transgendered people?
- premature menopause (organic or induced)
- enjoying/appreciating menstruation
- menstruation and/in the workplace
- menstruation through the eyes of Western medicine
- the “menstrual alternatives” movement (e.g. reusable pads/cups/sponges) and its culture
- menstruation in straight vs. queer spheres
- feminist culture and menstruation
GENERAL GUIDELINES:
- NONFICTION only.
- NO fiction, poetry, or memoir. (This means that unless there is a specific reason for it to be in your piece, we do not want to hear about when you got your first period or how bad your PMS is. This is not a collection of first-person narratives.)
- Submissions should be between 1500 and 5000 words in length.
- TWO (2) copies of your submission will be required.
- Hard copy (paper copy) submissions ONLY. No electronic or emailed submissions will be considered.
- Typed or computer printed ONLY.
- Formatting: 12-point type in some generic traditional font (Times, Georgia, Geneva, Courier, etc.), one-inch margins, double spaced. Please include all italics, boldface, blockquotes, section breaks, etc.
- References, if any, may be either footnote or endnote according to author preference and should use Chicago Manual of Style format. No inline references please.
- Please number your pages
- Each submission should be accompanied by a cover sheet that contains ONLY the following data: Author Name, Pseudonym (if used), Title of Submission, Author mailing address, Author e-mail address, and Author telephone number.
- The author’s name or pseudonym should NOT appear anywhere on the submission itself.
- Each submission should be accompanied by a single business-sized self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE, with first class letter postage already affixed). Submissions from outside the USA do not require the SASE.
- Please DO NOT send additional cover letters with your submission,, only the cover sheet as indicated above.
- Please DO NOT send your only copy/copies of your work.
- NOTE: Manuscripts will not be returned. Manuscripts not chosen for the book will simply be recycled.
SUBMISSIONS ADDRESS:
Send all submissions to the following address
Breakthrough Bleeding – SUBMISSIONS
C/o Hanne Blank, Editor
44 E. 26th Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218 USA
COMPENSATION:
Writers whose work is included in the book will receive a cash honorarium (amount TBD) and two copies of the book.
DEADLINE:
Deadline for all submissions is March 20, 2007.
Writers will be informed of editorial decisions no later than June 1, 2007.
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11.29.06
Posted in Virgin book, art, good things, health, making book, publishing at 11:11 am by Hanne Blank
It would seem that I am well overdue for a State of the Hanne Address. I’ve alluded several times here to having been under the weather a lot lately, and a handful of folks, concerned, have written to ask me if I’m okay.
Short answer? Yes.
Slightly longer answer? Yes, for certain values of “okay,” and am getting okayer.
Longer still, but more informative answer: The best I can figure it, my system waited until I had finally gotten done with the last stages of getting Virgin into production, until the page proofs were out the door, and promptly collapsed like a souffle in the front row of a road production of Riverdance. Almost four years of mostly solitary work on very difficult, often emotionally and conceptually toxic, intellectually tricky material that mired me in the misogyny mines pretty much from Day 1 took their toll… along with various other things, familial and professional, that’ve gone on in my life during that time that I didn’t really have a chance to deal with, grieve, recuperate from, etc. because I was already over deadline with the book.
So in the time-honored manner of college students finishing finals only to catch the most revolting flu available, I crashed. Hard. Not “post-book depression” particularly. I know from depression and this wasn’t the same thing. Exhaustion. Awful flareups of all the repetitive stress injuries I’ve ever dealt with, plus some new ones just for fun. Exciting new stress-related health issues I’d never experienced before in my life, like temporomandibular joint pain, frequent nausea and other GI misbehavior, cluster headaches… huh? Who, me? I’d never had these things happen to me. And then the array of symptoms that came along for the ride with the exhaustion, like the inability to focus, the shakes, the muscle and joint aches, the incapacity to think well. Writing was laborious and unpleasant, which it generally is nowhere near. Reading anything too complex was right out, because I couldn’t follow what was going on. I could just make it through Terry Pratchett’s new YA, Wintersmith, but I think that was mostly because I already knew the characters.
I’m not about to get into some tedious recital of all the ways in which this was a gargantuan pain in the ass, let alone how un-fun it was to endure. I’m sure you can do the math. Point is, I had never before understood those bits, typically in Victorian novels, where someone undertakes some massive task and does it and it “ruins [his/her] health.” I never imagined that was literal. I always figured that was code for “after doing such-and-so, s/he was feeling a bit run down and tired and in need of a vacation.” It wasn’t. At least not necessarily.
Fortunately, having something ruin your health can be a temporary condition. For the past six weeks or so, my day job has been getting better. Figuring out what I can and can’t do. Figuring out how to get the stuff I can’t do done anyway. Lots and lots of acupuncture, which has been helping me enormously… truly amazing, and my acupuncturist is worth her weight in something really really good. (Like maybe Michael Recchiuti fleur de sel caramels, or something equally outrageous.) Sleeping a lot. Eating plenty of fruits and veggies. Trying to get a judicious quantity of gentle exercise. Trying not to beat myself up too much about all the stuff I couldn’t do, or the stuff I still can’t. Waiting. Praying. Trying to be patient, because this kind of incapacity is tooth-grindingly frustrating.
The good news is that I’m doing a lot better. It’s a perplexing thing, this recovery process. There are some things I still can’t really do a whole lot of — driving the car remains inordinately taxing for some reason, for instance, so there’s a really firm limit as to how much of it I can do in a day — and other things that are getting more or less back to normal. But the ability to get through a whole day without needing to sleep for a couple of hours was a milestone. Getting to the point where I could go swimming was another, but first I had to get to the point where I wasn’t likely go shaky and dizzy and disoriented in the pool, or at least if I did, that I was well enough that I could depend on a few minutes’ rest being able to set me back to rights.
That was two days ago. And after two days where I was well enough to trust myself to be able to go swimming for a little while, I’m now having a day where I can tell it wouldn’t be such a hot idea. I’ll probably feel up to it again tomorrow, but today I’m apparently running on fumes. So, ya know, still a work in progress.
I’m hopeful that I’ll be back to normal by my birthday, which is at the end of February. Virgin comes out in March, so it’d be awfully nice not to feel like I had to husband my energies quite so carefully by the time that happens.
And speaking of Virgin, I’m happy to say that the Japanese rights have just sold, to Sakuhinsha. Other foreign sales are in the works, but nothing to announce yet. This will be my second book to be released in Japanese, which is very exciting for me. Not that I can read them. I always have a secret fear that they’ve taken my name and put it on the cover of a book about, oh, I don’t know, growing enokitake or something.
Also, blurbs have been coming in from various people, and I’m truly thrilled by some of them — validation is paradise, as a certain very wise and wily friend of mine notes, but validation from people whom you admire personally as well as professionally is a special sort of joy.
Oh, and y’all do know that the Virgin book has its own blog, right? I update it pretty frequently with discussions of virginity-related news items, and will be adding book events/book tour information, speaking gigs, and so on when the information becomes available.
Anyhow, that’s all the news from the little purple house in Baltimore. Over ‘n’ out.
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