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!

                          

More regular programming, including Mrs. Avoirdupois’ latest missive, will resume soon.

                          

I’ve done several other interviews that haven’t hit print yet, but I will keep y’all posted when they do.  This new Big Big Love seems to be stirring up a lot of interest, which is really exciting to see in a number of ways.  The first edition was so out-there, for its time, that it was kind of difficult to get mainstream media venues to pay attention to it.  But times change, and so do people’s ways of thinking, and it’s fascinating (and affirming!) to see some concrete evidence of that.

Oh and!  My upcoming book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality got a very nice little review in Publishers Weekly yesterday.  You’ll be able to get your hands on that one in January, 2012.

                          

It will be a little less painful in a month or two, when I am regularly wearing a sweater or a hoodie while I work.  She is sharp.

                          

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.

                          

There’s a way in which a book doesn’t feel real until it’s out there in the wild where people can find it, and a way in which it really hasn’t finished getting published until it’s getting read and responded to.

I should remind you all that it’s available in ebook format as well as the print version.  For those of you who have print accessibility issues, this should help.  Or, y’know, if you just want it on the e-reader, I’m cool with that too.

As Big Big Love gets ready to make its debut, I should note a couple of things just for the record:

The new Big Big Love is not merely a reissue of the old Big Big Love!  It’s completely rewritten, from the ground up, with loads of new content, updated listings, some new organization, an entirely new survey and survey responses, fantastic interviews with amazing people like Substantia Jones and Lesley Kinzel, and even illustrations, something that wasn’t possible for the first BBL.

The new Big Big Love is for people of all sizes of fat and people of all sizes of thin.  I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have any issues whatsoever hanging around the place where their body intersected with their sexuality.   If you have issues around sex and your body’s size, shape, or appearance, this is your book.  If you face issues around sexuality and your partners‘ body size, shape, or appearance — or their issues with their bodies! — this is your book too.

Big Big Love is a size-accepting book.  But if you’re not someone who considers yourself part of the “size acceptance movement” that’s okay!  As one of my interviewees in the book so wisely says, not everyone has to be political and not everybody should be.  I’m pro-choice, and so is my book.

Big Big Love doesn’t care if you’re straight, queer, bisexual, asexual, or really have no idea what kind of sexual you might be.  Big Big Love  also doesn’t care what your sex or gender are, whether they’re factory originals or aftermarket modifications, and I can guarantee you it is totally okay with you being experienced, inexperienced, completely celibate, monogamous, nonmonogamous, vanilla, kinky… whatever you’ve got going on. Everyone’s welcome, and as broad a spectrum of you as I could manage are actively verbally included.

I wrote Big Big Love for you.  Yes, you.  I wrote it because I know sexuality is tricky and bodies are tricky and it can really help to get some perspective on things from someone who isn’t right in the middle of an emotional situation.  I wrote it because I want you to know that when it comes to sex, it really doesn’t matter who you are and it doesn’t matter what you weigh, or what the people you are attracted to weigh.  You’re a human being and that makes you, and your desires and your needs, real and meaningful.  Love’s not measured by the ounce.  The ability to have an orgasm is not correlated to your pants size.   This is about you being a human being, about your quality of life, about your pleasure and satisfaction and joy.  I wrote Big Big Love for you.

                          

Saturday, September 24 at 7 pm
Baltimore Book Festival
“Diversity in Genre Fiction” panel, Maryland Romance Writers stage

Friday, September 30 at 7 pm
Atomic Books, Baltimore
Reading, Q&A, and booksigning — my hometown book launch!  I’ll be making homemade cupcakes for this one, so don’t miss your chance to get your hot little hands on my buttercream!

Sunday, October 2 at 6 pm
Sugar, Baltimore
My Big Fat Sex Workshop — a two-hour intensive that is truly one size fits all. Come talk and learn about the ins and outs of sex toys, sex aids, and positions for big folks – yes you can get on top! — as well as ways to cope with the insecurities that go along with living in a culture where “you can never be too rich or too thin.”  Bring your questions and be prepared to supersize your sex life!  $20, tickets available at Sugar or online via the link above.

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

Thursday, October 13 at 7 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

Friday, November 11 at 7:30 pm
Charis Books and More, Atlanta
Reading, Q&A, and booksigning

Friday, November 11 – Sunday, November 13
National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Atlanta
I’ll be giving a paper about my work with both editions of Big Big Love at NWSA this year — if you’re there, c’mon down and say howdy!

NOTE: I still have a few spots of availability this fall for more events.  If you’d like to book me, please email me at events at hanneblank.com!

                          

Except of course that you haven’t actually done all the research and planning.  So you don’t really know all of what the book is likely to involve or contain.

Since you’ve done relatively little writing on the topic, you also haven’t necessarily found the approach or the voice you will want to use when you write the actual book.  There is additionally the highly functional temptation to write the proposal in a somewhat breezier and more engaging (see also seduction mode) tone than that in which the book is likely to be written.  This is facilitated by not having done all the research and planning and not knowing all of what the book is likely to involve or contain, naturally, as anyone who has ever made 20 minutes of cocktail conversation out of a headline and three sentences of the lede of a newspaper article can tell you.  Knowing very little is an asset if you wish to remain free to be insanely entertaining.

This makes for treacherous going.  How do you map out, for example, a prospective table of contents for a book when you don’t actually know all that it will need to encompass?  This is the task in which I am currently embroiled, and I do not mind admitting that it gives me stage fright.  I do not get stage fright when it comes to actual performance, I never have.  But this wakes up the butterflies in my stomach.

Handwaving is, to some extent, appropriate to the task.  But at the same time you know — or at least you do if you’ve been through this process before — that no matter how many times you include the words “provisional” and “projected” in a proposal, any editor who is willing to buy your book will have found something in your proposal to which sie has become a little bit attached.   You will not necessarily know what this is, but you will find out, sure enough, if it ends up not being part of the final manuscript… or even if it is just substantially different from the way in which it was originally described in the proposal.  Killing your own darlings is difficult.  Killing someone else’s can be… sticky.

So you try to be careful, but there can at this stage be no guarantees. You try to be conservative in your scope, but at this stage, you know that it doesn’t matter what lines you draw now, you’ll be coloring outside of them shortly after the ink is dry on the contract.  You try to be moderate in your tone, even though you want to catch people’s attention, to make them think the book is a wonderful idea, knowing that you don’t actually know whether the book will sound like you’re making it sound right now.  All you can do is make educated guesses and speak calmly and clearly while you smile and try not to look too confused.

You do all that and you know you are simultaneously a) telling the most fair and transparent version of the truth about your proposed book that you have to tell right now and b) making things up as you go along and lying through your teeth.   As nervewracking as I find it, it’s all part of the job.  Being a writer means writing proposals while simultaneously accepting that the process of writing a book changes both the author and the book.

If it doesn’t, I daresay you’re doing it wrong.

                          

As you may be aware, an all-new, updated, revised, illustrated, and 100% gorgeous new edition of Big Big Love  is slated to come out on September 20 from my good friends at Celestial Arts Press, an imprint of Ten Speed Press.  (And when I say gorgeous, I mean: I double-dog dare you to look at that cover pic and not swoon a little.)

I’d like to produce some promo materials for the book that feature the words and the lovely real-life diverse gorgeousness of people like you — people who are the real everyday sexy face of fat sexuality.

So…

I’m looking for fans of the first BBL who would be willing to do email interviews, and let me use their words to help promote the book and get the word out to others.  For this, I’d need you to choose a name you were comfortable having used in conjunction with your words, but you could retain as much anonymity as you liked.

I’m also looking for fans of the first BBL who would be willing to be interviewed on camerafor the same purpose.  If you live near Baltimore, this is something we could set up a time to do in person, but if you don’t, and you’d still like to be on video talking about BBL, that’s okay too — we can work something out because the Internet is made of magic.

If you’re interested in helping out with this, please email events @ hanneblank dot com.

It doesn’t matter if you’re female or male or intersex or transgender, straight or queer or asexual, brown or tan or olive or pink, young or old (as long as you are over 18), skinny or super-sized or anywhere in between, conventionally able-bodied or not, tattooed and pierced or prim and proper looking …fat people and their partners come in all kinds of forms and flavors and I want to reflect that.

You do not have to be a native English speaker — I would especially welcome some people who would be willing to video interview with responses in other languages, including ASL! — but you do need to have enough English ability to understand my questions and respond appropriately, and help me translate what you say into English so I can put captions under it where needed.

For those wishing to participate in the video part of this project, please be aware that this will be work-safe.  This is not a porno project.

Those who participate will be required to sign a release giving me permission to use their words and/or image as relevant.  To be on the safe side, I will also be asking for proof of age (over 18 only, per US laws that prohibit sexual imagery of legal minors).

Again, if you’re interested in helping out with this, please email events @ hanneblank dot com.

                          

I was thinking about this earlier this morning when a little automated internet robot informed me, with the cheery efficiency such things exhibit, that someone had left an anonymous morsel of praise on an equally anonymous piece of (whisper it!) fanfic I posted under a pseudonym some while ago, and thus instantly and markedly improved my day.   A four-line email telling me that someone whose name I will never know appreciated a piece of highly silly, more or less illegal, derivative piece of fiction I wrote more or less on a dare put a spring in my step and a smile on my face and made me all chipper and perky.

By contrast, I have been left downright glum by good reviews of my books in respected newspapers.  I have reacted with surliness befitting a fourteen-year-old to praiseful comments on my work from some of my colleagues in the publishing industry.  My private and inward responses to even the best-intentioned praise of my work are sometimes grumpy — “that’s nice, I’m glad you liked it, even if you don’t seem to have read the same book I thought I wrote” — or in some way dismissive.

I do try, in fits and starts, to do better with all this.  It would be more appropriate.  I theorize that it might also be gratifying.  Alas in addition to being less than diligent, I have a rubbery, impervious, ungrateful little brain.

I do not, I find, trust praise very easily.

I suppose it is in part an aspect of being one’s own harshest critic, which of course every artist must, in all honesty, be: no one else can see your work with your eyes, hear it with your ears, touch it with your fingers.  No one else knows whether what you’ve created comes close to being what you intended it to be.

A teacher, a mentor, an editor can give you an opinion.  They can look at what you’ve done and tell you what they see, and you can gauge from their reaction whether you’ve gotten enough of what you wanted that it’s worth putting it out into the world at all.

Sometimes you don’t, you know.  Sometimes you realize that you didn’t get close enough even for horseshoes or government work, and you scrap or shelve whatever it was and start over.

And you yourself have to be both the first and the last line in that vetting process.  You have to know whether it’s got enough of whatever it is that you’re even going to show it to your teacher, your mentor, your editor, your trusted friends.  Then you have to know whether or not to trust your gut about the worth of the piece, regardless of what your mentors and friends and editors have to say about it.  It’s going to go out into the world as an emanation of you, after all.  You have to make the call.  No one else can.  Or will.  Or should.

It is rare that any of us put anything out into the world that we think is genuinely good, that is, genuinely what we wanted it to be.  Really nailing your art — getting it absolutely one hundred percent right, and knowing that it’s absolutely as right as it is ever going to be — is glorious and rare and I don’t know any artist who does not do what sie does more or less for the sole reason that if you do whatever it is that you do enough, some of those religious moments will come your way and you will, for brief blazing moments, be ten thousand bulletproof feet tall, blasting laser beams made of pure refined sex electric awesome out of every radiant pore, leaving swirling puddles of infant universes in your godlike footsteps.

Most of what you or I or anyone ever creates is not that.  It’s good enough.  But that’s all it is.

This is part of where the infamous and soul-sucking condition known as Impostor or Charlatan Syndrome comes from, of course.  Yes, yes, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and sometimes good is the enemy of done.  But as a creator, you know when something could’ve been better.  You know when it was just okay.  You know when frankly, you didn’t have the chops to make it into what you wanted it to be.  You know when your eyes are bigger than your stomach. You know when you just dashed it off and let it ride because there were other more important things on your desk.  You know when you just didn’t have any more time, when there were too many deadlines.  You know when, oh just fuck it, it was done for values of done that include the relevant people signing off on it and telling Accounting to cut you your check.

You always know what it could’ve been.  What it would’ve been.

Which is part of, although at least in my case definitely not all of, why I don’t, or maybe can’t — or maybe both and neither and other things besides — necessarily trust people who try to tell me that something I did is good.

(I have observed similar things in other artists of my acquaintance.  But I’ll refrain from assuming they are as ungracious and incapable and pigheaded as I, and not attempt to say that we’re all coming from the same place or thinking the same things.)

And yet.

And yet a nameless person on the Internet can anonymously click a little box that says “I liked this story,” on a piece of unsaleable and technically only quasi-legal writing whose author’s name they do not know, and somehow I get notified that they did, and I end up beaming like I just won a prize.  The kind of prize I probably wouldn’t trust if it were given to me by someone in a suit, shaking my hand at some ceremony of the sort where people make speeches and there are canapes after.

Somehow, it feels more real. I wrote a thing.  Not a perfect thing.   But it gave someone else pleasure.  I don’t know who that person was or why they liked what they read.  They don’t know who wrote it and it doesn’t matter.  They just knew — I only know — they liked it enough to say so.  It seems clean and honest and sweet.  I don’t know any more.  I don’t need to know any more.  I don’t want to know any more.

This praise, I know what it is.  And I know how to take it.  Thank you.