Personal Digest Saturday: September 20 – September 26

Life news this week: 

• Well, big news is MY BOOK IS SELLING WELL ENOUGH THAT MY PUBLISHER DECIDED IT NEEDS A PAPERBACK. So, next year, Fall 2015, my book is going to come out in paperback and get marketed to retail stores. Just like I wanted. YAHOO, it happened!


• It has been a week of mainstream press. It started with Saturday's appearance on the Australian television news show Sunrise. They had me sent to a Tampa television station to get piped in on their breakfast program on the other side of the world. These guys had a nice green room. :) Very respectful interview, and one of the hosts even cleared a sensitive question with me before asking it on the air!


• On Monday I got a phone call from one of the interviewers on a Sexperts podcast which is associated with Playboy. The lady was calling to kind of pre-interview me and judged me as appropriate for her show. She assured me it's kind of a niche show and that her listeners would find the topic fascinating and she wants to do the interview live in late October. This should go ahead.


• On Tuesday I got interviewed on BBC World Service podcast. They kinda woke me up because they called early. I had to think on my feet and I think I did pretty well, but it was a really short and sort of brusque interview. And then just an hour after that I had a second interview for Speaking of Sex, which was a warm and sensitive interview that I think is going to come out beautifully in its final version. The interviewer, Chris, also wants to write a companion piece about my book and said they'd read the whole thing and loved it. The BBC one has aired already (I'm at 22:40), and the other one will air in mid-October so I'll link it then.


• On Wednesday I showed up in the New York Times. The article was about asexuality in general, but it was sort of guided by my quotes in the Salon article and lifted from my actual book. I told my publisher about the new media alert and she said she'd been the one to provide them with a copy of it, but she'd thought it was unlikely they'd actually review it or mention it and was thrilled that they had.


• I have several pending requests for more interviews; I'll be doing the Sexperts one, and another print Q&A that will appear in Marie Claire in the UK, and another branch of the BBC podcast network wants to interview me. And I'm still hoping to hear from JVClub because Janet Varney is cool, but we'll see if she feels like contacting me. :)


• I decided I want to try to clean up my science fiction romance novel and show it to my agent. We shall see what happens.


• I ate at Applebee's with Jeaux this week. At my place we didn't do much but watch some funny videos about Avatar and talk about how crappy Internet sexists are.


• I was randomly ill for the last half of the week (after Wednesday). On Thursday morning I thought I was going to toss my cookies but just remained kind of uncomfortable for the next couple days and I really don't have any appetite.


• I did work on my mentee's and alternate's books this week as well, and it's going so well! I'm so impressed with both of them.

Places featured:

• "Why Asexuals Don't Want to be Invisible Anymore": My book and my quotes are heavily featured in the New York Times.

• Attracted to No One: My TV appearance on the Australian TV show Sunrise. It was also discussed on their Facebook page.

• BBC World Service: My audio-only interview on the BBC. This is the entire segment so you'll need to skip to 22:40 to hear my part. This was also discussed (with lots of horrible, mocking, invalidating comments) on their Facebook thread.

• Other Facebook pages shared my Salon story, such as Equality California and Autism Women's Network. Most of the comments, again, are angry, mocking, dismissive, snotty, and "WHY DOES THIS NEED ATTENTION?????? THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS!!!!!!!!!" You know.

• I was mentioned in Vue Weekly, but it wasn't an interview; they more or less just summed up some stuff I said elsewhere and recommended my book.

• I'm mentioned briefly in The Literary Omnivore.

• Asexuality, and my materials, ended up in a discussion in West-Info, but there are a lot of problems with the article:
  
  
  1. Asexuality isn't something "Americans" are doing as implied.
  2. The "call to arms," as they call it, did not "come from" me in any way.
  3. We don't hyphenate "a-romantic," though I know why some people want to.
  4. It attributes to me a quote of "That's how we're born," which is not something I have ever said or would say because I do not like "born this way" as an explanation for a variety of reasons.
  5. It claims the NYT "interviewed" me and they did not. NYT made it clear they were borrowing quotations from Salon and other places.
  6. They call it "the fourth gender." Gender?!?
  7. They define sex-positive as the notion that two asexual people can have sex with each other. Nope.
  
  
• I was on the Asexual Agenda's linkspam again with a reference to my Australian TV appearance and the NYT article.

• A jerk wrote on her blog about how I'm obviously just lying to myself and asexuality isn't an "identity" because it just means you don't have sex, which is NOT something you're allowed to define your identity by. I'm not linking that, though. Just thought it was funny.

Reviews:

• Awsome Book: Five-star Amazon review by Richard W. Cooper "rick." Also added a different review on Goodreads: Richard Cooper's five-star Goodreads review.

• educational and like an essay but an interesting essay: Five-star review by aquestari.

• Beautiful In Every Way: Five-star review by Ellen Silverman.

• Invisible no more: Five-star review by paul kriese.

• Sara's five-star Goodreads review.

Reading progress:

• I didn't finish any books this week--pretty busy!--but I'm still currently reading The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson.

New singing performances:

Here I'm singing Alanis Morissette's "That I Would Be Good." It sort of explains a message I need to tell myself lately--that I'm still all right even if I don't accomplish everything or even if I fail sometimes.


 
New drawings:

Webcomic Negative One Issue 0489: "Adult Influence."

New videos:

Here's Letters to an Asexual #21, in which a man explains to me that he will marry me and fix my asexuality. He also explains condescendingly that he knows I'm so lonely that I cry myself to sleep all the time but am doing this "asexuality thing" for attention and desperation to be relevant, when really we all know that the only thing that would truly satisfy me, as a female, is becoming someone's wife. 'Kay. 




And here is the embed of the news show I was on in Australia, if it works for you.



New photos:

I'm in the green room before going on TV.

 

Me demonstrating how to decide if a new purse is right
for you: as long as it has room for a trade paperback!

Social media counts:
YouTube subscribers: 3,855 for swankivy (27 new this week), 382 for JulieSondra (2 new). Twitter followers: 553 for swankivy (6 new), 734 for JulieSondra (7 new). Facebook: 271 friends (2 new--KWBF friends) and 142 followers (4 new) for swankivy, 450 likes for JulieSondra (19 new), 48 likes for Negative One (no change), 84 likes for So You Write (1 new). Tumblr followers: 1,567 (33 new).