(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) (Caveat lector: This essay will talk quite frankly about what kinds of sex people have.) What is appropriate for people to do with their naked bodies and each other’s? What’s … Continue reading
Today, communication fans, I’d like to dismantle four sentence-like sequences of words that have something in common: muddled meanings caused by a poor (or possibly clever) choice of words. Who said them and with what intent is irrelevant to the … Continue reading
What worried me, as my teenage writer self set out to write my 150 novels, was that that was a lot of books. … So the first advice I would give that kid, speaking from my dizzying height of twenty novels published and five series is this: Don’t bite the basketball.
Continue reading(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Because homosexual behavior has attracted so much attention from society over the millennia, I want to take a moment to focus on it specifically. As previous essays have probably made … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Any discussion of sex and gender flows fairly naturally onward to the question of sexual orientation, because those aspects of identity are a major part of how we formulate the … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Contrary to what some people believe, non-binary gender isn’t a new idea. It’s just relatively new in the West: in other parts of the world, it’s been around for a … Continue reading
I discovered Georgette Heyer in high school, after reading an entire issue of the fanzine Niekas devoted to it, somewhere around 1967-8. At that time I hadn’t yet read Jane Austen, though I’d loved historical novels ever since I checked … Continue reading
We all have those days when you stare at the computer screen for hours and anything you try to type looks like Old High Marsian. My muse is on walkabout. Mental exhaustion I tell myself when this happens. Too many … Continue reading
Next week we’ll talk about traditional third genders and the modern array of alternative genders, but first we should look at the most common components of a gender system: the ideas of male and female. Because they’re cultural construct, these … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Last week we looked at the sex half of the cultural can of worms that is sex and gender. This week we turn to gender — and, to repeat my … Continue reading
