Nico & Tucker Launch Day!

I really wanted to post a video of me reading chapters 1 & 2 for launch day, but I woke up with some kind of funky virus. I am just not going to look as happy on video as I’d like. So bear with me and I’ll update later this week with the live reading.

In the mean time, have you read the awesome interview on Huffington Post? If you have, I’d love to know your thoughts about other ways to describe/communicate nonbinary genders, especially to people who are well inside the binary.

Also my editor and Lesbian Literary All-Star Katherine V. Forrest said wonderful things on Facebook (reprinted here with her permission) about how people need more literature from the second half of the LGBTQIA+ acronym. I do have some copies available to donate to libraries and queer & trans centers, so please comment to me here, on FB or Twitter if you know of a place that could use some Nico & Tucker.

Katherine wrote:

Many of you know I’ve worked as an editor as well as a writer for the past three decades. I’ve edited many of our finest writers, including a couple of our great ones—Jane Rule, Isabel Miller. I’ve not posted on Facebook about the authors I edit because of the sheer time involved and a minefield of conflict of interest issues. But this time I have to. I have to talk about one of the most important authors I’ve ever edited: Rachel Gold.

All of us in the LGBTQI family acutely remember how it felt to discover we were Other. Feeling isolated and lost in that Otherness. Rachel Gold’s books are directed at those who find themselves in the last four letters in our LGBTQI community, and crucially those most at risk of suicidal despair over their Otherness. Her books are set in that seething cauldron we all remember so painfully well: school. They authentically portray that milieu as experienced by our kids of today and they brilliantly convey all the issues surrounding the controversies of gender today.

There was a reference on Facebook recently to Rachel Gold’s Being Emily as “an instant classic.” It is. This potent novel is the journey of young Christopher claiming the true self of Emily. Just Girls follows some of the characters from that novel into high school. Nico & Tucker, published today, continues with these characters into the world of true gender complexity in a unique and powerful portrayal of intersex and personal identity.

Perhaps some of you reading this will have minimal interest in reading these books. I ask simply that you spread the word of their existence. The Rachel Gold books sit prominently in the office of my psychotherapist spouse, and she has told every therapist she knows about them. Tell everyone you know involved in the world of young adults— trans people and trans groups, your LGBT center, your local PFFLAG chapter, librarians—about Being Emily, Just Girls and Nico & Tucker. Let all our kids of today know that they can find what so many of us did not have in our early lives: reflections of ourselves in print. Books to end their isolation by showing them they are not alone. Do whatever you can to get them into the hands of our LGBTQI children.

I’m very proud of Bella Books for publishing Rachel Gold, and very proud to be the editor of her life-changing, life-saving books.

First off, that is super humbling. And makes me see how much I want to keep writing books with trans, queer, nb, and more characters.

And also, I appreciate how deftly she describes the plot of Being Emily in one sentence with a beautiful lack of “he/him” pronouns. In Katherine’s Kate Delafield mystery series, later books introduce Kate’s trans nephew Dylan. I enjoyed all the books and I loved his addition to Kate’s life. He first appears in Hancock Park if you haven’t met him already.

I’ll be online a lot this launch week, so feel free to ask me questions anywhere you see me and I’ll answer some of them here on my site as this book makes its way out into the world.