Denne Michele! More books! More baseball! The correct 25% off code this time!

It’s the last day before the MLB playoffs, there are like six important baseball games happening right now, and I cannot possibly write a newsletter under these conditions. But I will bravely attempt.

(Speaking of baseball, only three days left to claim your FREE MONTH of Batting Around's Patreon!)

Thank you to everyone who suggested tour locations / venues / etc! Reading all your ideas made me realize that I cannot possibly visit any cities where I don’t have friends and places to crash because my budget is zero dollars... but I now have a robust list of places that I deeply want to tour if I ever have an actual budget!!!! (Gender Ordeal 2: Gender Repeal tour after one of us becomes very successful???) Thank you all for your help—I will hopefully have tour dates to announce in the new few weeks.

In other book news, I have successfully loaded 1440 copies of Sex Change and the City into my apartment hallway, thanks to the generous help of Gender Reveal alum Soraya & Sarah as well as SCATC contributors (and future Gender Reveal guests??) Kit & Chae. To celebrate, you can get 25% off your order when you buy 2 SCATC copies with code “TWOSHOES” — that’s like $10 off! A good deal! (LAST WEEK I SAID IT WAS 2SHOES but it was actually TWOSHOES sorry!!!!!) Code will work through 10/1.

This week on Gender Conceal, I spoke with Gender Reveal/Conceal alumna Denne Michele Norris, who you may also know from Food 4 Thot (RIP) and Electric Lit. Denne Michele recently published her debut novel, When the Harvest Comes, after working on it for nearly fifteen years(!!!!!!). She also edited the essay collection Both/And, which features writing from Edgar Gomez, Raquel Willis, Kai Cheng Thom, Caro De Robertis, Meredith Talusan, and many other trans writers of color.

In this episode, we talk about whether time is linear and how that relates to deadnaming fictional characters (lol). Also, Denne Michele theorizes on what the next few years will look like for trans authors (not ideal!) and explains why she thinks most people would not survive the book publishing process (dramatique!).

Okay baseball is finally over so let’s do Links & Stuff. These are sort of all over the place and I don’t even know how to sort them so get ready for tonal swings I guess!

• Speaking of baseball, Kelsey spoke my truth; also, even if you’re not a baseball fan, maybe you can still enjoy these sick slides??

• And speaking of Kelsey, I’m so happy that Defector Bake Off is back.

• This American Life is somehow still kicking and I really appreciated this episode and its exclusive interviews with immigration judges!! Good and important listen imho!!!

• If you enjoyed my in-the-weeds publishing convo with Denne Michele, you might enjoy this extremely in-the-weeds article about book publishing? (Found it very telling that mostly only queer and lefty folks were willing to go on the record about their pub deals and experiences)

• I asked for examples of unhinged Threads posts a while back because I refuse to ever use the app Threads but I wanted to know what was going on… this article delivers!

• Not to get so messy but I was doing research for a mostly-unrelated interview and ran into this year-old blog post about the Dykette woman stealing the book’s controversial (among boring Goodreads users) kink scene directly from the life of a trans performer and writer named Sloane, which is somehow not surprising but also so wild! (If you’ve never heard of Dykette NO WORRIES stay blessed.)

• If you like Matt Rogers & Bowen Yang (and can tolerate drunkenness), it’s actually very sweet watching Seth Meyers get gayer for them as he gets drunker with them.

• Red Bull and Prada paid to turn a 22-story building into a skateboard ramp so that 50-year-old skateboarding legend Sandro Dias could make history and holy shit holy shit (also genuinely a great use of brands’ money).

That’s it for this week. Here is your Weekly Rhubarb (feat. Puffin) (also feat. books).

Photo: Looking down a carpeted hallway with Puffin lying in the foreground and Ruby lying far in the background. Back in Ruby's corner there are 40 boxes of books.

Xo,

Yr resident gender detective