Friday Excerpt: (W)hole
You know, I don’t think I’ve done an excerpt from my first novel, the book that started it all. As with many writers, this is not actually the first novel I wrote, but it is the first I published. This book sets the tone in a lot of ways for the direction my career is going. I felt that before I could start writing confidently about the “wounded” heroes that I love so much, I needed to express where that love came from. This book is very close to my heart, since it is the one most closely based on my life (other than the non-fiction True Tales about my real life dates). What I like to say is that nothing in (W)hole actually happened, but the emotions are all completely true. The thoughts and feelings that Elizabeth experiences are...
Read MoreUnfortunate Shout Outs
It seems like every movie or book that has a love story with a disabled character has an obligatory sentence about those freaks who are attracted to disabled people. It really annoys me. It’s always a love story where the people “really” love each other, as though that’s different from how a devotee and a person with a disability could feel about each other. The guy (in my case) will complain that he can’t get a normal date. Of course there are these weird people out there who will date guys in wheelchairs because they like it, but who would want that? Thank goodness the heroine is a nice normal non-dev woman. You know what? A lot of devs are reading and watching these stories. And it is painful when we’re going along, enjoying...
Read MoreAllies
Disability civil rights is a subject that I am very passionate about. I got started in it as a way to put my devness to good use, as it were. I didn’t want to use it for my own pleasure, but to take my great interest and put it towards helping people. I’ve sometimes encountered a bit of a problem with that, though. My help in this situation is not always wanted. There’s a long history of non-disabled people deciding what’s best for people who have disabilities. We swoop in all cocky and sure of ourselves to help save the poor crippled people. There’s a strong backlash against this. I think this person on Tumblr put it the best… Able bodied people…did I ask for your opinion? The Sequel I must now interrupt your...
Read MoreFetish Map
I ran across this on another blog and found it really fascinating. I wonder if everyone is represented on here? Someone must have put a lot of work into this. There’s so many different sort of kinks out there. It makes me wonder if no one really gets to adulthood without at least one odd sexual connection. I haven’t spoken about this here before, but devness is not the only “kink” that I have. Devoteeism to me is not really a fetish. Or at least my relationship to it is not a fetish one. Just the fact that I date disabled men in real life and that I value them as human beings beyond just how their bodies turn me on makes it not a classic fetish. I do have a real fetish, though. It’s related but also distinctly different and it sits...
Read MoreDevotee and Non-Disabled Partner
There are many devotees in relationships with partners who are not disabled (and farther down I’ll be talking about the different ways this happens). Does that make them no longer devotees? Not at all. This can be a tricky concept, because I know I had trouble with it when applied to a situation with some parallels to this one: bisexuality. I have a friend who is bisexual and she is now married to a man. It was difficult at first for me to understand that her picking a man didn’t mean that she had chosen to be straight and that her bi-ness was now gone or even effectively gone. She is bisexual and she always will be. Â I only started to understand that when I looked at my own situation. I’ve dated both disabled and non-disabled men. A fairly even...
Read MoreThe Nature of Pornography
I can’t even imagine what sort of traffic I’m going to get with this title! This is the biggest issue, though, in the uncomfortable relationship between people who have disabilities and people who have devoteeism. I have yet to ever hear of any case of a devotee harming a person with a disability in real life.  As far as I know, there have been no reports of rapes or kidnappings or anything dangerous (and I think if something like that happened it would be HUGE news that we would all hear about, even so: one or two cases is the same rate as in general population, so could not be blamed on devness).  The big complaint against devs is that we are using images for masturbation that were not intended to have a pornographic nature. I went looking for the...
Read MoreBook Montage
RFW winner October 7, 2011
