Back before Gadget died, before Barnum was born, before I started blogging, before Lyme disease ravaged my life, I was a writer. And now I am becoming one again, thanks in part to you reading this blog and encouraging me. Thank you!
Back in the Day
Disability Literature and Culture
Yes, Virginia, there was writing before blogs. I used to manage and edit Breath & Shadow, a literary journal of disability culture, and I wrote occasional essays and articles (some humor, some disability studies), short stories (usually erotica, though not always), and poems for a variety of paper and online magazines, newsletters, papers, journals, and anthologies. From 1992 through 2006, I slowly built up a writing career. It was a challenge because I was disabled by chronic illness very soon after I graduated from college, so there were many years where getting published at all was a big deal each time it happened.
In January of 2007, I moved house, which I spent months trying to recover from. That summer, I got Lyme disease, which picked up my world and shook it like a snow globe. A lot of the time, my world still whirls around me in chaos. From 2007 through 2010, I did almost no writing. I handed over the reigns of Breath & Shadow to another editor, to whom I’m very grateful. During my most extreme years of illness, I did manage to write a couple of essays — a grueling undertaking — and a very small number of short erotica pieces. I also conducted periodic interviews of activists with multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) for Our Toxic Times,* the newsletter for the Chemical Injury Information Network. If you have MCS or want to keep abreast of issues relating to environment and health, I highly recommend joining. The newsletter is excellent, and you will be supporting a 501(c)3 nonprofit that puts every penny to good use.
MCS: Roller coaster or merry-go-round?
Aside from the interviews, most of the stuff that got published in that time period were pieces that had been written earlier. Some were reprints; others were pieces that were waiting for the right home. And, after Gadget died, in December 2009, I started this blog. Blogging, I discovered, did not require the extremes of care, editing, proofing, and other work I usually put into writing. It offered me some slack that enabled me to continue writing.
“Professional” — or something**
Slowly, in the past two years, I have begun to write professionally again. I’m still hampered by severe swings in my cognitive and physical functioning and by needing to spend so much energy on training Barnum, but I’m managing to pick up a slow, stuttering sort of momentum. I know many of you read this blog because you’re interested in the topic of service dogs, dog training, recovering from loss, and other topics I cover. Others of you have told me you subscribe because you like my writing. I’m preparing for a big writing undertaking (a book, actually), and it would be very helpful to have more readers “follow me” to some of my other writing sites when my book project devours my soul takes over my life becomes the focus of my passion.
I wanted to tell you where else you can read my writing and ask you to subscribe/follow me on those sites, because I don’t generally post here about my writing elsewhere. I have some big projects I’m working toward — I hope to unveil the details about The Book in upcoming months — but meanwhile I need to keep stretching and exercising my writing muscles that are a bit stiff and atrophied from disuse. I would love it if you’d join me in some of my new writing ventures!
Dykes, Dogs, Disability, and . . . Maine?
Here’s where you can find some of my work:
– My writing blog, Bed, Body & Beyond, focuses on life as a writer with disabilities. Although historically I haven’t posted there as often as here, I have been posting there more frequently lately. I also put a lot of care into the posts that appear there. Sometimes a great deal of research and thought goes into a single post, such as this one about the language of disability.
The longest alt tag ever?
Lately I’ve focused more on being an erotica writer, but so far I haven’t actually published anything x-rated on my blog. However, there have been requests for excerpts, so I might start posting some teasers, perhaps focusing on stories with a disabled protagonist (hint for upcoming book project!). Rest assured, if I do post something explicit, I’ll put NSFW (“not safe for work”) in the subject line so people can make an informed decision about whether to read it. Most of the time, so far, material on that site is not remotely explicit.
Recent posts include interviews with editors of books in which my work has appeared in 2012, a discussion on the language associated with disability, some reviews of my work, and pages with blurbs and links to online and book publications. As my work gets published elsewhere (I have essays, fiction, and possibly poetry coming down the pipeline) I’ll post interviews, excerpts, and links. I’d love if you subscribe/follow my writing blog! (Note: This is a Blogger blog, which means that subscribing by RSS is easy for anyone, but subscribing by email requires doing a Captcha [“word verification”]. If Captcha is a barrier for you, please contact me and I will subscribe you. I apologize for the inconvenience.)
I’m ba-ack…
– Ability Maine — the website of disability news, views, information, and literature, especially (but not exclusively) with a Maine focus. One example is an interview I did with Arnold Mann, the investigative reporter for Time and USA Weekend who published a fantastic book on corporate and government complicity and coverups of chemical injury.
I’ve also started a blog for Ability Maine — Ability Maine Blog. At the blog I post blurbs and links about new content at the main Ability Maine page as well as its literary journal, Breath & Shadow. I also have started posting short, time-sensitive posts relating to disability news, events, culture or other pieces of interest to the disability community in Maine or around the world. Subscribing to the Ability Maine blog is a great way to read my new writing and found out about information of interest to the disability community. Those are actually *short* blog posts, which is a rarity with me, you know. (Note: This is also a Blogger blog, which means that subscribing by email requires doing a Captcha [“word verification”]. If Captcha is a barrier for you, please contact me and I will subscribe you. I apologize for the inconvenience.)
IAADP logo
– Partner’s Forum, the newsletter of the International Association of Assistance Dog Partners (IAADP). I have written occasional articles for PF for many years, usually training tips or equipment ideas. Now I am also helping the editor, Joan Froling, with locating, editing, and writing work on what will hopefully be an ongoing basis! You need to be a member of IAADP — a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization — to get the most recent issues of PF. Anyone is welcome to join. It’s a great way to support and learn about what’s happening in the assistance dog world. Partner members (those partnered with a working assistance dog) also receive additional benefits with membership.
– Amazon.com Listmania — I now have two listmania lists at Amazon of most of my work that’s appeared in books. (Work from magazines and such is more difficult to make available.) One list of books are nonfiction pieces (essays or humor) and the other is lesbian erotic fiction.
– The Chronic Writer(??) — Way back in the day, I wrote a monthly humor column called Sick Humor for Ability Maine. It was an outgrowth of my comic strip by the same name. “A twisted look at life with disability.” When I was invited back to write for Ability Maine, I really wanted to start writing again about the life of a writer with chronic illness, although I wasn’t sure I wanted it to be purely humor/satire. I wanted to do interviews with other writers with disabilities or chronic illness, write about some of the complexities of writing with impaired cognition and limited energy, the politics, the unexpected gifts of writing. I planned to call it The Chronic Writer.
I haven’t yet written an official Chronic Writer piece, although I’ve written lots of partial pieces, and I’ve published pieces at Bed, Body & Beyond and at Ability Maine that could certainly fit under the “Chronic Writer” rubric. My current plan is to move both my blogs (After Gadget and Bed, Body & Beyond) to my sharonwachsler.com domain (which is very, very old and outdated, so I am not linking to it) and launch The Chronic Writer there. That website would be the home for all things Sharon-the-writer-Wachslery and would also allow me more freedom than using Blogger or WordPress freeware (especially as I’ve recently been made aware of an issue with WP Terms of Service). But, it’s been my plan for years to update my domain, so let’s call this a work-in-progress in progress, shall we?
So, that’s my big news. It’s a bit scary to make this announcement as if it’s some done deal, as if I can be relied upon to keep producing. Because if I had a dollar for every time I’ve said, “I’m doing better. I’m starting to write again,” and then discovered that I couldn’t even finish a piece of flash fiction or a blog post . . . I would have made a lot more money than I ever have on anything I’ve published! But that is, after all, the way of the Chronic Writer.
– Sharon, the muse of Gadget, and Barnum, SD
*I’m still doing OTT interviews when time and energy permit, so if you are chemically injured, and you are involved in any form of activism, very broadly interpreted, please drop me a line, and we’ll see if you’re a good fit for my series. My goal is to profile one activist from each US state (and then perhaps I’ll move on to US territories and other countries after that).
**My definition of professional writing: getting paid occasional paltry*** sums for huge amounts of work OR getting paid nothing to have your work appear in academic or literary venues. This definition is slightly different if your name is J. K. Rowling or Stephen King.
***I recently got a royalty check for $1.36. That was $1.36 more than I had expected to earn in royalties for the year for that piece!
After Gadget 