“I’ve come to realize a few things over the last few days,” John said. “The first is that no one would choose to subject themselves to the kind of rejection that Kyle has faced over his life. No one would choose to be sent away by their parents, disowned by their church, and cursed by God. Some of you may think that a homosexual’s desire for aberrant sex is so strong that they do in fact choose that because they cannot resist their temptations. I would submit to you that no one that lost to sin would walk into this church building seeking our love and tolerance- so there is something amiss with our basic assumptions about homosexuals.”

Excerpt from Honest Conversation

Remember- you can buy it through Cafe Press, or reserve a personalized copy by emailing me at linkees@gmail.com.

40 days ago I embarked on a strange journey.  Given the content of the story, I find it ironic that my artificial deadline of 35 days ended up turning into a forty day journey… but that’s a story for another time.

Today I want to talk about my novel- my brave little book that is finally written.  It has all of the things that a novel should have- a start, a middle, an end.  It has them in the right order, as well as being possessed of a single cohesive storyline and a subplot that involves kissing.

I’ve discovered something.  Fiction is dangerous- it’s dangerous because you don’t always notice that you are being taught a lesson when you’re reading a story.  When someone is simply schooling you, you notice immediately.  And if they tell you something you don’t want to hear, you get defensive.  But when reading a story it feels safer to allow yourself to be questioned.  So while I was working on this book and realizing how many things I was saying that some Christians might find offensive, or flat out wrong, I decided I would change things up a little.  I’d say all of the words that I wanted to say, but I’d cleverly hide them in a story that forced them to look at the humanity about which the words are intended.

So instead of me, as the author, saying that I find it hard to believe that God would reject the service of a gay man who honestly believed that God had created him to love other men, those words are spoken by a character.  And throughout the story there are moments of revelation, tenderness and tolerance.  All of it to forward a single message:

The big question isn’t one of sin, it’s one of mission.  It’s one of God’s love.

So pop this subversive little story of gay acceptance and hetero romance on your coffee shop trade table, slide a few editions into your local church’s resources library…  You never know.

A good book can save a life.

Available on CafePress

::For people who want a personalized copy, contact me at linkees@gmail.com- the price for a single book will be $16, including shipping.  Bulk discounts and discounts for books that are to be donated can also be negotiated through me::

Let me introduce myself a little:  my name is Lindsey Kay and I’m a Christian.  But I’m not the holier-than-thou “I know the best for everyone”, “please sit still and let me tell you how to live your life” kind of Christian.  I’m the kind who thinks that God is Love, that hypocrisy is one of the worst possible sins, and that the attitude Christianity takes towards the world at large and gay people specifically is so un-Christ-like that’s it’s a real embarrassment.

I’m writing a book.

It won’t be a big book and I doubt it will ever be a popular book, but it will be a short and very heartfelt book begging Christians to change the way they treat gay people and to try to explain to them that the judgmental and stony-hearted attitude some Christians take just drives people away from God and leaves us all with blood on our hands.

And I would like to give you the opportunity to share your story.  Have you ever seen hypocrisy harden someone’s heart against God and other people?  Have you ever seen someone’s soul wounded by the church?  Please tell me about it, and help me to open the church’s eyes to the reality of it’s actions.

Thank you.  My email is shush.lindsey@gmail.com

(Please send all stories in before October 12th)

Come to me, my death, my love.  Come in the night when the cool wind parts the draperies.  Come in the darkness as the dew settles coldly and turns to frost.  Come when the edges of the leaves crinkle from dryness, when green turns to yellow and the garden lies fallow with last fruit- last fruit that will never ripen.

Everything dies some day.

Come to me, my love, my passing.  Come to me and whisper words of harshest reprimand in tones that melt my heart.  Climb under the covers with skin that smells like burnt sugar and breath that smells of peppermint soap.  Come and hold me gently, like a brother would, brush the sweaty hair back from my forehead and place cool rags over my skin.  Sing the songs my grandmother sings, the songs that all are dark metaphors for children, songs to prepare us for that inevitable knowledge.

We are all capable of dying.

Climb in through the window with the broken screen.  Tiptoe past the monuments of broken toys and hectic evenings.  (Please ignore the dishes in the sink.)  Come into my room where the broken branches of lavender decorate the bureau.  Come and comfort me in the darkness, in the long nights broken by crying, in the inevitable tears of three o’clock and four and five- whisper to me.

Whisper to me that all is fleeting, all will pass, every day is a small marker in the passage of eternity.  Whisper to me of the time of leaving, of the days of winter where the ground grows cold and cracks and everything dies- everything dies, everything turns, everything is born anew.  Even I will be, some day, you whisper.  Ever you follow me in my thoughts, you haunt my minutae, you mock my pain.  And ever you comfort me when the wind grows cold, when the winter encroaches and I feel my soul withering.

Come to me, my love, my death.  Come and lay beside me, he who ends me.  Let me feel the cool softness of your hand in mine.  Let me feel the weight of your solidness.  Convince me you are real.  Send me dreams that walk and talk and teach me, send me songs that break me.  Remind me of my humanity, remind me of my frailty, humble me.

Come to me, my love my death.  In the softness of the night breeze, say my name.

Remind me I am born again.

Anyone reading this who has written fiction for pleasure knows what I’m talking about. Even Stephen King was fairly sure that his success was just a fluke.

Yet… I love words, I love shaping them, I love stories about humanity, I love success and failure and literature even when it’s total tripe. And I love my brave little novel.

Here’s the new first few paragraphs:

Let me tell you a story about a girl. This girl struggled every day to think of herself as more than just a mess of flesh and emotions taking up space and time. This girl slid out of happiness and into chaos almost overnight. This girl’s life changed in just a few short hours.

One night she was laying on her back lawn imagining her life taking it’s carefully planned course through college and into a career. She pictured a handsome husband and two fat babies and an energetic dog. Not too big of a dog. Maybe a Scottish Terrier or a small Collie. And then our girl heard a noise on the periphery and turned to see a dark figure holding a knife.

At this point the details cease to matter. What matters is pain and fear and the things that pain and fear can do to a young girl. What matters is the focus of her existence shifting away from the American dream and towards survival and survival alone. What matters is the shame, the embarrassment, the feeling of having surrendered control, fear of judgment, fear of consequence, fear of death and fear of having to continue to live the rest of her life carrying the knowledge of torment always in the back of her mind.

Let me tell you about what happens when a girl is left standing at the bottom of a dry well, knowing that there is nothing there to give her comfort or nourish her. So the girl looks up at the sky, so far away, and wonders. Millions of years ago primitive man looked up in the sky and he asked the same question. Throughout the ages that question has fueled art and industry and science, it has made men feel less and more alone, it has inspired awe and despair. And for one girl with blood under her fingernails, it gave her something to live for just a little while longer.

Just long enough.

Of course it’s not meant to give you much information. It’s only supposed to tell you just enough so that when you get to the next scene you don’t put the book down and never pick it back up. It’s supposed to get the saliva flowing just a little. It’s supposed to make you care about the main character enough that you forgive her selfishness and the fact that the book literally starts out with a scene of self-mutilation. (Which I’ve been told is hard to understand if you don’t understand the back story, which goes back fairly far, far enough that I’ve never really known where the tale should begin. I just can’t begin it before the rape, because I can’t make myself write about the rape itself in any detail.)

I thought I’d share that tiny bit with you so that you can get a glimpse into my “serious” writing endeavors. That and if it’s total crap, someone can tell me.

Perhaps you will find them.

* * *

I joined the Intergalactic fleet shortly after I finished secondary school, partially because I wanted to make something more out of my life, partly out of a sense of patriotism but mostly because flying out between the stars may finally give me a sense of belonging somewhere other than in my home.

I hadn’t known what to expect, but who ever does?

My job, as I was not physically prepared to be a fighter pilot and not emotionally equipped to be a soldier ended up being as a medic.  It was a fine job as it was peacetime and the most extreme injury I saw was when a galley boy dropped a pot of potatoes on his foot.  The stress of my job came not from the people I treated, but from my immediate supervisor.

Jennalee Soren was a pretty woman in the third decade of her life, she had deep brown skin and fine hair that was always pulled back into a utilitarian bun.  Unlike many of the women of the fleet she took no time for beauty, instead she wore a uniform that was cut more like a man’s and her face was always bare.  She had a severe kind of prettiness, the kind that you saw not because it was apparent but because everyt ime you looked at her you thought of who she might be if only she were more feminine.

Her lack of femininity extended to her profession.  The Code Enforcers were almost ninety percent male, as it was their job to write up deviations from the code with absolutely no sympathy.  If I handed out more painkillers than were standard I was handed a slip.  If I spent more time with a patient than was alloted I was handed a slip.  If I gave more than a single free sample I was handed a slip.  Any slight deviation was noted, and if my deviations reached a point that Jennalee felt was excessive, I was immediately docked pay.  Often I would rail on her about her lack of heart, about how the code could not account for the humanity of the people I was treating, about how if I were earthside her job would not even exist.  Jennalee would appraise me coolly and say “but you are not earthside, and the rules are here for a reason.  What if we were called to war and we ran out of supplies?  What if you have fifty patients to see in a day and you dallied because you felt badly for one?”

I would smirk and turn away.

Then one day as I was closing down my workspace for the day it happened.  A young girl came in, in tears, her face bruised and bleeding and her whole body trembling.  She wouldn’t tell me what happened, but I could tell from her injuries.  Rape was a serious offense planet side, but in the fleet it could be punishable by death.  The poor girl probably felt some sense of fear on behalf of her attacker, hence the silence.

I felt irritation with her lack of communication.  I wanted to slap her back to her senses, to yell at her that she had to be honest with me.  I found it hard to care for her properly. I eventually turned to Jennalee in consternation and bitterly asked her what the Code said I should do.

Jennalee looked at me with an unreadable expression.  She sat down on the table beside Isa, took her hand, and told her to cry.  Jennalee sang to Isa softly, like a mother, running fingers through her hair.  Jennalee spoke to her like a priestess would to an acolyte, reciting an old Soren proverb that one must cry away their grief to leave room for hope.

I saw then in Jennalee’s face, her hands, even the way her toes seemed to curl in suffering, that she felt for Isa, this girl she knew by name alone.  I saw in her eyes a sense of profound hurt that seemed foreign to me.

It was Jennalee who calmly coaxed out of Isa the details, it was Jennalee who laid her down to sleep.  And as Jennalee sat down to write up a report of the events she looked at me with that suffering still in her eyes.  “Every day you ask me how I can treat you with such a distinct lack of compassion.  You claim the law is without feeling.”

I said nothing, there was nothing I could say.

“The law is compassion for Isa,” Jennalee said.

And for once I understood.

Long ago in a place far away there was a young prince with a hard heart.  His pride was like poison and he became ruthless.  He cruelly punished villagers who poached deer from his expansive forest.  He brought the law down without mercy on the heads of the weak and powerless.  One day he was visited in the night by an old and bent woman with hair in tangles and torn robes.

“My prince, my prince,” the hag said, “I beg you a night to sleep in the kitchens by the fire, for it is cold and I am weak and far from home.”

“I wouldn’t let you sleep with the pigs,” the prince retorted, “who are you to beg anything of me?  Leave this place!”

The woman looked on the prince with sorrow and said, “would that you had shown me the kindness a boy would show a dog,” with tears continuing, “for a curse you have brought down on yourself with your hard heart.  The winds will change and this land will fall fallow, you will be left with nothing but your walls and possessions, without a single person to be your companion through the long winter.”

Time passed and the lands fell fallow.  One by one the prince was forced to release his servants as there was no longer food to keep them.  Quietly in the night the serfs who worked the fields crept away, until nothing was left of his kingdom but the castle and surrounding forest.  The road through his kingdom fell into disrepair, into the hands of thieves and slave traders.

The winter was, indeed, long.  It was cold in the castle without servants to tend the fire.  The Prince grew thin and weak without anyone to cook for him.  His appearance changed from the softness of youth into something far more haggard and grim.

Then, one night, he heard a voice call out.  It was a woman’s voice, high and desperate.  It was curiousity and boredom that first motivated him to don his riding garb and to go out in search of the voice.  Curiousity and boredom, that was, until he saw her.  Brown hair fell over pale cheeks and hands red and broken from the cold held her frail form upright against a tree.  Tears were pouring down her face and she was trembling.  “Is there anyone?”  She called, again and again, “anyone to hear me?  Anyone to keep me from dying alone?”

The Prince’s hard heart felt the first fingers of spring grasping for purchase.  He rushed to her side and held her up.  “Who are you,” she whispered.  “Are you real?”

The Prince made no reply.  He simply carried her into the castle and put her in his bed.  He scrounged through the pantries to find bread to feed her, he killed the last of his chickens to make broth for her to drink.  He went out into the forest and felled dead trees to cut wood to keep the fires burning.  All that he would not do to ease his own discomfort he did for the sake of the strange girl.  And over the weeks as the snow outside began to thaw, the girl’s condition improved.  By the time the flowers were peeking out from under the last fall’s leaves, she was walking again.  And in time she started to talk, and told the Prince the story of her father’s death and her own loss of home and security, how she had fled an abusive suitor to fall into the hands of slave runners, and how at last she had escaped their clutches just to lose herself in the forest.

“And now I am here.” She said, “but why are you?”

“Why am I here?” The Prince replied.

“Yes,” the girl said.

And so the Prince told her the story of his lost kingdom and the curse that had left him alone through the long winter.  “If only I could have learned of compassion, if only I could have governed like my father, in fairness and love for my people.  But I brought my curse down on my head, and now I live alone.”

“Is that what you wish for?”  The girl asked.

“My father was a good man,” the prince replied.  “He was loved by all, and he returned their love.  He gave to those who were weak, he studied the words of the elders.  There is a story of a time that he came to the defense of a man who was to be hanged for poaching in the forest.  He said, ‘I kill the deer here every month, shall I be hanged as well?’ and he killed a deer for the man’s family to eat.”

“And you are not like him?”

“He died when I was very young,” the Prince replied, “I forgot who he was until I was left alone.”

“But you took me in,” the girl said, “you fed me from your table, you gave me your bed, you built a fire to keep me warm.”

“There was no one else to save you,” the Prince said.

“All that you wish for you already are,” the girl replied, “you just haven’t realized it yet.”

* * *

And somewhere in that story was what I really wanted to say about reconciling our potential for change with the truth of who we are.

Somewhere.

I hope.

Mermaids.

Novella idea: Reverse of the common theme- a man falls madly in love with a mermaid and trades his legs in for fins.

Odd thought: How would mermaids reproduce? Would it be like seahorses? Or would they lay eggs like fish? Or would they be more like underwater mammals? In other words- just how human ARE they?

* * *

The first time he saw her was in the late evening. He was walking along the lava beds taking photographs when a flash in the sun caught his eye. There she was, head and shoulders out of the water, one pale hand brushing black-as-tar hair away from reddened cheeks. When she saw him she looked startled and immediately dropped out of sight.

This is a game, he thought, she’ll resurface in a little while, laughing, closer to me.

But she didn’t. He counted silently in his head, wondering how long she could hold her breath, and panic started to set in. Perhaps she’d been caught in the undertow. But how could he possibly swim out to her in time? More time was wasted counting his options.

Then she reappeared, farther out. Strangely large eyes peered at him, unblinking. Pink mouth pursed, pensive. Pale hand lifted out of the water and slowly every finger unclasped and clasped in turn. A slow wave.

Isaiah lifted his own hand and returned the gesture. He could see the confusion and fear in her eyes and it troubled him. “Hello?” He called out.

She winced, visibly, but returned his call with a timid “Aloha.” Her voice was far more musical than any other he had heard, deeper in tone and resonance. She blushed furiously and then was gone. This time she did not resurface, and oddly enough this time he did not panic. He saw a ship a little farther out, and some part of him assumed that was where she was going.

Another, deeper, part of him had registered the feathery gills on the side of her neck as she’d pulled back her hair, and the fact that her unblinking eyes had in fact blinked, with a third eyelid like a cat’s. This part of him accepted the fact that she simply disappeared with no haven in sight simply because it was used to accepting all of the irrational things that the rest of him didn’t want to deal with. This inner part of him was harmoniously tuned in to the inexplicable world living just beneath the skin of the one the Western world so empirically stated as the whole of existence. This inner Isaiah was about to permanently become the outer one, but he didn’t know it yet.

*And so ends the odd love story of Isaiah and Anala, as far as I’ve written. Part of me really likes it. A bigger part of me doesn’t want to engage in the necessary research to make Anala’s world more believable than Disney’s Ariel. Time will tell which part of me wins.

Allow me to explain myself. Right now, anyone can get married as long as they are heterosexual, not cousins, and not married to someone else. That means that it’s not just Christians who understand the “sacredness” of what they are engaging in who are getting married. Not all people get married in God’s house, either. I myself was married in a courthouse, by a judge, about ten minutes after receiving the marriage certificate. The service, the attire and the atmosphere were all far less than sacred and holy, right down to the stuffed crab in my back pocket and the fact I had a horrible case of the giggles and could barely say my vows. What makes my marriage holy is not the laws or the way in which it was made- it is the two people in it, their heart and their attitude. My marriage is not made less holy by the high divorce rate or the people who enter into it for the wrong reasons. The only marriage that effects the holiness of my marriage is MY marriage.

Gay marriage is not about whether or not heterosexual marriage is holy- it is about protection. It is about the protections afforded by a piece of paper that says “these two people are legally united.” It is about the way in which a couple is percieved who can provide that paper when legality is necessary. It is about little rules like hospital visiting hours in which two people with their names on that paper are afforded different rights than those who do not have it. It is about tax breaks, ownership, joint checking accounts, discounts and retirement communities. It’s about equality. It’s about the fact that any time two people decide to share a life, they are terrified. They don’t know what the future holds. They never can fully understand what signing their names beside each other really means. It’s about that sense trust and devotion that comes with the decision to share all things, including toothbrush holders and a carton of milk. It’s about the fact that I am not more privileged, more protected, in making this journey than anyone else should be.

If I have a piece of paper that says that I can sleep at my husbands side every night, even if he’s in the hospital and breathing his last, everyone else who wants that piece of paper should be able to get it. That doesn’t mean that pastors and priests will now be FORCED to wed gays, any more than they now are forced to wed every snot-nosed heterosexual kid who says he’s ready. Every individual always has and hopefully always will have the right to use their own judgment and say no. But just as I had the right to have my own marriage papers undersigned by my county judge, gay people should at the very least be afforded the right to that paper. That’s all I have to say for now.

In Religion:  Prayer can be like sex in a marriage.  First you can’t possibly get enough and you do it four times a day and never really think about the quality.  Then you start to want to have it better, even if it’s less.  Then, one day, you notice it’s been months and you wonder, “how is this possible?” and the next time you try it, you feel like you’ve forgotten what it’s all about.  Pray-a-Thons on TV are like Christian pornography, which explains why so many non-Christians find it offensive.  They are seeing something that was meant to be done behind closed doors.

In Family:  I’ve noticed that almost all five year olds seem to go through a stage where they have short term memory loss every time they do something wrong, which is why my children will be going straight from age four to age six.

In Health:  I find it amusing that there are so many sex articles coming out post Valentine’s Day.  Or is it pre-Spring?  In any case, this time of year seems to make sex leak in to everything.  Unlike bacon, sex does NOT make everything better.  It must be used appropriately and in reasonable amounts, or like bacon you will regret having so much later.  There’s the thought for the day:  Sex is like bacon, sex is not like bacon.  Also:  Sex and bacon should only be combined in carefully controlled environments.

In Literature:  Stephen King’s Duma Key is definitely worth reading, but make sure you’ve got 30 hours of free time and enough food in the house.  You won’t want to have to do ANYTHING but finish the book once you’re four chapters in.  (Trust me on this- I stayed up until one reading it, despite the fact that I’d only gotten four hours of sleep the night before and my son was teething and I KNEW I’d be exhausted.  Every time I turned off the lights I thought about the moon over the water and I freaked out and turned the lights back on so I could finish reading it and know that everything ended well, and then when the book ended I felt sick to my stomach and wanted to cry, but I LOVED it.  Stephen King is an evil genius.)

In Movies:  I’m really looking forward to the Spiderwick Chronicles, even though I’m already bracing myself for a letdown.  It seems like I’m always bracing myself for a letdown these days.  PRODUCERS:  MAKE BETTER  MOVIES.  For the love of me, PLEASE!  I have two small kids- if I bother to put on something not covered in ambiguously colored stains to go to the theater, I don’t want to be thinking, “and I could be napping in my car right now” the entire time.  (ambiguous stain = is it poo or chocolate or blood?  Do you WANT to know?)

In food:  Pepsi and mint Milanos are SO close to being the perfect breakfast. All I want is a sausage link and a bowl of cherries.  Mmm…  Then I would have the four food groups:  caffeine, chocolate, pork and fruit!