Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!

At the Creative Independent, author and illustrator Michelle Rial discusses creating while living with chronic pain.

Bi Visibility: A Bisexual Anthology is a new Kickstarter project from comics writer Kat Calamia and you can support it here.

Here’s how to ground yourself when shit gets chaotic.

“How should a Millennial Marxist novel be?”

What if we re-embrace our privacy?, asks Roslyn Fuller at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“Woolf believed that characters were a novelist’s greatest tool, a way to bridge life and fiction. In “Mrs. Dalloway,” she put her theory to the test,” writes Merve Emre at the New Yorker.

Sometimes you don’t sell your novel probably.

And sometimes if you do your parents don’t read it.

I liked this from Wayne Koestenbaum, republished at Lit Hub, and maybe you will, too:

“Fiction writers often say that they listen to what the characters tell them. Not entirely a fiction writer, I listen to what language tells me; I instigate the process, but once the language commences its relentless hum, punctuated by doldrum and silence and distraction and Instagram and anxiety, then I occupy the position of the cook who has been given the lamb and the milk and the lettuce but didn’t create them. Even if I planted the romaine and watered it and harvested it, I am not its originator. I don’t mint, or coin, or engender the words, though I twist and pervert them. Language—its codes and leanings—surrounds me, and I try to make myself as inconspicuous as possible so that language can have its way with me; though I seem, in my I-centered prose and poetry, to be naked, I am in fact half-hidden, behind the shrubbery of this prepositional phrase, which wields its barricade of leaf and bud according to natural laws. I can’t make myself known to you without this rule-governed armature, whose wendings and reprisals must take precedence over my ideas, even if language’s caparisoned marauders need the mulch of my ideation in order to have a ground to trample.”

Read some short stories. Read these queer romantic comedies. Read these 10 new books written and translated by women. Read these books in September. Read these books by Malaysian women writers. Read these eight memoirs of women hiking in the wilderness. Read these books about working at a newspaper. Read these books this fall.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!