Interview with author Michelle Rose

It's something missing and I'm licking, I got something to say, oh yeah All of the witches and the demons better get out of my way, oh yeah I get back up when I fall, get the pain from the wall, when I win I'm alright, take the road and everybody Put me in a box, make me something I'm not, and keep it up till I'm gone, baby I get back up when I fall, get the pain from the wall, when I win I'm alright, take the road and everybody Put me in a box, make me something I'm not, and keep it up till I'm gone, baby I get back up when I fall, get the pain from the wall, when I win I'm alright, take the road and everybody Tonight we have on our desk Michelle Rose. Michelle, welcome to Transpositive. Thank you, nice to be here. Thank you, it's so great to see you. Michelle has a couple of works in progress and I just wanted to have Michelle on the show tonight to talk about her latest work and just kind of find out what's going on in Michelle's life. So, Michelle, why don't you start, first of all, can you just tell us a little about who you are and what do you do? Okay, well, I have six books published and the latest project that I've been involved with is converting one of my earlier books into a limited TV series, so I can see, you know, that there may be a little confusion there. Is it a play or is it a teleplay or what would you call it? Technically, yeah, I suppose you could say right now I'm experimenting with teleplays. Great, yeah, I could have called you a script writer too, although I guess technically you're not actually doing a script right now. No, technically not. Script writers usually work for a production of some kind and they're limited to, let's say, ten weeks of work at a fixed rate and then they put together the script for, say for example, a series or a standalone production like a movie or something like that. I have absolutely no interest in doing that and that was one of the things I first discovered about, I guess it's been about ten years ago now when I first started investigating the kinds of writing that Hollywood wants and it's a very specific kind of discipline. It's very limited in some ways and in other ways it's very freedom, very free and allows the writer to do a lot of different things. It's also fiendishly competitive, so if one is a writer and you're trying to break into the script writing industry in Hollywood, you better be young and have lots and lots of stamina and are willing to take no for an answer several times. My goal mostly is to get this series made and then after that perhaps I might have some other projects that I could option to a studio. The studio buys an option on it, say, the going rate right now is about $7,500 for the option for, let's say for example, any given movie. The option lasts for three years and you can resell it at the end of it if the movie isn't made, but if you have six or eight of those projects out there, that can be a pretty fair little income, so that's kind of my goal at this point is to not necessarily work for a studio or production, but to be as much of an independent writer as possible, which is admittedly really, really difficult. It's actually no easier than being a regular prose writer, which is what I've done for the last roughly 30 years. I've noticed that there's a lot of transgender people who are also writers. Can you say something about being transgender and being a writer that goes together? Could you comment on that? Oh, sure. As a matter of fact, actually, and I'm sure you've had your share of counseling before you decided to transition, but one of the things that counselors will recommend when you begin some sort of social transition or if you're contemplating it is they recommend that you journal everything, that you write down your thoughts, that you talk about where you are at that time in that space, what you're feeling, how you're feeling it. I've always believed, and I tell this to my students in the college classes that I teach, that journaling is one of the most fundamental aspects of writing. If you can't write about yourself, then how in the world can you possibly be expected to write about anyone else because you know yourself best, right? So the idea, I think, is that a lot of us, when we go through this change, we tend to see a lot of events as really significant, even though later they may not have the same significance. So we write them down. And the story of our lives is, I've heard this referred to by several of our academic leading lights, say, for example, Susan Stryker or Dr. Sandy Stone. They came up with the idea of layered texts, which is kind of like, say, for example, your life is a book. Let me hold up a book here. And every page in there can be an hour, a day, even a minute. And the idea is to be able to describe things in a linear sense, in a narrative sense. Because I think my personal opinion is that all the way down to our DNA, we're a species of storytellers. This is how we explain our histories to one another. This is how we explain our spiritual components to one another. This is how we describe things in our world so that they make sense to us. So for we folks here in the trans community, making sense of the world is really important, because our entire perspective shifts completely when we begin to undergo that transition. And it's important to kind of focus on those shifts, because if you don't remember where you've been, how can you find where you're supposed to go? How does writing help transition? I mean, you've touched on it a little bit. I mean, you've talked about journaling and how journaling is something that we do. You've talked about layered text. For people who are in the midst of transitioning, I mean, I kind of want to get into it a little bit. What is it about writing that helps someone who's transitioning? Is it being able to imagine ahead of time what it's going to be like transitioning? Is it reflecting on your past memories? Is it free-flowing associative thought? Is there something specific to transition that is really utilized through writing? I wouldn't say that, no. Every writer has idiosyncrasies, individual methods of approaching their own narrative. And this is good. This leads to diversity. This leads to a variety of different perspectives. So I don't think there's any one particular technique that is used. I think the more we experiment with the idea of constructing a narrative from our lives, the more likely it is that we'll start experimenting with those techniques. Say, for example, flashbacks. You know, here I am at this point in time. What was it like for me 10 years ago? And then we do a little flashback and we say, well, I was this way or I was that way or I felt this way or I dressed this way or these are the people I talk to. And now I dress this way or I eat these things or these are the people that talk to me and I talk to them. It comes down to a kind of a before and after sort of situation. And we're always concerned, I think, with noticing how the changes occur during that process. But as I said, you have to know the kind of person you were before and the kind of person that you will be or that you hope to be or that you are later on. And this applies to everybody. It isn't necessarily limited to the trans community, although it seems to benefit trans people far more than it does, let's say, your average cisgender heteronormative person. We see people with a lot of written diaries and stuff like that. You can go on Facebook or any kind of social media and you can see day-by-day descriptions of people's lives. Look at a blog and you'll see sometimes like an everyday posting or a weekly posting or something like that, which I do the same myself on Medium and on Quora and occasionally on Facebook. But the idea of writing is to mark progress through our travels through time and space. And everybody comes up with their own way of doing it, and that's good. So when you brought up social media, I really appreciate that because I wonder what we do as writers or what you do as a writer that's different from what someone does when they're doing social media vlogging, basically. I guess that's an old-fashioned word now, but back in the day, when I was coming out and when the Internet was still a baby, that's what people did. I mean, people vlogged on YouTube their transitions. And nowadays people do it on Instagram, they do it on TikTok. I mean, what's different about writing from getting on TikTok every day and documenting your transition? Is it different or is it just the same? I think it's different. It's kind of like this podcast. It's long form. Writing allows you to add detail. Writing allows you to add perspective. Writing allows you to add perspective and, how would I put this, the personal touch, so to speak. When we see a video on Facebook or on Instagram, especially when we're talking about people like influencers and people who do regular video blogs, that's almost as much of a Hollywood project as it is anything that comes out of the studios in Los Angeles. Because it can be very artificial sometimes. So if I understand your question correctly, what is the difference between actual writing of something and then doing a video thing? It's shorter. And it packs more of a visual impact, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it allows you more of an intellectual impact. Because when you're writing, you're going through a series of processes to put words on the page. And then the reverse occurs when the reader reads it. They use their imagination to pick out the vivid words in the description, and then they place themselves there. With a video, you're there. There's no effort on the part of the viewer. You're just there in that particular world, whatever it is that they're talking about. So there's no need for imagination. There's no need for conceptualization. There's no need even really for empathy per se. Because when you read, you develop an empathy for one or more of the characters, and you start to relate to them. This occurs, of course, in long-form movies and TV series and so on. But in, say, for example, a vlog, a blog, a video blog, it allows you to have distance. And there's shorter bits of information, which some people seem to think is easier for us to absorb. But I think it's actually better for us to absorb the longer forms, because that forces our brains to work a little more. And we're getting, I think, a little too used to instant gratification. You know, the idea that we can have what we want if we flip over to YouTube and watch something that will instantly delight us or entertain us or amuse us in some way. And that kind of takes away from our cultural and intellectual and, yeah, even to a certain extent, our spiritual heritages. So, who are some writers that you admire, Michelle, when you're... Oh, my. We've got a couple hours we can spend here. I admire so many writers, I couldn't possibly list them all in one hour. If you ask me, say, for example, for a specific genre, I could probably give you my top three. But my favorite writers, oh, I have at least a thousand, probably more. Seriously. I mean, if you look at my library, I have over 7,000 books. And I read voraciously. I read all the time. For example, I'm reading right now, just for light entertainment, some old John B. McDonald, Travis McGee stories. Because he's really good with description. He's really good in what we call the film soleil kind of look. You know, everything's all washed with light and it's all, you know, kind of right back on. Because all of the action, of course, takes place down on the Florida coast. So, he's good for grabbing that sort of thing. But that's, you know, one of many, many, many, many writers that I love. To give you another example, I'm absolutely obsessed with John Steinbeck. I love almost everything that he's written. Anyway, I'm fond of him, although there are some things about his particular works that I sometimes think he's, you know, a little bit overrated. Who else? A lot of the American expatriate crowd. I mean, there's, oh, gosh, S. Godfrey Sherald. You know, out of that particular group of people, there's tons and tons of people. Science fiction would be here all day. I have probably a dozen different favorite science fiction writers who I think are just absolutely great. Female writers, oh, my God, the list is growing every day. I stumble across somebody and I go, wow, this woman is great. Oh, my God, how is it that I've never heard of her before? And then I'll go back and read everything that she's ever written, you know. So it's a situation where I'm kind of an omnivore when it comes to writing, and I'm influenced by everybody. And the same is true, you know, of my musical career. When I was a professional musician for off and on for about 25 years, steadily for about 11 or 12 years, I listened to everyone, you know. And my band, you know, the guys in my band, they'd be over listening to something else that was, you know, either really hard rock or something. And I'd be over here in the corner listening to Little Feet or something funky, you know, or, you know, some punk or something like that. And they're over there, you know, playing southern rock over and over again, trying to get that lick just right. I mean, I'm listening to everything under the sun, listening to The Pretenders, listening to Joe Jackson, things like that. And I've always been, I guess you'd say, an artistic omnivore, because the same is true of my love of art. My interests in art, painting and sculpture and so on, they're all over the map, you know. I'm really fond of Impressionists, but I like the old masters as well. Sculpture, you know, I like some of the modern stuff that's done, you know, cubicle forms or, you know, forms in space. But I also like some of the, you know, a lot of the earlier stuff, you know, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, oh, shoot, Rodin, all of those people, you know, the great classical sculptors. So, Marcel, let's get to talking about your work a little bit. And in the process, I would also love to talk to you about your gender identity, if you feel comfortable talking about that. Let's start with your writing first, though. So you've been a writer for 30 years. You said you've written six books. What is your most recent book? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Why, sure. As a matter of fact, I can even get a copy for you in a moment. Okay, well, my latest work is a collection of short stories and I think a couple of novellas in here, or actually novelettes. Those are the smallest long form short story that you can find. It's called Jade Milkshakes and Other Dreams and consists of 20 stories. And they cover, you know, the whole spectrum. Some of them are just people stories. Some of them are science fiction. There's a couple of trans stories in here, or at least stories that feature transgender characters. But they're a collection of stories that I wrote, you know, over the past 30 years. And after a while, you know, when the magazine or the company that purchased them goes out of business, their rights revert to me. So there was a period about two years ago, three years ago, where all of a sudden all of these rights for these previous short stories and things that I had written all came back to me. I started getting emails and paper letters saying, the rights are now yours again. You may republish this if you wish. And I said, well, why don't I just collect everything that I've done over the last 30 years? Well, not everything, but what I think of as the best of the bunch. I figure I think I counted it up one time, and I've written something like 111 short stories and, let's see, three full-length novels and a biography or memoir, if you prefer. Yeah, I was wondering, do you feel like this book, Jade Milkshakes, in a way, do you think of it as a memoir in any way? No, no, not really. Apart from the fact that it's not really personal. No, no, it's not. It's stories about other people. I'll read you the blurb on the back here. Let me get into the light here so I can read it. Twenty stories. I should have printed this in white. Twenty stories shaped by the imagination and the unconscious, which take the reader from the mundane to the sublime and all points in between. Flights of fancy and fate. Stories of lovers, friends, enemies, and aliens. And even a kitty or two. These morsels from the buffet of life could be quite filling, so make sure that you leave an appetite. Yeah. At least four stories out of the 20 have a transgender protagonist or character. Oh, interesting. One of them is a science fiction story from a series that I've been writing about a fictional world orbiting a red gas giant about 100 light years away called Aphrodite. And it's a tiny planet and it's been colonized by humans who, of course, one of the first things they do before they land is they start fighting. So the protagonist is kind of a Mata Hari type of spy. They drop her behind enemy lines and she seduces people and gets information and then makes her way home. So she gets a mission which kind of goes sideways. And I had fun playing with, because actually both of the protagonists are trans. It's a kind of a complex little thing. It's part of a long series of stuff that I'm writing about this imaginary world and the politics and the technology and how one side is essentially very woke, I guess. Is that the right word? And the other side is kind of a little bit like the Confederate States of America, not particularly tolerant of anybody. So, yeah, it's cliched, but it also gives me lots of room for some really interesting interpersonal conflict. Sounds a little bit like life here on Earth. Well, that was the idea. My point was kind of similar to Frank Herbert. You know, a thousand years from now, we'll still be fighting the same stupid wars with the same stupid weapons and the same stupid attitudes that we did before. And there will be somebody that will come along, and they'll be our leader or our messiah or something like that, and they'll lead us into another war. So one of my overall points in writing this particular series was to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Do you think that there'll be transgender people in a thousand years? Oh, of course. Of course. There'll be variations of transgender people that either we won't be able to understand. And we're beginning to see the very tip of that iceberg right now with the youngsters who call themselves non-binary or they have their own word for it, whatever it may be. One of the things we need when we have an ecological crisis is as much diversity as possible to ensure the survival of our species. And reducing it down to just man and woman will probably cost us, genetically speaking. And it's a good possibility that if we keep trying to do that, we're going to just simply breed our species out of existence. My belief is that the more diverse we are in terms of our gender expression, in terms of our sexual expression, with other humans, of course, is that we need to diversify as much as possible. That way we don't put all of our eggs into two baskets, woman or man. Thank you. We're talking today with Michelle Rose. Michelle is an author who has written six books and is currently working on a teleplay or some other word. A pilot. A pilot. You're working on some pilots. Thank you, Michelle. Let's move over to that. Let's talk about your pilot right now. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. As I said earlier, it's based upon actually my second book, which I wrote in conjunction with a very dedicated nurse in rural Montana, Kalispell. Her name is Michelle Alexander and mother of two kids. Very, how would I put this, probably one of the best nurses I've ever encountered. She went through a really remarkable experience with a blind, terminally ill transgender woman named, are you ready for it, Michelle Woodring. So, yes, we're talking three Michelles here. So how do we keep them separate? We number them. The blind transgender woman who passed away is Michelle number one or M1. The nurse is M2. I am M3. Okay, that's how we manage to keep them separate. M3, from now on I'll call you M3, okay. You can call me M3. You can tell from my email address, Michelle Rose 3. I've been reading that handle for years and years and years. And it was kind of interesting that when we discussed it, how are we going to keep everybody straight here? I said, well, I'll be Michelle 3. And she said, okay. But it was a long, arduous process to get the book itself written, 18 months altogether. I received about 150 pages of essentially which were nursing notes with some dialogue added from Mrs. Alexander right before Thanksgiving. And then Christmas Day, I sent her back the rewritten first chapter. And she called me and she was in tears. And she said, you're perfect. You're the one I've been looking for. Because she'd already tried several different people to help her write this story. And, of course, no one could quite get it, you know, because they weren't trans or they were thinking in terms of, you know, a standard narrative. And they couldn't figure out how to do it. And I saw immediately that this was a very cinematic sort of story. I mean, say we've got the backdrop of rural Montana with, you know, the snow-covered peaks and Flathead Lake and the forests and the mountains and stuff like that. So that's big sky country. It's, you know, big vision. So I was thinking, you know, big screen the whole time I was writing it. I broke it up into three different acts just like you would see in a regular movie. And then I used the flashback technique to put the reader into the events that occurred up until this woman's death. Mrs. Alexander took care of her for roughly four and a half months. And for her, it was a very stressful experience. She knew that her patient was terminal when she took the case. And after meeting her and talking to her for a few times, she realized what a horrible life she'd had. And it occurred to her that, you know, if there's so little time left, why don't I give this woman at least a little taste of the kind of life she should have had. And so she took her into her household and they became friends. And her youngest son just fell in love with her, adored her greatly because she played chess really well. And they could pass secret notes back and forth using her braille machine. And just all sorts of, you know, little boys like cool technological gadgets. And Ms. Woodring had a lot of cool technological gadgets so that she could, you know, essentially rent her services to other people like, you know, typing out the regular text in blind, you know, braille and that sort of thing. So she actually did work for a living, but she was essentially confined to her house because of her condition. And I said to myself when I was reading all that, boy, that's how it is for a lot of us. You know, we have all these skills and yet we're still confined to our homes because we don't dare go out or we can't go out. So was the Michelle one, was she always blind or was that a condition that came later in life? It came right around the time she was about 18 months old. She had a case of the measles and instead of treating, well, they thought it was measles, it was actually rheumatic fever. So they treated it like measles and they gave her a big shot of antibiotics. And, of course, it didn't work and it actually made her blind. It increased the ocular, interocular pressure inside of her eye until it literally exploded. I know it's kind of gross. We'll get off that subject. But she had a number of serious health issues. Like, for example, she had open heart surgery. So that kind of eliminated the possibility of her getting her lower surgeries, but she never gave up hope for that. She had a fractured spine and she was dying of severely advanced COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. And when Mrs. Alexander, M2, met her, she was diagnosed with having no more than about six months to live. And Mrs. Alexander decided out of the goodness of her heart to reach out to this woman and make her last days more comfortable. And at least make her aware of the fact that there were people that loved her and cared about her. Because her own family could not support the fact that she was transgender. They wouldn't allow her to attend family gatherings and things like that. So it's a long, complex book. I took the 158 pages of nursing notes and expanded it out to about 380 pages. And we were nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2000. Well, congratulations. Yes, this was in 2010. We didn't win. Actually, the winner was an anthology of Jewish trans stories called Dancing on the Matitsa. So I said, okay, well, at least some good people won there. Dancing on the what? I think I pronounced that correctly. Matitsa, is that right? In a Hasidic marriage ceremony, there's a line, the curtain that separates the men and the women, and they can't mix. Yes, yeah. Well, that's actually kind of a cool title because you're on both sides of the issue here. You may be male, but you feel female. Or you may be female, but you feel male. And you're stuck on that line, and you can't mix with one or the other. And the stories in that particular anthology, I read them about a year later, were all really, really interesting. And I suggest, if you can, look them up and buy it because it's a really terrific book. I've had Abby Stein on the show before. Abby Stein is a fairly well-known formerly Hasidic – well, she may still be a Hasidic Jew. She's a rabbi, and she grew up in a very froom congregation in New York. And is one of the best-known transgender women who represents the Jewish tradition. And we've talked about growing up in a Hasidic community and what it means to transition out of that community. It's a really interesting conversation. Yeah, yeah. So back to the story of the three Michels. Okay. Well, it's a tragic story. She started to sink rather rapidly. The COPD took her a lot faster than the doctors had thought. A very heartbreaking final scene where she can no longer speak and she's literally drowning in her own fluids. But because she had signed a non-resuscitation, or DNR, do not resuscitate form. Because she didn't want to be intubated and chained to a hospital bed. So she signed the DNR. And she passed away in Mrs. Alexander's arms with Mrs. Alexander talking to her and reassuring her. And essentially being the one person who was able to be there when she walked into the dark valley. So... Is that Michelle Alexander? Is she still alive? Oh, yes. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. I can't tell you any more than that. She's still a nurse a few years from retirement. We don't speak much anymore. I've kind of served my function as her editor and co-writer. But she did give me all the screen rights, international screen rights, to both the TV series or any documentaries or movies that may be made regarding this particular topic. And she gets all the rights for the book. And I've never taken even a dime of royalties. In fact, I returned my writer's fee to her. Because at the time we published it, there was some controversy about us exploiting the death of a trans woman for profit. And I decided I don't want any part of that. So I told Mrs. Alexander, here's my writer's fee back. And I said, you know, the criticism that we're getting, we'll just have to, you know, pull our heads in and try to ignore it if we can. Because there will always be people who will criticize. No matter how good your intentions are, no matter how good the end result may be, there will be people who will tell you, you didn't do enough or you didn't do it right. Or you did too much or, you know, it just simply doesn't please me. And you can't please everybody. You know, if that was the case, if everybody tried to write for everybody, we probably wouldn't get a whole lot of books out there. Or we would get the kind of books that we see too often, which is basically recycled romance. But if you've ever been to the airport newsstand and you go to the paperback book kiosk, right there about eye level are all the hot titles, right? And if you count them, about three out of five of them will be romances of some kind. And the other two will be supernatural thrillers. That's what's popular right now. Okay. So, you know, I don't write that sort of thing. I write about people. Romance is part of it, but it's not the focus of it. And, yeah, there are scary things in this world, but the scariest thing of all is a human being who's forgotten or never learned how to be human in the first place. Those are the real monsters. I'm not concerned about monsters under the bed or, you know, in the dark. I'm more concerned about human monsters. Those people are occasionally difficult to write about, but they can make for an interesting evil guy. So what became of Michelle who passed away? What became of her legacy? I mean, besides your book that you're working on, did her family ever, you know, come out and sort of acknowledge her life? Not really. There was a tiny, tiny little scene that I left out of the book where actually I kind of glossed it over by, you know, having Mrs. Alexander say, Earl, that's Michelle's father. Earl told me that I'd make a good farm wife, and he thanked me a lot for taking care of Michelle. And I asked her exactly, what does that mean? And she said, well, he hugged me and then tried to – he said something like, thank you for taking care of my boy. I know he didn't have many friends because that's because – well, that's because she was the way she was. And I left that out of there because it seemed a little over the top. I said, did he actually say that? And she said, well, that's what I remember, but I didn't make a big deal of it at the time because it was obvious to her that he was having a lot of trouble shifting pronouns and tenses in his mind. Yeah, that's pretty common. Yeah, her parents were, you know, straight out of the Depression era, and they just don't talk about stuff like that. And it's largely incomprehensible to them. But I think they were kind of beginning to realize it, but the funeral was kind of a very somber affair. Nobody really said anything. The pastor kind of mangled the final words because she didn't know Michelle, so she just kind of vented a lot of empty homilies and, you know, cliched phrases. But she was buried under her proper name, not her dead name. There's a bronze plaque, her headstone, in this lovely little cemetery overlooking Kalispell. And exactly two years later, almost two to date, the first Gay Pride in Montana is held in Kalispell. Wow, that's great. It's so interesting because recently Montana was in the news last year for refusing to acknowledge a transgender state representative. Uh-huh, yeah, I know. And that's the lash back that we got from the Obama years. After, you know, by the end of the first term of Obama's presidency, we trans people thought that the sky was the limit. We could do pretty much anything we wanted because there were no longer any constraints. But there were some of us who kept saying, this is going to bite us later in the future. This is really going to come back a curse because the pendulum always swings a different way. And I have to agree with that. You know, I went to Arizona to get my graduate degree in 2016 right after Trump had taken power. And the first year there was okay. And then things just went downhill from there because Arizona is in a very, very red state. And it got to the point where once I got my degree, you know, the only thing I could think of is I wanted to get out as soon as possible. Which I think kind of disappointed Mrs. Alexander because we had become pretty good friends by that point. But I had to pursue my way and she had to go her way. So we're friends, but as I say, we don't talk much. She's trying to put a lot of this behind her because the climax to this particular story is that less than five days after the funeral took place, she was accused of murder. Oh no, I totally didn't expect that. Yeah, well, neither did she. Usually there are a lot of people who are connected to that case. But somebody filed an official complaint stating that they felt that Mrs. Alexander had given her an overdose of narcotics and assisted with suicide. Because in Oregon, there's a way to do that in Oregon. Well, in Montana, at the time it was considered first degree manslaughter. Wow. 17 to 25 years. Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah. Nasty, nasty, nasty thing to be accused of. So the story opens up with a flashback to the police station and where she's being interrogated. And in the book, I have these little flashbacks where they jump back to the police station and the investigating officers say, so tell me more about this part here. And it worked really great for a narrative device because then I could redirect some of the action, some of the things that have occurred, and put the reader back into the focus of the story. And the same thing works, you know, writing it for the television. Because you can start each series, or excuse me, each episode with a flashback to the police station where the officer says, okay, tell me about this part. And then the episode, you know, proceeds and you see that stuff happening. Okay. So the flashback thing worked really, really well in both tangents. And hopefully we'll stick with that when it does go to production, if it goes to production. There's no guarantee of that in Hollywood. It sounds good for streaming. Are you looking at streaming? Is that kind of your goal? That's the goal. Because that's where the action is. Particular studios, when they bankroll a project, that's the first thing they think of. They sell it to a streaming service. And how well it does on its first, you know, two or three episodes is how it depends. That will determine how much the studio gets back in terms of, you know, what they paid for it and what they sold it to the streaming service for. And that's, of course, the basis of a lot of the strikes that the actors and the writers were not getting part of that fee. They were just cut out of it completely. If they were getting anything, it was like eight or nine cents a month. When the standard for residuals and stuff like that used to be roughly about $1,100 a month. Not a lot of money, but if you've got other income coming in, it's enough to make it and keep a roof over your head in Los Angeles. But all that went away when the studios started opting for the streaming services. And that was the basis of strikes. They weren't getting any of that. They weren't getting any of those literally billions of dollars. There were billions of dollars being spent on streaming services. And it was just one of those situations where the proper people weren't getting paid at all. Well, good luck with that. We've been talking today with Michelle Rose. Michelle, we have like maybe three or four minutes left. This hour has gone by so quickly. Is there anything that we haven't gotten to that we should really make sure to talk about in our last three or four minutes? Well, I'm a writer, so I'm going to promote my writing here for a moment. You can find my books on AmazonBooks.com. Punch in my full name, Michelle Diane Rose, for the search, and you'll get the five books that are still currently available. My first book is out of print right now, and Lord, may it stay that way, please. That's my first book we've got of a sticker. Actually, a couple of people have said, you know, if you take part of this and part of that, you could probably turn that into a TV or into a movie, too. So that's down the road. I have so many projects piled up on my desk, it's ridiculous. Let's see, what else? Can't think of anything except be good humans, you know, be kind, learn how to be kind, learn how to be good to one another. It's not hard to do, you know. Remember that the person opposite you is just as human as you are and hurts in the same ways and even cries at night. So try to see other people as people rather than ideas or, you know, icons of one thing or another. Even the worst mega-hat in the whole world deserves a fair deal, even though they're obviously not quite in the right mind, but they still deserve a fair deal. So that means be nice to Caitlyn Jenner. Well, some people kind of tend to wear out their walk rather rapidly, don't they? And Kate kind of tested our patience, oh, about three years ago, I think was about the breaking point for me. During her run for governor? Yeah, that one. Yeah. That's when I said, okay. Because then she said, I'm going to make sure there are no trans children in sports. I'm going to make sure of that. And I just went, okay. And you're obviously right up there with Blair White, just nutty as a fruitcake and convinced that your money and prestige is going to save you. I'm sorry, it's not. Well, let's let them have their moment in the sun. Which she already had. And then a life of obscurity, please. Yeah, please. So this teleplay that you're working on right now, what is it called? If people in the future are looking for it, maybe they'll find it on streaming service, what would it be called? The same title as the book, The Color of Sunlight. And as I said, I've written the pilot. I'm projecting 13 episodes. I can reduce it to 10 or I can extend it to 15, depending on the desires of the studio. But it's basically completed and ready to go. So I'm shopping for what they call a literary manager, which you might think of as an agent, but they're actually a developer. They will help you develop the project to the point where it can be turned over to a studio. And at that point, you get an agent because the agent is there just simply to handle your financial affairs. The literary manager is the one that helps you get through the process of readying the thing for production. Great. Well, now we know a little bit about how that works. Michel, it's been a real pleasure having you on Transpositive. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was my pleasure, too. I really enjoyed this talk. Thank you for allowing me to speak my mind about certain things that are near and dear to my heart. We've been talking today with Michel Rose. Michel is an author and is currently working on a screenplay called The Color of Sunlight that may be available soon on streaming services. Michel, thanks so much again, and have a great day. You, too, Emma. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Transgender people don't live here. I've never met anyone who's transgender. I swear I don't know someone who's transgender. Transgender and non-binary people like me hear this all the time. But according to the HRC Foundation, there are more than 2 million transgender people in the United States. We live in every community across this country. You might be surprised to hear that there are more transgender and non-binary people in the United States than there are Starbucks, McDonald's, and Walmart locations combined. In fact, if you put us all together, there'd be more non-binary and transgender folks than the populations of D.C., or Maine, or Idaho, or West Virginia. As a matter of fact, 15 states have a lower population than the amount of trans folks in the U.S. So here are a few things to keep in mind. You don't always know when a person's trans. But we're your neighbors, your coworkers, your students, your customers, and even your friends and family. We exist in every culture, and while we're more visible than ever before, sometimes we just don't see us. So when you hear about politicians pushing toward discriminatory bills, know this. These bills address problems that aren't even real. Problems that don't actually exist. But we do. We do. We do. We do. We do. We do. We do. We do. We do. And we need your support. We need your support. I haven't eaten for a week. I haven't walked in my sleep. What's wrong around me is always me. Every night I say, I hang my head and weep. Yes, I weep. I love my baby. I want her for myself. If he don't be mine, he won't have nobody else. He has left me. I'll do love as I can. I'm a do-right kid. Get a friend in any place I can. Now I've got to show him that he's mine. Every night I say, I hang my head and cry. I ain't going to the bus, I'm going to the fire, I'll be there. Who's going to take me? Going to run away from here. Now my love has been refused. Now I've got to show him. Hi, this is Emma. I am a co-host of Transpositive, and I'm also the current president of the Board of Directors here at KBOO. At KBOO, we prove every day that people-powered radio has the ability to bring us together across distances and give us hope when we feel despair. Your friend at KBOO wants to remind you that generosity has the same power. Join thousands of KBOO supporters from all around the world, and let's rally together to build stronger communities. If you can, just go to kboo.fm.gov or text KBOO to this number 44221. And thanks so much for your support of KBOO Community Radio. KBOO KBOO KBOO KBOO KBOO