Tréjà Vu — I Have a Publisher for my Book!

I'm happy to report that I have a contract with Sunstone Books for the publication of GENDERQUEER: A Story from a Different Closet. Sunstone is a Santa Fe NM based publisher, which I'm happy about since the action in the book takes place in New Mexico. I don't have a formal release date yet but I expect it to come out in the general vicinity of January 2020.

GENDERQUEER is the coming-out and coming-of-age story of a gender nonconforming male. Set in the late 1970s, it's a work of nonfiction and highlights the realness of an identity that is not gay, bisexual, lesbian, or transgender, but isn't cisgender and heterosexual either -- "it's something else".

It's a work of nonfiction. It's my story.

GENDERQUEER is a 96,000 word tale with real people, characters and dialogue, that is intended to make some fairly complex social concepts accessible to people who aren't regular readers of political and social theory.

It will be my first published commercial piece. So I'm a debut author.



I don't feel like a debut author. I feel like an old and rather weary traveler plodding across the damn desert.

That probably has something to do with the fact that this is the third time I've had a contract to get this book published.

Ellora's Cave was going to publish it in 2016 but they went out of business.

Original Announcement
Retraction

Then, in 2017, StarNine Press said they would publish it, if I worked with the editor to shorten and tighten the first third of the book. It turned out that by "tighten" they meant "discard", and we were unable to reach a mutually satisfactory understanding and publication was cancelled at my request.

Original Announcement
Retraction


I sent out nearly 1500 queries to literary agents about this book and never succeeded in getting a lit agent. Eventually I began querying small independent publishers and at this point the tally of those is 117 queries to publishers, resulting in three signed contracts.

The third of which had jolly well better be the proverbial charm.

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