I have been told that people like me, who present gender in atypical ways, are attention whores. "You can just be whoever you are. No one's questioning that", they say, (contradicting my experience, because some people definitely question that). "But by dressing the way you are, you're drawing attention to yourself, so as far as I'm concerned, you brought it on yourself".
This was in response to me telling about when I was physically assaulted a month ago on 14th street while wearing an orange skirt.
The person went on to say "I don't mean they've got any right to attack you. I'm just saying you did things that we could all sort of predict might lead to that kind of thing happening".
I'll take "Victim Blaming 101" for $500, Alex.
Look, here's the deal. People started drawing attention to me being a femme (sissy, whatever) when I was quite young. How I sat. The clothes I wore and how I wore them. The idea was that they get to draw attention to my difference, and I was expected to try to ameliorate the situation, to make more of an effort to fit in and hide the ways in which I wasn't like other male kids in the school.
My fourth grade teacher never had much patience for "Well, he started it", but, well, I can't help that: They started it. They get to draw attention to my difference but if I do anything that highlights it, I'm an attention seeker?
It reminds me of a conversation in grad school about women's footwear. Someone pointed out that a lot of the shoes designed for women are noisy; they make clack, clack sounds when you walk in them. "So when you wear those, you're broadcasting 'Hey everybody, I'm female' wherever you go. So isn't that luring in the attention you complain about, the unwanted public harassment you get?"
One of the women students replied that she'd originally gone everywhere simply as a person but people kept drawing her attention to the fact that she was a girl. As if perhaps she'd never noticed or something. And she began to assert that she was indeed a girl, especially when she went places that girls didn't generally go, because if she never did and they always did, it ended up feeling like something she was ashamed of, and she wasn't.
That's how I feel about being a gender invert, a sissy femme male. I've spent a lifetime encountering the assumption that I was ashamed of it, that I would prefer that nobody notice, that I agreed that it was inferior to how the other males were.
But I like who I am and I'm entitled to indicate that I'm proud and happy about it.
———————
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Saturday, October 26, 2019
Saturday, October 19, 2019
Pre-Typesetting: Final Author's Edits
I received from Sunstone Press the text of my manuscript, "formatted" and cleaned of violations of the Chicago Manual of Style and corrected for typos and whatnot, for a final author's opportunity to change anything before it moves forward to typesetting.
I have now gone past a landmark that I never reached with either Ellora's Cave or NineStar Press: I'm looking at the content of my book as it will be when it is released, give or take any changes that I make at this point.
If you are not an author--or even if you are but haven't as of yet worked with a publisher--the impact of that may not be apparent. Publishers accept an author's book contingent on a successful round of edits. Changes. Essentially, they're saying they would like to publish your book but first they want to do some things to it.
Even an established author with a high profile is not immune to changes to their work, and I'm not merely talking about catching typos and fixing errant punctuation, either. I've heard that when John Steinbeck submitted Travels With Charlie, the editor modified quite a bit of it before it went to press.
So although an acceptance letter brings great joy, it soon leads to apprehension and trepidaton: "Yay, finally my book will be published. I wonder what they'll want me to cut or write differently or stick in? Will I hate it?"
In my case, it wasn't a hypothetical situation, either. My editor at NineStar, in 2017, wanted to kill the first 35,000 words, the first five years of the story, and start it in the middle. "You can put some of it in as flashbacks, maybe", he told me. This was so far from acceptable to me that I ended up asking to have my contract revoked and my rights reverted back to me. Having a contract to publish and then finding the editing process so destructive that I had to pull out felt like being rescued from a sinking ship only to find out that my rescuers were cannibals and that I was better off jumping back into the ocean.
So although I had heard only nice and supportive things said about my manuscript by Sunstone so far, I could not relax or rejoice just yet. The editing pen still loomed over my work like the Sword of freaking Damocles and I'd wake up in the middle of the night imagining all kinds of awful dilemmas, horrible choices I might have to confront, depending on what they asked of me.
But they like it! They really like it! (He says, sounding oddly like Sally Fields). I've finished reviewing the first two thirds of the book and the book is still my book, intact, not missing any limbs or vital organs, its face not rearranged by plastic surgery into something foreign. The editor at Sunstone has a light touch and I'm seldom aware of where anything was changed, and where I do see it, he's usually made it cleaner and clearer.
I'm starting to feel like Sisyphus would upon getting the damn stone up over the rim of the slope and up onto a flat level place. Oh, sure, something could still go wrong. A meteor strike could vaporize the offices of Sunstone Press, or the economy could go into such a tailspin that the entire publishing industry shuts down. But I'm starting to feel optimistic that this is actually going to happen this time.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I have now gone past a landmark that I never reached with either Ellora's Cave or NineStar Press: I'm looking at the content of my book as it will be when it is released, give or take any changes that I make at this point.
If you are not an author--or even if you are but haven't as of yet worked with a publisher--the impact of that may not be apparent. Publishers accept an author's book contingent on a successful round of edits. Changes. Essentially, they're saying they would like to publish your book but first they want to do some things to it.
Even an established author with a high profile is not immune to changes to their work, and I'm not merely talking about catching typos and fixing errant punctuation, either. I've heard that when John Steinbeck submitted Travels With Charlie, the editor modified quite a bit of it before it went to press.
So although an acceptance letter brings great joy, it soon leads to apprehension and trepidaton: "Yay, finally my book will be published. I wonder what they'll want me to cut or write differently or stick in? Will I hate it?"
In my case, it wasn't a hypothetical situation, either. My editor at NineStar, in 2017, wanted to kill the first 35,000 words, the first five years of the story, and start it in the middle. "You can put some of it in as flashbacks, maybe", he told me. This was so far from acceptable to me that I ended up asking to have my contract revoked and my rights reverted back to me. Having a contract to publish and then finding the editing process so destructive that I had to pull out felt like being rescued from a sinking ship only to find out that my rescuers were cannibals and that I was better off jumping back into the ocean.
So although I had heard only nice and supportive things said about my manuscript by Sunstone so far, I could not relax or rejoice just yet. The editing pen still loomed over my work like the Sword of freaking Damocles and I'd wake up in the middle of the night imagining all kinds of awful dilemmas, horrible choices I might have to confront, depending on what they asked of me.
But they like it! They really like it! (He says, sounding oddly like Sally Fields). I've finished reviewing the first two thirds of the book and the book is still my book, intact, not missing any limbs or vital organs, its face not rearranged by plastic surgery into something foreign. The editor at Sunstone has a light touch and I'm seldom aware of where anything was changed, and where I do see it, he's usually made it cleaner and clearer.
I'm starting to feel like Sisyphus would upon getting the damn stone up over the rim of the slope and up onto a flat level place. Oh, sure, something could still go wrong. A meteor strike could vaporize the offices of Sunstone Press, or the economy could go into such a tailspin that the entire publishing industry shuts down. But I'm starting to feel optimistic that this is actually going to happen this time.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, October 11, 2019
False Dichotomy
There’s a false dichotomy between “born this way” and “choice”. We encounter it in the MOGII communities, where there’s a rapid embrace of the notion of inherent genetic and brain differences, first for gay and lesbian people and, more recently, for trans folks.
That’s not the only place you find it, though. That same ongoing discussion can be found in the perpetual arguments about free will versus determinism. You ever dropped in on those? The backdrop for those discussions – often hinted at but not always explicitly identified – is the criminal justice system and whether or not it is morally defensible to punish criminals for their illegal deeds or if, instead, we should recognize that they are products of their environment and did not choose their behaviors. If you want to delve back further, this argument dates back to whether God shall punish evildoers for the evil that they have done or if they were preordained by God to have done those things in which case it isn’t their fault.
In other words, the notion that they didn’t choose is used to excuse behaviors that are labeled criminal or immoral.
So if we slide back over to the arguments about whether gay and trans people have choice, the argument that they don’t starts to look a lot like gay and trans people’s identities are being excused and forgiven, as if they needed to be excused or forgiven. As if being gay or being trans was akin to being a thief or a murderer or something. Uh huh.
Are you in a big hurry to buy into the notion that who you are needs to be excused or forgiven, on the grounds that “you can’t help it” ???
Why are our identities on trial? In all these discussions, there’s an unquestioned taken-for-granted assumption about what needs excusing or forgiving in the first place. If you want to discuss criminal justice and punishment, for example, how about we discuss Officer Daniel Paneleo, he whose chokehold on Eric Garner resulted in “I can’t breathe”, and, behind him, the entire police-enforced structure of racist social control. Do you want to start off from the position that Officer Panteleo can’t help it, that he’s a product of his environment and should not be held accountable? That we can’t expect him to change? That he was not a maker of choices? That he is not responsible?
It’s a false dichotomy. When a person makes choices, the kind of person that they are dictates what kind of choices they will make, and yet those are still choices. There isn’t one “self” there who is a decision-maker but who is “affected by” or “determined by” their own biology or their socialization and upbringing, as if those are external to the “self”. They aren’t. A person’s identity consists of all of their environment, their personal history, their built-in nuances from genetics and biology to the structure of prior beliefs and values – that’s all a part of who the person is. If you take all that away there’s no “self” left to do any deciding. But if we consider all that stuff as part of who the person is, the expression of that self takes the form of choices that the person makes. It’s how we experience ourself, as choice-makers.
I certainly do. In second grade, I looked around; I saw girls behaving one way and boys behaving a different way, generally speaking. I was in situations where I chose my behaviors, and the behaviors that I chose were the ones more typical of girls than of boys. I was proud of it, and rejected the notion that I should be ashamed of it. Could I have made a different set of decisions and still been true to who I was? No! But they were still choices. I was affirming who I was.
Last month I was assaulted by an angry individual on 14th Street in New York. I was wearing an orange skirt at the time. He was coming my direction in heavily congested foot traffic and collided with me as we passed; I thought it was an accident but a split-second later he came up from behind me and began pounding my back and head, all the while yelling, “I didn’t hit you! I never hit you!”. Now, sure, social forces and his personal history and widely shared beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior no doubt shaped his worldview, but he also made choices. His choices are a part of who he is, and I hold him responsible for all of that. I could make the same point about the people who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Florida awhile back. I’m not out to pin the blame on the culprit, nor am I a true believer in the moral sanctity of retributional punishment, but we are activists here; we are active. We act. So let’s get one thing established: if I am allocated choice at all to any degree whatsoever in my life, I choose to be as I am, a gender variant individual, and if you think to hold me morally accountable, bring it on, baby. I wouldn’t want to be any different and I make no apologies for who and how I am.
Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
That’s not the only place you find it, though. That same ongoing discussion can be found in the perpetual arguments about free will versus determinism. You ever dropped in on those? The backdrop for those discussions – often hinted at but not always explicitly identified – is the criminal justice system and whether or not it is morally defensible to punish criminals for their illegal deeds or if, instead, we should recognize that they are products of their environment and did not choose their behaviors. If you want to delve back further, this argument dates back to whether God shall punish evildoers for the evil that they have done or if they were preordained by God to have done those things in which case it isn’t their fault.
In other words, the notion that they didn’t choose is used to excuse behaviors that are labeled criminal or immoral.
So if we slide back over to the arguments about whether gay and trans people have choice, the argument that they don’t starts to look a lot like gay and trans people’s identities are being excused and forgiven, as if they needed to be excused or forgiven. As if being gay or being trans was akin to being a thief or a murderer or something. Uh huh.
Are you in a big hurry to buy into the notion that who you are needs to be excused or forgiven, on the grounds that “you can’t help it” ???
Why are our identities on trial? In all these discussions, there’s an unquestioned taken-for-granted assumption about what needs excusing or forgiving in the first place. If you want to discuss criminal justice and punishment, for example, how about we discuss Officer Daniel Paneleo, he whose chokehold on Eric Garner resulted in “I can’t breathe”, and, behind him, the entire police-enforced structure of racist social control. Do you want to start off from the position that Officer Panteleo can’t help it, that he’s a product of his environment and should not be held accountable? That we can’t expect him to change? That he was not a maker of choices? That he is not responsible?
It’s a false dichotomy. When a person makes choices, the kind of person that they are dictates what kind of choices they will make, and yet those are still choices. There isn’t one “self” there who is a decision-maker but who is “affected by” or “determined by” their own biology or their socialization and upbringing, as if those are external to the “self”. They aren’t. A person’s identity consists of all of their environment, their personal history, their built-in nuances from genetics and biology to the structure of prior beliefs and values – that’s all a part of who the person is. If you take all that away there’s no “self” left to do any deciding. But if we consider all that stuff as part of who the person is, the expression of that self takes the form of choices that the person makes. It’s how we experience ourself, as choice-makers.
I certainly do. In second grade, I looked around; I saw girls behaving one way and boys behaving a different way, generally speaking. I was in situations where I chose my behaviors, and the behaviors that I chose were the ones more typical of girls than of boys. I was proud of it, and rejected the notion that I should be ashamed of it. Could I have made a different set of decisions and still been true to who I was? No! But they were still choices. I was affirming who I was.
Last month I was assaulted by an angry individual on 14th Street in New York. I was wearing an orange skirt at the time. He was coming my direction in heavily congested foot traffic and collided with me as we passed; I thought it was an accident but a split-second later he came up from behind me and began pounding my back and head, all the while yelling, “I didn’t hit you! I never hit you!”. Now, sure, social forces and his personal history and widely shared beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior no doubt shaped his worldview, but he also made choices. His choices are a part of who he is, and I hold him responsible for all of that. I could make the same point about the people who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Florida awhile back. I’m not out to pin the blame on the culprit, nor am I a true believer in the moral sanctity of retributional punishment, but we are activists here; we are active. We act. So let’s get one thing established: if I am allocated choice at all to any degree whatsoever in my life, I choose to be as I am, a gender variant individual, and if you think to hold me morally accountable, bring it on, baby. I wouldn’t want to be any different and I make no apologies for who and how I am.
Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, October 5, 2019
Genre Variant
Originality has its limits; to make sense to people, we have to begin in familiar territory; to say something new, we must connect it with something people already know.
But the worlds of publishing and producing constrain originality far beyond that, in their expectation that books and other creative works fit into an existing genre, and that books within a genre fit narrow specifications and tick off the requisite number of anticipated elements.
The popular mystery/detective genre has its well-established requirement of Clues, Character-Suspects (among whom the perpetrator must exist), the Escalation of further perpetrations of subsequent crimes (and further clues), and the False Suspect thrown in our path to throw us off the scent, and so on. I've never written one, although like most of us I've read many over the years.
The romance genre should have the protagonists Meet Cute but initially behave more like antagonists, give us some Steam but establish reasons to defer pleasure for awhile, and insert a Setback just as things are lighting up (a misunderstanding or an unreconcilable difference) before it resolves as HEA (happily ever after) or at least HFN (happily for now). Nothing I've written qualifies as a romance novel, although I've read my share of these as well.
If an author writes within a popular genre, and writes well with an interesting twist that makes their book ever so slightly different while still mostly fitting the template, they stand a chance of finding a literary agent and landing a publishing contract as a debut author. The publishing industry knows they have a built-in audience.
There are some genres that have fallen by the wayside, styles of writing that were once written and sold in large quantities. Would you like to be a brand new author today and find yourself pitching a book set in the 1800s in the west, featuring an upright male citizen who is a bit of a loner, who rides into a town where the establishment institutions of social order aren't working, so he makes a stand, bravely facing death and being outnumbered, but with his skill with a pistol he and his sidekick, with whom he has his conversations, prevail, only to find it necessary to ride off into the sunset because the little town is ambivalent about him?
Or perhaps you'd like to be fishing for a lit agent for your debut book that features a vivacious gal who finds herself in surrounded by deceptive creeping danger, and is fraught with self-doubt and doubt about the attractive but flawed male of wealth and power who lives in near-isolation in a crumbling old mansion; he starts off hateful but she forces his reluctant admiration and shows him her mettle, then she gradually finds that beneath his compromised and ethically questionable exterior and all his characterological flaws, he's actually shiny and principled -- ?
If you're an established author with a proven track record, it might please you to put forth a book that's a clever twist on the old classic western or gothic genre, but I suspect it would be a far more difficult sell for a first-timer.
One of my favorite examples of a creative work that doesn't shoehorn nicely into existing genres is actually a film (originally a screenplay), Miracle Mile. It kicks off as a conventional romance / romantic comedy, invoking the trope of a main character reaching a misunderstanding about something that makes him believe there's a crisis afoot, resulting in him behaving in amusingly silly ways and luring others into doing likewise. Except this time it turns out that the crisis isn't the result of a miscommunication and the story becomes an apocalyptic end-of-world tragedy.
That it ever got made (without being revamped to make it fit into genre packaging better) is a testimony to screenwriter Steve De Jarnatt and his durable stubbornness. He was a graduate of American Film Institute and had credentials for prior work on Hollywood films, but even after the Miracle Mile screenplay won awards there were misgivings about proceeding with the project as written:
-- from Radiator Heaven
I hadn't anticipated as much difficulty fencing my manuscript as I encountered. Like most newbie authors probably do, I thought the writing was the primary challenge. Thousands of people crank up their word processors for NaNoWriMo every year thinking maybe they've got a novel in them, probably assuming that if they do indeed write one, and it's good, they can get it published.
I thought of my book as fitting into a genre: the LGBTQ coming-out story. I figured it would fit on the same shelf as Conundrum: From James to Jan and Rubyfruit Jungle and The Best Little Boy in the World and Stone Butch Blues and Emergence and so forth.
Unfortunately, as with the western and the gothic romance, the LTBTQ coming-out tale is treated as an "old genre". As I wrote in my various query-letter incarnations, there have been such stories for lesbian coming-out, gay male coming-of-age, and transgender (in both of the conventional transitional directions) stories *, but nothing addressing that "Q" that sits there at the end of the acronym; nothing that explains genderqueer -- or gender variance by any other name -- that doesn't overlap with the previous four letters. Well, that may have been part of the problem: the people I was trying to sell on the story's concept didn't see any unaddressed need there, because they, too, didn't have a notion of any remaining category for which we didn't already know the story.
Aside from that, "need" isn't the operative word by which the publishing industry makes its assessment. They think in terms of "market", not "need". They consider manuscripts in terms of their potential audience, the people already poised to go out and buy such a book. Genre, in other words.
Instead of being conceptualized as a part of an LGBTQ coming-out genre, my book was typically seen as either an LGBT book or as a memoir. The LGBT genre is mostly fiction, and mostly erotica-romance at that, with an occasional literary fiction piece from an established author. The memoir genre is occupied by the personal narrative by someone we've already heard of, a celebrity or a person who made the news and attracted our attention, and hence has a "platform".
Submission Stats as of October 2019:
Total Queries to Lit Agents: 1453
Rejections: 1441
Still Outstanding: 12
Total Queries Directly to Small Publishers: 117
Rejections: 58
Still Outstanding: 43
Pub Contract Signed (then went out of business): 1
Pub Contract Signed (rights reverted, creative diffs): 1
Pub Contract Signed (publication pending): 1
* to be fair, there aren't many bisexual coming-of-age / coming-out stories either. As with so many things pertaining to bisexual people, I think there's an attitude that if we have lesbian and gay equivalents covered, the story / concerns / situation of bisexual people won't be meaningfully different so we dont need to bother.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
But the worlds of publishing and producing constrain originality far beyond that, in their expectation that books and other creative works fit into an existing genre, and that books within a genre fit narrow specifications and tick off the requisite number of anticipated elements.
The popular mystery/detective genre has its well-established requirement of Clues, Character-Suspects (among whom the perpetrator must exist), the Escalation of further perpetrations of subsequent crimes (and further clues), and the False Suspect thrown in our path to throw us off the scent, and so on. I've never written one, although like most of us I've read many over the years.
The romance genre should have the protagonists Meet Cute but initially behave more like antagonists, give us some Steam but establish reasons to defer pleasure for awhile, and insert a Setback just as things are lighting up (a misunderstanding or an unreconcilable difference) before it resolves as HEA (happily ever after) or at least HFN (happily for now). Nothing I've written qualifies as a romance novel, although I've read my share of these as well.
If an author writes within a popular genre, and writes well with an interesting twist that makes their book ever so slightly different while still mostly fitting the template, they stand a chance of finding a literary agent and landing a publishing contract as a debut author. The publishing industry knows they have a built-in audience.
There are some genres that have fallen by the wayside, styles of writing that were once written and sold in large quantities. Would you like to be a brand new author today and find yourself pitching a book set in the 1800s in the west, featuring an upright male citizen who is a bit of a loner, who rides into a town where the establishment institutions of social order aren't working, so he makes a stand, bravely facing death and being outnumbered, but with his skill with a pistol he and his sidekick, with whom he has his conversations, prevail, only to find it necessary to ride off into the sunset because the little town is ambivalent about him?
Or perhaps you'd like to be fishing for a lit agent for your debut book that features a vivacious gal who finds herself in surrounded by deceptive creeping danger, and is fraught with self-doubt and doubt about the attractive but flawed male of wealth and power who lives in near-isolation in a crumbling old mansion; he starts off hateful but she forces his reluctant admiration and shows him her mettle, then she gradually finds that beneath his compromised and ethically questionable exterior and all his characterological flaws, he's actually shiny and principled -- ?
If you're an established author with a proven track record, it might please you to put forth a book that's a clever twist on the old classic western or gothic genre, but I suspect it would be a far more difficult sell for a first-timer.
One of my favorite examples of a creative work that doesn't shoehorn nicely into existing genres is actually a film (originally a screenplay), Miracle Mile. It kicks off as a conventional romance / romantic comedy, invoking the trope of a main character reaching a misunderstanding about something that makes him believe there's a crisis afoot, resulting in him behaving in amusingly silly ways and luring others into doing likewise. Except this time it turns out that the crisis isn't the result of a miscommunication and the story becomes an apocalyptic end-of-world tragedy.
That it ever got made (without being revamped to make it fit into genre packaging better) is a testimony to screenwriter Steve De Jarnatt and his durable stubbornness. He was a graduate of American Film Institute and had credentials for prior work on Hollywood films, but even after the Miracle Mile screenplay won awards there were misgivings about proceeding with the project as written:
De Jarnatt decided to shop the script around to various Hollywood studios and was turned down several times by executives that didn’t like the downbeat ending. The filmmaker said, “I certainly could have made it a few years ago if (the hero) woke up and it was all a dream, or they saved the day.” In fact, at one point, he was approached to shoehorn Miracle Mile into Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) only with a happy ending, but he turned that offer down as well.
-- from Radiator Heaven
I hadn't anticipated as much difficulty fencing my manuscript as I encountered. Like most newbie authors probably do, I thought the writing was the primary challenge. Thousands of people crank up their word processors for NaNoWriMo every year thinking maybe they've got a novel in them, probably assuming that if they do indeed write one, and it's good, they can get it published.
I thought of my book as fitting into a genre: the LGBTQ coming-out story. I figured it would fit on the same shelf as Conundrum: From James to Jan and Rubyfruit Jungle and The Best Little Boy in the World and Stone Butch Blues and Emergence and so forth.
Unfortunately, as with the western and the gothic romance, the LTBTQ coming-out tale is treated as an "old genre". As I wrote in my various query-letter incarnations, there have been such stories for lesbian coming-out, gay male coming-of-age, and transgender (in both of the conventional transitional directions) stories *, but nothing addressing that "Q" that sits there at the end of the acronym; nothing that explains genderqueer -- or gender variance by any other name -- that doesn't overlap with the previous four letters. Well, that may have been part of the problem: the people I was trying to sell on the story's concept didn't see any unaddressed need there, because they, too, didn't have a notion of any remaining category for which we didn't already know the story.
Aside from that, "need" isn't the operative word by which the publishing industry makes its assessment. They think in terms of "market", not "need". They consider manuscripts in terms of their potential audience, the people already poised to go out and buy such a book. Genre, in other words.
Instead of being conceptualized as a part of an LGBTQ coming-out genre, my book was typically seen as either an LGBT book or as a memoir. The LGBT genre is mostly fiction, and mostly erotica-romance at that, with an occasional literary fiction piece from an established author. The memoir genre is occupied by the personal narrative by someone we've already heard of, a celebrity or a person who made the news and attracted our attention, and hence has a "platform".
Submission Stats as of October 2019:
Total Queries to Lit Agents: 1453
Rejections: 1441
Still Outstanding: 12
Total Queries Directly to Small Publishers: 117
Rejections: 58
Still Outstanding: 43
Pub Contract Signed (then went out of business): 1
Pub Contract Signed (rights reverted, creative diffs): 1
Pub Contract Signed (publication pending): 1
* to be fair, there aren't many bisexual coming-of-age / coming-out stories either. As with so many things pertaining to bisexual people, I think there's an attitude that if we have lesbian and gay equivalents covered, the story / concerns / situation of bisexual people won't be meaningfully different so we dont need to bother.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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