elevating marginalized voices

Maybe one of the worst parts of querying a novel is having to decide whether I want to cash in on the fact that it’s currently trendy to be “queer”. It’s not trendy to be a lesbian, mind. It’s trendy to be “gay” and “queer”, terms that are used interchangeably, and mean whatever you want them to mean. “Lesbian” just has a forever-stink about it.

It’s an exhausting ecosystem, made even moreso by literary agents trying to strongarm me into claiming an #OWNVOICES narrative, when that doesn’t even make sense, like, for anyone’s voice(s). I’m only one person, with one voice, and one story. I also don’t write autobiographies, unless my bloviating on this blog counts. Yes, my life and experiences inform my work, but if I only strictly wrote about my personal experiences, then we may as well shelve the concept of fiction entirely. Taken to its logical extreme, own voices implies one and done. Maybe I’m taking this too literally. Maybe I’m dense. On their homepage, We Need Diverse Books claims, “Every reader deserves to find themselves in a story”. As much as I feel like an asshole saying this… I just don’t agree. Authors, diverse a group as they may be, cannot possibly cover every facet of existence, because those are infinite. What if there’s a “diverse” reader, but no “diverse” author to match? Can this reader call up the diversity hotline and make a complaint? What is the remediation path for this situation? What if there’s a “diverse” author with no matching readers who share their experiences? Do they deserve readers the same way readers deserve to find themselves in a story?

To be clear, I don’t disagree with ensuring art made by people from marginalized groups is celebrated and recognized. To be even clearer, I can only speak for myself and my own opinions, and as someone who is part of one of these marginalized groups, or maybe even many (the ‘marginalized’ net is often cast very wide, meaning more people fall into it than outside of it, which is a whole other can of worms), I would still rather my work be judged on its merits than the boxes I or the characters within tick on some made-up scale of how diverse/marginalized/oppressed I/they are. It’s just a little tokenistic for my taste, which is always going to be the great gag of it all, because supposedly this is all meant to kill the idea of tokenism. I tend to subscribe to the school of thought that instead of everyone having the opportunity to succeed equally, we should all have the opportunity to fail equally. Cause it can’t all be good, no matter how marginalized or diverse you are.

It was the same while querying Don’t Worry About It. I saw the same “elevating X marginalized/underrepresented voices” line in so many agent profiles and wish lists I was starting to get the same vibe I get from those sun-bleached rainbow stickers businesses slap on their front door that assure you that the moment you step over their threshold, you won’t get beaten with a stick for being a dirty homosexual. Thing is, I wasn’t worried about that… until I saw the sticker. You’re telling me before you put the mass produced rainbow sticker from AliExpress on your window that I was fair game for homophobes at the grocery store? I have voiced these uncharitable rainbow sticker thoughts to gay and straight people alike and both have looked at me like I have two heads, so it is entirely possible I’m the idiot, here.

Theoretically, there is an argument to be made for making it clear that you’re interested in representing fiction involving same sex relationships or championing “diverse voices” or “underrepresented narratives”. The problem is that if everyone says that, then it either doesn’t need to be said at all anymore, or some of you are lying. I actually think in addition to that, it would be helpful to know which agents aren’t looking for “underrepresented voices”. It would actually be a big time saver for an agent to put in their profile, “I’m not the right person to champion your novel about a same sex relationship”. No one will do that, but I’m going on the record saying I would appreciate it. Then again, maybe I don’t want to know just how many agents, deep in their hearts, won’t give the time of day to a manuscript about lesbians.

Funny enough, with all I said above, “lesbian”, I think, is not considered the right kind of diverse. If I was willing to label this novel as QUEER or SAPPHIC or probably even WLW, that may give it an edge. All three of those descriptors still leave a little bit of wiggle room where you don’t have to go full lesbian, you know? Because you never want to go full lesbian. I feel like the closest I get to writing out of spite (not something I would ever recommend) is how often I use the word “lesbian”. Even though few women use the word these days, I will often trade off that branch of realism in my work to replace it with a world where everything else is the same, except now people actually say it. It’s not even close to the whole reason why my work doesn’t gain traction. But I do think it’s one of many little things about my writing that makes it unpalatable.

And the thing is, when I’m querying, I have to weigh my equally unpalatable options. It’s not like an agent reads my entire manuscript first thing. She’ll read the query letter first, and then maybe the synopsis and sample pages. In the query letter especially, not only have I already done all the work of writing the damn book, but now I have to market it, as well, and outside pornhub, the word “lesbian” doesn’t market well. But I use it anyway, because there are some things I’m not willing to concede on, and watering down my description of a lesbian romance into something more generic like “queer” or “sapphic” is one of them. I’m a writer, and despite my own personal tendency toward the occasional highfalutin prose, I believe in using efficient, clear, direct language when it’s appropriate, and “lesbian” is always efficient, clear, direct, and appropriate when you’re, y’know, talking about lesbians.

I wonder if I would’ve gotten more bites if I was less stringent on this with Don’t Worry. I’m no query letter expert, but I actually think Don’t Worry and novel 2’s query letters are pretty good. However, they do both allude to the fact that there is lesbianism contained within. My slight hope is that with novel 2, I was pretty cautious about how much a) unpalatable conversations about womanhood and b) lesbian sex it contained, again, keeping in mind the mainstream market, so, morally I feel unsettled, but from a marketing perspective, I am mutedly optimistic about my prospects. At least compared to Don’t Worry, which, based on how hard it flopped, isn’t actually saying all that much. “Lesbian” doesn’t even appear until almost the end of novel 2’s query, even though the f/f coupling is alluded to in the first sentence. Also, unlike my dear Wren Daley, the protagonist of novel 2 is not getting her pussy out every three pages, so I do think that can only help my chances, microscopic as they still are.

In my query letters, I have considered leaning more into the diversity hire aspect of it. But that’s just like… mortifying. And not the type of mortifying where I would feel like a better, stronger person for overcoming it. To even entertain the idea of sweetening the pot by suggesting I’m just a smol queer neurospicy bean 🥺 is deeply heinous to me. Hm, actually, even typing out the phrase “neurospicy” to make fun of it has given me hives. Either way, those things have nothing to do with the book! Or at least have nothing to do with the book beyond what Emma Donoghue or Tana French or Stephen King or Dean Koontz or Gillian Flynn’s personal hang-ups and identities have to do with theirs. It’s similar to filling out job applications that ask you probing questions about your identity. Like, sure, I suppose I could leverage that (and I have tried that in the past, and I’m pretty sure it has never once helped me get a job, lol, maybe this is all just sour grapes). Maybe I’m just crazy, excuse me, neurospicy, but does anyone else find that deeply condescending and infantilizing? Sure, I couldn’t have gotten there on my own merits before, but now that it benefits you socially and financially to showcase ~diversity~ in your industry, you have so kindly lowered the bar for me. Except for the fact that the only reason I needed the bar lowered in the first place is because you were holding it from the top rung of a ladder.

Between writing the previous paragraph and this one, I submitted a query referring to myself as an “underrepresented voice” because that was the only thing the agent mentioned in her bio that could feasibly be a reason she would be interested in my manuscript, and kind of the only thing she mentioned she was interested in representing at all. I could’ve not submitted at all, but unfortunately, I don’t really have the luxury of being picky. Querying is a volume game and a luck game, and I can only control one of those factors. And um, I hated it. Are there authors out there who feel no qualms marketing themselves over their story? In the real world, I would agree that a real live person is much more important than a story. In the world where we all want to tell fictional stories and that’s what we’re here to do, I’d argue the story is pretty important, and the author, if you want to get poetic about it, is little more than a vessel for that story.

I understand that condescension and infantilization was not the intent of the OWNVOICES and similar movements. Opening the doors for more varied viewpoints, in a vacuum, is something that should always be welcomed. The thing is, we conceived of this approach in a world that demands profit at the expense of everything and everyone else. When it’s no longer profitable to be “queer”, people and organizations will flee from the concept like a house on fire. Once “queer” as an identity becomes less sellable, and the pendulum swings once more, don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya. It’s kind of like the phenomenon where you are constantly sold How To Be A Good Woman by the world around you; make-up, empowerment, tampons, cleaning products, make-up, make-up, clothing, period underwear, sexy period underwear, skincare, lingerie, make-up, clothing, motherhood, make-up, skincare, razors, bikinis, make-up, mommy makeovers, jewelry, pregnancy tests, rape whistles, make-up, high heels, detox tea, essential oils, drag make-up, natural make-up, “clean” make-up, “sustainable” make-up, baddie make-up, coquette make-up, “it’s art not misogyny” make-up, and make-up. The funniest thing about this is how much of that list applies to “queer” people as well. They will sell womanhood to women until the sun explodes, because women aren’t going anywhere. “Queer”, as it pertains to a lifestyle and marketing ploy unattached to any actual same-sex relationships, is not inherent, and therefore will eventually be labelled a trend, and as all trends do, it will pass. In a way it’s good, because eventually, you will be left alone. Women are just fucked indefinitely, I think.

Hawking my art is a forever bad feeling, and it’s not just me who feels this way. Straight women, men, white people, black people, disabled people, minority or majority groups, anyone who truly loves their craft and wants to practice it and share it with others will eventually have to succumb, somewhere down the line, to a purse strings holder, whether that’s an agent, an employer, an algorithm, or even just the preferences of the audience they’ve already cultivated. An artist who wants to do their art for a living will always have their hands tied by this conundrum. If you are independently wealthy, you may get away with it. But even then, unless you finance everything yourself, including channels to share your craft with others, you are beholden to your audience’s whims. Like, maybe people just aren’t that interested.

More likely, you are a regular person who wants to spend your life following your artistic passion, and you can’t, unless you can make money from it. And to make money from it, you need to do what the people who give you money (or the people who make it possible for you to get your art into the hands of people who can sell it on your behalf) want you to do. And what those people want you to do is what will make money. And the way I, personally, can do this, is by telling all the agents playing this game that I am an underrepresented voice, regardless of what that voice says.

Except, we go deeper, because it does matter what that voice says. This will differ depending on which marginalized group badge(s) you carry, but for all of them, there is a script. You’ll see agents who are looking for unique and fresh stories and perspectives, while in the same breath asking for underrepresented voices. The problem with this is that it’s hard to offer unique and fresh stories when there is already a script in front of you. It’s not written down anywhere. No one will admit that to you. But it goes pretty hand in hand with how we discuss social justice issues today; do not step outside the party line. As a member of X marginalized group, do what you’re supposed to do and think what you’re supposed to think and say what you’re supposed to say, follow the teleprompter and no one gets hurt. It’s an exhausting, back breaking way to live, and we’re all swept up in it.

I am trying, in my own way, to leave this kind of thinking behind, and guess what? That’s also exhausting and back breaking, because the people you leave behind think you’re a traitor, and everyone else on the other side looks like an evil alien with an upside down belief system who may or may not say deeply inane things without an iota of self-reflection or shame or awareness, and the entire time you have to reconcile the fact that all of these dumbasses, the ones you left behind and the ones you’re now surrounded by, no matter how dumb or how ass, are the people you’re stuck with forever on this spinning rock hurtling through space. And at the same time, all those people are looking at you and thinking just about the same thing.

I am not on some heroic journey of reclaiming my individuality. I am on the deeply unheroic journey of a salesperson testing out the different ways in which she can psychologically manipulate people into purchasing her wares. And one of those ways, maybe, if everyone’s being honest, which they probably aren’t, which is infuriating and confusing enough on its own, is by selling myself as a smol queer neurospicy bean 🥺 devoid of any personality beyond what she sees in Instagram infographics, who will then go on, if she’s successful, to encourage others to do exactly the same thing; say what sells. do what sells. be what sells.

People are still making good art out there. I’ve seen it. It’s possible. The numbers are not in my favour, or anyone’s. But I guess that’s why you hear, anytime an author/artist gets interviewed, how they had to get rejected eleventy-million times before they got accepted. There are a lot of dumbasses out there, and only one you, who is also a dumbass, and we’re all trying, somehow, some way, to engage with the world around us in a meaningful and fulfilling way.

It’s a strange world we’ve built, or maybe not very strange at all, that we’ve managed to create a system where your marginalization is only as valid as the amount of profit it can generate for someone else. What a timely example as we push forward into June and all the retailers are stuffing their shelves with rainbow-themed garbage.

If I hear back from the agent who was seemingly solely interested in “underrepresented voices” I will let you know. Somehow, though, I doubt we’d be a good fit.

curing cancer with the power of love: clementine & jude

I never wrote an autopsy for baby, give me it. I write autopsies for every original work I’ve completed, because I’m pretty narcissistic, but I didn’t write one for Baby. Probably I didn’t get around to it because my life was just a few months short of imploding at the time of posting, so I was a bit busy, and as a result, forgive myself for this oversight. I didn’t even have this blog yet. Hell, I was still on PST, god’s worst time zone.

I also might not have written one for Baby because it’s not really worth writing one for, but still, content’s content. And it’s pretty fun! If you’re into lighthearted infidelity. Actually, at the time of writing, and if I recall correctly (editor’s note: I may not, as you will soon learn), I suspected I was also, in fact, being cheated on a little, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that played a part in it, too. For what it’s worth, I never got confirmation either way, so that will forever remain one of life’s fun little mysteries.

My own personal experiences aside, Clem & Jude, despite their light touch and somewhat insignificant percentage of my bibliography (love em to death, but still, at 13k, our time together was brief), were, overall, an incredibly significant milestone on my writing journey. They were the first ones! They were the first weird freak lesbians that were mine. I had my practice runs with f/f Wangxian for sure, and there are obvious pieces of my previous fandom proclivities on full display, but at the end of the day, Clementine and Jude were my first true original characters and IP. And that’s pretty cool.

Actually. Wait. What the fuck am I talking about. That’s a complete and utter lie, lol. I wrote Don’t Worry About It first. Scratch the victory speech. My sense of time is incoherent. I wrote Don’t Worry in 2022, and Judentine in late 2023. I had conceived this blog post so fully in my head as talking about Judentine as my first loves, damn. My memory… is bad.

Oh well! If nothing else, I am at least sure I haven’t written a blog post about Baby until this moment. Based on my ao3 chronology, it looks like I wrote Baby first, because I was still querying Don’t Worry at the time, which was also a likely cause for my momentary detachment from reality above. So, I suppose, as far as you, the reader, is concerned, I did actually write Baby first. Context is strange like that. Time is strange like that. It feels like I should have written Baby first, because it’s not that good, and Don’t Worry IS good. Then again, they’re very different beasts.

I don’t remember anything about the early stages of Baby. Other than the infidelity ping above, nothing rings a bell. I did revisit it the other day, though, and despite its rough edges, it’s kind of a hoot, in its own insane way. There are some excellent insults, and it always delights me when there are excellent insults in things. I like when people argue in a way that is both cruel and funny. There’s just something about how those two not-quite-opposites temper each other that makes it so compelling. Personally, I’m a big fan of Clementine being referred to as a Reese Witherspoon dupe, if Reese Witherspoon was mid. I also quite enjoy Clementine’s deeply inappropriate, “If I was interested in therapy, I would’ve majored in fine arts,” zinger. Along with Clementine suggesting her infidelity is OK because MLK cheated on his wife, too. Not only is she a bit of a rude and offensive mess in general, but she also acts this way toward her future wife. I mean, she does indirectly call Jude a cow at one point. Which, unfortunately, is also quite funny. To me, anyway. Sometimes, I wish I was the type of person who just yelled insults when I got mad. So long as you’re trading barbs with someone who can take it, it seems pretty therapeutic. In a deeply unstable way, Clementine is a bit aspirational to me. She gets angry, so she acts angry. What a straightforward and honest way to live your life.

Clementine, overall, was such a joy to write. The concept of “the worst person you know but she’s going to cure cancer” is so simple, so elegant, and so perfectly ripe for a dumb romp like this. I’ve talked a lot before, maybe on this blog, maybe just in my head, about how much I like playing with the balance of “good” and “bad” in my characters. “Good” and “bad” of course being almost entirely undefinable and ever-changing, because that’s a much more realistic portrayal of humans than any type hero or villain. There’s been “edgy” content in recent years that skews grey, but when I talk about this balance, I don’t really mean it in such a dramatic or egregious way. I mean in the much more mundane way that regular people are usually too busy living their own lives to worry so much about how “good” or “bad” they are. For example: telling the woman you’re on a first date with and don’t know very well that you’re sorry, but it won’t work out, all because the ex you’re obsessed with just fingered you in the washroom. Overall, you didn’t waste that much of her time. The emotional investment was quite low. But also, it’s pretty lame to let your ex finger you in the bathroom when you’re on a date with someone else. The good/bad balance is more exaggerated in Baby than it usually is in my works, because it’s just a dumb comedy romp, but still. There are echoes of it. But also, Clementine should stop cheating on her girlfriends.

Jude’s “artist” dialogue is so bad. Like, it’s bad on purpose, but it’s still bad. Which is fun. Even more fun when Clementine eats it up. There is something so heinous about a grown woman calling another grown woman “angel baby”. Some may argue it’s too much. I would say, correct. And then not change anything at all.

Zoey’s great. Much too good for the narrative she appears in. She’ll reel one in eventually, have no fear. Objectively, she is nothing more than the straight woman archetype. Subjectively, she’s not even in it that much, but she’s great. As a woman who often struggles to speak with conviction, I enjoy living vicariously through deadpan snarkers like Zoey. She’s not mean, she’s just direct. So should we all, Zoey! It’s a cruel joke of the universe that characters like her are relegated to lesbian best friend status, but tragically, she and her sisters are just not messy enough.

The tenses are a little crazy. That was me dipping my toe into any amount of past tense after years of not writing it and shaking off some serious rust. Both my novels are in present tense. My other, shorter original works are all past tense. This is subjective, but for me, I needed to move away from present tense because it was too reminiscent of fan fiction. But here, it’s messy. Especially in a story that doesn’t even break 15k. Doesn’t help that the first part of it is framed as a kind of weird, kind of fun, very visual-medium-esque story within a story as Clementine relays the drama of the night previous to Zoey. It’s like the written version of that trope in TV/movies where a character is telling a story, but then it just flashes back to the events as opposed to having the character narrate the whole sequence of events. Which actually is a lot easier to convey when there’s a visual component to your story. When it’s strictly text-based, things get a little hairy. But I tried. It was a fun idea.

The entire NOW/THEN framing device of Baby is lazy. No two ways about it. I don’t care for NOW/THEN narratives. It was just a storytelling shortcut I took because I wanted readers to be invested quickly, and it’s not a long story. This is also a bad fan fiction habit. I don’t like this tope in visual media, either. Make it worth my while to stick around as opposed to trying to reel me in with a filmmaker’s bait and switch. In my defense, the NOWs and THENs of Baby are much less exciting, and with less connective tissue. Wait. Maybe that’s a bad thing. Again, it’s just a way of filling in the blanks that encourages brain-candy reading, not real connection or depth or meaning. Which, for a 13k sex romp, is like, whatever. Guilty as charged. [editor’s note after I’ve already published this blog post: literally did not remember I already wrote an entire paragraph about my dislike of NOW/THEN storytelling in the Come this here July debrief, but hey, at least I’m consistent]

My real first with Judentine was the threesome. Threesomes are a big thing in fandom world, at least the corners I skulked around in, but I never cared for them. If I ever conceived of writing a threesome, my plans were usually surrounding how bad and icky it would go for the main pairing. It’s kind of a litmus test for my fictional couples. Who’s damaged enough to try a threesome with the love of their life plus some rando even though the idea turns them inside out with grief/jealousy/rage? I suppose when it’s out of only bad feelings, you could probably make an argument for most. Judentine are the exception to that. Sure, the way they do threesomes is still freaky and possessive and weird, but I do think they actually have fun. I mean, not really in the one that made it onto the page. But after they get married. Like. It’s almost their way of proving how obsessed they are with each other. It’s like, yeah I want my pussy eaten, but I also want to be kissing my wife at the same time, and Clementine is a scientist, and not too bad at math, either, so she probably figured out the trigonometry of that desire pretty early on. Meanwhile, Jude would say some pretentious purple prose about the female form—never purpler than what she’d say about Clem, of course— and off the three of them go. Clementine & Jude and her.

If I may, I made quite an iconic Wangxian tweet many years ago. It was something like, POV: you’re wangxian’s third. and the image was a closed door. This is Judentine, except the door is open and you’re between Clementine’s legs. But also the door is still closed. But it’s also open. But also closed. If that makes sense. Am I making sense? Do I ever? I suppose the point is moot, in that case.

As insubstantial as everything about Baby is, the core “trope” of science vs art is something I’m really interested in, and often debate with myself. Which I suppose makes sense, because what is writing, especially writing an argument between two characters, if not having an extensive argument with yourself? At some point in the future, I expect to return to this conflict in a more serious way. No idea in what capacity, yet, but it’s not like there’s no meat left on the bone. There’s a lot to explore. Of note; in my heart, I’m a Clementine. A hard-line skeptic. In Baby, Jude and her dumb artistic license win the argument. Not that it’s an argument you can “win”. You know what I mean.

Clementine was an early addition to my club of friendless lesbians. She had Zoey there for a bit, but what can you do when you ooze dyke hormones and captivate every lesbian woman you meet, fuck her, and then cheat on her because you’re obsessed with the one lesbian who (supposedly) doesn’t want you back? Clementine was also early to the party as a serious pheromone-haver. Wren has other attractive qualities, for sure, but she’s also definitely a pheromone-haver. Same with protagonist of novel 2; yes, she has other stuff going for her, but she apparently just can’t help herself when it comes to emitting “you will fall in love with me” vibes. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a weird self-fulfillment fantasy where I want to be the one who stinks up the place with “women want me” pheromones. Or maybe it’s just a straight up fantasy where I want to meet the woman with the crazy lesbian pheromones in real life. Not sure. If I ever determine which one it actually is, I’ll report back. Although I probably won’t, actually, because I’ll be too busy getting married to her to do so. Sorry.

I like that they’re both kind of shit. That goes way back in the saltyfeathers lore, the balancing of the scales of shittiness within a pairing. They don’t have to be exactly even, but characters need to give as good as they get. I don’t like steamrollers. Lack of backbone is an interesting trait, lots to dig into, but just not really my bag. I don’t want steamrollers and I don’t want devils dating angels. Again, it’s just a little too silly for me. A little too costume from Spirit Halloween for me. It’s just kind of fun that for the majority of the narrative, Jude, despite her pretentious, blasé attitude, seems like Clementine’s ultimate victim until it’s revealed that she only refused to marry Clem in the first place because it didn’t fit into her vision of herself as a tortured artist. A tortured artist who got her big break because she 2012 hipster’d all over American Gothic a decade ago on DeviantArt. Aw. I can’t stand either of them, I say, with the utmost fondness.

The climax is ridiculous. And weirdly abstract, but I suppose that’s the point since it takes place at an art exhibit. In the real world, imagine if, without warning, you came face to face with an artistic rendering of your own pussy getting eaten out. No matter how good, that’s like, 911-worthy. In fake-world, it’s the perfect stupid ending to a perfectly stupid lesbian sex romp with infidelity. Actually, I think the greatest act of love Clementine performs for Jude in this story is not finally admitting her feelings, but the fact that she hung in there during Jude’s Grounding phase. Her scientist brain would have been screaming, but maybe her lesbian brain was like, well, at least she has nice feet. Or maybe it would be funnier if Jude didn’t have nice feet, just regular feet, or even weird feet, and still, Clem stuck around! I wouldn’t have. Do you know what grounding is? I’ve gotten ads for “grounding bedsheets” on youtube within the last few weeks, too. And now the fact that I’ve written it out multiple times in this post probably means I won’t be able to get away from it for another few months at the very least.

Honestly, the most notable thing about Baby is that in terms of posting things on ao3, that was indeed the final nail in the coffin of my participation in fandom. Which is both strange and meaningful and heavy and at the same time ended up being something of a lateral move, because all I do now is fandomize my own work and characters, in my head, by myself. Talk about being a friendless lesbian.

Clementine and Jude were not my first, despite what some deeply misinformed parties will tell you. They were a very quiet sophomore exercise in fandom-ish, silly, romp-esque writing that, despite my terrible memory, I assume I really needed to escape to at that particular time in my life. I don’t revisit them the same way I do some of my other works, but then again, the one time I did, just the other day, I felt enough lingering endearment that I was inspired to write an entire blog post about them and re-write my memory of their conception, so, y’know. That’s something. As they say, you never forget your first. Or your second.

done finally

Took a bit of a break. In my defense, during that break, I finished book 2.

Feeling a bit dead inside, which I think is pretty par for the course. Dreading querying like a porcupine quill to the pussy. Very tired and unsure and what-is-art-anyway about it all.

Here’s the thing, though. Somewhere in this blog I said my deadline for book 2 was spring 2025. Guess what time it is? Spring 2025. It’s not actually that impressive that I stuck to a writing deadline, I’m not notably terrible with those, but I am in fact going to cling to this W with white knuckles. The fact that I managed to scrape together a book 2 after book 1 hit the ground with little more than a dull thud and a puff of dust is pathetic… and mortifying… but also pretty admirable. No one wanted it or asked for it, and I’m doing it anyway. I am once again hopped up on hubris, ready to peddle my wares with manic intent in the marketplace of free ideas that has already told me not to let the door hit me on the way out once.

And now I’m back, tired as ever, with a slightly more marketable idea in a slightly more readable package, with a slightly higher chance of catching an agent’s attention… maybe.

I expect much of this blog’s focus for the next few months to be on the world of querying. I wasn’t really querying Don’t Worry anymore by the time I started this blog last May, had already given up that dream, so what a perfect opportunity this go-round to capture just how terrible and ego-shattering and mind-numbing and existentially depressing the querying process is. The publishing world, even to someone who’s barely scraped the surface like me, is not for the faint of heart. Once you start to dig in on things like what actually is genre and what actually is a “good book” and is that the same as a “sellable book” and if a novel gets written in a forest and no one is around to read it, is it even a novel in the first place… you can imagine how hairy it gets. Plus, no point in pretending otherwise, I’m still licking my wounds over Don’t Worry. The thing is, though, you either keep writing or you don’t. Some days I feel like I’m at “don’t” status, but not fully, not yet. Round two, comeback kid, can’t have a sophomore slump if you never had a freshman hit, right?

It’s difficult to parse at this time how successful I feel novel 2 is. And when I say successful, I mean judging it on my own storytelling abilities, not any kind of mainstream marketability. The fact that I conceived this novel with marketability in mind absolutely hurt the final product, but I’m not sure how much, and I’m also not sure how much I was able to eventually buff the majority of that out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, what I think are the best and most interesting parts of it are likely the parts that will turn a lot of agents and potential readers off. It is interesting, though. I think it has a unique perspective that, while somewhat controversial, is still quite empathetic to the overall human experience. Then again, I would say the same about Don’t Worry, and look where that got me.

I like the characters a lot. This novel is populated with complex, weird, unsavory, sexy, competent, crazy, unpalatable women, most of whom are kind of bad and mean. But I really love all of them and their difficulties and their rough edges and how sometimes they are bad people, and some of them feel bad about that, and some of them don’t. Again, this isn’t actually that different from Don’t Worry. I’ve said before that writing DNA is very strong, and I am making an excellent case for that claim here. There’s even a rom-com-dram-vom! If that ain’t classic saltyfeathers, I don’t know what is.

This isn’t meant to be a full update. Last time I spoke into the yellow void I left on such an intensely dour note, even by my generally dour standards, so I did want to get something marginally more uplifting and exciting front and center, now that I have something marginally more uplifting and exciting to share.

Similar to Don’t Worry, I’m planning on giving novel 2 about a year in the query pan. Between now and then, however, I do expect to keep writing short stories/novellas, probably more similar in tone to Rat on a Horse than Come This Here July. I’m sure at some point, novel 3 will begin to crystalize in my mind and then that will take precedence. Until then, expect to find me here in the yellow void as well as writing what is likely going to be more entries in the woefully underpopulated “goofy lesbian erotica” genre on ao3.

open wide

Quite often now, and as my time wore on in ye olde fandom days, I debated with myself the degree to which I was producing content as opposed to just talking to people. One of the biggest reasons I finally left social media was because I could no longer stand how much it felt like I was constantly putting on a show, desperate for roses thrown onstage at my feet. Once I realized that I wasn’t sharing things to share them, but instead curated, cultivated thoughts and opinions to encourage people to click the little heart icon and give me a never-good-enough shot of dopamine, I thought, huh, I’m not entirely convinced that incentivizing human social interaction in this way is a fantastic idea. And this wasn’t just on my fandom/public accounts either. It was the same on my private account, in my private online friend group. I’ve always been a bit of a people-pleaser— I don’t mean that as a humble brag, it’s a fairly insidious personality trait—and my time on social media and in fandom exacerbated that already unfortunate aspect of me to a pretty nasty degree. Please people; reap social rewards. Ad infinitum.

And now I have a blog. And I try to balance what I’m interested in vs what I imagine a reader might be interested in when I post on it. And I write original fiction. And I try to balance what I’m interested in vs what I imagine a reader might be interested in when I do that, too. And I try to be true to myself as a person and a writer in both avenues, while also maintaining an emotionally healthy distance between myself and the mostly anonymous users who have access to what I produce, meaning, yes, there is still an element of performance to it all. And I try to be OK with that. I try to accept that from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we fall asleep, there is an element of performance to our lives.

Where the rub comes in is that the more of myself I allowed to free-roam, the more “me” I tried to be, both here in this blog and in my writing, the less people cared. Which is a tough pill to swallow. When I performed, I got roses. When I didn’t, it wasn’t even that the roses got replaced with tomatoes. It was just the fact that no one showed up. I’m pretty certain there’s a few people just outside the door listening in, but for the most part, it’s just me and yellow here in the Squarespace void.

For what it’s worth, it’s not like I’m blaming or accusing anyone or feel entitled to anyone’s attention. When I was deep in fandom mode, if a writer I liked started writing for a different fandom/pairing, or even, gasp, branching out into original work, my general (and in the privacy of my own head) response was, cool! [close tab]. Sometimes, I even stumbled across the blogs (!) of writers I liked, but because they never talked about the reason I personally cared about their existence (their fanfiction), it was exactly the same thing. Great! [select big red X in upper right hand corner]. Fandom, for all it breathlessly strives to be an endlessly welcoming and socially progressive bastion of peace and love and Superwholock, is also incredibly mercenary.

I am trying very hard to exercise self-possession, here. As interest in what I have to offer dwindles, I am logically aware that the spaces I share my work in are not the right fit for said work. It’s not that the work isn’t good, it’s just not finding the right audience. However, I am also aware that the potential audience for my work, wherever it is, is deeply niche, and any fantasies I have of speaking to a larger human truth of being alive that are universally resonant will never come to be. Pop culture tells me to embrace being a weirdo, but then we all made fun of Jughead when he did exactly that.

Complete sidebar, but surely, that speech was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, right? Everyone decided it was funnier if Riverdale wasn’t in on the joke because a meme isn’t as good if it’s on purpose, but like… pretty sure they knew exactly what they were doing… anyway…

So here I am, right? Baring my soul as much as I feel I can pseudo-publicaly, and… crickets. I was certainly no fandom celebrity in the olden days, but people engaged with my work, and talked about it, and liked it. I produced; they consumed. It feels good when people like your work. It feels bad when they don’t. It feels even worse when you decide to let that go to your head, start cutting chunks out of yourself under the misguided assumption that people are interested, and not only are they not interested, but now I have pieces of myself missing with nothing to show for it. Come This Here July was maybe the most personal thing I’ve ever written. I’d like to be clear; no one owes me engagement just because of that fact. It was more the unpleasant realization that maybe I really am alone in how I feel. Maybe the facets of human experience I explored in that narrative don’t resonate with others near as much as I originally thought. I’ve talked before about how one of the few ways I can connect with people is through my writing, but that’s dependent on what I create being of interest or relevant to them at all. Connections are two way streets. If no one’s on the other end, it’s not going to happen. And then I’m left standing on my own, like a fool, ass in full view.

When I was in fandom, on social media, in a relationship, I could fake my way through my inability to connect with others pretty well. It didn’t matter that none of those things were good for me; they still gave me the tools to bury this significant personal deficiency instead of ever meaningfully addressing it. And now I have none of those things, and no apparent ability to patch this hole in my personhood, and I’m going to level with you with a bald, semi-mortifying admission; I am so, so fucking lonely as a result.

I did it to myself. I literally wrote myself into a corner. I made sure so thoroughly that people liked what I produced, with no regard for who I am. I remember the days on tumblr of people preaching that You Are Enough Come As You Are. But I wasn’t. And I’m not. Everywhere I go I lead with what I can offer. What I can produce. The content I can create. Can I be the nicest? Or the most amenable? Or the most competent or conflict-averse? Can I be a listening ear? What can I be for you? What can I give you? Or make you? Or create for you? Because whatever I actually am underneath all that fluff is nothing. The person I am, my “true self” as much as such a thing exists, which honestly I don’t think is much at all, is nothing. Because I never worked on her. It was never about her.

It’s actually the perfect internal tension for a character, one who is deeply lonely, but also doesn’t like people, and people don’t like her. And this is also the perfect example of what I do, and why I will never be enough on my own— because I can always create something better, more interesting, more entertaining, more everything. I can always do it better in my head. I can always do it better because it’s not about me. I can always do it better because the world in my head, while touching every part of me, simultaneously doesn’t affect me at all. What I have to offer as a real living breathing human person completely separate from my ability to create is not an impressive list. In real life, with the people closest to me, I’m difficult, and persnickety, and moody, and morose, and melancholy, and hypocritical, and depressed, and anxious, and quiet, and flippant, and sarcastic, and high strung, and you know what? The maxim rings true. I am weird. I’m a weirdo. I even wear hats a lot.

I don’t really know how to exist without producing content. I can’t conceive of a world where coming as I am is enough. Where just existing is enough. And, unfortunately, my experiences, both online and in the real world, seem to confirm this belief. People consumed my content. People will not consume my personality. And it’s not even like I want them to. Maybe I don’t know what I want them to do. Maybe it all circles back to the apparent axiom of my life that happiness is not a possibility for me, that fun and enjoyment are not emotions that are accessible to me… ever, really. And how could I possibly know what I want, or what I want from others, if the act of ‘wanting’ feels so deeply alien to me?

Do I really want people to like me? Because I don’t like them. Do I really want to like other people? Because most of the time, they exhaust or annoy me. Do I really want to publish a book, when it likely means shelving what I actually want to write about? Would I even want to publish a book where I had free creative reign when no one would ever read it? I swear I want a house, sometimes it’s the only thing I can really hold onto in terms of a concrete ‘want’ in my life… but do I really? Once I actually get a house, and the dream is realized, and I realize it is not, in fact, a dream, but just a house, exciting, but still reality, and something I have to wake up for every day… do I really? Do I really want that snack, when I know it’s going to make my stomach hurt? Do I want to take that sleeping pill, that will help me fall asleep after weeks of not being able to, but also make me feel hungover and shitty all day tomorrow? What about going back to weed or alcohol or hell, taking up gambling, anything to help me power through? Well, no, because I swear I want a house and all of those things will drain my bank account, which I need to get the house I so desperately want. I swear I want friends. And a wife. And a job I love. And maybe a pet, somewhere down the line. And people who love not just what I create, but me, too.

At the same time, I don’t know if I want anything at all. In my free time, I think, what do I want to do? And I don’t have an answer, really. I have to do something, because I’m sentient. But most of the time, it comes down to what I should do, or have to do. Or whatever will pass the time. More importantly, though, wanting things is a bad idea. Because if I want something, something real, and scary, and meaningful, and it doesn’t work out, you know, kind of like trying to get a novel published, well, then I’m left standing on my own, like a fool, ass in full view.

Part of the power of writing, and sorry, because this is obvious, but it’s that you can do whatever you want. You can write that one-in-a-million or never-gonna-happen scenario of Carolyn Mary Miller and Dorothy Mildred Francis falling in love despite the odds, despite Carolyn’s suicidal tendencies, despite Dorothy’s bad personality, despite everything, and still, they stay together because I say they do. It’s kind of universally accepted that playing God is a bad idea, but, like, that’s what writers do. I can come up with a million justifications and re-framings to make something bad something good, or something impossible, possible. If I was more well adjusted, it probably wouldn’t matter, but I’m not, so that means when my real life isn’t looking so hot, I can just write myself out of it. Doesn’t change anything materially. It’s just a band-aid. It’s a weird ass coping mechanism, and one I doubt can be CBT’d out of.

This blog post is content. I feel pressure to keep the few readers I have, and to keep readers, you need to produce content. I pay for this site. It’s not a crazy amount of money, but I still need to be able to justify the expense to myself when otherwise I’m pinching the majority of my pennies— I’m planning on buying a house, didn’t you know, because I want one so bad! I am, in a way, monetizing my struggles. But I’m also reaching out. But I’m also not, because I don’t make any money from this, and I feel conflicted about posting this type of… content… at all, especially because I have to weigh what type of posts do better than others, even when the numbers are so low it feels like it doesn’t matter at all, except it does, because if I ever manage to make any money writing or producing content or being sad publicly online, well, isn’t that all just going right into the house fund, which I want, and am saving for, and probably will fix all my problems once I finally get it, and finally, I feel, as I so often do when I feel any emotion at all, like I’m showing my whole, entire ass.

It is so weird, when you think about it, how we’re expected to package ourselves up online. There are expectations in the real world, of course, of who and how you should be. Online, though, it just gets even weirder. And being a person, but one who mostly learned how to be one online, feels kind of like a dog that’s been raised by a cat. Like, I kind of mostly get it? If you saw me from a distance, you’d be like, yeah, that tracks. But up close, and for any extended period of time, the disconnect becomes obvious. The fact that I’m just not quite all there registers. Doors and windows shutter on both sides. And then we part ways, and I imagine another world where the conversation continued, and we became best friends, and embarked on adventures together, and I was funny, and enjoyable to be around, and open, and likable, and lovable. And over and over, that doesn’t happen for me, and it can only not-happen so many times, I can only fail at hail-and-well-met-ing so many times before it does begin to weigh on me. I can only reach out, and have my hand slapped away, or ignored, or politely rebuked, or choose to drop it myself, before I’m reduced to crying it out in my car on my daily commute, as if being intensely sad will somehow make it happen faster, or fix me, or make me better at all.

From eighteen to twenty-eight, I could probably count on two hands the amount of times I cried. Not because I was so happy and had no reason to; more because I was nothing at all. The last year and change forcing me to become something instead of nothing has not been easy. The search for substance, and opinion, and backbone, and desire, has been almost entirely composed of steps backward. I’m so tripped up and tired and lonely and sick of this world and everyone in it, while also begging them to spare me a glance and I… don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know how to reconcile this. I guess for as long as I’m willing to pay it, I have the slight comfort of this blog to vent, or parse, or lecture, or whine. I have the grace of a solo commute to cry on. And word docs to play around in. And other stories in my mind to retreat to.

Years and years of being high-functioning online has taught me that I am not allowed to post something so maudlin without also including some kind of PSA about self-care or therapy or medication or [insert additional overbearing and overzealous generic wellness advice here]. I don’t have any to offer. I don’t even have a joke or some rueful mirth in the hopper. I am simply tired. I am disappointed that nothing has moved for me, writing-career-wise. I am sad that the most people cared about what I had to offer was when I was working from someone else’s IP, and I am sad that I care about what others think at all. I feel ashamed and stressed about the fact that I am trying to monetize so many parts of my life. I am struggling to come to terms with the fact that I am the way I am, and that is unlikely to change, and yet, at the same time, I don’t seem to have any idea of who I am at all.

I am lonely and sad. The best I can do at this time is say that if you read this far, you probably share at least some of my feelings. Staggered as it is, meager as it is, it’s two people, feeling similarly, on either end of what could conceivably be called a connection. It’s not much. But it’s not nothing.

word count

According to my ao3 settings, since I joined in 2013, I have posted a total of 1,529,923 words. Depending on the veracity of my sources, this is 500,000 words north of the combined word total of the Harry Potter series, 200,000 words south of the current word count of A Song of Ice and Fire series, 1,000,000 words more than the Twilight series, 15 times more words than Anne of Green Gables, and 30,000 times the word count of The Great Gatsby. Approximately.

Does that help? No, not at all?

2013 was 13 years ago. Averaged out, I’ve produced 115,000 words a year since then. This averages out to 9500 words a month, which averages out to 315 words a day. Approximately.

Does that help? Actually, it might.

Up to “might” at the end of the last sentence, this blog post is 127 words. A “standard” paragraph is approximately 100-200 words long. So, three-ish paragraphs a day, and you could write a full novel and then some in a year.

[Quick disclaimer, I am leaving myself 90-100k of wiggle room for novel two, which was written last year, and is currently in the editing stages but without an ending. It was just easier to use the ao3 total, but even then, adding 100k onto my ao3 total only brings the daily average word count up to (approximately) 337. Minimal difference.]

I was asked at one point to talk about being a “prolific” writer. I understand why it looks that way. Broken all the way down to a daily total of 315 words, though? A little less impressive, but I would hope helpful to anyone who feels like they struggle to get words down on the page. And keep in mind, an average is an average. There are days I write no words at all. There are days I bang out 3000 in no time flat, but let me tell you right now, those are the far end of the spectrum. Most days are like pulling teeth. Most days are a sentence or a few paragraphs and then, somehow, I just cannot continue for one more second. It’s not like I’m making up new words as I write, but still, I am making up the words as I write them. I am creating something from nothing, and that’s hard. It’s hard to create for an extended period of time. I can’t even imagine being pregnant. Nine months of creating without a break. Shudder to think.

Not even to mention that numbers are numbers, but admin is admin. Writing is full of admin; planning, plotting, scheduling, organizing, time management, grammar, syntax, flow, revisions, characterization, themes, and on… and on… and on… I don’t know how much time it takes to write 1.5 million words as the crow flies, but I can certainly tell you that’s not an accurate reflection of how much time it took to craft those 1.5 million words. Pretentious? Sure. But also true. Philosophically and artistically, you could certainly argue the amount of supposed “craft” in many of my works. Doesn’t change how long I spent thinking about/writing/editing/scoping/everything-ing the thing.

If quantity is all you’re going for, well, nothing is stopping you from typing “curtains” 60,000 times over until you have a novel-length document full of curtains. I don’t want to lull you into a false sense of security that if you write 315 words a day for a year, you will automatically have a novel at the end of it. Actually, you’re just going to have a lot more work waiting for you. And then some more. And then some more. And then, if you want to sell it, well, the work actually hasn’t even begun yet, because is it really “work” when you’re not getting paid for it? Up to that point, you were doing a hobby. Now, you’re doing work. And it might not have even been any good.

You could write a story forever, is the thing. You could describe stuff endlessly. You could spin the characters out on more storylines endlessly. You could send them into an alternate universe. You could kill them. You could make them kiss. You could make them criminals, or heroes, or normies, or bakers, or witches, or losers, and then back again. You can just keep telling the story. Quantity is not actually an issue. There is always something to write about. There’s always something you can add to the story (or take away, but that’s for another post).

Writing a story is different than writing prolifically. Writing a story implies you’ve crafted a narrative through a series of escalating plot developments from beginning to end. Writing prolifically means the story should’ve ended 200,000 words ago. This is going to sound rude, because it is, but if you come from the world of fanfiction (like I did, it’s a self-own), then the line between writing a story and writing prolifically is going to be blurry.

In fandom world, you just want to see the guys (because it is almost always guys) kiss. You want them to be happy and hold hands and have sex and many people, people who, to me, are deeply alien, want them to have kids and be a big happy nuclear family, too. Readers want no complexity, they want no difficulties or challenges or obstacles that can’t be resolved with a good speech or, in the more progressive and deeply annoying fics, therapy and medication. They want uncomplicated easy-to-digest romance narratives. Which is basically just regular degular romance, a wildly popular genre across the female demographic, so really, fandom, beyond being almost exclusively m/m, is not really that different than a lot of the normie boring romance that makes it onto booktok.

And actually, I’ve kind of owned myself here, because a lot of those narratives could barely be called such, and yet, there they are, on tables in Indigo and book-shaped and with pages and everything. It’s probably important to remember that a lot (not all, but a lot) of widely read books are… bad. But a good reminder that quantity (of words, of salaries, of royalties…) is not the be all end all.

I think sometimes when people comment on the “amount” I’ve written, they aren’t necessarily commenting on the literal word count. Maybe they think they are. But I suspect when you really drill down on that question, especially if you’re a writer yourself, and you’re interested in and/or enjoy my work, what you’re really asking is how do I keep writing stories. In my head, anyway, that’s the true rub. Because the answer to the mercenary, numbers-only question of “how do you write so much” is simply that I write until the story is done. And as I’ve gotten older and better at writing, my work has grown more complex and layered and interesting, but not always longer. Longer doesn’t mean better, or anything at all, really, save the fact I badly need an editor. You just write until it’s done. Ten pages. Twenty. Five-hundred. My last Wangxian fic in MDZS fandom was 20,000 words long. Hardly a tome. But I hit 20k, and it was done. The story was over, so it was done.

Don’t Worry About It? Well, that was north of 100k. I wrote until it was done. I wrote until the story was over. Same approach as my final Wangxian fic, yet very different word count. Wren’s journey, from a narrative standpoint, reached its conclusion at 110k. I just received a deeply kind comment on it literally today that mentioned how great it would be to have a few one-offs where Wren and Ashley just got to have some romantic fun, and I agree! That would be awesome. At the same time, it’s not necessary. Not from a narrative standpoint. In fact, from a narrative standpoint, it would be useless.

—Which is fine, by the way. I cut my teeth on useless fanfiction. It’s a huge part of how I grew as a writer. Hell, every third literary fiction novel, basically nothing happens. I think—with great fondness—of Come This Here July as a victim of the classic Literary Fiction crime; dense as lead, and not a thing happens. Don’t Worry About It comes close. Novel two? Similar. Even these blog posts. It’s just kind of my thing, apparently. Very human condition of me. Sometimes to the point where I desperately want to plot out a genre caper with rigidly defined plot points full of obvious twists and turns and character archetypes, just to get some semblance of structure under my feet instead of the existential cacophonic muck my writing so often wades through.

Sometimes, I think people just aren’t prepared for the fact that writing is difficult. I talked about this in my previous blog post, but truly, sometimes, it’s just hard, and it’s easy to mistake persistent for prolific. There’s no secret to it, no matter what anyone says. To write, whether it’s a little or a lot, you just have to sit down and do it. Or stand, I guess, if you’re fancy. Think of it like exercise, maybe. A necessary evil, that, once complete, you will never regret having done.

Unlike a number of other writing elements I’ve spoken about on this blog, word count is not really a tool. It’s just a neutral measurement. It doesn’t mean anything other than practice, assuming you’ve hit that number in good faith and didn’t “curtains” your way to the top. I’m now 1.5 million words more experienced than I was thirteen years ago. I certainly wasn’t always thinking of it as learning or practice or experimenting or finding my style, but that’s exactly what I was doing all that time, and I’m better off for it, and just plain better for it.

Forget prolific. Focus on practice. The words count all the same.