What is up

How’s it going? Hope you’ve gotten to enjoy some fresh air lately. Autumn is here, which is deeply pleasing to my senses.

I just wanted to have a quick chat [Ed: it’s not that quick] about what I’m currently working on, both because it may be of interest to anyone reading and it will hopefully encourage me to put some real time into it. The thing about writing is for something I love and attach much of my self-worth to, I am also excellent at complaining about it and not doing it. Don’t ask. I cannot explain it.

I’m still shopping around novel 2. Still debating whether a novel 3 is worth my time and emotional energy if 2 also crashes and burns. I’ve queried 37 agents so far, which is not the end. But certainly not the beginning, either.

In the meantime, in fits and spurts, I’ve been cobbling together an old story idea that is not an appropriate fit whatsoever for the publishing world, which in many ways is the perfect antidote to my lack of publishing success. I don’t have to waste anyone’s time, including my own, and I can do whatever I want without ever having to worry about what an agent or publisher may think about it. It’s all got a bit of a getting-back-to-nature vibe. Potentially a licking-my-wounds vibe. But back-to-nature reads better.

Years ago, while I was still in fandom, I thought it may be fun to challenge myself to write tropes I either hadn’t written before or outright didn’t like. You can see me dipping my toes into these concepts near the end of my time in Wangxian fandom, whether it was a/b/o-lite f/f erotica or action/adventure modern AU (on a train!). Nothing earth shattering, but I enjoyed the brain-stretch of writing a/b/o (which I never much cared for) and action/adventure (which I like, but never got around to until then) and turning those tropes/genres into something that worked for me and my writing style.

Very close behind a/b/o in the realm of tropes I greatly disliked was the somewhat unholy trio of royalty, medieval/fantasy settings, and to a lesser extent, mistaken identity (always just so convoluted, where’s the plausible deniability?!). Royalty AUs always gave me the heebie jeebies. I understand the wealth and palace-intrigue fantasies, but I could never fully square that with my blanket distaste for the concept of monarchies as a whole. Especially coming from fandom world, which largely considers itself left-leaning and anti-capitalist, except when the royals doing the boning are starcrossed men, apparently. As for medieval settings, I don’t really have a reason for my dislike of them beyond the fact that classic western fantasy as a genre is not very interesting to me. Yes, I’ve read Priory of the Orange Tree. No, it did not turn me onto the genre as a whole. As I declared at the time of finishing Priory, if that one couldn’t turn me (because apparently that was the one that would turn me), then nothing would, and that’s fine. Not every genre is for every person. And when it came to mistaken identity narratives, well, sorry, but I generally didn’t think they were worth my time. I’m also not a love triangle person, so I did not care for that aspect of the trope, even when the whole point is that points two and three of the triangle were the same point all along. I just don’t think I ever had much faith in the stories that utilized this trope as being… good. There isn’t really a way I can both be truthful and not-rude about this opinion, so let’s just leave it there.

Obligatory disclaimer that if you like any of the above tropes, that’s fine. I don’t care, nor do I want you to feel upset or like you have to defend your enjoyment of them. Nor do I think you’re a bad or morally compromised person if you like these tropes. I feel silly having to say this but the fandom etiquette imps that still live in my brain are holding me at gunpoint lest I fail to adequately prostrate myself over my potentially sacrilegious opinions on what is or is not a good storytelling trope.

That being disclaimed, the whole point of airing my grievances with these tropes is to then turn around and say I wanted to write a story that included as many of them as possible, for little more than a fun thought exercise.

And thus, as I left fanfiction behind and ventured out into the world of original fiction… the medieval royalty mistaken identity lesbian psycho-erotica travelogue sex romp was born. Working title.

You may note I added some additional descriptors into the medieval/royalty/mistaken identity soup there. That’s because I wanted to.

Here’s the lowdown. Not much is planned out beyond harebrainedness and a very general aim of writing a meandering pastoral travelogue masquerading as a half-hearted murder mystery with the usual saltyfeathers trappings; that is, a fucked up sexual dynamic between the main pairing.

The protagonist, Mór, is a princess and only child of her parents, the Queen and King of Lupinshire who have just been violently murdered. Mór has spent her entire adult life and much of her teenaged years semi-locked away in a crumbling wing of the castle due to general family shame at how much she sucks for refusing a husband to produce heirs with. Unfortunately for her, she is also not very good looking, which wasn’t why she was locked away, but it certainly didn’t help; she is a tall, broad woman, not feminine, not pretty, not a rule follower or stickler (but not in any kind of interesting or rabblerousing way), not much to offer the world at all what with her refusing to spread her legs for a man. Objectively, her stature is actually very impressive as she is quite hardy for someone who is likely the product of generations of incest. Overall, Mór is a seemingly well adjusted person for all her mistreatment. In fact, she’s almost unnervingly laid back for someone whose life has turned out this way. So casual about her own imprisonment that she may as well have foisted it upon herself. It’s like, all copacetic, man.

When her parents are murdered, Mór decides that she will don her detective hat, venture out into a world of poverty and plague and horse shit lining the dirty streets of her kingdom and the lands beyond, and solve this most heinous crime. Most importantly, she will leave the castle and all her royal obligations far behind her while she investigates, so very hard. She’ll be right back to Queen it up, though. One little side quest and then her ass is back on that throne. Just you wait.

Mór is capable and adaptable, but she is not a detective by trade, so she enlists the help of an expert. This expert is a witch; a strange, mysterious, sullen woman who lives deep in the woods on the outskirts of Lupinshire. In a dilapidated, eerie cottage, Mór meets Aoife (ee-fuh). Aoife, in all her spiritual, swooning, conniving, all-knowing (and ill-lit) introductory glory, and through a deeply silly, contrived misunderstanding, thinks she has, in fact, ensnared a prince. Unfortunately, Mór is as I’ve described; tall and broad and short-of-hair, and as a result, and not for the first time in her life, been mistaken for a man. Woebegone the butches who need a spine and the witches who need glasses of yesteryear.

Usually, Mór being mistaken for a man is not a huge deal. She was often swathed in overlarge robes to conceal her royal identity when she would escape her confines while still living in the castle. No one who exchanged more than a handful of words with her would ever think her a man for long; it was only when they caught fleeting glimpses out of the corner of their eye of a statuesque human figure with short hair and an athletic build that the “Sir” slipped out, before an aggrieved silence and a hasty correction on their part, while Mór loomed on the spot like a slightly awkward tree about it.

Enter Aoife with bad eyes and too much mood lighting. Enter Aoife with low social skills and an overabundance of sketchy spell books written by pervs. Enter Aoife, impoverished and peculiar and intrigued by a visit from a royal seeking her wisdom, who proudly announces her price to assist this most handsome (I said she has bad eyes) prince with his quest to solve the mystery of who murdered his parents, apparently the most potent spell ingredient of all spell ingredients; HIS SEED.

Deeply seed-less Mór says, after saying nothing at all due to nonplussed shock: uh yeah sure. Thoust canst harvest every last morsel from my sacketh just as soon as you complete your end of the bargain.

And thus begins the true dance. Sure, it’s like, who murdered the Queen and King and what does that mean for the future of the medieval land of Lupinshire? But, much more interestingly, what the fuck is Aoife of the Deep Woods thinking? Does she actually believe Mór is a man? Surely, the second she catches Mór in the sunlight, or up close, the jig is up? Surely, once she spends more than ten seconds with her travel companion, she will catch on? Maybe feel a bit embarrassed, a bit chagrined, like those before her, but, like, she’ll get with the program? Surely, after Aoife sees how others interact with Mór? Surely, after they begin to grow close?

… after they kiss?

… after they fuck? Even if Mór never takes her clothes off?

Surely?

Mór can’t even disrobe in front of the woman she’s fucking for fear of shattering the gossamer illusion Aoife clings to, and yet, she can’t tell the woman she’s fucking to fuck off and get with the program, because then she wouldn’t be able to fuck her anymore, probably. What is Aoife’s deal, anyway? Maybe we’ll find out. Then again, Mór’s chill, dude. She don’t care about much at all. Visit whatever horrors you wish upon her; imprison her in her own home for years; attempt to marry her off and stuff her with children; she’ll take em on the chin, because, like, whatever. It’s all good. Nothing bothers Mór, definitely. She is just chilling so hard, while Aoife is just Aoife-ing so hard. Golly, what a contrived situation these women have gotten themselves into.

It’s a precarious position. For smashing together a number of tropes I don’t care for, I have still somehow managed to mold this narrative into something that, for better and for worse, is a resplendent example of the type of character dynamics and philosophical approach I tend to bring to my work. Stupid as it is. Fun as it is. Awkward and squeamish and cringeworthy as it is. Cathartic as it is? Fulfilling as it is? We’ll see.

Also, there will be much walking through moors. And fields. And woods. And taverns. And inns. And strange harvest festivals. And badly misappropriated folklore and landscapes combining the best of the Atlantic Canadian and UK persuasions. It really is meant to be a smorgasbord. One that I have every intention of savoring as I meander through with no real plans for structure or plotting, yet another unfamiliar writing element that is scary and alien to me. I’m not good at research and am unsure why I’ve done this to myself. Fun, right? I already said that. I already know this is going to be deeply ahistorical “history”. In Lupinshire, historical accuracy goes only as far as how tired I get of listening to period-accurate medieval string instrument compositions on YouTube on any given day.

I should be clear; I haven’t even met Aoife yet. The moment she walks onto the page, the entire trajectory of the story could change completely. Sometimes (oftentimes, at least for me) stories are like that. They are not living things, but you could fool yourself into thinking they were with how they grow and change unexpectedly.

I am considering a few things regarding this story. I am considering whether I should charge money to access it. I am considering whether it would be fun and/or beneficial to chronicle the writing of it with companion blog posts about where I’m at, how I’m strategizing, or if I’m just letting Jesus take the wheel for this particular chapter. I am considering channels beyond ao3, though I’m probably at about maximum exposure for my particular niche in the location I’m already in, and that exposure is approximately 4, so I may be considering too hard on this one.

I am excited to get to know Mór and Aoife. I’ve spent lots of time with them in my head, and I look forward to meeting them on the page (and them meeting each other) as well. Oh yeah, and they’ll solve a silly little murder mystery while they’re at it. Maybe.

Hope I actually write this story now that I’ve talked it up! How embarrassing would it be if I didn’t. Future me is trembling at the thought of what past me has gotten her into.

you are a writer who hates ai

If you are looking for a balanced or emotionally-regulated-in-any-way opinion on AI, you have clicked on the wrong blog post. Further, I would say you’re better off doing almost anything else than reading the following manifesto.

No? You’re sure? You want the incoherent rambling? Well, if you insist:

!!!!!!!!!!!!FUCK AI!!!!!!!!!!!!

FUCK IT, DUDE

DAMN I HATE THIS SHIT

Every time you, a real human, blink, an asshole cries because he hasn’t yet been able to teach chatgpt how to close and re-open his eyelids for him. People are hooked up to giant horrendous machines in hospital beds because they have no choice but to let an external, soulless operator breathe for them, meanwhile these Zuckerbergian nitwits are out here unable to send a one-line email without Copilot holding their hand through the trauma of asking Sandra in accounting if she’s received the invoice they’ve submitted yet.

The amount of times I have been confronted by someone using AI. The amount of times I have had to bite my tongue in these situations because the urge the ask them why they couldn’t use their brain instead is so strong.

Dismay is not a strong enough word. I am not-thinking with my emotional brain. I am in full-on vent mode. I am so tired of this shit and so long as our world is ruled by technocratic megalomaniacal billionaires, it’s going nowhere fast. Do you own a Windows computer? Probably. Depending on your Windows settings, every time you open your lock screen, you will be greeted with AI propaganda pushed by Microsoft. And wouldn’t you know it, Microsoft just so happens to have an AI they desperately, desperately want you to buy. Apple has its own AI as well, so don’t worry, if you’re a Mac devotee, you’re invited to the party too. Depression? Disillusionment? Much to my dismay, I work in tech. Though I am not in a technical role, I am exposed to the industry as a whole, and it is exhausting. It withers me. Any feelings of goodwill I manage to drum up about humanity immediately evaporate when I remember that what we are all apparently gagging for is more AI in our stupid giant palm pilots. At least, that’s what Google tells me. Because Google is everywhere. So is Microsoft. And Apple. And Samsung. Barely even matters to list the heavy hitters because everyone has some kind of janky AI they can’t wait to send an email blast full of emojis about. These days, you can’t shake a stick without hitting someone’s AI assistant or AI-powered whatchamacallit.

Querying a novel sucks. I’ve whined about this extensively. To this point, though, I don’t think I’ve mentioned one of the most soulsucking parts of the querying process circa 2025. It’s not the synopsis. It’s not being asked if this novel has been published before, and if it did, how many copies did it sell. It’s not having to personalize yet another query letter for an agent who won’t even give me the time of day. No, no no no. I’m talking about the Yes/No checkbox that I can only assume is now a standard and necessary question in QueryTracker, a querying form used by many, many agencies all over the world:

“Was any part of this book or query package created by A.I.?”

I wither, further. No! No it was fucking not! But guess what, even if it was, how could you tell? AI is notoriously hard to detect. I hereby submit using AI to write a book be considered a trait of genuine psychopathy. Or delusion. Certainly anti-social. Anti-art. Anti-human. Anti-creation.

Here’s a tough pill to swallow: if you can’t write a book, don’t write a book. If you can’t make art, don’t make art.

The kicker is anyone can make art, literally anyone, and still, they will have a tech bro’s wet dream do it for them. Just make art yourself. You should make art yourself. Even if it’s bad. Especially if it’s bad! But it may also be good, which is good, too. But the most important thing is that YOU made it. Defining “art” is a thorny topic. Surely, one of the few things we can all agree on in this space is that in order for something to be art, it must be made by a person? Elephants who are given paint brushes and go ham on a canvas, you will have to forgive your exclusion. The good news is, as you are elephants, this matters not to you.

I am upset because it feels like we are losing. I don’t even like humans, or myself, and it feels like we are losing humanity, and ourselves, and that is upsetting to me. I don’t know where the line begins or ends between the, “back in my day” old person diatribe and the real, genuine, substantiated fear there is to be had over the current state of technology. How justified is my concern? Every generation thinks the world is worse than it was previously. There is evidence of this going back about as far as humans have been recording history. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that this time, it might be true. The rate at which our technology is evolving (“evolving” a bad word choice, as that implies the natural world being involved whatsoever) is unprecedented and, frankly, awful. Our brains—or at least mine—just can’t keep up. I often feel like my grasp of the world and the state of it is unreachable. Unknowable. Imagine you’re born in 1900 and die in 1985. Or even 1950. May as well be different planets. My life, and the lives of the people who come after me, will be like that, times a hundred. I don’t think we were meant to ever understand the entire world. Big ask for small person. Technology, AI, money, and their unholy throuple is only making it worse. And it was already bad before. I’m upset!

If we were doing something meaningful with all the free time AI is supposedly giving us, maybe I could understand. But when AI frees up your dance card, what are you doing with it? Scrolling social media? Busywork? More AI shit? AI should allow us the freedom to do the things that matter. Does it? Or are we freeing up time just to squander it in other ways? As someone who works in an environment rife with AI, take a guess which scenario I’ve seen more. There is now an entire sub-industry dedicated to teaching you how to prompt AI to get the results you want. Middlemen who exist to create more middlemen. Busywork for busywork’s sake. Business for your business to do more business at your business of business and business. The endless labyrinth of the supply chain, when the majority of the ocean of goods being passed along it are junk. Junk and junk and garbage and junk. Real or digital, it’s all trash. The shit I have seen people ask chatGPT. There are AI voices so realistic now they genuinely sound like you’re speaking to a real person. It’s uncanny and awful. Anytime someone at work has a verbal conversation with AI I swallow down the urge to request they never do that around me again because of how desperately uncomfortable it makes me. Am I being dramatic to say it feels violating to me on a human level? I am a human, and this robot has put on a human skin and is pretending to be like me. I don’t like it. I am exhibiting xenophobia toward robots (and anger toward their creators).

AI is scraping. It’s us, in a funhouse mirror. It steals and it consumes and it eats everything we’ve made that it can get its hands on. AI doesn’t “understand” anything. It has no notion of being alive. It cannot conceive itself. It is not a thinking being. It is an automated tool trained on the unpaid labour of humans. It steals what we’ve created and spits it back in our faces, and the worst part is some people like it. Many people like it. Most people, like with most things, don’t think about it at all.

There are probably things I do and places I traverse that I enjoy and that use AI without me even realizing it. There has always been some garbage on Pinterest, but with AI, it’s gotten so bad I can hardly stand to be there. The anguish I felt upon realizing those adorable quaint pictures of houses and cottages in the woods with colourful gardens bursting at the seams— upon reflection, obviously fake. But when the content is so voluminous, you’re not always hearing every single alarm bell. You’re not clocking each uncanny vibe or blurry face or weirdly placed door knob. We’ve been primed for years and years of endless scrolling to accept slop. This is just an extension of that. Slop so sloppy a human never even laid hands on it.

Remember those ai generated uncanny valley neural slop images circa 2018 or so? Deeply unsettling. Images full of items that, at a glance, seem normal, but look for more than a moment and you couldn’t identify even one of them. There’s a couple reddit threads about the same few photos (“name one thing in this picture” type titles, I will not put here because the images really do engender discomfort and I’ve looked at them enough). Many commenters express upset and anxiety upon looking at these images. There is some false lore these pictures are meant to simulate what someone having a stroke sees, but it seems the much more likely explanation is they are very early AI image generation experiments. And they are horrifying!

Now we have that, but the “realistic” version. Awesome. So, so cool. Like lipstick on a pig.

There must be meaningful uses for AI. I don’t know everything about everything, so I have to believe in some corner of the world, AI is useful in a way that isn’t completely destructive to the people or places or environments around it. Then again, the number of times I have wondered in the last year or so when people espouse how “cool” AI is: so… it’s like a search engine? Which we already had. “Ask Copilot”, you say? How about I just type my little question into Google? I can use the Gemini (Google’s AI) answer. Or I can scroll (past all the sponsored links) until I find something that looks relatively legit. Before Copilot and Google, there were books. Or other people. Or you just accepted that you didn’t and wouldn’t know. Or, if finding the answer mattered enough, you hunted it down until you got it.

It’s OK to not know something. It’s OK not to have every answer to every banal question that pops into your head throughout the day. It is not imperative to our daily functioning to confirm the name of that restaurant you ate at once two towns over twenty years ago that’s been closed since 2004. Or to learn what skibidi means. Knowledge is power, maybe, but more and more it feels like what Google and Copilot and chatgpt and all the rest give you is not knowledge, but slop. In a genuinely unexpected twist, making knowledge more accessible has made us dumber, not smarter. Wide, not deep. “Jack of all trades” is not the end of the saying.

Take a shot, because yet again, I am talking about how it all comes down to money. AI doesn’t do the slog work, because the slog work isn’t generating income. AI wasn’t implemented first for humanitarian measures, but for capital gains. I presume whatever AI actually could do for us is deeply banal, boring work that does not generate significant income. Or dangerous work that, to this point, humans have had to risk their lives to complete. No, it’s mostly used to take people’s jobs, jobs which, while boring and unfulfilling, are not generally the type of “dangerous” jobs that AI should be taking over. Or steal their art. Or write their university paper (a couple months ago I went on a date with a professor and the absolute horror stories she told me about students using AI… I. WITHER.). Even worse, what if AI does eventually steal the shit jobs, and the people who had those shit jobs can’t find other work? The technology moves faster than meaningful jobs (and the training for them) can be created. We still live in a world where people need money, and are willing to do shit jobs to get it, if that is all that’s available to them. When those jobs are taken by AI (or any automation, really, hello industrial revolution), who looks after those people? We have gotten ourselves into such a mess I have managed to fully pivot back to “let people do unsafe/shit work” because otherwise, they can’t live. I don’t know how we fix this. It goes so much deeper than AI. This is a question of how we, as humans, have structured our societies.

I feel like a punctured balloon. The air has escaped me, along with my ire. I am left, deflated and flabby and pathetic. I have lost. We have lost. It is possible AI will die out, but in its wake, other terrible profit-at-all-costs technologies will rise. I feel like in those near-future dystopian novels where the majority of humanity has escaped to some fictional version of the metaverse, the idea is that people go into those digital spaces willingly as the physical world around them crumbles. In reality, it feels like we’re being nudged forward, one poke at a time, shuffling toward a specific future whether we like it or not. The concept of “choosing” such a fate seems laughable. Many of us are surviving, frog in boiling water style, without even realizing what’s happening. Or even enjoying it. Frog kicks back and thinks its in the hot tub at the spa before it realizes the doors have been locked behind it.

Demoralizing. I am feeling demoralized. Don’t use AI to write your stories or make your art. Hold the line. Use your brain. It’s hard (trust me, I know, most days I can’t think myself out of a paper bag). But it’s possible.

slog

Figured maybe people would be interested in a play by play of the querying process? Yes? No? Maybe? Too late, I suppose, by the time you’re reading this. At some point, I did threaten such a thing.

I am quite behind in my querying journey for Novel 2. “Behind”, in the sense that I’m dragging my feet because I just don’t wanna, not because I have any hard and fast external deadline to meet. There isn’t really a deadline when it comes to querying a novel, in my experience. You do it until you either run out of steam or potential agents to pitch to, whichever comes first. It is a painfully drawn out process from the jump. You can speedrun as many queries as you want as fast as you want, but most of those agents you submit to (the ones who actually respond to you, anyway, which is maybe 10%), will take weeks or months to get back to you, so by the time you finally get the letter (likely of rejection) your adrenaline will have long worn off, and you will receive said rejection with a somewhat deadened, muted sense of dismayed acquiescence. In a way, that’s preferable. Better than getting a hard No when you’ve barely had time to daydream about how much your life is definitely going to change for the better after this agent falls at your feet begging to represent you for free because she’s never read a better story, and also, she is now in love with you, and also, you no longer have to work that job that makes you a little money but a lot crazy, and also, you can finally afford that out-of-the-way house that no one even wants that you’ve been eyeing up for months on real estate dot com as the price has ticked down, down, down, and even at the lowest price you’ll probably ever get any kind of home, let alone a potential dream home, you just can’t afford it regardless, except for the fact that if you sell a book and your agent falls in love with you, you will now be a DINK with a book deal, so maybe, actually, you can, and everything will have been worth it.

Anyway. I write my blog posts in fits and starts. As I write this sentence, it is July 28th, and I just received another rejection email. What fortuitous timing. It was perfectly polite and encouraging: “I’ve reviewed your work, and I’m afraid I just don’t feel strongly enough to move forward, so I’m going to step aside.

As you know, this is an incredibly subjective business, and another agent may very well feel differently. I truly appreciate the opportunity to review your work, and I hope you find someone who is passionate about your project and confident in their ability to champion it. I wish you all the best, and thanks again for thinking of me.”

(Checking in from the future on July 30th: received another rejection email. Shall we? Many thanks for sending us your submission. I’m afraid to say, however, that it won’t be a project we’ll be pursuing. Unfortunately owing to time constraints, and the number of submissions we receive, we're unable to provide individual feedback.

Our business is subjective by nature and another agency may well feel differently – we wish you all the best with your writing.)

Despite the rejection(s), do you feel a little warm and fuzzy reading that (them)? Like, oh, it’s not the right fit for her, but she sure seems to believe it will be viable to someone!

Let me put it this way. It would be rude to call it a script. But, by this point, I have received a lot of these. Anyone who has tried to get a book published, I bet you have a couple of rejection notes very similar to mine. It is somewhat difficult to swallow the polite “no” when the unspoken follow-up to “I just don’t feel strongly enough to move forward” is “because I don’t think it will make me money”. You could say that about any business, I guess. Though it does feel different when it’s something I created, for free, and am offering to someone else, as opposed to, say, offering your services as a plumber to a client who says no. In that case, the plumber (presumably) hasn’t sunk hundreds of unpaid hours into this client beforehand, and there will always be another toilet to plunge. Sorry, plumbers, I know you do more than that. It’s just a bad metaphor.

Then again, what is an agent supposed to do? Of course she wants money. I want money for my book. She wants money for her job. If she thinks my book and her job are incompatible, then of course she’s going to say no thank you. Maybe it’s the artiface of it that annoys me so much. The farce and facsimile of politeness, when I would maybe rather a curt, “This won’t sell, which is why I’m not taking it on” straightforward response. When everyone is tooth-gratingly polite about their rejections, it does actually become harder to understand exactly why you’re not getting anywhere. I’m not asking for a full autopsy of the manuscript. But when I finally find the agent who tells me straight up my books aren’t worth money, that will be quite the day, indeed. Still a rejection, yes. But not one that could just as easily have been written by chatgpt.

Let’s get on to the actual process. First thing I do when I’m getting ready to send a query, aside from conceiving, planning, writing, editing, re-writing, and formatting the manuscript? Gotta know your audience. For Don’t Worry, I extensively made use of pw.org’s literary agents list, filtering by genre, although, as previously discussed, genre is slippery, and I have taken advantage of that lack of friction before. Permanently pinned to the corkboard of my mind is also the ever present existential dread of being Canadian. There are approximately thirty literary agents in Canada. There are approximately forty million people in Canada, and god knows how many of them are clogging up those scant literary agent channels with their manuscripts that are objectively worse than mine, because mine, of course, is very excellent.

Most literary agencies will take on international clients. Very few ever cop to the fact that this is something of a logistical nightmare and you better have an NYT #1 bestseller to shill for them to even deign a response. Maybe this is a complete conspiracy theory and I am only using it to justify my lack of success. But I have yet to be proven wrong. Why would a New York agent take me and my Canadian legal baggage on when she could so very easily find another manuscript that will sell better from her own backyard? Does that mean I have to be better than my American counterparts in order to get a seat at the table? Have I found myself in a twisted idpol version of women having to prove themselves to be better than men in order to be given the time of day in their professional lives, except in this scenario, the axis of oppression is hailing from the same land that so cruelly unleashed Ryan Reynolds onto the unsuspecting global population?

If so… maybe the discrimination is fair. That guy’s selling scrambled eggs for Tim Horton’s now. I do not look forward to meeting Ryan Reynolds at rock bottom. Unfortunately at this point, it seems I have little choice in the matter.

For Don’t Worry, I was scouring pw.org. Thankfully, that ended up being one of those passive income type deals where because I kept track of all my submissions in an Excel spreadsheet, I now have a handy reference for agents/agencies that, despite their across the board rejections the first go round, we are at least somewhat in alignment with the genres and types of stories we are interested in, giving me an easy starting point for Novel 2. When I first started querying Novel 2, I scrolled to the top of my Don’t Worry About It list, the earliest and most embarrassing submissions, and just started all over again. In publishing world, anyway, it’s not frowned upon to knock on the same door twice (so long as you have a new, different thing to shill).

There is still a small amount of admin (which often feels like an insurmountable amount) to taking that first step. Literary agents move around a lot, so I have occasionally had to chase an agent to another agency, or select a different agent from the original agency I was targeting and go from there. Honestly, though, it’s not like I remember any specific agents or their preferences, so the amount of work after that is basically the same, regardless if I have to select a different agent or not.

Which brings me to the next step. I’ve found an agent, or an agency. If it’s an agency, I toddle over to the About or Agents page, and skim every bio on there. By this point, I have something of a routine; anyone with a title of VP, President, Owner, Senior Agent, etc, I bypass. I’m looking for just Agent or Associate Agent or Junior Agent. I highly doubt I can trick anyone more savvy/with more experience into taking on one of my books. I also only query women, so I can cut out any male agents, although there are so few, at least in the genres I frequent, that specific task hardly registers.

Now that I’ve read all the bios, I have probably narrowed it down to a few. Sometimes it can be three or four. Sometimes it’s just the one agent I think is the right fit (or close enough to it). Most agencies don’t allow simultaneous submissions, or claim they share submissions between agents if they think one of their colleagues would be a better fit, so I do ultimately choose one agent. Sometimes I just have to read her bio. Sometimes she has a wishlist that links out to an external site that I will take a look at if I think I need something a little more substantive to sink my teeth into.

Substance in an agent bio is not important to me from a literary or moral standpoint; like any good cover letter when applying for a job, I’m scanning for information I can use to my advantage and include in my query letter to prove we’d be the right fit. I have copied full sentences from agent bios/wishlists and included it in my query letter to say, Hey, you said you’re looking for this specific thing in a story, and I just so happen to have written it! What a coincidence! Buy my manuscript! Read any guide to writing a good query letter and this advice is mentioned. What people tend to leave out is that, for anyone who has ever been on the hiring side of sifting through endless resumes and CVs, 90% of getting hired for anything less than a specialized position is a total crapshoot. It’s luck. Someone really needed to hire, and your resume was in the first five in the pile and proved any amount of sentience. Literary agents can probably afford to be a little more discerning, but at the same time, how many manuscripts do you think they’re shuffling through a day? Tens? Hundreds? Your eyes eventually start to glaze over no matter how picky you have the luxury of being.

Once I decide on an agency and an agent, I have to check that agency’s submission guidelines, which is usually a separate page. Some agencies allow agents to dictate their submission preferences, usually with some overarching rules. Some agencies have the same rules for every agent. Submissions are usually submitted via email or QueryTracker, although I have submitted through a few website forms as well. Some agencies want only query letters. Some agencies want those query letters submitted following their strict structural guidelines (meaning I have to take the time to adjust the query letter I’ve already written). Some agencies want the first five pages posted into the body of the email. Some agencies want the first three chapters attached as a Word doc. Sometimes you just post pages directly into the required field in QueryTracker.

Some agencies also want a synopsis, which is a brief overview of everything that happens in the novel. So, not really meant as marketing fluff (unlike the query letter), but a fairly detached play by play of the events of the novel, all the way to the end. Not a ton of agencies ask for this, but enough do that I wrote one out for Don’t Worry and also Novel 2. Another one of those tasks you thankfully only have to do once, but still, it takes time to scour your book and write out every plot point, then, being mindful that shorter is better, editing it down and down until you have something between 500-1000 words, and most places would probably say that’s still too long. With this exercise also comes the lovely realization that writing everything out so bloodlessly makes your novel sound like absolute shit.

Once I determine who I’m submitting to, what the submission requirements are, and which channel I’m submitting via, now is the time to customize my query letter (the amount of times I’ve prepped my submission as if I’m going to be emailing it when the agent actually only uses QueryTracker… Always check the submission method first!!!). To customize my query letter (using email as the example method here), I set up my subject line. Some agencies have requirements for this, others don’t. If they don’t, I just go for something straightforward with something like “Adult Fiction Query - [last name, first name] - TITLE” or “Fiction query for [agent name] - TITLE”. Then, I’ll copy and paste a query letter from a previous submission, changing the following; why I’m choosing this specific agent and the amount of material they wish to see. Then, I have to prep the material itself. I have a number of “most requested” page/chapter amounts saved as separate documents. However, sometimes I have to copy and paste the text directly into the body of the email from the Word doc, which doesn’t always play well, so sometimes I have to search my sent folder to find a pre-formatted version of the first ten pages or whatever. Then, I usually double check submission guidelines, fill out my own Excel sheet tracking my submissions, and… send.

And I get on with my life. For weeks. Or months. And then, one auspicious day and if the stars align, receive a response. And that response, up to this point, has always been a no, worded much like the friendly examples mentioned above. More often, there is no response at all, which is in fact a response, and that response is also a no.

Rinse and repeat. Ad infinitum. Each submission takes time. Each submission chips off one more tiny piece of my psyche, never to be recovered. Each rejection means one less agent out there I can pitch to, which means one more agent more likely that no one will take on this manuscript, and I will be left, again, without a path forward.

What can I say? It’s job hunting, but worse. Unlike job hunting, though, it doesn’t matter at all. The needle moves not at all when I get rejected. The only sacrifice being my time, skill, and sanity. At least it’s cheap. It doesn’t cost anything to submit.

Below is the query letter for Don’t Worry. This is not to be used as any kind of example or how-to, as this letter failed to serve its purpose; I remain agentless and without representation. I just thought people may find it interesting. Psychologically, it is. It’s amazing how many ways you can spin the same story. I did occasionally change the genre of Don’t Worry, made little tweaks to the letter here and there, but in general, here is what agents saw when they received queries for Don’t Worry About It:

Dear [Agent Name],

I am seeking representation for my book, DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT, the story of a lesbian celebrity’s sexploits in Hollywood and her unintentional journey toward unattainable autonomy. As an agent interested in [insert reasoning gleaned from agent bio/wishlist here], I believe this story could find a well-matched home with you. This novel takes a complex, unflattering look at how the world views women, and a complex, unflattering look at how women view each other and themselves. It is a novel about the damage women do to each other, and the lateral societal structures that encourage them. 

At a celebrity charity event, womanizer and Oscar-winning actress Wren Daley finally loses her cool. Harassed one too many times by a beloved young star, Wren socks him in front of a crowd including a notoriously unscrupulous paparazzi. Though the star goes sprawling, it is Wren that begins to tailspin as her agent devises a plan to rehabilitate her tarnished image. First, her privacy privileges are revoked. Wren is to become an outspoken, liberal celebrity, who, above all, believes that women should be allowed to choose (no matter that she is saying so against her will). Next, she gets a girlfriend who, in real life, is an inspiring influencer, dreadfully heterosexual, and in a long-term relationship with her high-school boyfriend who refuses to propose. Thrust into the spotlight after so many years of avoiding it, Wren’s too-cool-to-care exterior starts to crack, and the true pain and price of womanhood, femaleness, and lesbianism makes itself known, no matter how tightly she closes her eyes.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT is an adult novel of 110,000 words that combines lesbian erotica, literary fiction, and romance into thought-provoking social commentary. This novel is meant to titillate body and mind, exploring female and lesbian desire in a way few other mainstream works have. It is meant to be a challenging story, encouraging debate and word-of-mouth discourse. It will appeal to fans of With Teeth by Kristin Arnett and Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason.  

I have a [degree from university related to writing]. Since then, I have been writing personal stories and screenplays in my downtime, until deciding early last year to take up the mantle of writing a novel I fully believed was worthy of publication.

Please see below [or attached] for the first [however many chapters/words requested] of DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

If you recognize parts of this letter, it is likely because I repurposed much of it for the ao3 synopsis, so at least it ended up being good for something.

I obviously don’t have a ton of experience, but I think this is a fairly good query letter. Maybe most damning, I think it’s quite honest about the contents of the story. Surely, that’s good? Though “good” may just be a measurement of how sufficiently it has convinced an agent I’m worth her time. In that case, it was terrible. Regardless, the query letter for novel 2 follows this exact structure, because I am not convinced the query letter is what’s at fault. Of note: the comps for Don’t Worry? Never read ‘em. Someone else suggested them because I had no idea what to compare it to (everyone claims to want unique stories… but also… no they don’t! They want something similar to what has sold in the past). I have actually read the comps for novel 2. One of them, I think, isn’t bad. The other… maybe a stretch in terms of how it relates. Oh well. Did my best. It’s just sooooooooooooo hard being sooooooooo unique and different.

This is a long blog post where very little of substance was said. That’s fine. This was more for me than for you, if I’m being honest. A good old vent sesh. Fluffing myself up. Casting myself as the underdog hero in an utterly mundane and unimpressive drama. In fact, if you’re a writer who is trying to sell your manuscript, maybe don’t read this post at all. Ah, but this is the end of it, I’ve already done all my complaining. Sorry.

If nothing else, I agree with my many rejection letters that this is all subjective. It just takes one agent to think there’s something to it. I haven’t found her yet, but I also haven’t queried every agent in existence… yet. Despite the fact that I have good, real life reasons for dragging my feet on the querying (beyond just not wanting to, I swear), it is also… just hard. Even at my best, it is just hard. It’s emotionally difficult to set yourself up for what you already know is going to be overwhelming failure, with an absolutely miniscule chance of success that may never come to fruition at all.

I feel sad when I receive a rejection letter. But also, that is truly just how it is. Whether I like it or not. Whether I think it’s fair or not. Whether I think my unpublished writing holds more value than writing that has been published. It does not matter. This journey has been a lesson in thick skin and long conversations with myself about money, careers, and the value (or lack thereof) of art.

The best thing to come out of this process so far is that no matter the amount of rejections I receive, or lack of audience at all, even after posting a number of original works for free, I retain the belief that the stories I write are stories worth writing. I wouldn’t write them if they weren’t. I wouldn’t waste my time. No matter how sour my grapes or dollar-hungry I maybe unfairly cast literary agents as being, I’m proud of my un-published/self-published work. How could I not be? It’s not perfect. But it is interesting. And it is good. And I made something out of nothing. And I did it by myself. To both my benefit and my detriment, I write stories that are worth writing, not stories that are worth money.

genre wars

If I asked one of the three people who read Don’t Worry About It what genre they thought it was… what would they say?

As two of the three people who read it, (I count as two because I read it a lot) I would say, it depends on the day, and my mood. Which is so very strange, considering the content of the novel doesn’t change. You could say it’s literary, if you were being generous. I certainly pitched it as literary fiction a number of times, even though the prose is not quite there. Could say it’s a romance, even though it’s not, despite the Wren/Ashley romance itself being a central part of the story. You could say, if you were being very cheeky, that it falls under the umbrella of women’s fiction. I mean, what’s more womanly than women fucking each other for a hundred thousand words? You could call it erotica. Or upmarket. Or, barf, queer/wlw/sapphic. I could call it drama… satire… contemporary… crossover… new adult… book club… or just plain “fiction”. And that’s just off the top of my head.

The concept of “genre” is so bizarre. It’s meant multiple different things to me in my life. I suppose, at the very, most basic level, genre is a different type of a thing under one umbrella. Usually, the umbrella is representative of a medium (TV, film, music, etc) and the genres describe specific subgroups within. However, “genre” also has a somewhat schlocky connotation, referring to the subgroup of fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and similar. “Genre”, in that instance, implies some amount of cheese. Some amount of low-brow, trashy fiction. A “genre” show is something like Supernatural or Doctor Who. But even though “mystery” is a fairly structured and terse genre, you probably wouldn’t lump it in with… genre. See, it’s very simple. Mystery is a genre, but it’s not genre. Make sure you write that down. Going even further down the rabbit hole, I have also understood genre as Storytelling Method. That is, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, screenwriting, etc. So, fiction is a genre. The TV show Supernatural is a genre. And mystery is a genre. All genres, but each application of “genre” means something different.

It’s confusing. You would think the lines become clearer when you’re trying to query a book and you literally have to choose an option from a dropdown menu in the agent’s QueryTracker submission form and yet— it’s not. I’m not convinced all agents, readers, reviewers, publishers, etc, are in agreement on the supposed constraints of one genre vs another. Or maybe that’s wishful thinking, and everyone else knows exactly what’s going on and I’m the only one who’s confused.

In most cases, I would argue “fanfiction” is, in and of itself, a genre. There are expectations within the world of fanfiction, and tropes (heaven help us all, so many tropes), and a pretty narrow, specific style of writing. In my time, I have gone through varying stages of fanfiction-ness in my writing. Most of the time, I think my writing has always been at its most successful and interesting when I veer away from that. However, there is no denying that fanfiction has shaped my writing style. On one hand, I struggle with that. There are gaps in my writing knowledge and experience as a result. On the other hand, it makes my original work unique and adds an additional layer to my literary fiction aspirations. Though it may seem like I’m constantly turning my nose up at things, fandom and fanfiction instilled in me a big anti-snob streak. When writing becomes too high-minded and academic, no matter how “literary”, I lose interest. There’s no hook. I don’t think everything has to be relatable, but I do want a certain amount of groundedness in the content I consume.

Mixing the fanfiction style (or maybe my specific fanfiction style, even though I just described it as narrow and specific above, I KNOW) with my aspirations of writing original fiction has proven difficult to capitalize on. Too much of one, not enough of the other, too much of each, maybe and probably both. It doesn’t really fit anywhere, even with what feels like the increasing fanfictioning of mainstream fiction. And there is, of course, the ever-present possibility that my writing is just not that good. I tend to discount the quality factor a little bit, not because it is undeniably untrue, but because many bad novels get published. If my novel was bad and published, it would simply be one of many bad novels already on the shelves.

Novel 2 follows from Don’t Worry in a similar, weird-genre fashion. Which, if you’re familiar with the non-success of Don’t Worry’s Query Tour of Misery and Destitution 2023/24, you will know does not bode well for it. I’ve talked a little about the genre weirdness of Novel 2, which is a bit brazen of me considering for privacy reasons I have to remain mostly mum on what it’s actually about, but still, I talk about it because it’s interesting. I just had a friend (shoutout to friend) give notes on it, and seeing someone else’s reaction to your own work never really gets old. It is amazing what other people, who are indeed different than me and experience the world differently than I do, will pull out of your words, sometimes even the complete opposite of what you intended or expected. It’s exhilarating and exhausting. But also inextricably intertwined with the entire concept of creating art in the first place. I have made something of myself and shared it with you; the act of your receiving this piece of me will inevitably transform it into something else. Art can never just be the artist or the audience. It’s the relationship between the two where true meaning is derived. It’s the Kuleshov effect if instead of two film shots edited together, it’s the act of consuming a piece of art. Most importantly to my point, though, is that this friend saw some of the themes and characters in the story in ways that were contradictory to how I did. We both read the same words, and came away from them with incompatible interpretations of said words. Sometimes, genre feels like that as well. Everyone reads differently.

It’s pleasurable when a genre is executed well within its specific parameters. And yet, somehow, it is similarly pleasurable when genre gets fucked around a bit. We want to be inside and outside of the box at the same time. Maybe the true fear is when there’s no box to orient yourself at all, regardless of where you fall in proximity to it. If we don’t know what is or is not weird, we can’t specifically derive pleasure from the fact that something is or is not weird. Palindromic? Yes. But also, true. Maybe I’m just experiencing delusions of grandeur, but sometimes I do think my writing can be a bit boxless. A bit difficult to orient. And things that are difficult to orient are difficult to sell. The forever fruitless thought exercise is how, exactly, one would have marketed Don’t Worry if both an agent and publisher had been insane enough to pick it up.

There are times where I write something I think is funny and someone else thinks it’s sad. There are times where I write something I think is sad and someone else thinks it’s funny. These chafing interpretations sit at a three-way cross section between 1) writer error (aka I didn’t write it good), 2) my reading of my words, and 3) your reading of my words. Very rarely will all three of these things be in alignment. But… that’s also the point. Paradoxically, good writing is both specific and interpretative. How does that makes sense? It doesn’t, really. Except for the fact that it does.

I think Don’t Worry About It has a very bittersweet ending. Very spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. On the other hand, it’s also been called very sad. On the other other hand, someone left a lovely comment on it just the other day that suggested the literary fiction world may not have enjoyed it because it was “too happy” for the genre. Despite the scripts and the tropes we supposedly all intrinsically understand after a certain age, we interpret genre similar to how we interpret the stories that take place within them. That is; everyone reads differently.

Am I splitting hairs? Does any of this matter? I wonder, as I often do, if this amount of navel gazing can ever benefit anyone. I suppose it’s important in the sense that I need some kind of story to tell myself about why no one wanted to publish my book(s). But also, the more I embrace these blurred lines, the less likely I am to perpetually feel like I am standing on one side of a glass enclosure and every other person is on the other side. The more likely I am to feel at home in the great animal soup of humanity.

It makes sense that genre is fucked up; it was made by us. Most things people make are pretty fucked up and don’t work good. At least genre is a somewhat innocuous offender compared to global supply chains, cigarettes, and money. That doesn’t make it any easier to get Don’t Worry or novel 2 published, but hey, it’s just money.

And, fucked up but true, just like Wren in Don’t Worry, the protagonist of novel 2? ALSO SMOKES. I’ve never smoked a cigarette a day in my life. What’s wrong with me.

it’s never just one thing

I don’t like to let characters off too easy. Rarely does anyone come away from one of my stories fully unscathed, fully unchanged. Rarely is any character in my stories happyandnothingelse. And if it seems like they are, no they’re not.

In the world of fanfiction, the one that I inhabited, at least, there was little room for happybutalsonot. There were a lot of strife-endlessgayhappiness pipelines. But very little acknowledgement of the fact that endlessgayhappiness is very rarely the last emotion one feels, forever. And that’s a little bit of a storytelling thing (stories can’t go on forever, nor cover every nuanced facet of existence) but also a personal gripe of mine. It wasn’t really that I was misled by fanfiction, though there’s definitely some unrealistic romantic expectations pushed under the guise of “this life could be yours if only you’d reach out and grab it!”. Like if you just worked a little harder, you too could become one half of a pair of glazed-over homosexual numbskulls who never feel anything except the warm fuzzies of their gayness and touching each other’s butts while they eat pizza and watch Netflix.

It’s an unrealistic, fairly grating, and fairly shallow approach to writing. I am going to draw on some of my own experiences from those times in my life to illustrate my point. I suspect any of you from the live-and-breathe-it side of the fandom world will understand me when I talk about the almost feverish “can you be in love with a fictional couple” delirium that can grip you when you are in the true thrall of your current OTP. At the time, frog-in-a-boiling-pot-of-water-esque, it just feels like really intense happiness. It feels like just one, uncomplicated thing.

Looking back on this time in my life makes me sad. Because it was about as far from just one, uncomplicated thing that I could get. I needed to be that insanely, mouth-foamingly obsessed with Destiel because anything less would fail to suffocate the crushing depression and loneliness I felt for pretty much all of my teenage/young adult years. The more I loved Destiel, the less I had to worry about the fact that it seemed like I was incapable of loving others or being loved in return. The more I loved Destiel, the less I had to worry about the fact that I didn’t know how to socialize, or hold a conversation, or move through the world with a healthy amount of composure and confidence as I settled into my adult skin, something I am still struggling with, way past the age where such a thing could still be considered quirky or endearing.

I’ve spoken at some length about my troubled relationship with fandom, but the reason I bring it up here is not to throw yet another pity party about it, but instead to use a real-life example to show that one, uncomplicated thing is rarely anything but. That euphoria I spoke about two paragraphs up, the “my fictional men are looking at each other again!” joy, is a multi-layered, mostly-pathetic and cobbled together attempt at understanding romance, subsuming and projecting sexuality, internalized misogyny, ignoring reality, and yeah, just generally enjoying a hobby by a fat awkward female nerd who couldn’t string two normal-sounding sentences together if you stopped her on the street and asked her to name a woman.

And this is where it gets interesting, because that… is interesting. It is interesting that what seems like one thing is actually many, and contradictory to boot. It is interesting that what looks, on the surface, like a normal nerdy hobby is in fact the very tippy top of a Titanic-busting iceberg. If I may be so unhinged, this is great character fodder. Not literally this, not literally me. But the ever-titillating “and what else?” of it.

It’s an interesting spectrum, because a lot of fiction, both fanmade and mainstream, is flat. Tropes thrive in this space. Everyone gets exactly what they want, and expect, and that’s the point. Introducing complexity into this formula changes it completely. On the other end of the spectrum, you get the dudebros of yesteryear who did shit that didn’t make sense or had very little basis in their (fictional) reality, all in the dreaded, think-pieced to death pursuit of “subverting expectations”, Game of Thrones’ final season(s) being your Platonic example of such a phenomenon.

I don’t think I play in either of these spaces. I don’t like boring twee fanfiction and I don’t like splattering my audience with a battering ram only because they wouldn’t otherwise be expecting it.

I ran into this issue while writing novel 2. Because I was trying to keep it mainstream-friendly, I did a lot of emotional flattening. However, my natural inclinations as a writer really clash with that approach. What I was left with, upon reread, was a complex story where a number of emotional beats completely missed the target, because I was aiming for the wrong target. There was a storyline that ended with a betrayal of a daughter by her mother. Originally, the moment when daughter finally stands up for herself and calls mom out was played as a heroic, empowering beat for daughter, something you would generally expect in a story like this, in a situation like this. When I reread it, though, it was very clear this wasn’t right. As tumultuous and difficult as this relationship is, being given an “out” by way of betrayal, a way that a daughter can finally wash her hands of her shitty mom sans guilt, would never be easy or heroic or empowering, unless you also happen to be the protagonist of a tumblr post wherein everybody claps after. It’s not empowering to tell your mother to pound sand, even if she deserves it. Even if she really deserves it. The easy way out, what I wrote in the first draft, is to suggest the daughter has finally “won”. But she hasn’t. Because she’s a human, and humans tend to feel sad when their parent does something that negatively affects them.

There was another storyline, this one following the close friendship of two women that, by the end of the novel, had soured to a pretty unforgiving point. Not an uncommon storyline. Outside of a dour literary novel, in the world of twee romance (less sure re the dudebros of the subverting expectations crew, it seems unlikely they are familiar with complex, nuanced emotion), the expectation here, at least as far as I understand it, is to kind of… brush it off? Like, water under the bridge and all that, we will continue on as friends, business as usual, but thanks for the drama between the covers. It would almost be too much (when I was still convinced this story was more romance than dour fiction) to pull the trigger on a friendship in this way, to say, actually, it really is over. Maybe not yet. But its slow and inevitable decline, despite neither of them wanting to let go, marches ever closer. Guess how things went for this friendship in my first draft? And then guess how things went in my second? Maybe only now, many years too late, do I understand the rightly scrutinized sentiment from many a Power That Be of, “it’s like a romance, but it’s not,” to describe a very close same sex friendship, because when it’s over, it may as well have been. Just without any of the perks.

There are other examples, which is a bit unfortunate. That first draft was a true rough go. However, the fact that I can use them as examples now means that I identified the problem and have since addressed it. I was going for mainstream appeal (as mainstream as you can get with lesbians, anyway) but that was never really a match for my tendency toward happybutalsonot in terms of narrative subjects. Instead of getting out the cement roller and making it even flatter, I spent my months-long revision process roughing everything up to add back in some much-needed texture.

Once I started taking my writing seriously, I leaned hard into the bittersweet. In my Wangxian days, you can hear it rattling its cup against the bars of its cell. Even in the Supernatural days, there’s a whisper of it. Writing will never be a true reflection of real life— it can’t be, nor does it need to be, nor does all writing aspire to be. That being said, writing grounded in real human emotion (even when those emotions are very far from grounded themselves) tends to be what I gravitate toward. What is a true human experience without a bit of happysad and sadhappy and lovehate and depressedgiddyness and resignedexhaustion, not even opposites, necessarily, just different, and chafing against each other regardless? Emotions are much soupier than we give them credit for.

There’s a reason bittersweetness feels so right. It’s one of the few feelings that allows breathing room, that accounts for the fact that you are never just happy, or sad, or mad, or scared, or lonely. Maybe that’s why depression, already bad, is my worst offender. It’s the ever-flattening of everything. It forces one thing, and one thing only. I struggle with obsessive thoughts as well. If you’re at all familiar with my writing, fictional or on this blog, that will probably surprise you about as much as water being wet. And obsessive thoughts also tend to push just one thing, over… and over… and over… and then they get bored and move onto the next one. They flatten my existence. Sometimes, my mental landscape feels no different than a newly repaved megastore parking lot, baking in the sun as far as the eye can see.

I’m no psychologist, but it stands to reason that a natural response to the hideous flattening of depression and obsessive thoughts would be to explore emotions that run the gamut, and do so at the same time, pushing and shoving the whole way down. And the only place I can really explore that response is in my work. And in response to that response, no character in my work is ever allowed to be unreservedly happy. The generally understood best (but also dubious) practice of “write what you know” may apply here. If I ever write an optimist, it is here I am admitting to stolen valour, to writing about a life and experience I myself have never and will never know.

I understand why not everyone likes this approach. Real life is complex enough, and people are looking for an escape when they get horizontal to enjoy their screen time. As someone who seems to have completely lost the ability to escape into fiction or to feel uncomplicatedly happy, this is just business as usual. It’s funny, because I’m talking like I’m going against the grain, or indeed, subverting expectations, when really, I am simply incapable of unshackling myself from my own.

As my writing matured, as it crept toward “art” territory, bittersweetness feels like the inevitable outcome. So long as I keep writing, I keep expecting to mature. Although maybe I’ll re-focus my lens down the road. Without a crystal ball, I can’t say for sure. I am trying to write simpler stories for “fun” between novels. They almost certainly will prove to be more lucrative. However, I am not sure I’ll ever be able to put my love of the bittersweet aside for the sake of getting published.

The ending of the first draft of novel 2 had not been earned. It was in line with my bittersweet bible thumping mentality, but the bittersweetness itself hadn’t yet been properly threaded into the DNA of the story. Once I got those things aligned, it came together much nicer (bittersweet-er…). It’s kind of a downer ending, but then again, so was Don’t Worry. Importantly, though, they aren’t just downers. They’re downers… with a smidgen of something else. Maybe not hope, that’s taking it a little far. Even happiness is a bit of an overstatement. “Making a weary peace,” I will settle on, whether that’s the characters making it with the world around them, themselves, or both.

As the saying goes: Reach for the moon of happiness. Even if you miss, you’ll land amongst the weary peace of a silent, painless, unconscious death in the coldhot embrace of space.