genre wars
Everyone reads differently.
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
Emotions are much soupier than we give them credit for.
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.
elevating marginalized voices
Morally unsettled, but at what cost volume profit analysis?
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
Somewhere in this blog I said my deadline for book 2 was spring 2025. Guess what time it is? Spring 2025.
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.