A Change of Title / New Query Letter, Too
May. 17th, 2014 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahunter3I've changed the title of my book.
Well, the portion after the colon—is that more properly referred to as its subtitle?
OLD: The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale
NEW: The Story of Q: From a Queerly Different Closet
To explain why, I am going to have to drop back and explain why the original title. As I said in my introductory post on this blog, I've taken to using the term "genderqueer" but it doesn't really explain much. That the term exists seems to me a good thing. A single-word method of saying "different in some other as-of-yet unspecified way". That's useful in and of itself, although it's akin to saying "etcetera" is a specific type of expense in my budget. The implication is that you'd have to dig deeper and bring it into sharper focus before the finer, more granular categories will appear on your screen, and that worked for me as a premise for the book since it delivers on that.
But more to the point (he confesses), it's a trendy new term. It's a current phenomenon, people using that term as description of themselves. So my thinking was that literary agents and publishers might be alert for an inside story from such a person and hence would seize my cover letter and say "Aha!" when they read my pitch for the story.
Well, 200 query letters later, I found myself having serious second thoughts about that. My pitch isn't bad and it definitely conveys what the book's going to be about, so if agents were actively looking for a genderqueer memoir or coming-out story, it seems like more of them would have requested a peek at the manuscript.
OR, perhaps, those who are indeed on the lookout for a story of that ilk are being turned away by the realization that I am not a twenty-something. (My cover letter does make that apparent). As I said, it's a trendy new term. Most of the people using it to refer to themselves are young. I can visualize an agent scanning my letter and tossing it into the slush pile, thinking "Yeah, I could go with a story like that, but it has to be from the target audience of genderqueer folks who would buy it and read it, and they are not going to want to read about a middle-aged guy who says he's one of them".
Then there's this: as I've sought out people to be early readers or people with whom to discuss these issues, the ones whose personal stories are the most like mine do not call themselves "genderqueer". Some say "transgender", some say "it's complicated, it's something else, I don't have a name for it", much as I've said all my life. The people who actually call themselves "genderqueer", although none have said "No, you shouldn't call yourself that", are more likely to be "anti-gender" people, "I do not have a gender" people, or "sometimes I am this, sometimes I am that" gendered people.
Here's the new version of the query letter I'm using (it's not very different, actually):
I'm a girl, that's my gender; I'm male, that's my sex; I'm attracted to females, that's my orientation.
I don't feel as if I were born in the wrong body.
In 1980 there was no book I could find by anyone like that. Still isn't. I've written a 95,000-word coming-out memoir, THE STORY OF Q: FROM A QUEERLY DIFFERENT CLOSET.
As a child, I admired the girls so I emulated them and competed with them and played with them. By puberty I was being called "faggot" and "queerbait" and beaten up for my presumed sexual preference.
By the age of 21 I was under a lot of pressure to identify myself as something, but there was no term for it at the time. When I did try to come out, the result was incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
Newly confident that I was OK, I started a mental patients' uprising and was kicked out for disrupting the facility. I went on to get a college degree in Women's Studies, where same ideas that got me locked up were published in peer-reviewed journals as feminist theory articles.
This story will appeal to fans of Leslie Feinberg's STONE BUTCH BLUES, Daphne Scholinski's THE LAST TIME I WORE A DRESS, and Chaz Bono's BECOMING CHAZ, and it will be a resource for anyone exploring questions of identity and questioning their own sexuality.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Well, the portion after the colon—is that more properly referred to as its subtitle?
OLD: The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale
NEW: The Story of Q: From a Queerly Different Closet
To explain why, I am going to have to drop back and explain why the original title. As I said in my introductory post on this blog, I've taken to using the term "genderqueer" but it doesn't really explain much. That the term exists seems to me a good thing. A single-word method of saying "different in some other as-of-yet unspecified way". That's useful in and of itself, although it's akin to saying "etcetera" is a specific type of expense in my budget. The implication is that you'd have to dig deeper and bring it into sharper focus before the finer, more granular categories will appear on your screen, and that worked for me as a premise for the book since it delivers on that.
But more to the point (he confesses), it's a trendy new term. It's a current phenomenon, people using that term as description of themselves. So my thinking was that literary agents and publishers might be alert for an inside story from such a person and hence would seize my cover letter and say "Aha!" when they read my pitch for the story.
Well, 200 query letters later, I found myself having serious second thoughts about that. My pitch isn't bad and it definitely conveys what the book's going to be about, so if agents were actively looking for a genderqueer memoir or coming-out story, it seems like more of them would have requested a peek at the manuscript.
OR, perhaps, those who are indeed on the lookout for a story of that ilk are being turned away by the realization that I am not a twenty-something. (My cover letter does make that apparent). As I said, it's a trendy new term. Most of the people using it to refer to themselves are young. I can visualize an agent scanning my letter and tossing it into the slush pile, thinking "Yeah, I could go with a story like that, but it has to be from the target audience of genderqueer folks who would buy it and read it, and they are not going to want to read about a middle-aged guy who says he's one of them".
Then there's this: as I've sought out people to be early readers or people with whom to discuss these issues, the ones whose personal stories are the most like mine do not call themselves "genderqueer". Some say "transgender", some say "it's complicated, it's something else, I don't have a name for it", much as I've said all my life. The people who actually call themselves "genderqueer", although none have said "No, you shouldn't call yourself that", are more likely to be "anti-gender" people, "I do not have a gender" people, or "sometimes I am this, sometimes I am that" gendered people.
Here's the new version of the query letter I'm using (it's not very different, actually):
I'm a girl, that's my gender; I'm male, that's my sex; I'm attracted to females, that's my orientation.
I don't feel as if I were born in the wrong body.
In 1980 there was no book I could find by anyone like that. Still isn't. I've written a 95,000-word coming-out memoir, THE STORY OF Q: FROM A QUEERLY DIFFERENT CLOSET.
As a child, I admired the girls so I emulated them and competed with them and played with them. By puberty I was being called "faggot" and "queerbait" and beaten up for my presumed sexual preference.
By the age of 21 I was under a lot of pressure to identify myself as something, but there was no term for it at the time. When I did try to come out, the result was incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
Newly confident that I was OK, I started a mental patients' uprising and was kicked out for disrupting the facility. I went on to get a college degree in Women's Studies, where same ideas that got me locked up were published in peer-reviewed journals as feminist theory articles.
This story will appeal to fans of Leslie Feinberg's STONE BUTCH BLUES, Daphne Scholinski's THE LAST TIME I WORE A DRESS, and Chaz Bono's BECOMING CHAZ, and it will be a resource for anyone exploring questions of identity and questioning their own sexuality.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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no subject
Date: 2014-05-18 02:53 am (UTC)I find the new title æsthetically displeasing, whatever its merits.
This bit of writing by
You might want to address the way in which the acceptance of gay marriage further marginalizes poly folk. (One o' them things that might be redundant: maybe you already do this.)
It occurs to me that there are probably any number of marginalized splinter groups like the one you represent. Your story would have wider appeal if you claimed to represent all of them, if only for political purposes, rather than just the one.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-20 03:58 pm (UTC)---
There are two recurrent and interrelated comments or lines of thought that have cropped up quite often over the years in which I've been trying to do this:
• What is it that you hope to accomplish? What's your goal, your ideal outcome, if your efforts were to succeed?
• Why do we need to identify and "have liberation" for this or that specified out-group? Shouldn't we just have human liberation, embrace the ideal of equality for absolutely everybody and leave it at that? I mean, by identifying yourself or your group as ThesePeople™, you're adding more energy into the old tired labels that labeled you as ThesePeople™ to begin with; if you don't wish to be treated differently, that seems kind of counterproductive.
nickykaa's piece is one such exposition.
I think I am going to write about this theme next. It's a subject worthy of its own journal post.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-18 06:05 am (UTC)I do love your query letter, still.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-20 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-18 04:51 pm (UTC)I think you should take age out of the paper. If it makes it clear that you're not 'young'. The magic of being an author is...you can be a woman, a man, a boy, a child, and...the reader can't tell. An author is sexless and identity-less. Leave it that way. They don't need to know how old you are, or what you look like, that's not germaine to the story? Let them take the story, as is, and then be surprised that someone so positively ancient could be that cool and in touch or something.;)
K.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-20 04:02 pm (UTC)Taking age out of the paper isn't really a workable option. The story is of its own era, and although not being "young" may add a burden when it comes to finding an agent / publisher, the fact that I was doing and saying these things in 1980 makes me a pioneer of sorts and to the right agent / publisher that could add to its appeal.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-20 04:11 pm (UTC)What if I inverted it? FROM A QUEERLY DIFFERENT CLOSET: THE STORY OF Q
I'm open to suggestions!
I do still like the "STORY OF Q" part. And it still works: the old acronym LGBT (and the even older less inclusive ones GLB / LGB) was modified to extend the "umbrella", but in a somewhat vaguely defined way, to "Q", concerning which there isn't even consensus on what word the Q stands for (queer? genderqueer [avoiding a second G by shortening it]? questioning? something quintessentially different?), which sets the stage for a "story of". (And of course the play-on-titles reference to STORY OF O).
no subject
Date: 2014-05-20 06:42 pm (UTC)I still think you can...de-emphasize age. When I read mafia stories from the 1940s, I know the people are 1200 years old, now. But...they're youths in the story and...so you, subconsciously, imagine the author (if it is a biography at least) as whatever age the character is...
K.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-20 06:43 pm (UTC)