Hi! Sorry I haven't blogged lately. Things have been simultaneously hectic and non-newsworthy for the most part in the land of STORY OF Q. That's a situation that just changed today, but I'm not quite prepared to write about today's developments (I think the relevant phrase is "waiting for the dust to settle"). Watch this space for more activity in days to come.

I will, however, take this opportunity to introduce my team. Yay, I have a team!!! I do!!!


First off, meet my literary agent, Sheree Bykofsky, of Sheree Bykofsky Associates. She now lists The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale, by Allan Hunter, as one of the books her agency represents.

I first interacted with Sheree Bykofsky and her agency in October of 2013. Hers was the first agency to indicate a serious interest in the book, and they asked me to submit a formal book proposal. I did not have one. I was given some examples and general instructions on how to assemble a formal nonfiction book proposal, and that proposal, with occasional minor modifications, was the proposal I sent out a total of 163 times.

Sheree Bykofsky Associates ultimately decided not to represent my book in 2013, probably for legitimate reasons (it was still pretty rough around the edges—something that's easier for me to see in hindsight after it's been revamped and polished a few times).

I did not, in fact, ever succeed in luring any literary agent into representing my book until after I had secured a publishing offer from EC Books through a direct query. That, also, is probably for legitimate reasons. My book is a narrowly tailored book, a niche book for the most part, although there could not be a better time to be coming out with a book about an additional and different gender identity. It's at least momentarily a trendy social topic. Even so, it's not a mainstream book of the sort you'd pick up at the Penn Station bookstore while waiting for your train.

The reason I wanted a literary agent ANYWAY was that I'm a total newbie and I wanted someone who could tell me when I was being reasonable and when I was not, and when my publisher was establishing normal industry-standard contract terms and when they were going pretty far afield of that. And how to express my wishes and concerns in such a way that I'd be most likely to get the concessions I wanted without making the publisher regret having decided to have anything to do with such a prima donna.

Sheree Bykofsky has been wonderfully supportive, available to me as someone I can write back and forth to informally and openly, and who will then don her professional persona and craft business letters, negotiating on my behalf, protecting my interests.



Then I sought out and found a publicist. I'd been warned away from doing so by many authors, including the opinionated crew at Absolute Write Water Cooler as well as several bloggers, warning me that they often don't do much that an author could not do on their own to publicize a book, and that some of them aren't very ethical and just run off with the author's money. Yeah yeah, I appreciated the warnings, but I know where my talents lie and where they do not. The publicizing of my book could not possibly be in worse hands than my own. I could go up to a randomly chosen homeless person on the sidewalks of New York and hire them and the project would be better off than with me relying on my own skills.

What I did was research the matter and found a web site of biographers (close enough to memoirists for my purposes) that maintained a list (Boswell's List) of professionals that several of them had had good experiences with.

I went with John Sherman, who was praised for the excellent work he did for the author of a biography about an industrialist that no one had heard of. The author was similarly an unknown person. So I contacted him and we had a good conversation on the phone. He was quick to embrace the project, to see the book as an important book that SHOULD be out there, that SHOULD be read, and he will be helping me to market it, firstly to academics—to women's studies and gender studies professors teaching courses for which it would be relevant text.

I'm already making him a busy person. He has a good sense for what info and other preparations we need for marketing endeavors down the road in ways that I am ignorant of. For example he says we need to target book reviewers who have a policy of not reviewing a book once it is already out, but who will only feature books in their reviews that are forthcoming.

This is all very exciting. I think I've been dreaming about this since, oh, 1980 or thereabouts. It's gonna happen. I get to tell my story at last.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Seal Press will not be publishing my book. I received the rejection letter on 9/8.

I was originally planning on querying Cleis Press next: "Cleis Press publishes provocative, intelligent books across genres. Whether literary fiction, human rights, mystery, romance, erotica, LGBTQ studies, sex guides, pulp fiction, or memoir, you know that if it's outside the ordinary, it's Cleis Press."

But then I read some things other authors have written about them in recent months that made them sound like a bad idea.

I've been contemplating Thorntree, publishers of the polyamory guide More Than Two, and in fact I sat down at my desk tonight to review their submissions policy:


To submit a proposal, please first send an email with the following information:

A one-paragraph biography, including any published works

A one-paragraph summary of the proposed work, including your intended audience

Links to your social media and Web presences

If your submission appears appropriate for our list, we will invite you to submit a complete proposal.

We will accept queries and proposals on a rolling basis.



Whether it's the mood I've been in lately or not, I can't say for sure, but right now their submission process is very discouraging. It comes across to me very much as "we might be interested in your book if you've already got a track record of publication and, in particular, if you've got a strong active platform already; outside of that, just summarize your book and its intended audience in one paragraph and we'll let you know".


I have of course continued to send query letters to literary agents. It seems to me that public attention is more focused on gender issues and gender identity than ever before, so my book is squarely located in the midst of a trendy topic. So I keep telling myself that any day now some agent could decide to represent my book and get it published. Well, here's how that's shaping up at the moment:


Total queries to date: 680
Rejections: 613
Outstanding: 67
Under Consideration: 0

As Nonfiction, specifically, total queries: 467
Rejections: 414
Outstanding: 53

As Fiction, total queries: 213
Rejections: 199
Outstanding: 14



I've been trying to make a public ripple, explain the phenomenon of being a male girl or non-transitioning transgender or heterosexual sissy or gender invert or any of the other things I've attempted to call it over the years. I've been trying to do so because once upon a time, a long long time ago, I promised myself that if I *EVER* found out why people treated me this way, if I *EVER* found out why these things were happening to me, I was going to do something about it. I've been trying to do so because once I did, in fact, figure it out, I promised myself that I'd make it so that anyone like me growing up would not have to figure it all out for themselves. I've been trying to do this as my primary avocation and purpose in life, my mission, since 1980.

You could say I've only seriously set out to do one thing in my life and I've been a pretty pathetic failure at it.

That's not entirely fair, I tell myself. Once I figured this stuff out, I also set out to actually live my life, to not merely preach these ideas but to put them into practice. And to my relief and surprise, that's been the easier part. It took decades but I got better and better at communicating up close and personal, I learned from experience how to find what I was looking for, and I found personal solutions. I get to live my everyday life not at all closeted or isolated but instead loved and understood and cared for and appreciated for who I am, and I in turn get to hold and love and cherish and have togetherness and meaningful connection in my life.

Which is to say that I've got damn little to complain about, and also to acknowledge that it is grossly insulting to people who love me for me to characterize my life as a failure.

I get to be me, and not merely in isolation. (Can anyone be themselves without connection and accepting companionship?) But there is "be" and there is "do". I set out to do something. Nothing else I have ever set out to do has held anything akin to the same kind of importance; every other activity or accomplishment has basically been distraction and entertainment along the way, including artistic accomplishments, job and career, and the acquisition of skills. This one thing is where I've invested all my determination. I am stubborn, intelligent, passionate about my issue, and I'm good with words and skilled at explaining complicated concepts, and I can't believe I've accomplished so damn little in so much time!

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Hot damn! From one of my query letters to a nonfiction lit agent, query only, no additional materials, I just got a request for a proposal plus sample chapters!


So once again my book is under consideration with two agents simultaneously! One full manuscript (still holding my breath on that one) and one formal proposal.


Current stats for The Story of Q:

Total queries: 640
Rejections: 573
Outstanding: 65
Under Consideration: 2

As NonFiction:

Total queries: 439
Rejectionsw: 388
Outstanding: 50
Under Consideration: 1

As Fiction:

Total queries: 201
Rejections: 185
Outstanding: 15
Under Consideration:


————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Basically, movements like ours tend to have two goals: to reach out to others like ourselves, in the belief that if you're like us it's easier to have the support of other similar people than to be isolated; and to do social change, to modify how we're treated by others, to stop the mistreatment or oppression, to change the law or the social structures, so as to make the world safe for ourselves.

Today, I want to focus on the second priority, the social change fork.

I don't know what your experience was, but I first ran into hostility, directed towards me for being different, when I was a kid in school. I found it startling, shocking; I hadn't expected it and didn't understand it. Why were these people so hateful and mean?

Looking back on it with the additional benefit of hindsight and a lifetime of thinking about it, I'm aware of a couple of things that escaped my notice in 4th grade:

• To a lesser extent than what they were displaying, but still definitely present within me, I was hostile to THEIR differences from ME as well; mixed in with my anger and hurt was some outrage: how DARE they, I mean LOOK at them, they're pathetic, something's wrong with them, how can they be that way instead of being like me and then on top of that be so wrongheaded as to think I'm the one who deserves to be made fun of? They should look in a mirror, yeesh!!

• They had a notion of what my differences meant. It was all distorted and badly wrong in a lot of ways, and it was shot through with contempt and ridicule, and basically didn't reflect any meaningful understanding of me, but they apparently THOUGHT they understood what it meant to be like me, and they were largely in agreement with each other.



We tend to form our notions of dogs in large part from our experiences with dogs, but our notions of hippopotamuses almost exclusively from what we've heard about them and how they're depicted.


When it came to male-bodied people (or people perceived by their classmates and teachers as male) who act like girls and share the interests of girls and so forth, I was often the first direct experience for many of the other kids in 1st and 2nd grade; they hadn't formed a lot of attitudes yet, and although there was some of that basic xenophobia thing — "eww, why are you like that, you're different?!?" — it didn't get bad until later.

The boys and girls who had class with me talked about me to other kids, because it's an item of curiosity, something to be described with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Their description of me and how I act was formed from their experience of me, although of course shaped by how my behaviors seemed to them, and would not have tended to include much of any self-description by me of my own behaviors and how I saw them.

Within a couple of years, most kids my age had HEARD OF people like me, partly from this process (where kids describe someone that had been in their class who was like me) and partly from things they picked up from TV or things their parents or other adults said. Girlish boys were held up to ridicule for them before they met me, and still, in many cases, before they'd had much actual contact with anyone like me. So they observed a few things, sufficient to make them think "ooh, he's more girlish than any of the other boys in class, let's torment him, it'll be fun", anticipating that I'd rise to the bait and prove my boyish masculinity to their satisfaction... and when I didn't, and didn't try to conceal how I was, they had their first live one, one of those sissy boys they'd heard about. The circus was in town. Come see the weirdo!



This is the situation for marginalized minorities in a nutshell. Mainsteam people (e.g., cisgender conventionally binary people in our case) know about us primarily from what other mainstream people have said in the process of describing us to each other. There's a certain amount of not-very-friendly xenophobia ("ewww, you're not like me, why aren't you like me?") that probably can't be attributed strictly to social structures or "isms" of various negatively discriminatory sorts, but they're heavily fertilized and fed by what's inside the package of shared social attitudes towards us, the stories that the mainsteam have told themselves about us, and yes, in many cases they are also reinforced by institutions, social structures, systems that perpetuate our situation.

Laws can be overturned, policies can be set, and systems, especially formal systems governed by rules and whatnot, can be modified to make room for us, and to make those kinds of changes, it has proven useful and effective to appeal to mainstream people's sense of justice and to point to our injuries and the damages done to us and the unfairness and unnecessary nature of these hurtful things.

But formal structural rule-based aspects of society are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Attitudes may to some extent follow the path initially set by court decisions and institutional policy decisions, but for attitude changes to become pervasive, there has to be understanding, not just compliance.

Race — I dare say this as a white-skinned American who has never been on the marginalized side of racism — the concept that racism is wrong is easy for racially mainstream people to understand. People are born with one set or another of certain ethnic physical characteristics that we categorize as "white" or "black" or whatever; the people thusly categorized are otherwise not inherently different, and treating them on any level — institutionally, personally, culturally, etc — as if they WERE inherently different is wrong, immoral, unfair, has caused great pain and suffering. OK, in actual practice embracing and enacting a racism-free world is not quite as easy or as simple as we once hoped, but as a CONCEPT it has turned out to be something that people could grasp sufficiently well to make overtly racist attitudes socially unacceptable and viewed as reprehensible. Or possibly it only looks that way to me because it's 2015 and the long rough slog it took to get to this point stretches far back into our cultural past.

At any rate, gender and sexual identity, in my opinion, are largely NOT understood clearly by the mainstream folks. I think we're getting a decently generous batch of politically correct compliance and parroting back to us of the most common phrases likely to appear in newspapers and magazines about differently gendered people and our experiences, but it is accompanied by a lot of perplexity and pushback from people who resent being pressured to parrot those phrases when it makes no sense to them, they don't get it. They have some attitude, some annoyance, and some lingering xenophobia ("why can't you just be normal, why do you want to be a special freaking snowflake?"), but not such a high prevalence of real hostility and contempt so much as bewilderment.

Me, I'm not a 4th grader any more. I'm sure of myself and my gender identity, I am not plagued with nervous self-doubts about my difference, I understand how the pieces of the puzzle fit together, and I'm willing to be in the circus sideshow. Yeah, come see the weirdo. Ask your questions. Wanna hear my story? I'll tell you how it is, what it's like. Don't worry about offending me, I've heard worse, I assure you. Interact with me. Think about this stuff. I want you to understand. The more you mainstream folks understand the more you will hold attitudes that I want you to hold because they just plain make sense, not because everyone will point fingers at you and tell you you're an insensitive privileged cisgendered boor of an asshole who should be ashamed of yourself.


That is how I view our activity. I'm glad we're winning at the policy-change level, but the current rising trend towards correcting people for microaggressions and castigating them for triggering behavior and otherwise trying to roll out social change by demanding compliance before understanding, that doesn't appeal to me.

Even the phrase "social justice" is getting on my nerves lately. The word "justice" is a heavily loaded term. We live in a punitive society. The systems that dispense justice largely do so by identifying evildoers and perpetrators and violators and wrongdoers, and then punishing them, as well as or sometimes instead of stopping them from continuing to do so. And they are all of them systems that rely on authority, coercion, power over other people, to lend force to their implementations of justice. Oh, I understand anger, all right, and the gut-level desire to see the shoe forced onto the other foot, oh yeah WE shall coerce YOU and designate you as a perpetrator of our oppression and FORCE you to stop it, punishing each offense, identifying it as a social misdemeanor against us, connected historically with how we've always been treated up to this point, and if it makes you feel disempowered in the process, yay, so much the better, assholes. But it's morally wrong, it's tactically wrong, it's factually wrong, and it's, dammit, politically wrong.

I don't believe in the Culprit Theory of Oppression. I don't think the white cisgender able-bodied male people gleefully plotted everyone else's plight in the primordial paleolithic boys' bathroom and then subjected us all to this. I also don't think people intrinsically benefit from having power over other people and therefore are unfair beneficiaries whenever someone else is disempowered and silenced and marginalized and oppressed. Furthermore, if it were true, it that really were the case, YOU CAN'T FIX IT since if it is intrinsic, you are, by definition, saying that you would oppress if given the opportunity to do so; that anyone, ever, with the opportunity to oppress will do so; that anyone set up to be in a position of protective power to enforce equality will use that power to oppress, instead, because, well, it's intrinsically beneficial to them to do so.

It's a measure of how marginalized (ha! so to speak...) I am within our own activist communities that I just got booted from a Facebook group, the Genderqueer, Agender, Neutrois, Genderfluid, and Non-binary discussion. The precipitating event? Someone had posted a link to an article about Triggering. In the article, the author, Gillian Brown, said "Triggering occurs when any certain something (a 'trigger') causes a negative emotional response", and then went on to explain the necessity of preventing triggering from occurring, and the necessity of stepping in to protect people and keep the space SAFE by reminding people to put trigger warnings. I replied with some derision: by that definition, we would all have to preface anything that might cause a negative emotional response in anyone with a trigger warning. It's a silly definition. More to the point, this is simply not how I think we best make the world a safe space in which to be genderqueer people. We make the world safer by making ourselves understood. We make the world safer for ourselves by stepping out, being brave, being seen, letting people point and ask questions, by risking hostility and derision, by being brave enough to SHOW that we aren't going to be intimidated by the risk of hostility and derision, by not being ashamed of who we are.

It didn't go over well, apparently. (I can only conjecture; my membership in the group evaporated without any private message and I can only assume they decided I was a trigger and made people in the group feel unsafe).



OTHER NEWS


I haven't blogged in an embarrassingly long while. A big part of it is that I'm metaphorically holding my breath while an agent is reading my entire manuscript, trying not to become unduly hopeful that she'll represent me, but not succeeding in that attempt. I can't help it. I may be setting myself up for a horrible letdown but I am full of excitement and joyful daydreams.

I have, however, at least succeeded in not just sitting motionless in these endeavors. I've continued to send out query letters. And as a matter of fact, I got a request for a partial (a request to read the first 50 pages) from a query letter and therefore, for a couple weeks at least, for the first time ever, had two agents simultaneously expressing interest and reviewing my writing with the possibility of representation. Unfortunately, this second agent soon wrote back on June 3:

> We were impressed by From a Queerly Different Closet: The Story of Q's
> holistic approach to the underwritten topic of growing up queer.
> However, we struggled to engage emotionally with Derek because of the
> lack of specificity in prose. For example, it was difficult to
> understand why, in middle school, Derek found boys' behavior to be
> "bad" (rather than merely displeasing or disruptive), when Derek had
> not expressed a desire to be "good" or why Derek was ostracized
> growing up without knowing how exactly he was teased in each school he
> attended. Without such basic details, it was difficult to get a sense
> of Derek's personality and essential conflict. Ultimately, this meant
> that we couldn't completely fall in love with the story.


That was such a thoughtful and personal rejection letter that I did something I never do in response to rejection letters: I wrote back!

> Hi, and thank you for the most thoughtful rejection letter I've ever
> received!
>
>
> This is the type of feedback I was hoping to get except, of course,
> accompanied by something along the lines of "please address these
> concerns and send us modified chapters" instead of "not quite right
> for our list".
>
> I don't suppose y'all liked what's there well enough to want to work
> with me on it to see if I could address some of these concerns? (It
> can be hard for me as the author to "see" only what is on paper
> instead of seeing through it to the story that I already know —
> especially after editing it to a smaller size).
>
> If not, well, thanks again for such a personal and encouraging reply.

No subsequent reply though, so onward I move, on my still-neverending quest for a lit agent.


Current Stats:

Total Queries (Story of Q): 562
Rejections: 524
Outstanding: 37
Under Consideration: 1

As Nonfiction, specifically, total queries: 373
Rejections: 343
Outstanding: 30

As Fiction, total queries: 189
Rejections: 181
Outstanding: 7
Under Consideration: 1


————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Revision project is successfully completed!

This thing was written, originally, as a nonfiction memoir, but since I'm currently hawking it mainly as a work of fiction, and because I've gotten enough feedback over the last couple years that the writing is a little "disappointing", it made sense to me to go back in and translate generic descriptions of how things were into individual representative scenes, complete with dialog and action and so forth.

That tends to create much longer, wordier blocks of text. One doesn't need to lay down a lot of words in order to say something like "I had tapered off and then quit spending time with the flagpole folks who sang the religious songs. I'd attended some evening sessions in various folks' houses and one day was riding back to White Rock with one of the guys when his VW bus ran out of gas coming down the hill. He cheerfully 'put it in the hands of the Lord' and managed to coast to the traffic light then creep through a left turn and then pick up speed down the next hill and into the service station, and he praised Jesus for making sure we got where we were going without any fuel. I became aware that I simply did not believe what they believed and even though they were not at all confrontational about it I felt less and less comfortable, as if I were faking it just to be singing the songs, so I dropped out of that scene."

But if you were going to do that like a screenplay, well, let's see, let's have me arrive and greet some people, come up with some names, specify 3-4 characters standing around the piano, try to recapture the feel of their friendly but treacly way of interacting, put some private thoughts in my head, a line or two of a song, some more dialog, get into the VW bus, some dialog taking place in the van before it runs out of gas, hmm better describe how we're going down this steep hill, NOW run out of gas, now have the driver comment on putting it in the hands of the lord... OK now describe coasting through the traffic light and slowly making the corner then picking up speed down the hill, and the guys in the van doing the Praise Jesus thing, and more internal dialog, then me getting out of the van, some more contemplation, elaborating on me not feeling comfy with those folks any more, then a wrapup sentence or two indicating that this event among others led to me tapering off and dropping out of the folk-religious singers group.

Guess what, we've sprawled out into several pages to cover a scene that used to be described in a paragraph!


So alongside of that, I streamlined and trimmed and hacked off subplots, condensed some characters into one character, and ended up with a narrative that sticks a lot tighter to the central story line, and that seems like a good thing too.

Overall, the manuscript has gained weight, but not too badly.

Old: 302 pages, 95,900 words
New: 318 pages, 96,800 words

With the revision finished, I've gone back to querying. Another 17 went out via email or are queued up for delivery to the post office for snailmailing.

Stats:

Total Queries: 470
Rejections: 380
Outstanding: 90

As NonFiction: total queries = 332
Rejections: 320
Outstanding: 12

As Fiction: total queries = 138
Rejections: 60
Outstanding: 78


Since it's a new edition, I'm again interested in beta readers. If you'd like to stick your nose into this tome, email me backchannel: ahunter3@earthlink.net


————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Not too terribly long ago, on a message board just the usual internet-distance far far away (the Absolute Write Water Cooler, to be precise), I bravely asserted that all this is just the first year, and that I was going to keep plugging away at this for at least 10 years before before calling it quits.

One of the board regulars replied:

> you say '10 years,' as if you're just going to query for 10 years,
> come hell or high water, but won't you run out of agents long before
> then? I mean they do keep making more, but still. How're you not close
> to that already?

As it turns out, that was a rather prescient observation. In the first week of October, I continued my ongoing agentquery.com search for agents who do memoirs, picking up where I left off, and at the bottom of the page, where there's usually a "next page" button, there wasn't one. I'd gone through the entire supply of author's agents who do memoirs.

That's not quite as FINAL as it may sound. I mean, the first search I did, way back when I first got started, was for agents who marketed nonfiction books about gay and lesbian subjects. I ran to the end of that within a couple weeks. But the pool of agents doing memoirs was OCEAN-sized and yes, it was unsettling to hit that wall.

I've been focusing since then on sending out queries positioning the book as fiction, of the "Literary Fiction" ilk. I have to admit, though, it's all been a bit discouraging.

Which made it particularly nice when I opened another in a small daily stack of self-addressed stamped envelopes, recording the rejections in my database, and realized after a moment that what I was staring at wasn't a rejection.


> I'm writing to you about your book FROM A QUEERLY DIFFERENT CLOSET.
> We would like to consider it. Please send the first 50 pages, a
> detailed outline or synopsis no more than 10 pages, double-spaced, and
> mail them to my attention. Please claerly mark "REQUESTED MATERIAL"
> on the front of the envelope and enclose a self-addressed, stamped
> envelope. We'll review your work at the first possible opportunity.
> If it seems like something we can represent, we'll contact you soon.


That still doesn't shift the odds for me with that particular agency to "more likely than not", but it's at least a move in a favorable direction. It's so good when someone's sufficiently interested that they ask to see more instead of just sending a form-letter rejection notice.



Current Stats:

The Story of Q--total queries = 420
Rejections: 310
Outstanding: 109
Under Consideration: 1

As NonFiction--total queries = 331
Rejections: 286
Outstanding: 45

As Fiction--total queries = 89
Rejections: 24
Outstanding: 64
Under Consideration: 1

That Guy in Our Women's Studies Classroom--total queries = 22
Rejections: 21
Outstanding: 1


————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Got this reply from an agent*:

> Thanks so much for sending your heartfelt memoir. The big issue
> standing in the way of my taking you on is not editorial, since you
> write cleanly and smoothly. It's a matter of platform, that built-in
> audience who knows the author through some form of media. With the
> comparisons you gave, it's the authors and their reach beyond the book
> world that distinguishes them. Feinberg has long been a rights
> advocate in the spotlight, Boyle had a successful writing career as a
> man, and the Scholinkski was a case that got media coverage that led
> to a book deal, not the other ay around. Publishing is an industry
> that can ride a wave but is not so great at making them. It's a shame
> that a good book is no longer enough, but I see a tough road ahead
> without a really impressive platform. I appreciate the chance, though,
> and wish you luck connecting with an agent who doesn't share my
> reservations.


This is pretty much where I came in, the impetus for starting this blog.


On the one hand, it IS encouraging to get some occasional confirmation that the problem isn't that the book isn't good enough to be published, and QUITE encouraging to get some signal that the problem isn't with the quality of my query letter, either.

On the other hand, the platform isn't something I can easily do much about. I've been operating this blog for a little while now (it's one of the few platformy things that seems to be within my reach), but as much as I deeply appreciate you folks reading it, and commenting on it, I suspect that the agents who are looking for an author's platform won't be impressed with blogging unless there are hundreds of followers lapping it up, not the dozen or so that I have. And I have no clear idea what kind of magic tricks I need to do to drive people en masse over here to read my stuff.

I've been to more GLBT meetings and have found myself understood and accepted there, with reciprocity, but if being part of those structured organizations is going to morph into "a platform", it will take awhile.

I've spoken a couple times at open-mike events where performance artists and poets and comedians and other folks get 5 minutes at the mike, and will attempt to do more, but at the moment I don't see that growing into some kind of huge cult following.

As far as I can tell, my best bet is to just keep plugging away and accept that the lack of platform means I have to do this for a lot longer than if I were famous or had a built-in audience. That I have to believe it makes my road difficult, not impossible.


Current query status (The Story of Q):

total queries: 305
rejections: 193 (includes no reply > 3 months)
outstanding: 111 (no reply yet, < 3 months)
under consideration: 1


* agent's name and agency not included here due to lack of explicit permission. I don't really have permission to reprint the email, either, I'm just doing it anyhow. The references to Feinberg, Boyle, and Scholinski are from my query letter and proposal identifying "comparable books": Leslie Feinberg's STONE BUTCH BLUES, Daphne Scholinski's THE LAST TIME I WORE A DRESS, and Jennifer Boylan's SHE'S NOT THERE

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

In February, I excerpted a second book from my massive autobiographical tome. This one begins with me figuring out that I could discuss all these gender issues, and my interest in feminist theory, in a women's studies class. My folks (not too surprisingly, but to my dismay) aren't interested in financing a 3rd attempt at college so I head off in a huff, hitch to New York to seek whatever job I can get with the aim of eventually getting in anyway. A year of homelessness there is a blessing in disguise: it makes me economically independent of my parents and so I quality for financial aid and I do indeed get into college.

The balance of the story, THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS, is about me in college trying to do feminist theory and pursue my gender activism in the 80s and 90s.


This second book has been sitting on the back burner for several months; I didn't like the query letter I was using for it and I was focusing on the first book. But recently (for reasons I'm about to go into) I decided I wanted to go back to sending queries on that one again, and I spent some time revamping the query letter.

I'll post the new query letter I'm using for it in a moment.

Anyway, my current thinking is that either of these books MIGHT be more easily published at an academic press instead of a mainstream popular press. Authors query academic presses directly rather than trying to get an agent, and I haven't gotten many nibbles from agents yet.

I have not, as of yet, tried to market the first book (THE STORY OF Q) to academic presses because many agents don't want to have anything to do with a book that has been seen by publishers yet. Quite possibly they aren't thinking about academic presses when they make that stipulation, but I haven't wanted to do anything that would limit my options with them.

I'm thinking that by hawking the second book to academic presses, I retain the honest freedom of saying, with regards to the first book, that no, it has not been seen by any publishers, and at the same time, if the second book generates any interest among academic presses (or even gets picked up for publication!), I can let them know at that time that I have a different book they might also want to take a look at. Plus, if it gets printed, I'm then a published author instead of an unpublished author looking for an agent for the first book.



-----

Stats so far on the two books:


THE STORY OF Q

Total queries so far: 316
Rejections or no answer after 3 months: 161
Outstanding (sent, no reply yet): 112

THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS

Total queries so far (including old query letter): 25
Rejections or no answer: 17
Outstanding: 4


————————

Index of all Blog Posts