It's that time of evening when I open the email mailbox that's dedicated to querying, so I can mark a handful of lit agents as "Rejected" and the date I received the rejection.

I open the first one and the agent likes my query and wants to see the full manuscript!

This happened a couple times with my first book, GenderQueer, although it never resulted in being offered a contract.

But this is the first time it's happened for Within the Box.


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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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I've been postponing a full-on resumption of querying until it should seem I was no longer dipping in to make little edits to the manuscript. I guess I forgot that that never happens, really.

One reason for procrastinating postponing -- aside from the obvious sense that one should get one's book into final form and then query -- is that I keep an array of snippets of the sort that lit agents ask to receive: 50 sample pages, first 25 pages, a sample chapter, first 5 pages, etc. Any of which might be out of date if I'm continually editing the actual manuscript.

That's a bit of a headache, actually. For American lit agencies in particular, sample materials are nearly always requested to be either pasted into the body of the email or else pasted into a web form such as QueryTracker. Either way, you can't depend on anything but plain text to go through and land intact. No tab stops or first-paragraph indents, no bold or italic.

So periodically I have to refresh all my snippets. Open the actual manuscript, select the relevant chunks and copy, paste into a plain text editor (I use BBEdit), replace all returns with double returns so there'll be a white space between paragraphs (since there's no paragraph indent), then comb through that portion of the manuscript looking for italicized passages and setting them off in the plain text with *asterisks*.

I've switched to keeping the snippets in a database, so that I've got a modification date on each one. Version control!



I'm seldom doing "deep edits" these days; the manuscript really is pretty stable. I mean, it's rare at this point for me to insert a scene or append another paragraph to a dialogue.

My most common edits are individual sentences I'm reading for the ten zillionth time and realize that it sounds slightly awkward or unclear and that I reacted that way last time and the time before that, so yeah, how can this be improved?

I confess I woke up the other day sitting bolt-upright in bed, convinced I had kept the same nurses on continual shift for 24 hours. That's the kind of error that can bounce an alert reader out of the flow of the story, so that would be bad. (I hadn't, though -- the scenes in question are rather long scenes measured in words and pages but despite all that takes place, no nurse ends up being in the story for over 12 hours of chronological time -- whew!)

Those are the sort of errors I have to watch out for. Sequences of events that read well and feel plausible until some little discrepancy catches your attention and makes the whole scene unravel. Like having everyone sit down for supper on page 137 and then you get two characters discussing what they want for supper on page 139.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Lit agents and publishers often release (or make posts to) a Manuscript Wish List. I figure turnabout is fair play, don't you?

Let's start with the notion that we, as authors, are supposed to select the lit agents that we really want to work with, and not just spew query letters at random to anyone who appears to be a lit agent with a pulse.

You go to web sites that aggregate information about lit agents (such as querytracker or agentquery) and they'll tell you that an agent named (let's say) Susan Jones represents general fiction, sci fi, romances, suspense, thrillers, mysteries, other genre fiction, historical nonfiction, popular science nonfiction, memoirs, how-to guides, self-help health and therapy; and is accepting queries, prefers them via email.

You go to individual lit agents' own web sites such as susanjones.com to find out more about this lit agent and you learn that what she's really interested in are books that you can curl up in bed with and lose track of time, books that feature brave heroines or nontraditional heroes in quirky new settings, stories with a modern punchline that adds a new twist to old wisdom, or books that make her think. And she has two poodles and an aging cat and likes lasagna and wears flannel in the wintertime. And by the way, the Susan Jones Literary Agency had the privilege of representing THE CAGE AND THE KEY by Joe Johnson, MY PASSAGE THRU THE UMBILICAL CORD by Terry Truwrite, FIFTY KEY BILLS AND HOW THEY TIED UP THE SENATE by Senator C. D. Politician, RHODESIA SONNET by Jane Goodwriter, and nineteen other titles I haven't read or heard about by authors I haven't read or heard about, although some of these sound like books I should add to my reading list.

So...

Dear Susan Jones,

What I'd really like to know about you and all the other lit agents that would tell me whether I should query you soonest or only later as a last resort:

* Of the books you have taken on, what percent of them got placed with major publishing houses that invested in publicizing the book?

* Please describe the changes that you've requested authors to make to their manuscript. Have you tended to request the addition or subtraction of a character? The addition or subtraction of a major plot element or theme? Have you suggested extensive edits to improve readability and smoothness and continuity? Cleaned up typos, spelling errors, grammar errors, run-on sentences and the like? How often have you ended up in protracted arguments with your authors about the changes you've requested?

* What are the most annoying behaviors you've encountered from the authors you've worked with? Are there any attitudes or habits or tendencies that really drive you up the wall, such that you wish you'd known about them in advance and had avoided those authors? How did you handle it?

* What is your success rate at negotiating the details of the contracts with the publishers to the satisfaction of your authors? Are there things that authors tend to want (e.g. retention of film rights, subsidiary rights, foreign rights) that you've had difficulty obtaining? If so, from which types of publishers?

* How often have you contracted to represent an author and then were unable to place their book for publication for more than 5 years? 8 years? How often have you reverted the rights or rescinded the contractual arrangements due to inability to place the book (or the author's impatience with you doing so)?


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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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This is by far my least favorite part of the process. Yesterday I likened it to cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue.

I'm not Don Draper or Darrin Stevens. Whatever talent I may have for writing 1600-word blog entries or 7000-word articles or 97,000-word novels, it does not translate well to writing one-page query letters. Or single-sentence pitches.

The insider advice is that the author is supposed to carefully research the lit agents -- find out who they've represented in the past and what specific kinds of books they're most interested in seeing; investigate their reputation and make sure their style of working with authors would be a good fit for you, be sure that they've got a proven track record for placing books like yours with solid mainstream publishers, verify that the kind of book that you wrote is fully up their alley so they'll know how to represent it successfully and will be enthusiastic about it and so on and so forth.

Uh huh. Sure. And all those teenage job seekers fresh out of high school should Google the companies they're considering applying to, research the personnel who run them. Look for local newspaper interviews to get their philosophy for how to run the workplace. Investigate how happy their employees are with their job situations. And custom-tailor your resume to each of your carefully chosen targets and only apply to the most perfect jobs, because you wouldn't want to work for anything less than your ideal employer, right?



I am trying to approach it with less urgency than in the past. I think I've got a good book that's entertaining and not just socially relevant this time. So I actually am spending more time putting focused attention on the material I send to each lit agent, and seeing if there's an opportunity to tailor the inquiry a bit to that recipient.

One thing that makes this book different from the previous two is that it is less relevant that it's a true story. I tried to make the other two books entertaining, but the topic and the story arc didn't make either of them a really great fit for any major fiction genre. "Kid grows up being made to feel weird and ultimately comes out genderqueer" isn't a genre. "Young LGBTQIA activist goes to college to major in women's studies to discuss gender" isn't a genre. But Within the Box is a pretty good suspense tale. I found it far easier to assemble a list of "comparable titles" than I did when querying the previous two books.

So I can query it as fiction or as nonfiction, and I plan on doing a bit of both.

—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

"List some books that are similar to yours. (500 characters or less)" reads the query manager entry for both Kristin Nelson and Stephanie Rostan, two professional literary agents.

It's not explicitly required by all lit agents and publishers, but some folks advise including a "comp titles" section on any query letter.

I haven't tended to, but it was definitely in my formal proposal (which, in turn, is required by some lit agents and publishers for any nonficton queries, and memoirs are nonfiction), and I had a standalone Comparable Titles snippet I could include whenever it was a part of what was requested.

So now that I've generated at least a rough draft of my third book's query letter (see previous blog post), I've started work on assembling a list of other books that Within the Box has some important resemblance to.

"You may be intimidated or skeptical, thinking either that your idea has to be unique in order to pique their interest, or that your book needs to be similar to others, or else there won’t be an audience for it. The reality here, like with most things in life, is somewhere in the middle", says Kevin Anderson.

Yeah... I'm not aware of any other first-hand account of being in a rehab clinic that turns out to have similarly sinister overtones. Or a genderqueer person's narrative about having their inability to function well socially attributed to their drug-addled mental instabilities instead of pinned to marginalization and society's biases and attitudes. But let's see... books with a lot of internal thought-processing and which invoke a sense of a possibly unreliable narrator who may be more messed up than she thinks she is, in a place or in the care of people who are supposed to be taking care of folks but may be doing something a lot more evil...


Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh looks promising. It's a first person narrative from an unguessably different individual, one who seems sharp but perhaps damaged goods in some not fully explained way. Definitely an outsider. She's not institutionalized but works in one (a juvenile reformatory prison). A facility that is at least officially and nominally about doing good but pretty evidently, from the narrator's observation, isn't. A narrator who cares about her interactions with others and is vulnerable on a number of parameters, but not in the usual manner; she's an interesting mixture of impervious and insecure. And Eileen is even more self-immersive than Within the Box -- very little action and events have occurred in the first 60 pages.

Dennis Lehand's Shutter Island takes place in a high security forensic psychiatric hospital. The main character and his companion are federal marshals brought in because one of the committed inmates has gone missing. But readers learn pretty early on that the main character has some hidden agenda of his own involving a murderer who killed someone in his own family, a murderer committed to this same facility. And he may not be wrapped as tightly as he likes people to think. Something's totally up with the shrinks running the place, too. They're not playing honestly with the agents; the marshals don't believe the inmate could have escaped without assistance from at least some staff members, perhaps highly placed ones. And now, 50 pages or so in, I'm seeing signs that they may be doing conscious and deliberate things to manipulate their federal guests... or is it the narrator's paranoid imaginings?

I'm also 45 pages into A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. The first person narrator is the younger sister of Natalie, a brilliant high school student who created entertaining stories but whose imaginings are going very dark and twisted. Natalie is clearly suffering -- she says so -- and her behaviors are impacting others in her family negatively, making her situation different from that of a person who may merely be perceived by others as deranged.

You get more of that from A. Mark Bedillion's Psychiatric Survivor. Or that's my expectation at any rate. I haven't started it yet, it just arrived in the mail. But it's billed as "from misdiagnosed mental patient to hospital director", and it clearly comes from the critical perspective that we call the psychiatric patients' liberation movement or the anti-psychiatric movement. So it is unlikely that the author will position himself as believing he needed to be in the facility, and equally unlikely that the people running it will be portrayed as agreeing with him.

Another couple books I picked out as prospects are Good as Gone by Amy Gentry, which a brief inside peek revealed itself to me as a suspense tale in which a daughter returns after years of being missing, but the mom actually isn't at all sure that this girl is really her. That creates the worry that the situation may be a dangerous one for her family. And An Anonymous Girl from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, the first couple chapters of which shape up as a psychological chess game in which a girl swipes another girl's invite to a paid research project involving personal questions about moral choices, and in which the psychologist running it knows she was not being honest about how she came to acquire the invite.

Then there's The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) -- unreliable narrator, substance abuse, questionable mental status, blackouts (so maybe she's hiding stuff from herself and us)... but I think there's a risk involved in comparing one's unpublished book to something that's sold quite that successfully. Still, I won't rule it out.

Oh, and I'm still waiting on the arrival of Upstairs in the Crazy House, another memoir from a psychiatric survivor.

If any of these titles or descriptions conjures up the names of other books you think I should take a look at, let me know!




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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I've started sending out my pitch to get my second book published.

Here is my standard query letter, and below that, the parts of the formal proposal that spell out in more detail what the book is about.


Query Letter:

"When you're a fish out of water you look for the nearest ocean" — Anthony T. Hincks

THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS is a nonfiction memoir about a genderqueer sissy male, Derek, who decided that women's studies in college would be a good place to engage people in discussions about gender.

This narrative tale follows Derek down Oklahoma highways and into heroin dens in Harlem and then into the homeless shelters of 1980s New York City, as the determined but not always practical Derek pursues his dream.

Along the way, the story delves into the complexities of privilege and social identity in ways that challenge assumptions about power and marginalization—not in primary-color simplicity but by exploring privilege and deprivation along a number of different dimensions and showing it in all of its native complexity, all while still respecting a concern for empowering the voice of those left out.

"Hunter's prose explores the delicate tapestry of privilege and power... this is a deployment of 'show, not tell' I've rarely seen done... narrative social theory" — An early reader

Length: 95,962 words


From the Formal Proposal:


Elevator Statement —


In 1980, I came out as a sissy. I was reclaiming the term the same way that proud lesbians referred to themselves as "dykes" or the way that gay folks were reclaiming "queer". "Sissy" comes from the word "sister" and so it seemed like the right word: a sisterlike, i.e., feminine or girlish, male person.

We had gay rights activists back then. We even had trans activists. A lot of people didn't understand why I was using a new and different term. But I wasn't gay or trans. It was something else.

Trans women, both back then and today, tend to say "Don't see me as a trans woman. See me as a woman". That wasn't me. I didn't consider myself female. I considered myself femme. I didn't identify with the gay rights movement: my sexuality wasn't same-sex attraction and I saw a need to untangle gender from either physical sex OR sexual orientation.

The activists I identified with the most were feminists. They were the ones who said having a different behavioral standard and polarized social roles for the sexes was sexist.

So I headed off to the university to major in women's studies.



That Guy in our Women's Studies Class is a rare thing in the world of memoirs: a sequel. In March 2020, my book GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, was published by Sunstone Press (Santa Fe NM).

GenderQueer told the coming-of-age and coming-out story of realizing I had a different gender identity and of giving it a name. At the end of it, I vow to confront the world about how sissy males are treated. In That Guy in our Women's Studies Class, I set out to do exactly that, choosing the world of academic women's studies as my platform.

 
Elaborating on the Concept —



"When you're a fish out of water you look for the nearest ocean" — Anthony T. Hincks

As a male person very focused on the unfairness of gender expectations, I headed for the largest metropolitan center I could easily get to—New York City—figuring that even if my identity made me an exception to the exception to the rule, I'd be able to find people who were like me. And I pinned my hopes and dreams to women's studies, because the material I wanted to discuss with people would overlap with the material we'd be focusing on in the classroom.


That Guy in our Women's Studies Class illustrates the complexities of intersectionality, the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender and so forth. The main character is male, the privileged sex in the patriarchal context. Within the first few pages of the book, he has reason to worry that he's invading women's space by attending women's studies classes. At the same time, he's a minority within that space, and, as a gender-nonconforming sissy in the 1980s, a person with a gender identity that wasn't acknowledged and recognized yet, he's been somewhat marginalized by gender himself.

That's the presenting surface of a larger and even more intricate situation. To get to New York and attempt to get into college, he hitchhikes across the country and becomes a homeless person on the New York streets, eventually trading in on a history of psychiatric incarceration (he'd been placed on a locked ward shortly after coming out) to get into the better-funded assistance programs, which were earmarked for the "homeless mentally ill". A person with a psychiatric diagnosis was thus both privileged among the homeless and at the same time often stripped of basic rights because of that same status. And we follow along as the main character commutes every day from the grounds of Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital to SUNY college campus, where most of the other students are middle class suburban commuters with the advantages and privileges of that existence.

There is also the dynamic of race: although the SUNY campus is not as disproportionately black as an historically black college such as Grambling, there is a high proportion of inner city black students living in the dorms as residential students, and there's a tension between the mostly-white commuters and the majority-black resident students. The book's main character is commuting from a different majority-minority environment, the world of formerly homeless halfway-house residents. In his second year he moves into the dormitories to live among the resident students and get away from the oppressive environment of the psychiatric facility. Over and over again, he finds his attention diverted from matters of gender identity to questions of race and racial oppression.

Meanwhile, in his academic studies, he gets increasingly immersed in studying the complex tapestry of power itself, and the larger question of its desirability, which feminist theory examines as part of the patriarchal value structure.


That Guy in our Women's Studies Class is a narrative story, with characters and conversations and a compelling storyline. While real life doesn't often resemble the trajectory of a fictional novel's plot, this particular slice of life tells that kind of tale. It's an entertaining book, one that does not read like an educational treatise. It's the story of a young out-of-town person from a small village making a go of it in the big city, of a survivor coping with life on the streets while seeking employment and a place to stay, and of a fervent activist looking for his 'people', finding a place in the world, and finding a political voice.




The people and events described in this memoir were all quite real, but to streamline and optimize the narrative flow, I sometimes combined several characters into one composite character, so as to not have to develop so many characters; and on occasions I also condensed multiple similar events and described them as single events.


The names have all been changed—including my own, for consistency. As I did in GenderQueer, I refer to myself as Derek Turner throughout.


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You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!

My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

I was going to send out some query letters but Optimum Online was having an outage, so I thought I'd compose a blog post about the querying process instead.

The core piece of the process is the pitch or query letter, which is going to be the leadoff part of nearly every query that gets sent out. Authors interested in getting their books published are encouraged to work long and hard on their query letters, honing them and perfecting them in order to hook the interest of the literary agents or publishers who will be reading them. They're supposed to be short, they need to grab the reader from the first sentence, they should make the reader want to hear more. On the more mechanical and utilitarian level, the query letter is supposed to provide the title of the book, the genre it fits into, its length in words, and a sense of what the core conflicts or plot trajectory or story line is about.

Obviously, given those requirements, the crafting of a query letter requires a skill, it's an art. I often wonder why having the ability to write what amounts to effective ad copy should be used as a measure of one's ability to write good-quality novel-length tomes. I mean, it's not the same process and doesn't necessarily involve the same skills, although it's reasonable to suppose there'd be some overlap. It's a bit like requiring that composers of symphonies submit a 90 second commercial jingle if they want to have the orchestra consider performing their work, and deciding on the basis of the jingle whether to look at the symphony itself. But that's how the game is played.

Some lit agents don't want anything except the query letter--just send that and if we're interested in seeing more, we'll ask. But more often, they want auxiliary accompanying documents.

The writing sample, an excerpt from the book that's being pitched, is commonly requested. The length of the excerpt varies all over the map, with some people wanting to see your first three pages and others asking you to provide your first four chapters. The most common specific requests that I've encountered are the first three pages, first five pages, first ten pages, first fifteen pages, first twenty pages, first twenty five, and first fifty; first chapter, first two chapters, first three, and first four. Given the possible variations of what constitutes chapter length, these requests are often expressed in hybrid form: "Paste the first three chapters or fifty pages", or "Send me 25 pages or first two chapters", or "Please provide your first three chapters (not to exceed 35 pages)".

You'll notice a word recurrently repeated in all of those variations. However much of it they wish to see, they nearly always want that much of the start of your book. That puts a pressure on authors to frontload their book so that things are happening rapidly on the first pages. It works against an author who prefers to set the stage and develop the characters before springing the book's primary situation on the reader, and perhaps explains Dan Brown. I suppose I do see the point to this: if a person picks up a book and it doesn't hold their attention in the early portions, they won't keep reading long enough to get to whatever may be in the book farther in. I do have my doubts about what anyone can tell about a book from reading the first five pages though, aside from "yes this writer can string sentences together in a tolerably pleasant style".

The synopsis is another thing that people often ask for. A synopsis is more or less what we used to think of as a "book report" back when we were in fourth grade. It's a summary of what happens in the book, in the order that it occurs in the book, often chapter by chapter. For fiction and memoirs and other narrative forms that have storylines, the synopsis is a description of the plot. A synopsis is usually a single page's worth, and unlike the query letter is not supposed to be a teaser but instead should reveal what's in the story, to the extent that that can be summarized in a page's worth of description.

It is also common for the description for how to submit to include a blurb about the author, providing a list of any prior books or other publications that the author has to their name, giving the author's credentials or otherwise explaining why this author is a good person to have written this tale, and giving any additional background. A request for some information about the author is particular prevalent for nonfiction titles, and often specifically includes questions about the authors platform, the existing audience of people who are already paying attention to what this authors says and writes, the folks who already follow this author on Twitter or subscribe to the author's YouTube channel and so forth.

A memoir is nonfiction and unfortunately that means authors of memoirs are expected to have a platform in a way that authors of novels are not. I wish more lit agents and publishers were inclined to recognize that memoirs have more in common with fiction than they do with How To Make Your Fortune By Investing Shrewdly in the Stock Market or The Making of the Governor: Gubernatorial Politics in the Instagram Era or Authentic Spectacular Creole Recipes For a Limited Budget.

Speaking of nonfiction, a lot of times the instructions on "how to submit" specify that people who are pitching nonfiction manuscripts should include a proposal. A proposal is a complex multi-part document designed to make the case for why this nonfiction book should be published; it typically kicks off with an extended argument for the need for such a book, then delves into the qualifications of the author to write it (this part being more or less interchangeable with the about the author piece described above), a description of the market for the book (who will be likely to consider reading it if they're made aware of it, and why), a list of comparable titles and how this book is different from what's already out there, a chapter by chapter breakdown of the material that the book will cover (this part, for a memoir, is loosely identical to a synopsis; for The Making of the Governor and other more conventional nonfiction books, it would be more like an outline of topics and subtopics that the book will address and how those topics are organized), and, finally, a marketing plan, a proposed course of action for publicizing the book and bringing it to the attention of people likely to purchase it.

Oh, and proposals will typically contain sample chapters. For once, though, the tendency is not to concentrate on the material most direct adjacent to the front cover. In a proposal, a sample chapter may be from any part of the book. Some proposals may contain two or three sample chapters, and in keeping with that, the instructions for submitting material may specify that one should send a proposal with a specified number of sample chapters.

Less commonly, lit agents and publishers may request a list and/or discussion of comparable titles as a standalone alternative to a formal proposal, or may request a discussion of the likely market for the book.



In the United States (although not so much in the UK), literary agents typically do not want to mess with file attachments, at least at the initial-query stage, and so all of the above components are to be pasted into the body of the email. More often than not, submission procedures will specifically say that no file attachments will be opened or even that no emails containing file attachments will be read.

Email has limited capacities for text formatting; despite the occasional instruction from a literary agent to include everything in the body of the email and yet to "be sure to indent every paragraph, use one inch margins on all sides, and set the text to double spaced throughout", email doesn't handle indentation of a paragraph's first lines, doesn't do double spacing, and can't be relied upon to format the text in a specific font or point size. Even italics and boldface are pretty iffy. I've found it useful to maintain separate text copies of all of these query components, one with an extra line of white space to offset divisions between paragraphs so that it works reliably as part of an email body.


I have a querying engine that lets me quickly assemble an outbound email:



As you can see from the dropdown menu, I can append a synopsis, a full fledged proposal, writing samples of various sizes, an about-the-author blurb, and other components of a query to the current email body and then send it in that format. (I can also send any one of those pieces as a file attachment for the occasional agent or publisher who wants to receive the proposal or sample chapters as a Word or PDF document instead).


You may be thinking that this doesn't seem very personalized, and indeed some lit agents' instructions say we should "please tell me why you selected me as the agent that you want on this project" and indicate that they prefer to receive letters that don't make them feel like they're receiving spam that has gone out to all the other lit agents out there. I do sometimes customize my query letters, editing them with an additional note to say "I thought this would be of particular appeal to you because of what you said in your 2017 interview with Writer's World about wanting more LGBTQ material written in our own voices" or whatever. But writers' workshops on crafting and perfecting the ideal query letter abound, as do online forums such as "Query Letter Hell" on Absolute Write, all of which are oriented around the notion that one hones and polishes a query letter and then sends it out to the various people that one wishes to query, not that one starts from scratch writing a query letter with one individual recipient in mind. And in my situation in particular, there are seldom a lot of legitimately good reasons to query this lit agent instead of that lit agent. It's not like any of them have a track record of representing genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age stories and therefore would be a good choice for representing mine as well. There are those who have indicated an interest in handling "lesbian/gay" material and there are those who say that they represent memoirs or narrative nonfiction, but very few who have any kind of track record with coming-out stories or anything else that readily compares to what I wrote. So the honest answer in most cases to "why did you decide to query me on this project?" is along the lines of "you are in the business and open to queries and you are alive and breathe air".



As of today, I have sent 1,424 queries out to literary agents and an additional 64 to small publishers that allow authors to query them directly. From the lit agents I have received 1,292 rejections; 132 queries are currently outstanding. On five or six occasions, lit agents have requested more material before ultimately saying they were not interested in representing my book, but none have ever offered me a business arrangement. From the publishers, I twice had signed contracts to have my book published, once with a publisher that went bankrupt and once with a publisher who assigned an editor to me who wanted to discard the first 33% of the book, which I was unwilling to do; I've had 62 rejections and none are currently outstanding because I was complying with a publisher's policy of exclusivity, and only got the rejection letter the other day.


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The #MeToo movement has revealed a cognitive disconnect in our society between people who think sexually predatory behavior is inherently and inexcusably wrong and people who think it is only wrong when it crosses certain thresholds or boundaries.

In the latter camp are people who say that if we aren't careful, we're going to make it illegal and reprehensible and socially unacceptable to be a sexual male.

Why male? Because saying predatory male sexual aggression is mostly about as necessary and useful as specifying female menstrual supplies when discussing tampons. Because sexually aggressive predatory behavior is generally assumed to be as naturally a part of maleness and male sexuality as having periods is inherently a part of being female.

Feminist theorists have pretty much always said that this isn't so. That the connection of males to this behavior is a part of institutionalized heterosexuality, that it's not biologically built-in that way. This simultaneously means that it can't be excused on the grounds that it is inevitable and inherent in males and also that it is sexist to project this behavior onto males as if it were automatically a component of their character.

But if it isn't biologically built-in, if it is indeed a social construct, what happens when someone who thinks of himself as one of the girls ends up being attracted to them as well?



Me. On the most fundamental level, I'm what happens. It's the core of my story. Certainly there are other aspects of the tale, other areas of tension between the gendered expectations that people assumed about me and who I actually was--from interest in an ongoing connected relationship as differentiated from interest only in casual sex opportunities on down to things like how I move and sit, and so on. But if there's a central axis around which the greatest tension lies, it's around the behaviors that get called things like "sexual initiative", "sexually aggressive behavior", "putting the moves on", "making your play", "seducing" and, yes, "being sexually predatory".

Basically I'm not. It's not behavior that comes to me automatically, and since it is perceived as selfish and pushy and exploitative of women (and certainly not feminine), well, as someone who always thought of himself as one of the girls, I wasn't at all happy to be perceived this way and recoiled away from it. So that's what happens.



But that's not the only thing that happens. People like me get seen as examples of what happens when a male is not taking the initiative to put the moves on sexually attractive female people. And what doesn't happen is any kind of simple fluid coming together and connection, any discernable heterosexual success rate that makes our behavior look like a good strategy. People see that, observe that, and incorporate that into how they understand the world, that's what happens.

And there is social hostility and marginalization of feminine males, girlish males, as we all know, but more specifically to the point there is condescension and a disparaging attitude towards the prospect of us as heterosexual participants. We are pitied. The female people who might become involved with us, however briefly, are also pitied. Our sexuality is perceived as pathetic.

#MeToo voices seldom speak at any great length about males whose sexual behavior is not invasive and geared towards making sex happen, initiating sex. Their focus is on the problematic ones who do. When a different set of voices are expressing uncomplimentary opinions about nonvirile effeminate men who are unsexy for failure to grab and take, they seldom go on to discuss sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape and such things. It's almost as if no one can see both sides of the coin at the same time, or remember what's on the side opposite of what they're currently facing.



Not all male people who consider themselves atypical of the male gender or consider themselves femme or otherwise not part of the masculine construct, are opposed to taking sexual initiative. Some are quite emphatic about saying that being feminine does not mean they are sexually passive or strictly reactive to someone else's overtures. Indeed, I suppose the grab-bag of supposedly feminine traits contains enough material for someone to claim several aspects without selecting that specific one. I have to admit that I'd be interested in sitting down with other femmy males who are sexually aggressive and trying to get a better understanding of how and why this is compatible with thinking of themselves as feminine, how they handle the perception of this, how it all fits together for them. But yeah, I haven't been nominated to speak for all the sissy femme guys, and I don't. But for some of us it is not only a part of the picture but rather central to it, the behavior and the nuances of feeling and attitude towards sexuality and towards other people, the economics of sexual supply and demand and questions of self-worth and dignity, the role of tenderness and responsiveness in sexuality and the concomitant avoidance of the belligerent and the offensive crude.



Recently I have had the opportunity to pitch my book to feminist publishers who wanted a shorter and more concise query letter than what I usually use, and in the process of honing a new tighter letter that gets to the point quickly, I found myself pitching my book as a what-if: what happens when someone who thought of himself during childhood as one of the girls grows up and ends up being attracted to them as well?

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I wrote a book about being genderqueer and I'm trying to get it published.

Those of you who've been reading my blog for awhile now are well aware of that, but I have recently joined several Facebook groups where I may not have mentioned that, and I'm now echoing my blog in more places in hopes of reaching a wider audience... and it's been awhile since I blogged about the book itself. Most of my recent posts have been about some aspect of gender or genderqueer experience.

Anyway, yeah, it's a memoir (nonfiction, my own story), a coming-of-age and coming-out story, about 97,000 words long (probably about 325 pages, give or take). And I've been querying literary agents since 2013 and small publishers (the sort that you can query directly) since 2015.

Here's where things are at at the moment:


THE REQUEST FOR A FULL


Every rare once in a while my queries to literary agents have resulted in a request to see and evaluate the full manuscript, an event known in the world of authors and author-aspirants as a "request for a full". It's akin to when sending in your resume results in an actual job interview. I've had six of those so far.

The most recent was from Lucinda Karter (or, more precisely, from her assistant Jadie Stillwell) of Jennifer Lyons Lit Agency, on November 17 of last year. I sent in the full manuscript and didn't hear a peep, so on December 8 I sent a follow-up inquiry, just asking for confirmation that they actually received it. They had; Stillwell apologized for being behind and said they hadn't had a chance to look at it but would get to it in due course.

At some point in the spring, I went back to querying lit agents, if only to distract myself from the waiting.

Eventually, the 8th of March rolled around, and it had now been three months since I'd heard anything from them and four months since I'd queried them, so I sent a follow-up email, inquiring if I had perhaps missed a critical piece of correspondence. On March 20th, still not hearing anything, I repeated that inquiry, and on March 30th I got a somewhat formletterish "thanks for the opportunity to read but unable to fully connect with the characters and will have to pass" rejection letter.


THE DOLDRUMS


One of the literary agents that I subsequently queried wrote back to say my proposal looks interesting but that they have a policy of only considering material submitted to them exclusively — so did anyone else have it? Of course they did. So in a back-and-forth exchange of emails we established that they'd be happy if I waited until any still-outstanding queries were rejected or else timed out with at least six weeks elapsing from the time I queried them, and then subsequently didn't send any other queries out until they'd had a chance to make their evaluation. That point will be on April the 12th, two days from now. I'll let them know on the 12th that they now have exlusivity and then an additional six weeks will tick by before their exclusivity-window expires.

It's a long shot but all inquiries to lit agents are long shots. I decided to go for it. But it's meant not doing anything as far as lit agents are concerned from week to week and (at this point) month to month.

It's hard to feel fired-up and like you're doing something towards getting a book published when you're just sitting around waiting for a calendar date to crawl by.

Meanwhile, with the publishers, I'm in the same damn situation: there was a publisher I wanted to query, one that was highly recommended on the queer / nonbinary / minority orientation and sexual orientation and intersex FaceBook groups as a good solid publisher for LGBTQIA titles. They, too, have a policy of exclusivity. So I had to wait until the previous publisher submission (to Kensington Books) expired from lack of activity and then sent them my query, which they've now had since January 23. They want 90 days to evaluate manuscripts, so they've got exclusivity until April 23, another thirteen days from now.

So I've been sitting on my thumb, metaphorically speaking, not sending anything to anyone and watching the damn calendar.


BROAD OVERVIEW / REVIEW OF THE SITUATION


I have twice had a publisher sign a contract with me to publish this book. Generally what happens when a publisher signs a contract with an author is that the book goes into print. In the first instance, the publisher, Ellora's Cave, went out of business and revoked all pending books. In the second instance, with NineStar Press, the editor wanted to cut the first third of the book entirely, and we were unable to establish a working relationship. (I experienced the editor as heavy-handed and insulting, and I gather that he found me arrogant and impossible to work with). So I asked them revert my rights back to me.

This is extremely frustrating, as you can probably imagine. The relief and excitement and joy of having a publisher pick up your book, the anticipation of seeing it listed on Amazon and perhaps on a book stand in a book store, the enthusiastic planning of promotional talks and book-signings and lecture tours and all that... ripped out from beneath me.

I was going to write that this isnt fun any more. That's misleading: it was never any fun, this process of trying to sell agents and publishers on the idea of publishing my book. I detest this entire process, just as I hate doing job searches. I have said in the past that trying to sell myself like this ranks right up there with cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue. So "isn't fun any more" isn't the applicable phrase here. What's changed, I think, is that I won't be able to feel any of that relief, excitement, anticipation or joy when I finally do once again have a publishing contract. At this point I don't think it will seem real until the damn thing's actually in print and I am holding a copy in my hands. Maybe not even then.

"Well", you may be thinking, "why don't you just self-publish?"

It's an easy enough process to create a print run of my book. I even have a routine that allows me to print the whole book onto 5.5 x 8.5 format, two pages to a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, double-sided, so it can be whacked neatly in two with an industrial sheet cutter and bound. I could get bids and go with the cheapest bid, and that's before I even look into companies specifically geared to help authors self-publish.

Electronic printing is even more effortless, and free. I can generate a PDF at will, and Amazon (among others) will readily help me convert it to other standard eBook formats for paid download.

None of that is at all difficult. Most of that is not relevant.

The difficult, and relevant, part of what makes publishing different than mere printing is distribution and publicity. Running off five thousand copies of my book (and/or generating an eBook for electronic distribution) doesn't get it into people's hands. It doesn't get it reviewed. There are human activites that successfully overcome those barriers, promotional activities. I'm not good at them. If I were good at them, this would be a very popular blog with hundreds or thousands of weekly readers. It isn't. I'm not.

I'll still have to gear up to plan and execute a promotional campaign even with a traditional-model publisher, unless I get a large publisher on-board (unlikely); but even a small publisher makes the book "authentic" to the world of reviewers and opens up opportunities for distribution and consideration. I'm particularly interested in seeing it picked up as reading material for gender studies, LGBTQ studies, feminist theory, and other related academic course work, and hopefully also to find shelf space in LGBT community centers and support group meeting spaces and whatnot.


READINGS


One thing I have been doing more of lately is attending authors' groups where people bring samples of their work-in-progress and read from them and get feedback from the others there. I've been attending the Long Island Writers' Guild and the Amateur Writers of Long Island in recent weeks. Of the two, I like the format used by the latter somewhat better, as they allow up to 1800 word samples to be read and spend more time discussing each selection before moving on to the next. I've enjoyed them both, though.

The feedback I've received is encouraging. The people say my writing in general is vivid and effective, the characters and their behaviors and dialog strongly drawn, the paragraphs and phrases well-constructed. That's not to say I haven't received useful criticism, of the sort "you could do more of this up here before he says that" and "I found it a bit confusing when it jumped to this next scene, is that supposed to be later the same week or what?" and so on. But the overall takeaway is very good: my writing does what I want it to do, it works. At least in 1800-word chunks. (I still yearn for more feedback on the entire book as a satisfying or less-than-satisfying whole).


STATS


total queries to Lit Agents (counting requeries): 1171

Rejections: 1092
Outstanding: 79

As Nonfiction, total: 944

Rejections: 866
Outstanding: 78

As Fiction, total: 227

Rejections: 226
Outstanding: 1

total queries to Publishers: 30

Rejections: 22
Outstanding: 1
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, went out of business: 1
Pub Contract Signed, rights reverted: 1

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I've been on a 3-month hiatus from sending out query letters. On the publishers' front, I had an unanswered query ticking away waiting for the "allow 3 months for us to reply" window to expire, because the next publisher I wanted to query asks for exclusivity. Just sent them a query this morning. And now the clock resets again.

Meanwhile, queries to literary agents has also been suspended for awhile because I got a request for a full (in other words, a lit agent responded to my query letter with a request for me to send in the entire manuscript for their consideration) and I've been waiting on the verdict to that before querying other lit agents.

I'm mostly in a mode of not taking the lit-agent-querying very seriously. I mean, I've sent out over 1000 queries to lit agents and never gotten an offer to represent me. In contrast, I've only sent out 39 queries to publishers and that resulted in two publishing contracts. (One publisher, Ellora's Cave, went out of business, and the other, NineStar Press, assigned me an editor who wanted deep cuts to my book that I wasn't willing to make). Be that as it may, however, only 6 of those 1000+ queries to literary agents resulted in a request for a full, and this is one of those 6.

Wendy Sherman of Wendy Sherman Associates took one day in 2013 to examine my manuscript and decide not to pursue. I had been introduced to her at a paid pitch conference and I don't know if she would have requested to see the manuscript if that had not been the case.

Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli of Jet Literary had my manuscript from late April until early July in 2015 before deciding against representing my book.

Linda Loewenthal of David Black Lit Agency took only six days in August 2015 before declining with a very thoughtful analytical personally tailored rejection letter explaining what they did and did not like about the book.

Anjali Singh of Ayesha Pande Literary held onto it for a month in 2016 before also writing back with praise as well as analysis for what gave her misgivings about the book and deciding not to go forward with it.

Eric Ruben of The Ruben Agency had my manuscript in hand for a month last spring and then sent me back a cursory "not for me" email.



Hmm, it's helpful for me to have compiled that. I see that this current request-for-full has not been awaiting a reply for such an unusually long time after all. (Two months as of January 17th).


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