The literary agency Redhammer is one I ran across awhile back; until recently, their page on submissions said they didn't accept unsolicited queries and then went on to say that if you're looking for a lit agency that does ... and then they supplied a rather long list of UK literary agencies.

It was a useful resource for me: the agencies that Redhammer listed on this page were agencies that I had not come across in AgentQuery or QueryTracker or the other sources I've relied on, for the most part.

Anyway, just recently the Redhammer folks changed tack and started accepting what they call "pop-up submissions": stating that most lit agents don't read much more than this much before making a decision anyhow, they ask for just 500 character's worth of query letter and the first 600 (now upped to 700) words as writing sample.

But they make their decisions live so you can listen to their evaluation and decision process.

So I opted to participate.


The whole August 5th program

Where they start reviewing my query and 1st 600 words




In general they said nice things about my writing — that it flowed easily with a natural looseness rarely found in unsolicited submissions; a couple of the participants complained that the main character wasn't as frightened (in particular) or otherwise reacting emotionally to what was happening as people began beating him up; and Pete, the primary honcho at Redhammer, said the main reason he could not represent my book is that it's not a type of book he has any experience representing and wouldn't know where to begin in trying to get a publisher for it.

I like the reassuring feedback about my writing, that's very nice to hear.

Derek's (i.e., my) reaction in the fight is a bit more complicated. The near absence of affect is realistic and intentional; years of unexpected out-of-nowhere hostility and violence is numbing, and early in the book I have Derek trying to turn to authorities for help and basically being told to just be a good sport and weather it. This is one of the tales within a tale in this book, that victims of this kind of alienating treatment learn to shut down. Obviously I can't explain that in the three pages' worth of intro, let alone in the 600 word sample that Redhammer permitted me, but I'm choosing to regard it as a feature, not a bug — that readers will see it (as one of the Redhammer reviewers suggested) as an aspect of the character, or will notice it and be curious about who this person is who experiences being beaten up in such a matter-of-fact manner. In the book as a whole, I don't explicitly say that Derek is shutting down emotionally or becoming stoic about other people being hostile, but in the best tradition of "show don't tell" I hope the sequence of events paints that for the observant reader.

And the notion that one main barrier to obtaining lit agents to represent my book is that this isn't the kind of book they're equipped to market to publishers is what I've been suspecting for quite some time now. I will continue to query lit agents but my main hopes lie with my queries to small publishers.


Incidentally, a couple people have suggested that I make YouTube videos of myself reading my blog posts. I'm seriously considering it. I could go back and do all the serious ones about gender and being a gender invert, and maybe some about writing and trying to market the book. I dont know if I'd get any more traffic on YouTube than I get here, but possibly I would.


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"That's not a very good thesis project for a sociology dissertation," the professor told me. "What you should do is select the group you study based on objective criteria, like whether they have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or have petitioned to have their driver's license gender marker changed, and then interview them about their feelings and attitudes and intentions and beliefs and so on. But what you're trying to do, to study male subjects who identify as 'sissy' or 'feminine', there's no external marker for that so it's all intercranial, it's all inside your subjects' head, depending on self-identification, and then you want to interview them to see what ELSE they think and feel, and that's not very sociological".


* * *

Twenty five years later, defining "genderqueer" and "gender invert" appears to involve the same basic problem. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people can be readily defined by something specific that they do, which sets them apart, but there's no obvious equivalent for genderqueer people (in general) or gender inverts (specifically) --

Gay and lesbian people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex

Bisexual people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex AND with the opposite sex

Transgender people: transition from the sex they were assigned at birth to the other sex

Genderqueer people: ??

Gender inverted people: ??



Well, admittedly, no, it isn't that simple when it comes to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people either. There are sexually inexperienced gay and lesbian people, they haven't had sexual relations with people of the same sex and yet they're still gay / lesbian, right? "Oh, but, well, they, umm, want to. I mean, they feel same-sex sexual desire", backtracks the hypothetical definer. But what do we mean by that, what exactly does one feel and think that constitues "wanting to"? Is it a specific concrete desire to engage in a specific activity, an activity that constitutes sex? What about the person who finds several same-sex people breathtakingly cute and becomes obsessed with the contours of their body shapes, but doesn't formulate a specific plan of action that takes the form "I want xxxxxx to happen, you and me" -- ?? Not to mention, what is that 'xxxxxx' anyhow, what precise activities count as 'sex'? Then there's "same" versus "opposite", when here we are in a world that includes both transgender and intersex people! Is a woman with erotic feelings towards an intersex individual a lesbian, or is she straight? If she also has the hots for a transgender man, is she bi? So if in addition to that she finds herself aroused by males who identify as girls, does that bring her up to trisexual or something? Obviously the clean clinical definitions used for the other LGBT identities don't withstand close scrutiny, either!


But that doesn't solve the problem, which involves perceptions and assumptions. However fuzzy and problematic our definitions for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender may be, the fact that there's a general acknowledgment of them as identities, a general belief in the categories and their usefulness, means that a coming-out story can be written with any degree of development of the identity itself ranging from an immersive soul-examining self-searching all the way down to a simple statement like "I knew I was that way from back in childhood", and then the rest of the book can be about the person and that person's experiences and only minimally about explaining, defining, and defending the identity itself as a relevant concept.

Borrowing from the same list I used in last week's post...

Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, the prototypical lesbian coming-out story, starts off with the tale of Molly (presumably Rita herself) as a young girl with a slew of tomboyish characteristics. Then in chapter 5 she becomes romantically obsessed with Leota Bisland from her sixth grade class and proposes marriage to her. They don't get married but by the end of the chapter she and Leota have kissed and touched each other all over.

Andrew Tobias' book The Best Little Boy in the World begins with the author describing himself as a delicate child, somewhat sexually ignorant. He alludes to "hiding something" during the course of describing how he learned about masturbation from songs and jokes, and eventually on page 33 notes that his first wet dream "was about Tommy".

Mario Martino's Emergence gets to it much more quickly, with the first sentences in the author's preface stating "I am a transsexual. I have undergone sex change, crossing over from female to male".

Daphne Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress notes early on that Dad had wanted a "demure and obedient" daughter and within the first six pages explains that this "daughter" was subjected to psychiatric incarceration "as an inappropriate female" with "deep unease in my female nature" and makes reference to being harassed with lipstick, foundation, and eyeliner.

Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues opens with a letter to "Theresa" in which the author expresses "missing you... seeing you in every woman's face", then recounts a conversation in Greenwich Village with a woman who "hates society for what it's done to women like you", in other words causing them to "hate themselves so much they have to look and act like men". By page 7, she has used the term "butch" as a noun to refer to herself and the others she fits in with.

Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There opens with the author picking up a pair of girls hitchhiking; they address her as "ma'am" as they get in. She thinks maybe she recognized one of them as someone "who'd been a student of mine back when I was a man".



Now, in The Story of Q I try to do that, too, to set the stage as it were, and in the first ten pages I've explained how, in childhood, I sought to emulate the girls, whom I admired, and to distance myself from being viewed as one of the boys; and I've also given early notice that I was physically attracted to girls from early on. But I'm at a disadvantage: I can't announce an identity the way Martino does, or count on readers immediately slotting me into one as Tobias, Brown, and Boylan all can when they describe their same-sex sexual attractions or refer to a time when they manifested as a different sex.

I have to build the identity for my readers before I can inhabit it. And it's somewhat subtle; there is no hallmark behavior where I can say "I did this" and that behavior conjures up a socially recognized identity (gay, lesbian, transgender) for most people immediately.

Leslie Feinberg's book is probably the closest in that regard. To be a butch lesbian is to inhabit a less common, less familiar identity. It's different from a generic lesbian coming-of-age story, with elements that are very similar to those of the stories written by transgender men, but it is its own tale, its own concept of self, including a culture and a community. And I suspect it's no coincidence that Feinberg's book is among the longer books that I've listed here.

This is the third installment of a three-part series specifically about coming out and writing the coming-out story as a genderqueer person. On April 23, I wrote Coming Out: Genderqueer Compared to Other LGBTQIA Identities and last week (May 22) I wrote The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point .


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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


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Authors and agents and writing coaches have a mantra: "show, don't tell". Instead of saying that John and Theresa had a fight, you describe the glares and the raised voices, you provide the dialog, describe the way the silverware jingles and bounces when the hand smacks down on the table, and so on.


There's an entire category of memoir that ought to have a name—illustrative memoir, demonstrative memoir, exemplary memoir, representative memoir, something like that—in which the author is trying to show a situation to the reading audience as an alternative to telling them about it in a polemic or a manifesto. In other words, their memoir is less "This is the story of me-the-author, ain't I interesting?" and more "This is the story of a ______ person, so that you can see how it is".


And there's a gamble in doing that. The author is gambling that the readers will get out of it what the author intended, that they will perceive the book as being a representative example of whatever situation or phenomenon the author is trying to draw attention to.



Marilyn French wrote The Women's Room. Her tale (recast as the tale of Myra) could have been received and reviewed as a sort of soap-opera days-in-the-lives story of a suburban woman and her circle of similar white women in the 50s and 60s, but it was seen (quite rightly) as a show-don't-tell presentation of women's lives in patriarchy, the Exhibit A to go along with Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan's theory works.


Jan Morris wrote Conundrum: From James to Jan. She gave us her first person account of growing up as a male child increasingly aware of feeling that the real person in that body was a girl, later a woman, and of the conflicts and complexities of that experience, eventually culminating in a successful sex reassignment surgery. Almost no one perceived it as anything other than an inside look at what it is like to be a transsexual male-to-female person, as Morris had intended it should be.


Not all attempts to illustrate a concept by telling a representative tale work out as planned, although the most prominent example isn't a memoir, but fiction instead: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Sinclair intended his tale of Jurgis Rudkus, immigrant from Lithuania, to be an illustration of the miserable lives of impoverished immigrants in a class-stratified society. Instead, it was widely received as an expose of what goes on in slaughterhouses as told from the perspective of someone working in them.


In some situations, the novelist (and novel fans) have often expressed a desire to have, for example, gay main characters without the book being ABOUT being gay; or mixed-race family characters without the book being ABOUT a mixed-race family. It's the opposite of trying to write a representative memoir: the desire for the difference to be accepted as normative.


When Rita Mae Brown wrote Rubyfruit Jungle, it was perceived as a coming-of-age story of a lesbian, an inside look at what it is like to grow up lesbian. If it were being published for the first time *now*, might it be perceived instead as the tale of an interesting semi-rural lower-income southern girl who goes on to college and who also oh yeah is lesbian and has to take some shit for that?


In my case, I am very much trying to be "Exhibit A". I am counting on people reading my book and seeing a social phenomenon, without me jumping up ever 3rd paragraph or so to say "Now, you see, that would have gone down differently if I had been a typical boy instead of a girlish / girl-identified male".

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