In the querying of my third book, a new record has been set, and I suspect it will not be broken.

I received a canned rejection letter ("I'm sorry, but your project does not sound like a fit for me at this time...").

Date I sent the query: 7/4/2023
Date I got the response: 1/7/2026
Interval between: 918 days (2 years, 6 months, and 3 days)


:: shakes head ::


Why would you bother to send a reply to a query that's been backburnered that long if you're only going to send a standard form rejection letter? I would expect at least a "Dear Author, my admin assistant found your vintage-2023 query letter where it had accidentally been transferred to our Deeds and Property Management inbox. I want you to know we did give it serious, if belated, consideration, but I don't think it's a project I could sign on for", or "Dear Author, I have been recovering from the consequences of a head-on collision that left me in a whole-body cast for years, and I'm only now catching up on my querying inbox..." or something?!?

The usual advice I've seen is "If you haven't received a reply within 3 months of sending a query, that's a pass". Lots of lit agents only reply if they are interested. So yes, of course I'd marked it as "NoReply 3Mos" and was no longer treating it as an outstanding query.

----

I still work on the book. Recently, I marked two places in my manuscript where I told my readers about something that was occurring in that timeframe, but didn't provide the dialog and interactions -- what we call "telling, not showing". And I made a note to myself: "If these are important to the story, do these as real scenes; if they aren't, get rid of these references!"

I decided in both cases to develop them. The first one in particular appealed to me as something the book would benefit from actually having: I had stated that in my day-to-day interactions with the other rehab patients, I occasionally made fun of certain behaviors in ways that some of them found offensive.

I decided I wanted that, to show myself not only opening up to them but also caring enough about their feelings that it would make me feel embarrassed and apologetic if I offended them.

The other "throwaway line" was where I made passing reference to an uneventful psychodrama session involving one of the women I was kind of developing an interest in. Well, if I was becoming interested in her, why wouldn't I have found the psychodrama session immersive? Yeah, I should either write the scene or discard the mention. I decided to write it and it does flesh out here character more to have that in there.



So, some people might have the attitude "You should not be querying your book until it is FINISHED." Well, David Gilmour has continued to perform music that Pink Floyd was performing back when I was in high school, and he occasionally finds new ways of presenting the material, small changed in how he expresses this or that section. That doesn't mean it wasn't fit for musical consumption back in 1976. I doubt I'll quit modifying the book until it does get published, but it has long since become a good book that's well worth reading for entertainment and enlightenment and good shivers.


—————


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

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.


—————


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

As author of autobiographical nonfiction, I'm occasionally questioned and challenged about my recall. I even once had a potential publisher tell me I could not market my book as nonfiction at all, since human memory is so unreliable!

That's an extreme position, and hence pretty easy to dismiss, but to a lesser extent the question has come up in various ways several times.

I do appear to have an unusually good recollection of events in my own life, but another factor involved here is that I've often written about things that happened to me, the events that had an impact on me at the time. That means that when I sit at my computer to write in the 2020s about something that happened to me in the 1980s, it's typically something I've written about previously. That works on two levels: the previous act of prowling through those memories and pondering them in order to write about them probably keeps them fresher than if I hadn't thought about them much in the intervening years, and in many cases I have copies of what I actually wrote at earlier points.

Within the Box has a couple pages of description of my first incarceration, in 1980, as a student at the University of New Mexico.

Here is a portion of that, followed by a snippet or two of an earlier description of the event from 2003 and one from a yet earlier description I wrote in 1982.

I dealt with Mountain View by starting my own local chapter of Mental Patients’ Liberation Front, and even though they were utterly coercive and we had no rights to speak of, I managed to get most of the patients in agreement that we should listen to each other and be mutually supportive, and try to ignore the horrible treatment the institution was subjecting us to. And I also got the support of a significant percent of the staff members, to the point that it polarized the institution and disrupted its functioning. I was making sense to a lot of people, and making their jackbooted authoritarian ways look silly and indefensible. Upper echelon clinical staff eventually decided I was a rabble raising psychiatric rights activist and booted me out, as if they’d caught me trespassing.

(from Within the Box, "Day Eleven" chapter)

So I make friends with the other mental patients. I’m thinking initially “I don’t belong here this is a mistake”, like most of you probably would, but the other mental patients here on the Seriously Disturbed Ward…umm, they don’t think they’re Napoleon and they aren’t seeing pink elephants and I can talk to them. Heck, I can even explain the stuff in my papers that got me into this place and they understand it (with varying shades of disagreement or ideas about what some things would mean that don’t overlap with my own). And I can understand the stuff that they are wrapped up in and concerned about...

After a week or so, we have started calling ourself the “patient people” instead of “patients” because to survive in this place you need to be very patient with the confrontational and abusive staff who belittle you and order you around, and patient with the situation in which you’re locked up and when not in immediate danger from the psychiatric professionals are generally bored. And we start referring to the staff when they behave at their worst as “impatient people”. We continue listening to each others’ stuff and give each other reality-checks and confirmations of the authenticity of feeling this or that based on what has happened to us here or there, and give each other pragmatic advice and sympathy and just someone to talk to about it. And pretty quickly we’re overtly saying that the only therapy in this place is what we are providing to each other. There are a couple of nurses, one in afternoon shift and another on night shift, who applaud this and say it is excellent. There are others on both of these shifts and everyone on the morning shift who regard it as inappropriate behavior and try to discourage us from talking to each other. The woman whose husband put her in there has a doctor who starts issuing instructions to the staff to stop this behavior. My doctor is mildly supportive but mostly for what he thinks it means regarding me individually. He thinks this is all my doing. At first it sort of was except that it caught on like wildfire once some of this stuff had been said out loud once or twice. There is another doctor who thinks the whole phenomenon is a great success story for “milieu therapy” which usually means “the therapeutic advantages of being surrounded by walls and barred windows” but now because we are essentially doing mutual therapy (and not assuming each other to be “sick”, by the way) we are part of each other’s “milieu” …at any rate he thinks it’s all wonderful and is instructing his patients to participate in our home-grown group sessions.

By the fourth week the staff is openly bickering, not just in the conference room behind the nurse’s station but in front of us out on the ward floor, and we’re behaving like calm patient little Zen masters. One guy hooks up the teenage couple with an attorney friend he knows and although he won’t “take their case” he gives them simple legal advice. I flirt with the married woman in front of her husband when he comes to visit and we imply to him that the two of us are having an affair in the hospital and he suddenly starts saying he’s going to talk to the doctor about her coming home. The guy with the Jesus freak parents is drawing his nightmare visions in crayons and it seems to help him cope and for crayon drawings they are pretty good.

Then one day I’m out in the barbed-wire enclosure (“yard”) where they let the patients go to smoke and get sunlight and when I come back in I find all my stuff is piled in the middle of the intake corridor and they won’t let me go onto the floor. “You aren’t crazy and you can’t stay here. You have to leave. Take your stuff and get out of here.”

(from a message board post, 2003)

...[I]nto the modern shiny psychiatric institution was tossed a stranger who had been handing out strange feminist manifestos, and he had just recently read an article about a group of psychiatric inmates calling themselves Mental Patients' Liberation Front, so when he deciced he wasn't getting what he'd come for, he decided to start a chapter right there in the hospital.

And the members of this new Mental Patients' Liberation Front wanted to talk about sex and politics and religion and love and suicide and life and death; and some of them wanted to sleep with each other while others wanted to sleep on the couches or on the floor, and they said, "So what if it it's emotionally intense, or unorderly, or different from normal? Does it hurt anything?" They complained about the godawful boredom, and some of the women put their makeup on their boyfriends while the men giggled, and the men shaved their eyebrows instead of their cheeks while the head nurse scowled from his plexiglass office.

In group therapy, the patients, now calling themselves the patient people, began discussing and redefining values. The nurses who had come to beam parentally and guide the therapy were told they could join in or listen patiently, but not to interfere impatiently with the patient people talking; after awhile, some of the nurses started talking, too.

But there were also a lot of very threatened and insecure people there who didn't like their reality tested like that, and they yelled, became violent, and insisted that personal contact was psychologically damaging to their patients' well-being. The patient people insisted otherwise, but the fearful ones lost their patience as rapidly as they were losing their patients, no matter how patient the patient people tried to be with them. Psychotropic tranquilizer drugs were ordered all around. It didn't look good for the patient people.

But some of the other therapists and an administrator or two began speaking up for the patient people, saying that these outspoken patients had an interesting set of ideas about reorganizing the care plan procedure of the institution. Some of them even went so far as to say that they didn't think the patient people were crazy at all.

Until one day a fiery MPLF radical or two found all personal possessions stacked in piles on the corridor floor after returning from weekend pass:

"You can't stay here any more. No, you can't talk with any of the other patients. Get your stuff off our floor and leave. If that stuff is still here tonight, it goes outside into the street."

(from The Amazon's Brother, unpublished, written in 1982)



—————


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

In my November 16 post (the "Transgender Lack of Awareness" post), I returned to a recurrent theme: that the mainstream transgender message doesn't make me feel included and recognized. Quite the opposite. Even when there's an effort to mention nonbinary trans folks and emphasize that a person's gender is valid regardless of their body, I feel left out, omitted.

Well, I'm currently reading several books that are likely candidates for what are called "comps" in the world of querying lit agents and publishers: books that your own book can be compared to because of similarities. One such book is A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Dunham.

Dunham refuses a lot of blocky klunky binary either-ors and dives straight into the gooey ambivalent conflicted territory he had to transit, and shoves it back at us, demanding that we consider it. He opens with a preface in which he indicates that his testimony of gender identity being a complex and nuanced thing without certainty could be seized upon as evidence that transgender identities are being embraced by people who will get buyer's remorse later and wish to de-transition.

And that's a big part of why so many trans people embrace the mainstream narrative. "I always knew I was born in the wrong body and was actually a [person of the opposite sex's gender], that's a solid irrevocable fact", goes the narrative. "I had to transition and get a new name and new pronouns because that's how you do it, and to do otherwise would make me horriby disphoric and suicidal, whereas transitioning totally makes me whole and comfortable in my own skin and validated". If you don't say it that way, the world looks back at you with dubiety and tells you "You don't seem like [that gender] to me, and since you aren't sure yourself..." and suggests that you're disturbed in the head, that these weird notions are obviously delusions brought on by the stress and so on and so forth.

But Cyrus Dunham appears to recognize that there's a problem with that: if young people contemplating these matters are led to feel that authentic trans people have that kind of absolute certainty, where everything is quite clear, where the correct identities and the correct courses of action are obvious and compelling, ...but that isn't how the young people going through it feel at all.. isn't that, itself, telling them that their identity isn't real and valid?

It takes a special courage to step forward and say "My identity and understanding is not clear and sharp and plain. But that doesn't mean it's less important than yours or doesn't count for as much". And to testify directly about the ambivalences, the worries about compromises, the contemplation of alternatives, and the presence of conflicting feelings and attitudes and inconsistencies in thought.

Dunham doesn't tell us that each gender identity exists objectively and that a person comes to recognize which one is authentically theirs. "The more I suspected people thought I was a liar, the more impossible it seemed to tell the 'truth'. There were so many truths; I didn't know how to locate one. Lying was embedded in every gesture, every statement, every interaction; every time I reaffirmed the presumption that I was female, which was constantly. I resigned myself to being incapable of not lying...I hesitate to call the exhausing day-to-day of embodiment 'dysphoria', that catchall for the pain of having a body that doesn't align with one's sense of self. What was a sense of self, after all: a delusion; mental illness...And if I admitted I was dysphoric, I'd have to deal with the fallout. I'd have to decide whether to do something about it".

He also asks the complicated question "Why do I need this?" rather than positing it as self-explanatory, rather than embracing "this is what you do if you realize you are trans". He writes:

"My story isn't resolved enough for me to believe that I have an unquestionable right to my own gender-confirmation surgery. I do believe it, in one part of myself. At the very least, because I know I should. Because it's my body, and I have to live in, with, and as it. Let me pilot it.

But it's not that simple for me. My brain monologue sounds like this, spoken in a cacaphony, not a linear progression of ideas: My breasts have felt invasive since they started to grow; every time I remember they are there, which is constantly, I am defeated; I have the right to augment my body in order to make it livable; the only reason I need the surgery in the first place is because the tyrannical gender binary has made me believe that my breasts are incompatible with my felt gender".

Cyrus Dunham accepts the turmoil as a legitimate part of identity and does not set out to vanquish it in the name of certainty. At least not internally. When he decides to proceed with top surgery, he -- like so many other trans people in his situation -- finds it necessary to oversimply for the moment, to package his situation in terms that the world is prepared to understand:

My confession of utter transness sacrificed nuance for legibility. I defaulted to the trope that I was born in the wrong body. That I had the soul of a man. Which implied that I believed in such a thing as a man in the first place. Which implies that I believed that, were I to live as a man, I would finally be okay.

But I didn't have time to be rigorous. I just needed them to believe me...

The week before the surgery, I got a letter from my insurance provider:

A request has been made for coverage of "top" surgery to help with your change from female to male gender. We are unable to approve at this time. We require that you must have a desire to live and be accepted as a member of opposite sex for at least six months. The letter from your therapist indicates only "recent months". Therefor [sic], you don't meet our requirements that you desire to live and be accepted as male for at least six month [sic].

Cyrus Dunham's willingness to show his actual unedited internal processing in all its vulnerable uncertain state allows for a rare thing: he describes someone like me as a hypothetical possibility in his writing:

If I was truly transgressive I would be able to tolerate the simultaneity of my breasts and masculinity and see them as co-morbid rather than contradictory

I do like to feel truly transgressive, it's a confident brave look, but in truth I've spent my life unsure. Unsure if I were embracing this 'explanation' because I so badly needed an explanation, not because it was the right one. Unsure if claiming an identity that had no specific external objective characteristic had any substance at all to it. (My sociology research professor once told me gay men could be studied because you operationalize them as men who have sex with men; crossdressers because you operationalize them as men who dress in clothing designed and sold as women's clothing; but you can't operationalize 'thinks of himself as one of the girls and not one of the boys' because that only takes place inside his head). But yeah, I have a sex (male), I have a gender (girl, femme, woman, sissy), and my transgression is to insist that neither one is wrong, neither one needs to be changed. I'm not a transitioner.

So -- interestingly -- Dunham's openness creates a space for me to feel included, whereas the conventional/mainstream narrative about what it means to be trans, with the litany of officially sanctioned viewpoints, never has.


It was my intention from the start that in Within the Box I was going to put my own internal processes, including self-doubts, on display. So that makes A Year Without a Name a very good choice for the comparable lit section of my forthcoming query letters.


—————


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 a third book, Within the Box, which isn't published yet, 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

In last week's blog post, I noted that I need to rework portions of Within the Box to include more tension between me and the staff of Elk Meadow around being gender-atypical. As it stands, I've got Derek thinking a lot about gender inside his own head, but you really have to read between the lines a lot to get any sense of Elk Meadow as sexist or heterocentric or transphobic.

This kind of falls between the cracks between nonfiction and fiction. There's a lot that I recall from the actual events of 1982 without recalling the granular details, and mostly that hasn't mattered much, but in this case I remember the folks running the place being very sure of themselves in their conventional gendered attitudes, and I need to convey that better. So although this specific conversation didn't take place, I think it's not a dishonest insertion. Things sufficiently like this occurred.

This is the start of Day Seven, which is one of the shortest chapters in the book, so it's a good target for expansion. (As originaly written, this entire scene ends with "Well, it’s better than being sneered at in derision or being informed that I’m intellectualizing"; the rest is new.

(This isn't the only insert I'm planning. Just the limits of what I've actually done so far)

-----

Day Seven

A less apologetic Dr. Barnes shows up at our unit’s morning meeting. “Derek, it is good to see your face here among us this morning. Derek has come to some important conclusions about us here at Elk Meadow, has decided he’s in the right place after all. I think we’ve all seen how someone can come to recognize important truths that may not have been apparent to them when they first arrived. So let’s all go forward with a fresh start attitude.”

I guess that’s better than being sneered at in derision or being informed that I’m intellectualizing.

“Our Mark Raybourne tells me that you don’t care if other people don’t see you as a real man”, Barnes continues. “That’s actually a healthy attitude.” He glances around the room, gathering everyone’s focused attention. “For all of us, sooner or later we have to look into the mirror and deal with the person whose opinions matter: ourself! And I think Derek has been trying to tell us that, that it’s not your opinion of him that counts, and it’s not mine, or the opinion of any of the Elk Meadow staff that counts...”

Barnes crouches down slightly, resting his hands on his knees, narrowing the focus back to me. “A real man has to live up to his own standards. He has to put down the excuses and the avoidance strategies and face up to his mistakes and his errors of judgment, and examine any patterns of self-destruction he might be stuck in. A real man can’t be satisfied with being less than what he can be, what he was born to be, and you’re right, Derek, it’s his own opinion of himself that he has to live with.”

Barnes straightens up and opens his hands, palms upward. Benign kind fatherly face in place, waiting.

“I agree with you about being honest with yourself and living up to your own standards”, I say, “but what I was talking with Mark about the other day is that I’m not into all that ‘be a man’ stuff, the standards I have for myself aren’t centered around masculinity. I do have standards and sometimes I don’t meet them and have to work on myself or, you know, try to deal somehow with my faults, but I don’t aspire to a lot of the things that were pushed at me in the name of proving I’m a man”.

“Well now, one thing I think you should examine, since you’re being honest with yourself as much as possible, is whether you’re using that as an excuse...”

Barnes steps back slightly and holds up one open palm, a stop sign. I don’t think I was reacting visibly, but it’s possible that I did. Or maybe Barnes just finds it expedient to act as if I was about to argue. “I’m not saying you are”, he continues, “but what if you’re using that as a way to set your aspirations in a way that doesn’t leave you open to failure. Just consider that. I mean, anyone could redefine their failures and disappointments as their goals, hey look, everybody, I always wanted to be an unemployed homeless guy with a drug habit, I’m a rolling stone, I’m a tumbleweed and I’m free, never wanted to pay income tax and live behind a picket fence. See how that works?”

“Well, I don’t think I conjured this attitude up to excuse what some people regard as my failures. I was a university student a couple years ago and doing okay in my courses, but I was keeping a scrapbook in my dorm room, I wrote ‘Militant Heterosexual Sissy’ on the first page, and the more I took those ideas seriously, the happier I felt about myself. I was never like the other boys and I never wanted to be. It’s not that I didn’t think I was as good as other boys. I used to think I was better than them. I don’t really think that way now, but I do think I’m different. And always have been. But to your other point, yes, I think I have things to work on, ways in which I don’t measure up to what I want of myself, and that’s why I’m here”.

—————


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.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

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)?


—————


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.

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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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Thanks to my partner anais aka Cassandra, my synopsis has been whittled down to a tolerable size.

A lot of lit agents request a synopsis, so I needed to have one in order to be ready to begin querying. (Yes I could have deliberately chosen targets who dont' ask for a synopsis, but that would interfere with procrastination!)

And, on that front, folks: I have begun. The first tiny handful of lit agents are now in receipt of my query. I have begun the process of trying to sell my third book.


So...



SYNOPSIS

Prologue:


Derek, a 23 year old nursing student, is suspended for refusing to manipulate patients to take their medicines. Derek's parents worry that he will never finish any course of training. They're convinced that Derek's problem is drugs and alcohol, and they want him to check into a fancy private rehab facility. Derek doesn't believe that he abuses drugs or alcohol, but agrees to go because they also do other types of therapy.


Derek is genderqueer -- or that's what he'd call himself in 2023 -- but it's 1982. Derek thinks he has an important message, but finds it difficult to make people understand. So it's the promise of improving communication skills that lures Derek into trying rehab. He's told it's voluntary and if he doesn't like it, he can leave.


The First Six Days:


Derek goes through an exhausting intake and orientation, with residents and staff praising Elk Meadow Clinical Retreat. He quickly tires of the one-way flow and puts posters on his door defining himself as leader of his treatment team. This offends some residents. Dr. Barnes says Derek is intellectualizing, and a counselor says Derek is in denial. Derek tries to remain open-minded. He participates in psychodrama, and learns about his interaction patterns with his parents.


Dr. Barnes pushes Derek to turn his life over to the pros since he isn't running it well himself, and Derek pushes back by making a nameplate like the one on Dr. Barnes' door, angering Barnes. Derek goes AWOL through an improperly locked door, sees a movie, then drops in on colleagues of his Dad's who live nearby. They call his parents, who aren't pleased. Dr. Barnes calls and apologizes for Elk Meadow failing to meet Derek's needs, and Derek agrees to return.


Days Seven Through Eleven:


In psychodrama, Noelle takes the role of Derek and mimics him sounding intellectual but incoherent; this clears the air and Derek starts making friends with other residents. In group, Dr. Barnes says Derek should remove the materials from his door if he's "serious about a new start." Derek is cynical but complies. His counselor says Derek takes a "certain pride" in not caring what others think, and notes that this hinders others from connecting with him.


The recreational therapist tells Derek he can't go outside anymore because of his escape. On his own, Derek contemplates the link between being a feminine male and his difficulties getting and keeping blue-collar jobs among males. In group, Dr. Barnes baits Derek for acting femme. Derek asks to read his own chart, but is denied. While power-walking in the hallway to get exercise because he's being kept inside, Derek grabs his chart from the nurses' station. He finds he has been diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, and that his father authorized involuntary treatment if necessary.


Days Twelve Through Sixteen:


Gary says Derek should admit he shouldn't have read his chart; but Gary subsequently shows contempt for schizophrenics in a way that residents find inappropriate and offensive. Derek tries to crawl up above the acoustical tiles to escape, but gets caught. His therapist says "You know what you need to do to walk out of this place. Why don't you just do it?" Derek agrees, and asks to be discharged.


Dr. Barnes says he's preparing the discharge paperwork, but has orderlies restrain Derek in seclusion. Derek expresses his fears and vulnerability to the supportive night nurse, but the morning nurse treats him as a diagnosed psychotic. A mental hygiene attorney explains Derek's options and files a 72-hour letter of intent to leave, which Barnes says he'll challege in court. Dr. Barnes warns Derek that he plays golf with the judge. He tells Derek to cancel the 72-hour letter and take psychotropic drugs or Derek will never be outside of a mental hospital again. Derek agrees to take the medicine. He wakes up under the effect of the drugs, and decides he has to break out now. Derek escapes, walks all night in the rain, and eventually collapses crying.


Aftermath:


Derek hitches to his sister Jan's college. Jan offers him a bed for the night but calls their parents, who tell Derek to go back to Elk Meadow. He hangs up on them. Next morning he hitches to his girlfriend's home and she welcomes him.

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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

Derek is genderqueer, or nonbinary -- or rather that's likely what Derek would call himself in 2023 -- but it's 1982, and 23-year-old Derek is finding it a challenge to explain to people. He views himself as needing help becoming a better communicator. His parents view him as having a drug and alcohol problem.

They reach a compromise: he'll check himself into a very modern upscale facility that promises to help people work on all their issues. It's strictly voluntary. “But we’d want you to give it a real try”, his Dad says. “Don’t stalk out the first time you think there’s some policy or some person that isn’t perfect. You won’t get anything out of it unless you go in intending to get something out of it.”

Dr. Barnes and his staff think Derek is in denial about his situation. He insists he doesn't have a drug or alcohol problem, but he's never been able to keep a job or complete any projects, including two attempts at college and a more recent attempt to complete nurse's training. And he's constantly deflecting, bringing in social issues and political theories. “You can’t go out and fix the world and solve its problems when you haven’t dealt with the mess in your own life”, Barnes tells him. “I think you’re just afraid to confront your own worst enemy, because unfortunately he isn’t out there with expectations and roles, he’s right there where you are.”

But Derek is finding the facility heavy-handed and coercive. They've gotten off to a bad start -- nobody asks his reasons for coming there or what he hopes to get out of the program. He thinks being a heterosexual femme is relevant to why he's had difficulties fitting in socially and doing well. That and the resulting isolation which have left him deprived of the easy interactive social skill-set that most people have. He wants to work on that, but the institutional staff seem bent on working on him in ways he isn't consenting to.

The other patients in the program don't warm to him immediately; he's disrupting the program and they're also being judged by the staff on how appropriately they react when someone behaves disruptively. Derek watches and observes. “Therapy here is all about residents proving that they can be an obedient part of Dr. Barnes’ echo chamber. Anyone who doesn’t echo doesn’t advance to the higher levels”, he says.

Within the Box is a psychological suspense tale. Derek can't be sure they aren't right; maybe he seized on this weird notion about gender because he so badly wanted an answer other than "horrible unlikeable person with a hideous personality and atrocious social skills" for why he's been reviled and hated, and it's really a defense mechanism, like they say. And the reader is invited along to wonder who is right, and whether the institution is benign or awful, whether Derek is arrogant and stubborn or bravely resistant.

Arching over all of this ambivalence is the issue of safety: if, indeed, the institution is unduly coercive, and Derek is openly resistant to them, is he being paranoid about worrying about what they might do in response, or is he on safe grounds because, as Dr. Barnes himself said, “You all know you can leave any time you want"?

Within the Box. 72,000 words, nonfiction, a personal account (memoir) rendered in the style of entertainment fiction.

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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

Memoirs written by mad people — describing what it's like to wrestle with the emotional and cognitive disturbances we call "mental illness", or the experiences with psychiatric treatment, or the associated stigma and the sense of having become something unmentionable — seldom cover the entire territory.

There are those books that invite us along for a glimpse of the descent into madness, such as Hannah Green's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; there are the ones that focus more on what it's like to need help so badly and to instead be subjected to the grim and harsh realities of psychiatric incarceration, such as Janet Gotkin's Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears or Susannah Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted.

Then there are the more militant books written more as condemnations of psychiatric oppression, like Leonard Roy Frank's "The Frank Papers" from back in the Madness Network News days, or Huey Freeman's Judge, Jury & Executioner. Sometimes the latter folks include a description of The Movement — mad people's liberation, the consumers and survivors and ex-patients banding together both to fight for our rights and to be the support network and therapeutic safety net that the psychiatric system has been unable to provide us — such as you find in Kate Millet's The Loony Bin Trip or Judi Chamberlin's On Our Own.

A lot of the militant / movement-oriented stories do not come from people who were seeking or needing help, but just had it imposed on them anyway whether they liked it or not. So, as you might expect, there's a lot of focus on the right to say "no" and be left in peace. My own writings have mostly fallen into this category.

Mary Elizabeth Van Pelt's 2010 book In Silence I Speak: My Journey Through Madness provides one of the less common testimonies, the story of a person who fell down into the pit of real mental and emotional turmoil and truly needed help, but for whom the help was at best a mixed bag until she found community and connectedness with others who were in the same boat...and from there, became acquainted with the movement and increasingly committed to the user-run self-help model for alternative therapy.

Hers is as fervent a callout to the movement and its ideals as anything written by the militant leave-us-alone contingent. Of particular interest, she testifies to what it's like to work in the mental health system as a person who is known to have a psychiatric diagnosis herself. The attitudes and expectations, the overt double standards, these all paint a graphic picture of how the professionals in the psychiatric system tend to view us: as very different from themselves, as impaired people, as people of a different caste whom one would not invite to a dinner with one's real colleagues, as people who are automatically disqualified from being on the actual staff because we can't have such people with such ruined minds working here, as people whose time and energy has no intrinsic worth, so their contributions need not be compensated.



In Silence I Speak is a slim volume that packs a lot into just 128 pages. Van Pelt recapitulates her experience of an aspect of the situation and then moves on to another subtopic. Some sections were definitely richer, more fleshed out and punchier than others, and these are the places where In Silence I Speak is at its best. The sense of disorientation and being unplugged and lost is well-provided in "Psychiatric Interlude"; and the new hopes arising from mutual support and connection are very evocative in "A Time of Growth and Change". She details the sense of betrayal and her frustration with the obliviousness of her professional colleagues in "Flying Beyond Institutional Walls" and "Beyond the World of Madness".

The thinnest and most perfunctory sections of the book are the early ones describing her initial descent into dysfunctional patterns. Whether out of a reluctance to relinquish her remaining privacy or, as she hints, because it's still a painful place to go back to and relive long enough to capture on paper, we aren't given a really visceral sense of what was happening to her and how it felt.

But in the emergence into the peer support and psychiatric rights community, her tale is compelling, in large part because it is so effectively prefaced by her description of what it was like to try to provide those kinds of services and be a participant and colleague within the medical-model version that the peer services are an alternative to.


Mary Elizabeth Van Pelt. In Silence I Speak: My Journey Through Madness. Paperback and Kindle editions. Albuquerque NM: Mercury Heartlink 2010

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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 second draft, 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.

————————


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I haven't had any book reviews of my books show up in quite some time, so I was pleased to get a notification that Amanja Reads Too Much, a book blogger with a long pending stack of books to read, had gotten to That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class and her review was now up.

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February 2, 2023

I previously reviewed Allan D. Hunter’s first memoir, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet. This book is a follow up that focuses more on his status as “outsider” all the way from high school, to college, grad school, and beyond....

Interested in feminism he enrolled in college as a women’s studies major. He stood out as the only male in any of his classes. Some women welcomed him as an enlightened male, others took objection with a perceived invasion of a woman’s safe place.

That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class candidly discusses social issues beyond feminism as it also explores race and class struggles. Hunter is honest and open about his time spent homeless and “in the system.”...

For those who aren’t part of the LGBTQ community it will be upsetting to learn that there is a lot of infighting still going on today. Well, it’s upsetting to those of us in the community as well. Hunter experienced it through being genderqueer, I’ve faced it through being bisexual (why don’t you just pick a side?!), and many others experience it from other angles. Even outsider groups are not immune to judgement and discrimination...

Hunter is a strong writer and the memoir is a surprisingly quick read. Both of his books are strongly recommended for anyone looking to branch out their reading list to more than just one closet

(snippet; for full review click link below)

AmanjaReads

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Speaking of my books, I am still seeking interested readers to read my third book, a work-in-progress now in the midst of second draft (working title Within The Box), and give me feedback. I'm particularly interested in getting beta readers from these demographics:

• People with any connection to women's studies or feminism, especially if their connection dates back to the heydays of the second wave, 1970s-1990s.

• Anyone from the psychiatric rights / mental patients' liberation community.

• LGBTQIA folks, especially those who participate in organized gender politics

• Currently or formerly homeless, or homeless advocacy workers, or people who provide services to same

• People who provide services to folks with psychiatric diagnoses, especially residential services

If you're interested, shoot me an email, a PM, or post a reply.

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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 now in second draft. 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.






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