saturday scenes: 2/2/2019

Happy Saturday, my loves! Back for another day of the Big Queer Funeral Novel, and another moment of my dumb boys being dumb.

What’s that, you say? A rom-com situation, courtesy of ladders and Christmas lights? Sure!

“I think we’re done,” Sam said. “Hand me the extension cord?”

Jamie hunted around on the floor of the porch until he caught sight of the black cord coiled up by the wall. He gave the ladder a suspicious look, then glanced up at Sam. “Do not fall off,” he said sternly.

Sam laughed and held up one hand, making a point to hold onto the roof with the other. “Pinky promise.”

Narrowing his eyes, Jamie let go of the ladder cautiously, stepping away to pick up the cord and reaching up to pass it to Sam. Sam plugged the string in, and they lit up, a glittering rainbow of light stringing their way across the roof hanging over the porch. The sun had gone down just enough for them to get the full effect, and Jamie whistled through his teeth.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s…”

Sam grinned down at him. “Good, right?”

Jamie chuckled, shaking his head. It was just gay enough to make a point, but not so queer as to be in your face. “It’s a fine balance,” he said diplomatically. “Are you done?”

“You really want me off this ladder, don’t you?”

“So badly,” Jamie said honestly.

Sam snorted. “I do this every year, you know,” he said, coiling the extra lights into a loop and tucking them into the plastic bag with the lights he’d kept dangling around his wrist.

“And this morning you tripped over Sappho while you were reading a book, and you broke a coffee mug and almost broke your face,” Jamie countered, hoping he sounded more patient than he felt. “Please get down.”

“You are ridiculous,” Sam huffed, rolling his eyes, but he handed the bag down to Jamie and started down the ladder.

Absolutely true to form, he missed a step and fell backwards with a yelp, grabbing for the ladder rung too late. Jamie moved faster, catching him with an arm around his waist before he could fall too far, his own heart pounding in his chest. Sam’s hands flew up to catch his shoulders, automatic and instinctive, stabilizing, and for one dizzying moment they just stared at each other, frozen.

order of operations

So one thing that I’m learning, as I dip my toes into this whole “maybe what if we possibly potentially gave writing publicly outside of fandom a try” thing, is that I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing.

Not on the writing part! That part, honestly, I feel pretty good about. I have quite a bit to say–on more topics than I thought I did–but everything that comes with it. Growing up, I had this very set image in my head of The Way Authors Came To Be, and it followed a very specific order:

1. Write Book
2. Get Agent
3. Agent Sells Book to Publisher
4. ??????????
5. Congratulations, you are now an Author!

Ah, naivete, you’re a hell of a drug. Given that this is 2019 and not, say, 1950, things obviously don’t look like this anymore, and don’t worry, my eyes have been opened. Gone are the days of the recluse writer who lives off the grid and sends an amazing best-selling book out into the world once every few years, so I’ve spent the last month doing a deep-dive into Twitter, which I’ve used off and on with various professional accounts but always tried to shy away from personally (it’s just Very Big and I am Very Small and #yikes), making lists of other sites where I think I could submit, reaching out and making some contacts, finding writing groups to join and hashtags to participate in.

A lot of this has to do, honestly, with that fuzzy space that hovers around step 1.5, between Write Book and Get Agent (if we even assumed those steps still followed that approximate order, which, ?????). There’s a lot of emphasis in query forms on having some kind of established brand–not necessarily a massive following (though I’m sure it doesn’t hurt) but an expectation that you have some kind of presence or digital footprint that gives potential agents a sense of who you are, not just as a writer but as a person. What do you care about? What does your voice sound like? Who is your audience? What perspectives are you bringing to your work?

Unfortunately, this is where I found myself ramming into a wall. I have about eight years of writing, publishing, and digital storytelling experience, in various forms, but most of it, unfortunately, was done through masquerading as someone else–writing as my organization, using my nonprofit’s voice, and generally not creating work that I retained intellectual rights to (fun!). Establishing a history of me as me means, essentially, starting from square one.

Simultaneously, though, there’s the biggest project I’m working on right now: writing the damn book.

This novel (which doesn’t have a proper working title, though I’ve been calling it the “Big Queer Funeral Home Novel” in my head) started out as a NaNoWriMo project, and has been evolving since then. It’s been the first original project I’ve felt was worth actually digging into in years, and it’s helped to have gotten a lot of encouragement towards publishing from friends who have gone in that direction, including a few who have been traditionally published. I love the story, and I love the characters, but over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself starting to slow down as the plot hasn’t quite resolved and I haven’t been able to wrap up the story in the way that makes sense.

Which is a pain, because, as I said, Step 1: Write the Book.

Well–yes and no. It is, in the sense that in general, you do need to have written the thing to sell it. But in the sense of do you need to have finished, edited, and polished your novel to query it?

Apparently not, according to Ryan La Sala, “YA Fantasy Author and Notable Gay,” (which is the greatest newsletter signature I’ve ever heard, and I am livid that he claimed it before I could, honestly, how dare you). While I cried a lot about how Writing and Revising is Scary and Why Does Anyone Do This, Anyway, Ryan explained that it’s a good idea to write up a sample query before you finish the book. “Get really into it,” he told me, until you remember what made you fall in love with the story in the first place. “Then ask: is my story as compelling as my super awesome query makes it sound? If not, revise until you feel they match.”

Y’all? The novel I have been writing was not the novel I was thinking of in my head.

Oh, it was close, in a lot of ways! The vibe was really similar, and had a similar basic plotline. The characters were the same. The love story sure as heck was the same, with my two doofy boys who couldn’t get their heads together if their lives depended on it. But the energy, weight, and emotional character arcs that I was looking to write? I’ve got 78,000 words here, and “the good stuff” doesn’t show up in nearly enough of them.

So. Step 1: Write the Book is really Step 1: Write the Book but also Pitch the Book to Yourself and then Make Sure it’s the Right Book and then Re-Write the Book and then Re-Pitch the Book and then Maybe Write it Again and then See What Happens.

And then maybe write it again.

But like I said, we’ll see. After all:

I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.