Writing LGBTQ+ characters isn’t new for me. For those of you who followed my process of writing and revising DUODECIM, you know that story is chock-full of minority characters who deserve the spotlight. I live for writing diverse characters whose stories are not about their experience as a minority. I wanted to write a fantasy story about diverse characters being badass and powerful, and that’s what I did. THE PUNCTUATION BETWEEN is a different animal entirely. While in DUODECIM, different characters featured aspects of my identity, it didn’t qualify as #ownvoices because my protagonist didn’t encompass my identity in its entirety. For THE PUNCTUATION BETWEEN, I wanted to take that step and try my hand at something different, and boy, was that an experience. My gender has always been something difficult to articulate. I didn’t start exploring the subject until I was in college, and discussing it outside of friend groups took even longer. Even with the different names for identities and their descriptions, it was still difficult to explain how I felt in words. Non-binary is different for everyone who falls under that heading, so narrowing it down to my truth took time and a lot of personal exploration. Needless to say, committing to write a book about someone who identified the way I do when I didn’t know how to describe it myself was tricky in concept. What surprised me was how easily it came to me in practice. While THE PUNCTUATION BETWEEN isn’t in itself a coming out story, it deals with Lex’s anxieties over telling their friends and family, and that lends to the overarching conflict in the story. LGBTQ+ people don’t come out just once—it’s a daily process that comes in different forms. To leave that out of Lex’s story, and subsequently my own, would be a disservice to portraying this kind of an #ownvoices story. Lex’s identity is by no means a catch-all for how non-binary people identify. Identity, presentation, and orientation are all different and valid. Exploring how I define my gender and myself through Lex was one of the most rewarding experiences to come out of writing this book. I’ve always known that #ownvoices stories are incredibly important in terms of how they affect those reading them. What I never expected was all that I would learn from writing #ownvoices. Even if it’s never shared, I encourage everyone to write their truths, whatever that truth is—you never know what you’ll unearth about yourself in the process.
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Want to read the first page (and a half) of my new WIP, THE PUNCTUATION BETWEEN? Click the 'read more' button to check it out!
You can also find the snippet on my Facebook page, along with other updates and information about this project's progress. So what are you waiting for? Click below, give it a read, and share your thoughts in the comments! There’s going to be a few posts about this highlighting my experiences writing this new manuscript, and it was hard to decide which one I should focus on for my first entry. As I clicked the ‘title’ box, my fingers answered the question for me. DUODECIM is currently out on submission. I’m fortunate enough to have multiple agents reading my full manuscript, and if any of you are reading this, I’m waiting patiently, (and eagerly), and have trained myself to only refresh my email a few times a day. DUODECIM wasn’t an easy project, but not because I didn’t love the story. It was my first real work. I didn’t have a community of writers encouraging me and teaching me. I was in the throes of navigating a whole new world and I was discovering the tools to do it myself. It wasn’t until the last year of drafting that I joined the twitter writing community and made friends who opened up a world of opportunity to me. The revising of DUODECIM was harder than drafting, but the process went quicker. I went through so many drafts and I didn’t have a strategy. I changed a plot point in the beginning, started to implement it throughout, and then I would come to the end and realize there was an even better way of doing it. It took a big wake-up call from my friend Kat—who all of you should follow because she’s going to be huge one day, just you wait—who broke down all of the problems in my draft with the kind of honesty that hurts the same way antiseptic burns in a fresh cut. I learned what many of my bad writing habits were. I learned how to fix them. She poured my inbox with articles about craft, and was always there to hear me out when I needed to talk through a tricky plot problem. It took seven years to get DUODECIM to where it is, but I learned so much. This blog post isn’t about DUODECIM. Words cannot express how grateful I am for every one of those seven years, and every struggle I pushed through. In reflection, they changed who I am as a writer. That book is my love and my child, and without it, I couldn’t have learned my craft well enough to have written THE PUNCTUATION BETWEEN. I went in with new tools, and a new understanding of drafting. I caught myself making the mistakes it took me ages to undo before I made them. I went in with an outline that kept me on track while still allowing me to let my characters tell their story. I changed up my tense and point of view to challenge myself, and found a new side to my writing style I didn’t know existed. THE PUNCTUATION BETWEEN was an exercise in confidence and affirmation. Every time I put words on the page and they came easier than I ever imagined, I felt driven to push more out. With each finished chapter, seeing the story grow, I was inspired to dive into the next one. It was a vicious cycle, sans actually being vicious. I think writers don’t always take the time to celebrate these little landmarks. After all, writing is an art, and art is never really finished. It’s in our nature to criticize ourselves, and point out places where we could have done more. This post is an active step against that bad habit. I wrote my first draft of THE PUNCTUATION BETWEEN in three months. Yes, I still have revising to do, and it won’t be ready for querying tomorrow, but it still feels like a landmark to me. I pushed myself to do something that I never thought I would be able to, and finishing this draft feels like a victory. Of course, this story was landmark for me in a few ways, and there will be other posts for that in the coming days, but for now I simply want to say that I’m overwhelmingly proud of myself. Reader, for wherever you are in your writing lives, or even your every day lives, take a moment to be proud of yourself. Whether it be for putting words on a page, going to work, making an important call. Be proud of yourself, because it makes a world of difference. Now onto the next adventure: revising. I wanted to do a writing practice based on this prompt: I’ve been putting so much into revising, it felt good to rewire my brain for this. It’s not quite focused ALL on one sense, but I tried to center it around hearing/sound as much as I could. I also am trying to test out a new voice to see how it flows. The sounds of my little demons chittering to themselves in the blackness of my room at night are directly correlated with the bruised shadows under my eyes every day. I’m pretty sure the people at school just think it’s part of my ~aesthetic~ which is fine by me. Better than them thinking I’m flat out crazy, cause school is enough of a pain in the ass. But then, who’s gonna come up with the theory that Lex always looks like she was up all night because she was trying to shut out the demons who thrive on the darkness outside? ‘She.’ I did it again. I know I’m not ‘she,’ but they don’t, so my voices for them call me ‘she,’ and even though I can’t hear her, I know Helen’s slithering around my mirror thriving on the dysphoria. God, she’s such a bitch. I’ll look in the mirror tomorrow, and she’ll make sure to highlight all of the things that help the world see me as a girl. Because there’s nothing like having your reflection used against you as a weapon, showing you what the world will always see. Brenda hisses out a stuttered wheeze before her barbed feet dig deeper into my back. I hate that I know she’s laughing at me, even though I’m fairly certain demons don’t understand the concept. Or at least, if they do, they all failed stupendously at that lesson and should not have graduated demon school to stalking their very own fucked-up human. I know what’s coming, and even though I lift my hands to cover my ears, her voice sounds through my head. “What if they knew?” I don’t like the idea of that. Not even a little, but her voice is accented like what I imagine a cockroach would sound like if it were granted a voice box, all sharp angles and grating vowels. “Shut up, Brenda.” I sound stupid talking to my empty room because I’m the only one who knows it isn’t really empty. “You’d go from a loner to an all out freak.” The way she drags out ‘freak’ hurts more than her pincers in my back. My spinal cord is being tugged like a drawstring, and my vertebrae are collecting on themselves as I try to curl away from the sound. “Not all the way a girl, or all the way a boy. A bastardization of the two.” “I’m just as normal as everyone else,” I insist to the room, and the chittering continues. I know I’m normal. I know it. It’s like I have two brains. Logic brain and Brenda brain. Logic brain knows that non-binary people are real. Knows that I’m valid in my identity. Knows that there’s nothing wrong with being a ‘they’ and not a ‘she’ or a ‘he’ or a ‘s(he)’ or a ‘he/she’ or any other stupid way of enforcing a binary that isn’t real. That the punctuation barrier between the pronouns isn’t as solid as it looks typed on a page. The problem is the Brenda brain. The demon on my back whisper-hissing in my ear that I’m crazy. A freak. A bastardization of two genders. That I’ll never be accepted. I know she’s wrong. I know that I shouldn’t listen to the cheese-grater insults that she stabs through my eardrums. Brenda stutter-wheezes in my ear again, and this time it’s accompanied by the squelching ooze of Susan coming to play. I hate the suckling pops and gurgles of her tar-like tendrils winding their way up my blankets and sheets . I hate how they coil around my wrists, holding me on the bed. Covering my ears wasn’t working anyway, so no loss there, but it doesn’t mean I like the weight her sludge puts on me. Susan doesn’t need to speak for me to hear her telling me to give up. She tells me through the way she makes me tired, but not tired enough to sleep. Tired of trying to disprove Brenda. Tired of fighting with Helen in the mirror. Tired of being tired. Susan’s good at sucking my soul out of me through my skin, and the room gets darker every time she does it. Brenda’s engine-failure voice sounds once more in my ears, but I don’t fight her this time. What’s the point? “You can’t ever tell them. They’ll never understand you. Especially Finch.” Finch. I close my eyes, and it’s just as dark is when they’re open, but it feels a little safer. Finch’s voice in my head sounds so much nicer than Brenda’s. It’s higher than the other guys I know; not quite like hot chocolate—that’s too thick. It’s more like a warm tea with honey and milk. The perfect drinking temperature. I don’t quite sleep that night, but thinking about drinking in the tea of Finch’s voice lulls me into enough of a halfway place that I can reduce Brenda to nothing but clicks and snaps and white noise. I can forget that Susan is holding me to my bed and sucking my soul up through a straw. I can forget that I’ll have to face Helen weaponizing my reflection in the morning. I think maybe I can live in that space forever between half-real and half-dreaming, surrounded with the sound of everything that makes me feel safe. I can live forever in Finch’s voice. The 2017 Writer's Digest Conference in NYC is four days away and coming fast! With all of the Pitchwars prep, and the wedding, I feel like I blinked and suddenly it's here, looming in the not-so-distant future and waving at me. It's my first writing conference, and I'm going at it alone. Not only that, but I'm pushing out of my comfort zone and trying out the Pitch Slam. For those not familiar, the Pitch Slam is speed dating with agents and editors. You get three minutes to sit down and tell the agent/editor why they should be interested in your work, and then they get to ask you questions. So how did I pick the agents I want to pitch to? Well, I started by narrowing it down to agents that wanted Young Adult Fantasy. No sense pitching to an agent who isn't interested in the genre you write, right? Well, that still left me with about thirty agents. It's like the real world of querying, but on a smaller scale. There's lots of options, but only a handful will be able to provide you and your MS what you need. So how do you figure out what you really need? I decided to think about what was most important to me in an agent. What did I want in the person who was going to be representing me and my manuscript to the big world of publishing? God I miss Bernie... ANYWAY: Diversity! I want an agent who actively seeks diverse works by marginalized authors about marginalized characters. Especially given the place the United States is in today. This country is trying to strip POC and LGBTQ+ voices, and I want an agent who will hold up a megaphone and let marginalized people scream through that silence. To me, if an agent lists that they're seeking writers of color, and LGBTQ+ writers, that means that the diversity in my story will be celebrated rather than washed. That, for me, is the most important thing an agent can offer me. NOW, I am in no way implying that an agent does not value diversity if it is not directly listed in their MSWL or bio. To know if an agent is right for you requires a ton of research. It means:
That's the takeaway here, folks. When it comes to picking agents to query, or Pitchwars mentors to sub to, or who to pitch to at a writing conference, find the most important piece of your MS. Boil it down to its essence. Is it about disability? Overcoming adversity? Love? Joy? Conquering fear? Find the theme in your story that would leave your words empty if you stripped it, and then find an agent who will nurture that. Sure, I don't have representation yet, so maybe it's not perfect advice, but I feel as though I've never been closer once I realized that. Don't settle for any agent that offers representation. This manuscript is your baby, so find someone who will love it just like you do. Have any other advice on how to narrow down if an agent is right for you? Leave it in the comments! “What have you done?” the older man asked, eyes usually bright from smiling and lined in the corners now shining with tears.
“Please don’t be mad, grandpa,” Mina said gently, reaching out to wipe away one of the wet trails down her grandfather’s lined face. “Your legs…sweetheart, what have you done? What did you give up? How could you be so reckless?” he lamented, sniffing and making no move to hide his grief and fears from his granddaughter. He pulled off his delicately framed glasses—they were useless anyway with the tears catching in the bottoms of the frames. “I knew what I was doing. I’m okay,” Mina pleaded again, taking the glasses from him and reaching out to settle them on the table beside the couch, legs motionless beneath her skirts. Her throat was thick with tears, and her hands trembled a bit, but her smile and the set of her face said she was certain. The old man shook his head, insistent. “You’re not okay, love. You’re not. You were so gifted already—you’ve never been a greedy child, so I don’t understand.” “This isn’t about greed, grandpa,” Mina said gently, struggling to pull herself closer to her grandfather without the use of her lower body. “I did it for the cause. He will come to us—I know it. He will find his way to us and between your gifts of the mind, and now all of my circles, we can make him more ready than we ever could before.” The old man paled, all of the color draining from his usually warm cheeks. “ ‘All’ of your circles…?” he asked, lips parting. “You mean you unlocked more than one?” he breathed. Mina looked down, the corner of her lips turning up. “I unlocked three,” she replied. “I can use all four elemental circles.” Silence hung in the air, and Mina could tell her grandfather was warring between the two halves of himself. ‘The Professor,” one of the most powerful men in the circle of Mind, the man responsible for successfully unlocking the Knowledge in more people than anyone else—that man was fascinated, bubbling with questions. But the part of himself that was simply Mina’s grandfather; the man who’d almost lost Mina once before, who’d lost so many—that man could only think of how much of a sacrifice such an act would have required. “Your legs and what else?” he asked, tears he didn’t care to wipe away catching in his beard. Mina did not look at her grandfather. The smile of her achievement fell from her lips. She’d had no hesitation about what she’d given away for these gifts, and no doubt in her heart, but loss was still loss. “A quarter of my lifespan,” she whispered, wincing as the man choked a sob. “Please don’t grieve,” she pleaded, forcing her gaze up, pushing her mousey black hair behind her ears and taking her grandfather’s hand. “I’m still here, and I’m not going anywhere. We know the prophet will be of age in the next few years. This seems like a tragedy, but it’s a beautiful gift, I promise.” “I’m sorry, Mina, but I can’t see how this could possibly be a beautiful gift. You cannot walk. You used to dance so wonderfully…” the man frowned. Watching the man a moment, Mina reached out to the potted plant in on the table beside her, fingertips grazing the edge of the pot. The air around the plant heated up, and the moisture in the air condensed into a little cloud over the pot, rain dribbling down. From the soil beside the plant’s original residence, a new one began to slowly creep out of the dirt, growing at a record pace until it was full and tall. “I can create beautiful things. And I can still dance,” she murmured, pulling the air in a little whirlwind around the plants, making them blow and wave. “I just do it a little differently now.” The Professor stared at the plant for a long moment before moving to sit beside Mina, wrapping his arms tightly around her. “I just want you to be okay and happy. Please promise me you’re happy. Promise you have no regrets. Yours is not my life to live, but I want to see only joy for you in your life.” Mina smiled. “This life is beautiful,” she promised. “It doesn’t have to be long to be full and well-lived. I have no regrets.” In the process of reading article after article on how to appeal to an agent, I’ve come across some very conflicting articles where prologues are concerned. Some articles argue that if you wrote a prologue, when querying an agent, that you should include it if it’s where you want the story to begin. Others say that most agents have read too many bad prologues and will often skip past them.
So which is it? I do have a prologue to my book which is less than a page. It is a small snippet of the end which I intended to draw readers in and show what is truly at stake. I enjoy it, and I think it’s useful, but I know I’m too close to my own work to judge if it’s really necessary at all. I haven’t been sending it to agents because I worry that they will read the word “Prologue” and lose interest immediately. Is that a bit of an extreme worry? Probably, but it’s been enough to keep me from sending it. Tell me your thoughts: Should I start including it in queries? Is it better to leave them out? Is there a purpose to a prologue like mine at all? Let’s discuss in the comments! |
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