I’m a little uneasy that my dream of being a traditional published author just is not possible. It’s may just not be possible because I’m too old, live in the middle of nowhere and am a self-avowed loudmouth crank.
I used to think I had enough “rizz” that “normal” people would at least humor me. But, now, I’m growing concerned that I could write the fucking Bible and the “normal” “serious” liberal white women who probably make up (or at least do in my imagination) most literary agents will take one look at places like this blog and run away from me as fast as possible.
I’m not picking on them. And it’s not really there fault — I just can’t help that I’m a kook. I am who I am and it’s taken me way too long to get where I need to be with this novel.
I’m breezing through the transformation of the first draft of the scifi dramedy novel into the second draft. At least at the moment. That’s because I’m able to reuse a lot of text that I generated in the first half of the novel.
Things are going to get much, much more difficult when I reach the second half of the novel because I just was more interested in stress-testing the outline that actually worrying about making sure scenes were long enough.
So, I’m going to have go through and really work to make the scenes of the second half proper length and that is going to slow me down some. But, and this is a huge but, I think I’m still on track — maybe — to query this novel in spring 2026.
Maybe.
If that is the case, then I have to start thinking about post-production stuff like querying, getting and agent and…a lawyer? I am totally broke, so unless I can figure out a way to get someone I’m related to do spot me for the costs of a lawyer to look over a book contract…oh boy.
And, yet, on a psychological basis, this is the farthest I’ve ever gotten with a novel so far. I really think I may wrap this baby up sooner rather than later.
Hopefully. Maybe.
But I continue to worry about my bonkers social media output being enough to either make “serious” liberal white women literary agents run away in dismay when they do due diligence on me.
I don’t know what to tell you. Not only am I demonstrably bonkers, I’m old and I don’t handle stress well. So, here I am, contemplating the prospect of querying this scifi dramedy novel I’m hard at work on.
I am going to go into the querying process totally blind. I am going to try to read as many books as I can, but, lulz, that isn’t really going to prepare me for the real thing.
The whole point of working on a novel all these years has been to see how far I could get in the process before it became clear I just wasn’t good enough to get published traditionally.
Looking back at how I got into this specific situation of being, for all intents and purposes, too fucking old to do any of this and one thing is clear — I think I would have wrapped up a novel worthy of querying had I had a wife or girlfriend in my life.
A wife or girlfriend not only might have been a “reader,” she might have also kind of told me “publish or parish.” As it was, I just kind of drifting year after year towards my goal. Then, I actually finished a thriller novel, only to real it just was not good enough to query.
But now, with the rise of AI, I think, no I KNOW, that this novel is going to be good enough to query. And, yet, there are some pretty significant headwinds. I’m old. I’m bonkers. And I can’t promise you that everything I’ve done online will pass the “smell test” of your typical liberal white woman who probably makes up the vast majority of your literary agents.
And, yet, this novel is not nearly as “spicy” as my previous attempt to write a good enough to query. Although, of course, it is kind of white, which is something I worked so hard to prevent with my previous efforts at a novel.
You just can’t escape yourself, you know. Or, as my mom would say, “You take yourself wherever you go.”
So, in that regard, I’m kind of saddled with being a freaky weirdo in a very demonstrable manner on the Internet. I bring this up because once I start to query this scifi dramedy novel I’m working on — probably in late spring 2026 — any literary agent worth their snuff is going to search for me online.
This leads me to blanch. I just can’t help who I am and I can’t help what I may have written online over the years. I call this the “kook tax.” It’s the tax that only kooks like me have to pay.
Anyway. I just can’t help who I am. For better or worse, I’m unique and that’s probably going to turn off some of the liberal white women who probably make up the majority of literary agents.
Though, in my defense, most, maybe nearly all, of my political views fall within the spectrum that liberal white women would find agreeable. And, yet, I also know virtually no one takes me very seriously these days for various reasons and so, lulz, kook tax.
I think I’m brooding about all of this because of general insecurity about what it’s going to be like to query. Just from my occasional interaction with literary consultants, it seems as though some literary people — even pop literary people — take themselves a tad too seriously.
But a lot of that probably comes from…they’re just normal? They take the querying process really seriously and, what’s more, the entire querying infrastructure is designed to prevent people like me from succeeding in teh first place…so…lulz?
I’m beginning to sense a trend with prospective editors of my first novel — they’re just not interested.
This is curious because my little group of friends and relatives who are reading the latest iteration of the novel don’t, at least, hate it. They’re at least willing to humor me enough to keep reading, hopefully to its conclusion.
Now, this difference is beginning to fill me with a lot of navel gazing and angst. What is going on?
Well, one theory I have is the story is, in fact, “racy” and the liberal white women that I keep talking to about editing the novel can’t stand how “racy” it is, especially in the context of me being a smelly CISgendered white male. I suppose it doesn’t help anything that I am drawn to cute young women to work with as my editor. Maybe a dude wouldn’t be so touchy about a lot of sex in a novel?
For me, the key issue is that I have, at last, finished a novel that tells a coherent story. So, in that sense, I have succeeded in what I set out to do a number of years ago. What’s more, I now know how *I* develop and write a novel.
So, one idea I have is to keep searching for someone to edit the novel but with the understanding that this novel could very well never be published. As such, I am feeling a lot of pressure to throw myself into the scifi novel I’ve come up with.
It’s built from the ground up to be as marketable as possible and in my mind, at least, has a minimal amount of sex in it. With that in mind, I’ve begun to recalculate in my mind the chronology of events going forward. I have to prepare myself for the possibility that it won’t be until about a year from now before I begin to query the scifi novel because, well, lulz, cute, young liberal white women don’t like all the “racy” sex in my first novel.
And, of course, all of this is happening in the context of the potential collapse of Western Civilization starting in late 2024, early 2025 because of fucking Donald Trump. But I can just stare at the ceiling for months and months to see what is going to happen on that front.
Because we live in an age devoid of nuance, it’s really difficult to pin down exactly what being “woke” means. It seems to me the whole notion of “wokeness” is more about the *fear* of being “canceled” by the “woke cancel culture mob” than it means something concrete.
And to figure out who is “woke” and why, requires one to juggle a few different causes in one’s mind at once.
One issue that has prompted the debate over “wokeness” is social media. Social media allows the most extreme points of view to dominate the discussion of any subject. Meanwhile, it is clear that a lot of GenZ people honestly do have different cultural tastes than their older peers.
As such, social media causes the most sensitive of GenZ people to put the fear of God into older people who fear being “canceled” for the slip of the tongue or something similar. I can tell you from my own life that I know people who are on a hair trigger for the possibility that their life will be ruined because they’re recorded by someone saying something that “doesn’t fit the media narrative.”
But again, all of this is very murky.
It is interesting than comics are often the ones who bitch and moan the most about the “woke cancel culture mob.” I think that may say more about older comics not understanding the comedy tastes of GenZ than it does there being some sort of raging band of woke people who scour the earth for people to cancel.
The more I think about it, the more I struggle to understand it all. I’m a loudmouth crank at times and I have, indeed, been attacked by people on my Left who are extremely touchy about the usual “woke” things. But these incidents are actually few and far between — but they leave a mark because of how fucking annoying they are.
But wait, there’s more.
Because MAGA Republicans, by nature, work only in bad faith, they have latched onto the idea of “wokeness” as a catch all for anything that they disagree with. To the point that they don’t even know what it is they think “being woke” actually means.
If pressed, I would say “woke” is a form of cultural Leftism that is has a sometimes absurd orthodoxy that is hypersensitive. Or something. It’s one of those “I know it when I see it” type of things. I don’t feel comfortable getting into too much detail about such things because, well, “woke people” might get angry at me. (Which kind of proves my point about the fear of being canceled is more powerful than anything “woke” people might actually be able to do.)
But I also think it’s a very, very small number of people who qualify as “being woke.”
But because of the bad faith arguments of MAGA Republicans and the nature of social media, that tiny minority of “woke” people has a huge amount of influence on the cultural as a whole. It all boils down to the FEAR of being “canceled” by the “woke cancel culture mob,” even if pretty much most of the “canceling” that happens is just regular old accountability.
So, in some sense, the fear of the “woke cancel culture mob” that a lot of older people have is simply the generation gap. They just don’t understand younger people and they have a wistful anger towards people they feel should know better.
I’ve finally reached the point where all I have to do is finish the latest iteration of the third draft. I think once I finish this latest version of the third draft that I have one more version to go before I feel as though it’s “finished.”
Once I reach that point, then I going to turn the novel over to someone I know who has offered to go through the third draft and give me detailed suggestions on each scene in the novel. My hope is that doing this will be a way that I can have some sort of developmental editing of the story.
It just doesn’t seem like I’m going to be able to afford *any* editor of the novel before I begin to query it. Or, to put it another way — it would take me over a year to save up the money to do such a thing and I’m not getting any younger.
As such, I will probably begin the querying process for the novel at some point after the July 22nd deadline. It may be as late as August or September, but it will definitely begin this year.
Of course, in the back of my mind there is the lingering fear that all hell may break loose this fall. There is a greater-than-zero chance that the United States, the greatest nation in the world, may collapse into the anarchy of revolution or civil war in late 2024, early 2025 because of “vibes.”
Only time will tell. It would definitely be poetic if that was the endgame of all my hard work on this novel over the years — everything works out but the end of the world happens.
In an ideal world, I pay an editor to look over my first novel before I started to query it. But I live in poverty — no joke! — and, as such, it would probably take me around a year to save up the money to pay for a traditional editor.
So.
I have a friend of mine who has expressed an interest in going through and reading the third draft once I’m done. This is a hopeful development, but I’m still uneasy about not using a professional editor to make sure the novel is up to snuff before I try to query it.
My big fear is, of course, that even if I could afford a professional editor that the one-two punch of me being a well-documented freaky weirdo AND how “spicy” the novel is will turn off anyone actually willing to help me.
Ugh.
But I have my vision for the novel and I’m sticking to it. I have to accept that either the novel may never be published or, if it is, it’s only published because of the success of the scifi novel that I’m beginning to work on currently.
I’m cool with those possibilities.
The point of all of this was to prove to MYSELF that I could write a novel that wouldn’t embarrass me. I feel, in general, that I’m just about to accomplish that goal.
What happens after that is going to depend on luck and pluck.
While I still have the entire second half of the latest iteration of the third draft to make a pass through, it is beginning to sink in that I’ve just about entered the post-production part of my journey towards publication.
The fact that many, many, many people languish in the querying process for years and years gives me pause for thought. I’m not getting any younger and it could be that either I drop dead before I get published or I’m so old that it’s just kind of poignant and sad. I keep searching my mind for ways I could potentially make the novel better. But at this point, the issue is simply rewriting scenes that maybe haven’t been updated in ages.
At the forefront of my mind is how “spicy” the novel is. This element of the novel comes about in large part because of one plot point — my heroine is a partime sex worker (stripper) during course of the novel. She owns a strip club and on someting of a lark, decides to go back to stripping for the holidays.
I hope that I have written a novel that is as popular and an accessible as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
This really helps the novel be better — at least in my opinion — because it makes it edgy, and interesting in an unexpected way. I’ve never seen stripping depicted in the way I do in popular fiction.
But.
There is a problem of the “woke cancel culture mob” that hates heterosexual sex (apparently) and hates CIS white men doing anything — especially writing from a female POV. (I’m being rather droll in even mentioning this.) There are no easy solutions to this particular problem — I have realized what my vision is for this novel is and that’s what I’m going with.
It doesn’t help — I say this with a wink — that many literary agents are white liberal women. I have nothing against white liberal women, I just think the phrase is amusing and I can’t help myself and bring it up a lot as something of a running gag. (Of course, my use of the term isn’t going to help me any when literary agents start to do due diligence on me.)
What I need is an honest third party evaluation of the novel to get some sense of how the sex worker angle of the novel will play with an audience. I have no friends and no one likes me, so my ability to get that kind of input is limited or nonexistent — at least for free.
All my regular readers know me personally. I need someone who reads a lot who is willing to be firm — but fair — about what I’ve come up with. I suppose what I’m saying is I need a manuscript editor of some sort. But those don’t come cheap.
But I even I have to admit that I’ve pretty much reached the goal I started towards several years ago — writing a novel that doesn’t embarrass me. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
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