I haven’t been blogging very regularly in recent months. I suppose some of that is maudlin discouragement. Thinking nobody reads what I post anyway, or that my posts have no impact in the world.
But the mood doesn’t come from out of nowhere. I’m trying to query. And I’m trying to research each literary agent and give at least a superficial reason for why I’m querying that specific lit agent when I send out my queries. That may not seem like much investment, but it’s taking a toll. It makes me care that much more, because I’m writing to someone I actually have a sense of, and I can’t help developing a hope that this one will actually want to represent my book. And so far, nobody does.
What else? Well, I signed up for a proposal course, a course in how to write your nonfiction proposal. So far I’m very very unimpressed. It’s broken into three segments of 1 hour each, on consecutive Thursdays. So far, all of it is geared towards people who are experts in their field writing nonfiction guides or prescriptive recommendations. Which does, admittedly, cover a lot of nonfiction offerings. But my primary reason for taking the course was that as a memoir author I find it really hard to shoehorn what’s closer to being a fiction suspense tale into a format designed for experts in their field giving advice.
I’ve said it’s as if you’d written a politcal polemic about social justice and to get it published you have to format it as a legal brief to the court, obeying all the structural injunctions about what statutes you need to reference and what precedents you need to cite.
Anyway, the second session was entirely devoted to having a platform. Because, generally speaking, nonfiction authors need a platform, i.e., a bunch of people already tuning in to what you might have to say on your subject.
I’m familiar with the notion that as a nonfiction author I ought to have a freaking PLATFORM. That’s why I have a goddam Facebook account. That’s why I blog. It isn’t working. I don’t have a following. Telling me I need to have a platform, that I need to develop a following, isn’t helpful right now. It’s just depressing and frustrating.
What I want is help developing the best nonfiction proposal I can, given the platform, such as it is, that I do have. And the overview, and the review by chapters, and all the other shit that proposals involve.
I have one more session upcoming. We’re supposedly going to get individual feedback on the proposals we have, and I’m going to be pushy about getting such feedback on mine. Otherwise, a complete waste of money and time.
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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.
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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genderkitten 