Ellis Nye

I fucking love when people give in-universe reasons for omegaverse shenanigans being a relatively new phenomenon and not just a fact of life. And this is probably my favorite out of all of them. Insane choice, and I want to kiss the author sloppy style about it.

As has been discussed here in the recent past, it depends what the option clause says, it SHOULD be restricted to "same audience" or "same world/same characters" or something of that nature. For this example, OK, let's say it's "same audience" but just be aware that every option clause is different.

So to answer your question: Sure, I guess that is one way to look at it.

Another way is: An editor buys your book. Per the option clause, they get first crack at your next book for the same audience. Let's say they buy it. YAY!

Then there's another option clause, etc, ensuring that the editor/publisher that is actively building you as an author for that audience gets to keep doing so. If the books are doing well, presumably you will WANT them to keep buying books, and lucky you, you get to send something to them MUCH earlier than you'd be able to sell it elsewhere, because most options (for novels, anyway) only require something like a synopsis and sample rather than a full manuscript, whereas if you were going to some stranger publisher, you'd probably need to have a full polished book.

(And if it is "same characters / same world" -- ie, companion books or sequels to the first book -- you SHOULD want them to publish it, because I can almost guarantee that nobody else will want to publish sequels to a book that they didn't publish!)

"And the only way to get out of it is to say no to that editor and go out wider with it, having turned that one editor down?"

No. First off, if you write something next that doesn't fall into that "option book bucket" / in this case, something that isn't for the same audience, you don't HAVE to show it to them at all. You CAN, and probably your agent will suggest you DO if it at all seems like something they might like -- but you don't have to. So that's ONE way to get out of it.

But I'd say the MUCH more common way to "get out of it" is for the publisher to say, "oh, gosh, no thank you." Which they won't hesitate to do if they DON'T want to publish it!

But IF for whatever reason you really don't want them to publish it, and they really do want to publish it, then yes, you could say no to the offer and go out more widely with the work.

In practice this is unlikely, because most of the time if your relationship is poor or the books have tanked, they are aware of that and wouldn't offer. And most of the time if they DO offer you will want to take that offer, presuming it is not a terrible offer!

But it can and does occasionally happen -- maybe it is a "regular" offer for what you and your agent strongly feel will be a Big Breakout book, or something like that? In which case, your agent will try to negotiate with them in good faith, but if they really won't go where you want them to go, your agent could say something like "Hey, we really appreciate this offer, but I don't think we're on the same page here. We feel strongly that this will be a Big Breakout book. I think my client would like to turn this down at this time and finish the book; we'll be happy to include you when we go out with it more widely." And then take a gamble and see what happens.

The poem frames "him" as subordinate in several ways, not just to the narrator ("i fuck him on the floor": not that getting fucked is inherently subordinating, but the narrator has all the agency in the phrase, "he" doesn't decide what happens or where) but also to "his wife". She has filled the house with chintz, meaning it wasn't his decision or his actions. "Filled" is also a choice of words that suggests that there is no space for him in the home: the only place left for him, not already filled, is the floor. To me this framing invokes the trope of the henpecked husband, whose wife has taken dominion over the home and who has ceded its control to her because it, as the domestic space, is "supposed" to be hers.

This trope, of course, is misogynist in its normative rendition: it reinforces gender essentialism, it erases the significant material benefits such "henpecked" men derive from the domestic labor of their spouses, and it dismisses women's expressions of suffering and attempts at negotiating terms for their relationships as "nagging." In the narrator's dismissal of the wife's possessions as "chintz" (frivolous, feminine, contrasted with what is "real") we can see this same misogyny at play.

The narrator's misogyny, and the central fact of the poem which is that the husband is getting fucked by someone other than the wife, quite possibly flip the power dynamics of the poem on their heads. The wife is now subordinated: both by her social marginalization based on gender (a marginalization which drives her into the home and confines her there, like OP so cogently points out! As "he" has run out of room in the home and can only get fucked on the floor, so has she run out of room socially; the only place she can control and make decisions like filling it with chintz is the home), and by the narrator who is fucking her husband in her home.

There's an additional dynamic in reading the narrator as male, which most readers seem to have done: it invokes the particular, bitter misogyny that men-loving-men sometimes direct at women expressing femininity. There's an envy to it, of course--straight and straight-passing women get to (are forced to) express desire for men, have sex with men, marry men, love and be loved by men. His wife gets to be his wife: the narrator gets to fuck him, in their home. Straight and straight-passing women also get to (are forced to) perform femininity: they can buy chintz and decorate with it, without being devastatingly punished for it like people presumed to be men are from the time they're babies. The envy mixes with misogyny to produce disdain, disgust, dismissal. We can read the narrator fucking him on the floor of their home as an expression of power and dominance (again, not that the fucking has to mean the narrator is topping, or that topping is inherently dominant, but the phrasing is stark: "i fuck him", the narrator acts upon him as an object/recipient), not just over him but over the wife in absentia as well.

Noting that "to keep it real" is AAVE, we can also introduce race as a potential lens; is the narrator, despite their dominant language, subordinated based on race in this dynamic? Is the narrator not just claiming a dominant role, but perhaps also stereotyped and limited into it as a Black person? Is the disdain of the chintz also an expression of class difference, of a rejection of the display of white wealth on the part of the wife? This is pretty speculative, of course: the use of AAVE could also be appropriative, which would suggest another tactic by the narrator to lay claim to masculinity and toughness, since non-Black people often use AAVE to try to invoke racist stereotypes of strength, violence and resilience.

I think one of the things that makes the poem so compelling for being so short is the struggle at the heart of it, this complicated jostling for power between three people and their actions over time (the wife "has filled" the house, in the past: the narrator fucks him in the present, perhaps in the habitual). Who controls the house? Who controls "him"?

the most common thing BY FAR is no full requests, no offers.

for queries that end in representation, if I were to GUESS, I'd guess that a couple/few full requests and one offer is the most common, many full requests with many offers less common.

I would imagine that exactly one full request and one offer would be LESS common than a few full requests and one offer. Because many/most full requests don't end in an offer. So... it seems like your chances of getting an offer go up if you have more full requests!

But all of that is based purely on guessing. Educated guessing, but still just guessing. In reality, there's no way to know a "real" answer to this, or try to map other people's experiences on to your experience and expect it to mean anything, because LITERALLY EVERY BOOK will have a different path.