just two dudes in a trenchcoat, being a girl

it was hard! very hard! which isn’t meant to discourage anyone - if anything, it means that you shouldn’t let rejections bother you.

first off was finding an agent, which meant making a list of every literary agency I could find that accepted books in English (using sites like querytracker and manuscriptwishlist), and combing through them to see if they had any agents currently accepting queries in my genre. I had really shit luck with Canadian agencies, because they skew heavily toward literary fiction, and my book was genre fiction. but eventually, I had a list of 120 agents I stood a reasonably good chance with.

then, the applications! it’s good to do it in batches, because the occasional personalized rejection will give you something to work on. like I completely rewrote the 10 book pages I was submitting, and redid my query letter about fifteen times. I paid editors online to critique my query letter, I won a contest where the reward was commentary on my query letter…..that query letter was my magnum opus. I put everything into it, and it still kinda sucked. one thing I learned along the way is that people really don’t care about your social media following, UNLESS it’s on Twitter or TikTok. if you say “I have a blog on tumblr :)” people will just be like “I thought that site got shut down.”

anyway, after 70+ written rejections (and many more silent rejections), I got an acceptance! a literary agent was interested in representing my book - if I made some changes to it. so I did (added more romance and ‘cozy’ scenes), and sent it back to him, and then he began shopping it around to publishers.

it took about six months to find an interested publisher. we didn’t have great luck with Americans, but British publishers seemed to really click with the humour, and suddenly we had multiple places interested at once! we went with Titan Books (technically an indie, but with a distribution partnership with penguin), and then…….back into editing hell because the book still needed more romance.

from start to finish, it took four years from the book being written to it being released! it’s a lengthy frustrating process, and so many people give up because the constant rejection wears you down, but you just have to be incredibly stubborn and have a delusional level of belief in your own work.

Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once

Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards

Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop

Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Temple T-Kimono by T-Michael, modelled by Paul Marcel M.

(archive link)

Some of the anti-AI posts included in the document reflect hyperbolic anti-AI rhetoric that is widespread across social media, including an unnamed internet user who “indicated a desire to ‘burn down’ data centers.” Other examples of potentially terroristic posts included references to a fictional anti-robot movement in the science fiction novel “Dune” and a Facebook meme. The fusion center, housed inside the Philadelphia Police Department, warned that “disruptive First Amendment activity” is an “indicator” of risk from “Domestic Violent Extremists,” an expansive term favored by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.