quietsnooze

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

BISEXUALS GROW FROM THE GROUND

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.

genuinely, that’s the most important thing you can have! everything falls apart without it. you might have people telling you that your writing is shit, and that you’ll never make it. those people might be friends, family members, partners, peers, professionals in the industry, online trolls, basically everyone but your nonverbal pets. when that happens, you NEED to be like “hmm I dunno, I think I wrote something nice 😌”