A Talk, a Conference, and a Manuscript Request
On March 12th, I will be giving a presentation at Life In Nassau at their regular monthly meeting in Woodbury NY, titled "Gender Inversion, being Genderqueer, and how Kink facilitates stepping away from gendered assumptions".
I'll be using a lot of the material from my Gender Isn't the Same Thing as Sex blog posting, including the visuals you see there (I had them printed out on sturdy posterboard to use as visual aids). I've done a run-through with anais_pf kindly sitting in as audience and I covered the material in my notes in 25 minutes. It should be more like a one hour presentation, so I need to go back through and insert anecdotes and examples, describe things in more detail, flesh things out more. That should make it a better talk anyhow. I tend to worry that I'm going to go way over so this time I sort of overshot... undershot? I did too good a job of compacting my message and now it's too short! Anyway, my first venture into lecturing since speaking at the Boston College Women's Center in 2010.
Hey, y'all, I'm building a platform!
I'm going to try to take this show on the road, give the same talk elsewhere, and then diverge from there, expand on it and so forth.
Last weekend I attended a one-day seminar called "The Editor's Eye", presented by Francis Flaherty, a former NY Times feature editor and geared towards helping people edit their own work more effectively. I thought it was well-presented and although some points were self-evident and not exactly news to me, overall I think it gave me a fresh sense of how to approach revamping my own work.
From my notes:
• insert ACTION to make paragraphs pop: sometimes by describing the present as a harbinger of the future, using language that anticipates, use metaphor, set up the future as a consequence of current processes and describe those using ACTIVE verbs.
• similarly use vivid action-inclusive metaphors and similes in describing your characters' mental processes
• describe decisions; don't have your characters float through time passively with things happening to them, be explicit about their decision-making process. Decisions are active
• embed yourself in each scene as if YOU were interested in what was going on at the time; if you are (or were) bored, your readers probably will be too
• sensory descriptions, especially other than visual (although in my case my writing actually does not tend to describe how things look, I'm NOT a very visual writer so in my case all 5 senses need to be punched up).
• Example A is about emotional human face of an abstract theoretical idea. Insert emotional content even if at the level of metaphor throughout the scenes of the book. Add body language: yours, that of other characters
• For trimming, think of your main message as a bullseye target. In each section look at paragraphs in terms of how close or how far they are from the bullseye. Trim more aggressively on parts that are farther from the bullseye.
I opened my my email as usual on Wednesday and saw another email reply from one of my query letters. The overwhelming majority of these are "Thank you for querying but after due consideration we don't think your title would be right for our line, sorry, best of luck" type letters so as I was double-clicking it to read it I was mentally already opening my query database to mark another rejection, yet I found myself staring at this:
> Dear Allan,
>
> Thank you so much for your query and we apologize for the delay in
> getting back to you. Is your manuscript still available? If so, we
> would be happy to read the first fifty pages or so of THAT GUY IN OUR
> WOMEN’S STUDIES CLASS. If you could send them as an email attachment
> with the word REQUESTED as the subject line, that would be wonderful.
>
> Thank you so much, and we look forward to the reading.
I blinked. Wait a minute. Oh wow, this is about BOOK TWO, which I haven't sent queries out about since last April. Heck, I haven't even been reporting my second book figures when I've posted my stats on # of queries sent and all that. The original idea behind book two was that, firstly, one way to get your book published is to get a different book published, then you're a published author; and, secondly, that I could directly query academic presses about the second book while still being able to say, honestly, that the main book has not been sent to any editors yet. But not too long after I'd started sending out query letters for the second book, I decided the book needed a massive restructuring and rewrite of its final 30%, that I had made it too much about a pissy argument with my academic advisor when I should have focused on how it led to me deciding I could not pursue a career as a feminist theorist in academia, that as a male person I could not theorize in directions that feminist women were not already pursuing, since trailblazing inevitably brings conflict and that in turn would lead to me arguing with feminist women about how to properly pursue the enterprise of feminist theorizing. Anyway, book two has been dormant and virtually forgotten. Except that now I have a request.
Fortunately, the first 50 pages are prior to the section that I think needs the radical surgery. I just finished applying some of my newly-honed editing skills, cutting some chaff and tightening the narrative.
Only 22 queries for book two were ever sent out. This is the one and only reply expressing interest and asking to see additional material.
Current Stats:
THE STORY OF Q
Total queries: 536
Rejections: 466
Outstanding: 66
As NonFiction-
Total queries: 348
Rejections: 332
Outstanding: 16
As Fiction-
Total queries: 188
Rejections: 134
Outstanding: 50
GUY IN WOMEN'S STUDIES
Total queries: 22
Rejections: 21
Outstanding: 0
Under Consideration: 1
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
I'll be using a lot of the material from my Gender Isn't the Same Thing as Sex blog posting, including the visuals you see there (I had them printed out on sturdy posterboard to use as visual aids). I've done a run-through with anais_pf kindly sitting in as audience and I covered the material in my notes in 25 minutes. It should be more like a one hour presentation, so I need to go back through and insert anecdotes and examples, describe things in more detail, flesh things out more. That should make it a better talk anyhow. I tend to worry that I'm going to go way over so this time I sort of overshot... undershot? I did too good a job of compacting my message and now it's too short! Anyway, my first venture into lecturing since speaking at the Boston College Women's Center in 2010.
Hey, y'all, I'm building a platform!
I'm going to try to take this show on the road, give the same talk elsewhere, and then diverge from there, expand on it and so forth.
Last weekend I attended a one-day seminar called "The Editor's Eye", presented by Francis Flaherty, a former NY Times feature editor and geared towards helping people edit their own work more effectively. I thought it was well-presented and although some points were self-evident and not exactly news to me, overall I think it gave me a fresh sense of how to approach revamping my own work.
From my notes:
• insert ACTION to make paragraphs pop: sometimes by describing the present as a harbinger of the future, using language that anticipates, use metaphor, set up the future as a consequence of current processes and describe those using ACTIVE verbs.
• similarly use vivid action-inclusive metaphors and similes in describing your characters' mental processes
• describe decisions; don't have your characters float through time passively with things happening to them, be explicit about their decision-making process. Decisions are active
• embed yourself in each scene as if YOU were interested in what was going on at the time; if you are (or were) bored, your readers probably will be too
• sensory descriptions, especially other than visual (although in my case my writing actually does not tend to describe how things look, I'm NOT a very visual writer so in my case all 5 senses need to be punched up).
• Example A is about emotional human face of an abstract theoretical idea. Insert emotional content even if at the level of metaphor throughout the scenes of the book. Add body language: yours, that of other characters
• For trimming, think of your main message as a bullseye target. In each section look at paragraphs in terms of how close or how far they are from the bullseye. Trim more aggressively on parts that are farther from the bullseye.
I opened my my email as usual on Wednesday and saw another email reply from one of my query letters. The overwhelming majority of these are "Thank you for querying but after due consideration we don't think your title would be right for our line, sorry, best of luck" type letters so as I was double-clicking it to read it I was mentally already opening my query database to mark another rejection, yet I found myself staring at this:
> Dear Allan,
>
> Thank you so much for your query and we apologize for the delay in
> getting back to you. Is your manuscript still available? If so, we
> would be happy to read the first fifty pages or so of THAT GUY IN OUR
> WOMEN’S STUDIES CLASS. If you could send them as an email attachment
> with the word REQUESTED as the subject line, that would be wonderful.
>
> Thank you so much, and we look forward to the reading.
I blinked. Wait a minute. Oh wow, this is about BOOK TWO, which I haven't sent queries out about since last April. Heck, I haven't even been reporting my second book figures when I've posted my stats on # of queries sent and all that. The original idea behind book two was that, firstly, one way to get your book published is to get a different book published, then you're a published author; and, secondly, that I could directly query academic presses about the second book while still being able to say, honestly, that the main book has not been sent to any editors yet. But not too long after I'd started sending out query letters for the second book, I decided the book needed a massive restructuring and rewrite of its final 30%, that I had made it too much about a pissy argument with my academic advisor when I should have focused on how it led to me deciding I could not pursue a career as a feminist theorist in academia, that as a male person I could not theorize in directions that feminist women were not already pursuing, since trailblazing inevitably brings conflict and that in turn would lead to me arguing with feminist women about how to properly pursue the enterprise of feminist theorizing. Anyway, book two has been dormant and virtually forgotten. Except that now I have a request.
Fortunately, the first 50 pages are prior to the section that I think needs the radical surgery. I just finished applying some of my newly-honed editing skills, cutting some chaff and tightening the narrative.
Only 22 queries for book two were ever sent out. This is the one and only reply expressing interest and asking to see additional material.
Current Stats:
THE STORY OF Q
Total queries: 536
Rejections: 466
Outstanding: 66
As NonFiction-
Total queries: 348
Rejections: 332
Outstanding: 16
As Fiction-
Total queries: 188
Rejections: 134
Outstanding: 50
GUY IN WOMEN'S STUDIES
Total queries: 22
Rejections: 21
Outstanding: 0
Under Consideration: 1
--------
Index of all Blog Posts