Back when I was hawking my first book, GenderQueer (at that time with working title The Story of Q), I decided after a long run of querying it as a memoir with no serious nibbles to try selling it as a work of fiction. "Consider Rubyfruit Jungle", I'd say to people. "It's categorized as fiction but it's pretty clearly Rita Mae Brown's own story ( Read more... )

I've been considering an additional way to present and market my book: as "Nice Guy™ Tells His Side of the Story" or "Testimony of a Self-Identified Nice Guy™" or something of that ilk.

I've blogged in the past about how I've perceived a connection between the Nice Guys thing and where my head is at (or has been at in the past), things that I see ( Read more... )

"What do you people mean when you say you're 'really women inside', anyway?", she posted, challenging us. "You folks apparently want us to believe that your minds, or hearts or whatever, are like those of us who were born female. But you've never been female, so how do you know whether who you are on the inside is like who we are on the inside? ( Read more... )

Just sent out the very first queries positioning the book as "young adult" fiction. This batch also included a higher % of queries for the book as a nonfiction memoir, as I decided it was time to do a search on notes I'd made on various agents' pages, "See also So-and-so, same agency", and many of those date back to when I was mostly focused on ( Read more... )

Revision project is successfully completed ( Read more... )

Not too terribly long ago, on a message board just the usual internet-distance far far away (the Absolute Write Water Cooler, to be precise), I bravely asserted that all this is just the first year, and that I was going to keep plugging away at this for at least 10 years before before calling it quits ( Read more... )

Continuing from More Repositioning Part OneAs I said, I started off positioning the things I wanted to say about myself and gender and sexual orientation as contributions to feminist theory. It was a good fit and except for some nuances of what to emphasize and how to formulate my descriptions, I didn't have to tuck away much of what I was ( Read more... )

On Sept 3, I penned a short piece about repositioning my nonfiction memoir as a work of fiction ( Read more... )

On August 25, I got yet another one of those "your platform isn't good enough" responses to a query letter ( Read more... )