It's that time of evening when I open the email mailbox that's dedicated to querying, so I can mark a handful of lit agents as "Rejected" and the date I received the rejection.

I open the first one and the agent likes my query and wants to see the full manuscript!

This happened a couple times with my first book, GenderQueer, although it never ( Read more... )

I haven't been blogging very regularly in recent months. I suppose some of that is maudlin discouragement. Thinking nobody reads what I post anyway, or that my posts have no impact in the world ( Read more... )

As author of autobiographical nonfiction, I'm occasionally questioned and challenged about my recall. I even once had a potential publisher tell me I could not market my book as nonfiction at all, since human memory is so unreliable ( Read more... )

I've been postponing a full-on resumption of querying until it should seem I was no longer dipping in to make little edits to the manuscript. I guess I forgot that that never happens, really.

One reason for procrastinating postponing -- aside from the obvious sense that one should get one's book into final form and then query -- is that I keep ( Read more... )

In my November 16 post (the "Transgender Lack of Awareness" post), I returned to a recurrent theme: that the mainstream transgender message doesn't make me feel included and recognized. Quite the opposite. Even when there's an effort to mention nonbinary trans folks and emphasize that a person's gender is valid regardless of their body, I feel ( Read more... )

So I do a vanity search one day on YouTube, being too lazy to just go to my profile account and click on "videos". And up pops:

This video review of GenderQueer... from somebody named "Novelzilla ( Read more... )

In last week's blog post, I noted that I need to rework portions of Within the Box to include more tension between me and the staff of Elk Meadow around being gender-atypical. As it stands, I've got Derek thinking a lot about gender inside his own head, but you really have to read between the lines a lot to get any sense of Elk Meadow as sexist or ( Read more... )

I've paused querying my third book Within the BoxAs I've mentioned, I hate querying. Well, lately I've come to realize that when I have a task that I hate, my default way of handing it is to take a deep breath, scrunch my face up tight, and then go at it with single-minded determination, blocking out everything else, and just blast ahead with it ( Read more... )

Lit agents and publishers often release (or make posts to) a Manuscript Wish List. I figure turnabout is fair play, don't you ( Read more... )

This is by far my least favorite part of the process. Yesterday I likened it to cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue ( Read more... )