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Read “The Visitor” at Wattpad

Back in 2009, a queer speculative literary magazine, Collective Fallout, published my story “The Visitor.” It started out as a NaNoWriMo novel—and the less said about that “contest” the better. The story’s about the narrator’s vacation fling with his friend’s neighbor who may or may not be from another planet. I like to think that my writing has grown since then, but I still am fond of the story, even if many of the details have become hazy even to me.

The magazine that printed it has since gone out of business, so I posted it over on Wattpad for anyone to read. Please check it out! And if you feel so inclined, let me know what you thought of it.

Embracing rejection as a goal

You may recall that I talked about the novel I’ve been working on lately. I’ve gotten some very useful feedback on it and (deep breath) I’ve started sending it to agents to see if I can get representation for it. I’ve only sent it out to three agents so far, so it’s still early days.

But not too early for my first rejection!

It was a form rejection, which means it was basically a “to whom it may concern” kind of reply. If you’re not familiar with the process (consider yourself lucky), literary agents get hundreds of queries a month, if not more, from potential clients seeking an agent to represent their work to editors at publishing companies. When your inbox is overflowing with queries, an agent has to decide quickly if a potential client is a yes or no. This is all in addition to the work they have to do for the clients they already have. So, if a book is a “no” at the initial stage, most likely a writer will get a form rejection.

It could be worse. Sometimes agents don’t even have time to send those out, so they will say that if a writer doesn’t hear back in X weeks/months, assume it’s a no.

It’s hard to read anything into a form rejection, in other words. They may not have liked the synopsis, the sample chapters, it may have been a Tuesday, Mercury may have been in retrograde. (It was.) Who knows! All I can do is mark them off the list and move on.

Which is why I’ve set a goal for this year: obtain fifty rejections for this novel.

Why isn’t my goal for this year to get an agent, you ask? Because I have no control over that. Okay, I do have control in the sense that I can guarantee I won’t get an agent if I never send out any queries. But I can’t make an agent say yes even if I send out one million queries. (I won’t be sending out one million queries. There aren’t even that many agents in the business.)

What I can do is conduct my research on potential agents, write the best query letter I can, and send it out. And send it out to another. And another. Until I’ve heard back from at least fifty saying no, or one saying yes.

It’ll get discouraging, I know. Heck, it already has been. But I put a lot of effort into this book. Hopefully it will have been worth it.

What I’m Reading

Out of character for me, I’m reading nonfiction. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams is about A New Zealand executive’s time at Meta aka Facebook and just how appalling and ethically bankrupt the company and its leaders are. It will probably come as no surprise that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg don’t fare well in her tell-all. Apparently, they were so afraid of what she had to say that they successfully sued to prevent Wynn-Williams from publicizing her book, but not from publishing it. I guess they’ve never heard of the Streisand effect.

I am also reading this article about the Antarctic expeditions of the early 1900s, and an unexpected love story that came to light in the papers of one of the explorers:

In 1913, after knowing Atkinson for some three years, Pennell finally confessed to his diary: “I am quite absurdly in love with him.

And this:

Charles “Silas” Wright, the expedition’s young Canadian physicist, noted in his diary that Pennell had “a taste for dancing hornpipes at inopportune moments” and was “suspected of being in Love.” But who was the object of his affection? Silas made no guess, and nothing in Pennell’s journal at the time gave anything away—though Atkinson appeared with increasing regularity as the voyage wore on.

Someone absolutely needs to make a movie out of this.

Or a novel.

Oh hey, that gives me an idea.

(A tip of the hat to my friend C-Money for the link!)

And that’s all for this month. Please take care and be kind to yourself. I’ll be back in your inbox next month!