It's a working title.
I have been writing novels for fun since the mid-90s and finally found a voice a few years after that. I have a whole range of things that either didn't get past the first edit or just were finished and stashed.
About 10 years ago, I began to make some serious attempts to get an agent and learned that agent searches are a joke for people who identify as "older white male." Not to sound too whiny about that, but the agent tends to be white/female/under 30 and is now interested in a genre that they think is what the reading public wants.
That is: Gender-challenged inside the alphabet, or a person of minority status who is telling the story from the inside as opposed to outside. They want LBGTQIA+ stories, indifferent to the fact that it's the same thing as asking for tall-short-skinny-fat-French-black-Asian-Martin people to all stand up and write a great novel. If you are going to write inside the genre, at least, you know ... pick one. G and L are not the same thing.
What they want depends on this: About 5 percent of the population is not identifiably hetero. Half that population is female. Discounting the 60 percent who can't spell 'water' while on a cruise ship and the other 30 percent that hasn't advance past third grade, and 10 percent living a nursing home or are in the Army -- there aren't many people left for that chore.
Of those who are, half aren't interested in making public the challenges they face because they don't see your challenge as being one to identify their challenge.
Others don't care about writing.
Of those who do, not many know how to write a novel. Of that number, not very many know how to query it, provided it was any good.
Or is an interesting story.
But the agents persevere in believing that -- and YA stories containing the same structure -- are what we are all chomping to read. Hint: We aren't.
So I learned that just a good story is great if it's a romance novel. I have one novel that has a young black woman as the central character. I can do that because it worked. I suspect I will summarily be told I have no right to attempt that, not being black, female, under 40.
So while I never truly gave up the idea that I'd get a publisher, what is expected of the author is to schmooze an agent who only knows what the pub houses are demanding -- and that's the quick-fix for their own racism that they pawned off for decades.
I actually made a couple of grand writing recreational sex books (aka porn) for a short time. I turned two of them into more mainstream books but neither of them is very good. I only wrote that stuff because I found a freaky e-book house that took anything.
But it did help me learn how to write a novel, how to build a plot, a character arc and how to ebb-and-flow on pace. I learned that dialogue is how to move a book along. Too much or not enough, both bad. "Wow, that tree is tall," she said as she looked up to see her cat hopelessly dangling from the power line.
To that end, I have used my reading/writing comprehension skills to modify the world. My characters are all loveable buttheads because everyone is a butthead. I just like some of them more than others.
Truthfully, though, in my activities surrounding the writing craft, what I have seen more frustrating than a lack of life experience by young writers -- the lack of life experience that comes with actually caring about it. I am no fan of the virtual world, but it's here now and getting people to see and understand the loveable butthead -- and to write about it, I don't know for sure how to impart that.
If we are to believe that everyone now sees the world in two flavors -- the liberals who dislike everything and the wingnuts who dislike liberals for that reason -- man-oh-man -- it is already starting to become a standard theme in literature.
There is no achievement now, only a beatback of oppression. And when American Dirt addresses achievement in the face of the beatback, the achievement is ridiculed because the oppressed person has no privilege in being in that condition.
Young writers wait too long to learn how to write. They always did. I was never serious about it in my mid-years because I wasn't interested in the world I would someday inhabit.
I only knew my past and it wasn't interesting. It still isn't but I can use it to mold a present that will inevitably be my future.
Most young writers have had the story told to them -- it's OK to be cruel. You can't kill animals, but you can kill creatures -- so we will provide an unlimited supply of that. Your parents will fill in the blank spots.
I will await new writers and will support them. Those writers also need to understand that the markets they are expected to reach in many cases just do not exist.
The fact: Being creative is free. Publishers and agents don't have to do anything. Most of them do exactly that. They are clueless and manipulative all at the same time.
Pandemics come and go. Stupidity is forever.
