And the great thing about poetry, is it’s a lot fewer words. That’s got to count for something!
Which allows you to get to the “But it doesn’t rhyme”* reader reaction much faster. Winning!
- Actually, I write in rhyme about a quarter of the time these days. But still.
We know how he sang and he was certainly a gender rebel who inspired us. We don’t really know how he flirted or even whether or not he was a sexual initiator.
Heh, if you can sing and play music like Prince, you won’t need to flirt. But - hey - a lot of flirting is body language and facial expression, and there are lots of videos of Prince talking in interviews. He’s not singing or playing music, but he’s still Prince. If I were a self-identified femme male, I’d look at those videos as a goldmine of ideas! Not bullshitting - honest truth!
I have several friends from another online group who fall, or did fall, right into this dilemma. When the self-publishing craze hit, they were all automatically on the bandwagon. A couple more friends from the same group started “little presses” using CreateSpace to avoid the whole self-publishing-anyone-can-do-it thing.
Needless to say those presses eventually disbanded. So did the hopes/dreams of everyone who published under them because it all came down to the marketing.
Another friend is doing all this but is going about it in several directions – call it “discreet marketing”, I guess? She’s been working on her novel for the last few years. She has her own website dealing with pop culture. She also co-hosts a couple of fairly successful podcasts. She runs a popular community on Facebook. All of that has garnered her a fan base, shall we say (to be sure much of her community she knows IRL from other endeavors as does the online-only).
She works very hard at all this. She has to if her novel is going to go anywhere.
And that’s why I never jumped on the bandwagon. Too much work for too little reward, so to speak. It killed whatever fun/desire I used to have to write for the heck of it.
I was one of those super shy guys and would actually pass a note to a girl I liked in HS saying "Would you like to go out sometime? Yes or No. Needless to say I did not get dates.
I quickly realized this also caused them to ignore me for 2 weeks. Did not matter if we were friends or not. Then after 2 weeks (after I got the message) then they would talk to me again.
The only successful flirting I can recall came in college my senior year (not saying I did not ever flirt prior to this, just that I do not recall being successful prior, especially since I never dated). There was a lovely young woman in my computer class. We would get together as a large group and study. She had a different programming class and was struggling with a particular bit of code. She was also notorious in our class for playing the lone text adventure game on the system instead of doing her homework.
One day she was going to the lab to work on her program. I said “Hey I will join you to make sure you stay on task.” She said sure. I helped her write the program and she sent me an email (this was 27 yrs ago, so games and email were new). In the email, she asked if there was ever anything she could do to repay me. I replied “go out with me sometime.” Her reply was “yes”
We started dating, dated 3 months, go engaged, got married a year later and we just celebrated 25 yrs of marriage last June.
All it takes is one successful flirt. 
One thing I find a little offputting:
In this thread you mention “becoming a nonvirgin” as if it were the goal. You have also mentioned your virgin status in other threads that I dont really feel like looking up. Not find love, or get into a relationship or any of that emotional stuff. It seems like your goal was get laid. I understand a young person feeling desperate to lose that virgin status, but it seems at odds with other statements you have made about wanting a relationship, not just a hook up, etc.
Out of edit time:
ETA OK you do say get into a relationship or become a nonvirgin, so I misspoke. But it still seems like sex was an important goal.
** nods ** reasonable question.
It was a gradual thing.
When I was 11, what I wanted was “a girlfriend” and I scarcely had a concept of sexual activity as applicable.
When I was 14, I was a lot more conscious of sexual feelings and had had a direct introduction to the fact that, yes, it wasn’t just me with a perverted fascination for girls’ parts, but rather that yeah, it was a shared fascination and people my age were starting to explore with their fingers. I didn’t cease to be interested in having a girlfriend but I wanted that, too, in my life. Because I’d been secretly obsessively fascinated by girlshapes and I had an appetite for that. (Wheeee! Bring it on!!!)
By the time I was 16, I wanted both sex and an ongoing relationship to be a part of my life and I was also increasingly conscious of girls’ attitudes: “boys just want one thing, and if they aren’t interested in the girl as a person that’s nasty and it means he just wants to take advantage”. Well, I couldn’t blame them for not wanting to get intimately familiar with the average guy, given the average guy’s attitudes towards girls. I didn’t think of myself as being like that, and didn’t want girls to think of me like that. So although yeah, I wanted sex to happen, I wanted it to develop out of a trusting caring connection, unless, … well, hmm, just sex by itself might be OK if the opportunity just sort of presented itself, you know? Like if a girl started stuff and made it explicitly plain that she wanted to. I mean, I wasn’t a prude about casual sex. But I wasn’t seeking it that way. After all, with or without casual sex as an opportunity, I still wanted a girlfriend.
When I graduated high school I was 18 and as I headed off to college I eagerly dreamed and anticipated having an ongoing sexually active relationship. I was a sexual person. My sexuality was a part of me. I wanted sex in my life. Virginity wasn’t really the central issue but I guess I kind of figured that having sex in my life would at some point involve becoming devirginated, I was interested and curious. I wanted it all. It remained important to me that whoever I was with didn’t think of me as selfish or exploitative about sex. I wanted it to be mutual. I wanted tenderness and caring and all that, someone to listen to and know her dreams and all that. I wanted all those passions in my life.
At the age of 20, “still a virgin” began to take on a sort of symbolic meaning, standing in for failure on all of these fronts. I felt like a child among adults. It wasn’t just the technical fact of virginity, it was the whole sense of so little of this that I had wanted for so long ever having worked out in my life. The relationships I had had, such as they were, had not been the mutual sharing and caring experiences I’d hoped for, and the sex part wasn’t mutual, such as it was. I did become obsessed with being a virgin around this time. What it meant to me was being “left out”.
And yeah in retrospect I definitely let the whole thing about “penis in vagina sex is the thing that matters” infect me. I can look back at the things I had done with people and if none of those things quality to make a person a nonvirgin, then yeah virginity is inherently heterosexist. But, hey, when you haven’t had the specific experience it’s kind of hard to confidently dismiss it as “the thing that matters” when so many people are saying it’s the thing that matters.
How I ended up feeling was that precisely because I wanted a caring relationship, and didn’t want to ever put myself in a position of making someone feel like I didn’t care about her and just wanted to get laid, I had ended up with neither an ongoing romantic sexually active relationship or or the standalone experience of getting laid, and I was angry about it. (Cue in the “nice boy” whiny complaints. Yes, that kind of attitude. Right then and there, at that age, I’m afraid that’s where I was at, starting to whine that girls like pushy aggressive bad boys and disregard nice boys. You’ve heard it all before so I assume I don’t need to dwell on that).
I wasn’t inclined to go forth being resentfully sexually-aggressive or spend the rest of my life whining about being left out, so I needed to realize how to approach flirting (and etc) in a way that wasn’t about pushing for sex but wasn’t oblivious to it and just waiting for it to drop out of the sky and into my lap, either.
All of this.
I think your abstruse writing style is actually a symptom of something bigger. The word obsessive comes to mind; you feel you have to explain things to an excruciating degree. It’s as if you think you’re blasting us with knowledge that is so advanced and profound there is no way we’re going to follow you unless you school us first on what you’re NOT talking about.
I lost interest in the OP as soon as I entered the section about “a couple” of distinctions. It felt like Inception, keeping up with all the recursive layers. Couldn’t figure out the point being made, and completely lost the motivation to do so.
Not surprised you think your writing is excellent, though. If you didn’t think that, why would you post it? Every aspiring writer thinks they shits gold, right?
All of this.
I think your abstruse writing style is actually a symptom of something bigger. The word obsessive comes to mind; you feel you have to explain things to an excruciating degree. It’s as if you think you’re blasting us with knowledge that is so advanced and profound there is no way we’re going to follow you unless you school us first on what you’re NOT talking about.
I lost interest in the OP as soon as I entered the section about “a couple” of distinctions. It felt like Inception, keeping up with all the recursive layers. Couldn’t figure out the point being made, and completely lost the motivation to do so.
Not surprised you think your writing is excellent, though. If you didn’t think that, why would you post it? Every aspiring writer thinks they shit gold, right?
You know I’ve been so demoralized about the whole process lately, but following this conversation through to its logical conclusion has really been reaffirming in a way. I read an article once about how happiness is the freedom to choose how you will suffer. This is how I want to suffer. I can write through disappointment and frustration and broken dreams. I already know how to write alongside despair. I absolutely love doing this work and I’m not going to stop.
I suggest keeping a spreadsheet or a database. Log each literary agent you send a query to and on what date and exactly which version of your query letter you used (you’ll soon enough find that each one has a different notion of what you should send, and in response to that you’ll end up with multiple versions that you use). Log any and all responses. Keep track of where you heard about the literary agents.
If you get to the point that you’ve queried over 750 lit agents and none have offered to represent you, that’s when I recommend that you begin directly querying publishers (real ones not “self publishing opportunities”) of the sort that let authors directly query them – small ones in other words – and you track those similarly.
AHunter–any idea of how much money you’ve spent on mailing materials to all those hundreds of agents and publishers?
I agree with Telemark that a good writer can make any subject compelling. We need look no further than this very message board. Some Dopers have such an engaging voice and manner of expression that I will read all of their posts regardless of subject matter. Interestingly enough, they tend not to be people with a professional or personal interest in writing (with the exception of contributing here, of course :)). And then there are others here whose writing style causes my eyes to glaze over after the second sentence.
Writing for an audience can be brutal, God knows. But constructive feedback is crucial for any writer. And I think the criticism here is being offered in good faith. In this case I think the OP really needs to tackle the issue of style and tone. I’d also be much more interested in specific examples rather than generalized, abstract pronouncements. That might help address the problem so many people have pointed out: the OP’s insistence on the absolute uniqueness of his experiences. Most writers want to evoke a shock of recognition in the reader, not to alienate the audience by saying (or implying) that no one else has ever felt this way, behaved this way, thought about these things. If the OP wrote more about incidents from his own life, we would see both the specific experience of the individual and the broader, universal elements.
Hey AHunter3, have you read Whipping Girl? Might be the genre you’re going for. A trans woman biologist explores the cultural hatred of femininity. Very engaging book about similar kinds of subjects.
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity https://www.amazon.com/dp/1580056229/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_mT.vAbHG88HFB
I agree with the above. Specifics would really help.
Less than a graduate school education?
You do have to think of it that way. It’s an investment. But if you’re not getting bites after 750 submissions, I think it’s a good indicator of some kind of disconnect between what you’re writing and what people want to read.
I recommend anything by Pressfield. I haven’t read it yet, but “Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit” might be a good place to start. This industry is brutal.
I did consider writing a memoir about my childhood. I attended a panel on it at the Chicago Writer’s conference, where the publishers said they won’t even look at a manuscript unless you already have a platform. Fuck that. I might crank out a memoir someday, but if I’m putting that much work into a platform, it will be in the service of fiction, not stupid reality.
I know that different types of self - promotion aren’t mutually exclusive, but that was a huge turn-off. Just the word “self-promotion” nauseates me.
I was listening to the Story Grid podcast today, and they were talking about a forced choice for many writers: Money, Recognition, or Freedom. How much are you willing to sell your soul for a book deal? It’s an important question.
Totally excellent book. Definitely the genre I’m going for.
I wouldn’t advise internalizing that attitude. Most of your 750 submissions are going to consist of a query letter in which you pitch the idea of your book, explaining its genre, how long it is, a brief encapsulated sense of its trajectory (a teaser, essentially), and some bio info about who you are, and perhaps some sense of what existing books your book could be compared to, all in the space of one page.
They’re going to accept or reject your book based on that, without ever having read it.
Perhaps 30 percent of those 750 submissions will be to agents who ask that you include a synopsis. That lets you describe each chapter and what happens in that chapter, all within a second page in addition to the query letter. When you get rejections on those, at least they have a better sense of your book than they would from just the query letter, but they still haven’t read your book.
Maybe 10 percent of those 750 submissions will also ask for a formal proposal but only if your book is nonfiction. Mixed bag there. On the one hand, a formal proposal lets you go on at great length in comparison with just a query letter and a synopsis, but on the other hand nonfiction submissions are heavily weighed on the basis of your “platform” — how many people are already reading your stuff, your reputation in the field, etc.
Overlapping that 10 percent, a different 10 percent of those 750 submissions will ask for a sample of the book. That may be just the first five pages. It may be the first 10, first 25, the first entire chapter, the first two chapter, or the first three chapters. When someone reads as much as the first three chapters of your book, it’s fair to say they stuck their toe in and got a sense of your writing, although not necessarily a sense of your book, depending on whether the storyline was fully in place by then or if you were still introducing setting and characters and establishing the preliminaries.
Damn few will ask to see the entire manuscript. Getting the fabled “request for a full” is a major accomplishment in and of itself. Out of 1000 query letters (which includes letters to publishers as well as lit agents) I have had EIGHT requests for a full. A few of those are unusual lit agents or publishers who want to receive the full manuscript right from the start but five of them were where my cover letter and perhaps synopsis and perhaps proposal lured them into wanting to see the whole thing. These and only these individuals are the people whose rejection is a rejection of the book you’ve written. All the other rejections are rejections of the concept of your book as thumbnailed into a single page or two pages, or at best as represented by the first 50 or fewer pages.
Don’t take rejections personally and don’t take rejections as a referendum on the quality of the book you’re trying to hawk. If you think you’ve got something, keep on fishing.
Got one just now, coincidentally.
Maria Carvainis of Maria Carvainis Agency, Inc.
She wrote:
What her submissions guideline specified was a query letter of one page, a synopsis, and the first 10 pages plus a biographical sketch of me, the author, indicating what I’d published thus far and so on and so forth.
You’re going to send out oodles and oodles of those and you’re going to get rejections letters in huge huge quantities before you strike paydirt. Most of those rejections letters are not rejections of your book. They will seldom have read your book. They mentally categorize your book based on a thumbnail sense of what it’s probably like, and the genre, which they measure against what they think they can place with the editors at publishing companies that they interact with.