Muse & the Marketplace
Apr. 6th, 2019 06:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fandomnumbergeneratorGoing to a writing conference today.
I signed up for a query letter workshop and a first page clinic. And I feel like I am really too thin skinned for this shit. Last year my query letter was absolutely ravaged. Apparently memoir, death, grief, and recovery are totally unsellable.
This year my query letter centers on the idea of “a double life” which is a phrase that I am really not comfortable with. The thing that finally pushed me out of academia was post-partum depression and work-life balance. But nobody would call that “a double life”.
In my early 20s, I was trying to treat academia as a day job. Which academia will absolutely not let you do. But at what level of chaos, illegality, secrecy, or just incomprehension by the reader does it officially become a double life.
But for now, it’s my elevator pitch.
I’m trying to find a way to frame it as an adventure gone wrong. I really wanted to be the hero of a beat novel, but pretty soon reality set in. And I ended up in all these gendered roles in the subculture — caretaker, den mother, Bettie, Old Lady.
I signed up for a query letter workshop and a first page clinic. And I feel like I am really too thin skinned for this shit. Last year my query letter was absolutely ravaged. Apparently memoir, death, grief, and recovery are totally unsellable.
This year my query letter centers on the idea of “a double life” which is a phrase that I am really not comfortable with. The thing that finally pushed me out of academia was post-partum depression and work-life balance. But nobody would call that “a double life”.
In my early 20s, I was trying to treat academia as a day job. Which academia will absolutely not let you do. But at what level of chaos, illegality, secrecy, or just incomprehension by the reader does it officially become a double life.
But for now, it’s my elevator pitch.
I’m trying to find a way to frame it as an adventure gone wrong. I really wanted to be the hero of a beat novel, but pretty soon reality set in. And I ended up in all these gendered roles in the subculture — caretaker, den mother, Bettie, Old Lady.
