On my world, it means hope.

So...I've been doing a lot of thinking lately.

I'm not someone who copes well with anxiety/uncertainty. Yet, that's kind of the precipice I find myself on right now regarding my writing career. Part of me is confident that my fantasy book will sell. If so, then in 2023 my goals will be to work on the sequel and outline series ideas.

But if it doesn't sell, or if it languishes on sub for months...

I think it's time for me to take a break and find something meaningful outside of writing.

Lately, I've felt so much anxiety. That anxiety was alleviated when I was deep into playing Persona 5 Royal, but now that I'm visiting my parents without much going on, I've felt that anxiety worsen. And I'm pretty sure it's anxiety because of my book.

Specifically, because I'm starting to feel like I've spent so much time on a writing career, and I have yet to show anything for it.

For authors who are trying to "make it" in the publishing industry, the advice is always "work on the next thing." And I took that to heart with Novel #4. But by now, I'm starting to feel exhausted by the grind. It's really demoralizing to spend a year or more writing a novel, knowing there's no guarantee it'll ever get published.

In a way, I suppose Novel #4 was my "miracle book." It was the first book I wrote that successfully balanced a story I was personally passionate about with a commercial sensibility. I was able to prove to myself that I could write a commercial book. But the idea of continuing that grind—of continuing to come up with commercial, high concept hooks and writing those novels to try to get a traditional book deal—has just lost any appeal to me right now.

I hate talking about super personal things online (lol), but I suppose another major cause of my anxiety is the misogynistic idea that the older a woman/female-presenting person gets, the harder it is for them to find a partner. I feel like, if I wasn't single, I'd probably come to the conclusion that I have nothing better to do with my time other than go back to writing books anyway. But right now, the prospect of dating just feels like a huge time sink that I keep putting off with my writing career as an excuse.

So that's something I'd like to focus on for 2023, I guess: Finding a partner. Then, hopefully, I'll be less anxious that working on books feels like a waste of time if I don't get a book deal.

More immediately, I'm in the middle of Persona 5 Royal, as I mentioned, and I'm absolutely obsessed with it so far. I'm dying to get back home and continue playing, hahaha (I'm currently in the middle of the fourth Palace). And I also really want to play through the story parts with my sister, since I think she'll really love it as well.

So...yeah. I guess I'm hoping that de-prioritizing writing, spending some time with video games, and reading the new books coming out in 2023 will help rekindle my love of stories. Hell, maybe I'll even write that sequel that I never got to write for Novel #2, just for fun. But for right now, it feels right to take a break.

(Of course, all of my plans will change if I DO get a book deal for Novel #4, lol.)

Happy new year!! (...I say, with a sense of existential dread at how much time has passed since COVID-19 became a thing. D: )

I know I've already done my writing goals post for 2022 (and beyond), so I won't rehash that except to adjust some of my (self-imposed) deadlines for Novel #4:

I didn't finish the first draft in December, but that was always a long shot, haha. I reached over 50k words, though, so I'm happy with the progress I made! (I'm estimating the "final" draft of this book will be a minimum of 60k words, and a maximum of over 70k.)

I originally intended to work on my book some more this long weekend, but I got distracted yesterday with a new Ooh Shiny idea. Luckily I managed to work it out of my system by the end of the day, but I might just take a break today to play video games. Also, I need to get off my butt and do some New Year cleaning, too.

My soft deadline for finishing my first draft of Novel #4 is end of January/February. I've decided that my hard deadline for sending Novel #4 to my agent—so, that means drafting plus incorporating feedback from CPs plus however many rounds of revision I want to do before I'm satisfied with the book—will be end of May; I doubt I can write and polish this to a shine in time to catch the spring sub period, so my goal is to hopefully go on sub with this novel in the fall (though I can't necessarily predict how much feedback my agent will have and whether I'll need to do another major editing pass; I've budgeted the summer for that, with the hope that I'm usually faster at revising than I am at drafting, as long as I have a clear idea of how to revise).

Fingers crossed!

2021 is starting off with a huge milestone—five years since I first started querying, I finally have a literary agent for my third novel!!!

Honestly, I'm still in the stage of feeling like it's unreal, worrying that I might wake up or take one wrong step and lose my agent, somehow. And I feel like I'm not as euphoric as I thought I would be because I still have doubts about whether my book will be picked up on submission. I don't know whether the pandemic/recent political events/whatever have put me in a state of hypervigilance and it's become impossible for me to rest or celebrate because I'm always thinking about the next potential problem/obstacle. The urge to chase goalposts is such a real thing.

But I'm going to do my best to celebrate by ordering bubble tea this weekend, at least!

Not only is the world a dumpster fire, but so is my life right now. I've spent several weeks trying to schedule a doctor's appointment (and I'm still trying to schedule it), my apartment is crumbling, and I've been double-taxed for something. Any one of these issues I could deal with, but all of them combined? I can't handle so many problems at once, and having them looming over my head is killing me.

Also, thanks to said recent stresses (but mostly the health issue), I've once more overshot my deadline for querying Novel #3 again. New deadline is by the end of this month, assuming I can finally see a doctor soon, but my anxiety has been worsening over time because I'm, by now, mostly convinced that the agent who gave me the R&R has probably lost interest.

Anyway, I'm back because I wanted to write a review for a book I read recently.


Inside Affair by Ella Frank

Genre: Contemporary romance / romantic suspense, MM romance

Honestly, the main reasons I'm tempted to rate this book 4/5 stars are because it was compulsively readable, I've been in a reading slump for several months, I really liked the fact that one of the main characters was a news anchor and his job was described well, and this is probably the most convincing setup for a "fake gay boyfriend" that I've ever encountered.

The basic summary of this book is that Xander Thorne, a nationally famous news anchor, starts getting threatening messages from an obsessed stalker and needs to hire a bodyguard. He goes to Sean Bailey, the brother of his best friend and detective with the CPD, for advice, and Sean volunteers himself for the job, even though Xander and Sean often get on each other's nerves. Sean decides that they need to draw the stalker into the open and, therefore, his cover story for sticking by Xander's side 24/7 is to pretend to be his boyfriend, even though Sean identifies as straight.

Again, the writing style was probably the best part of the book. I've had trouble getting through a lot of romances lately, and reading a book that I could blow through in one day was a breath of fresh air.

Yet I'm conflicted with this book, because even though I was entertained by it, there were some parts of it that were...not so good.

My main issue is that this book reads a lot like a "gay for you" story, a trope that was mostly rampant in the early days of MM romance but that I thought had died down with the rise of bi/pansexual awareness. Now, to be fair, Sean doesn't settle on a label in this book (which ends on a cliffhanger, by the way), so maybe he'll identify as bi in the future. But I went to Amazon and skimmed the summaries of this author's other books, and, uh...it seems like she has a thing for the "gay for you" (or at least, straight-identifying man suddenly realizes he's attracted to guys) trope in general, so I'm a little wary.

This goes hand in hand with the fact that Inside Affair is one of those MM romances that gave me a sense, while I was reading it, that if I hadn't known the author's name, I would've assumed she was a straight woman. It's not the worst offender in this respect, but again, there's something about the way the romance develops that reminds me of how MF romances are written.

Finally, a detail—there was one plot event that didn't really seem to make sense (if Xander's stalker wants him, why would he try to kill him all of a sudden? At least, without a "if I can't have him, no one else can" monologue to accompany it), and that seems to have been included just for the sake of moving the romance forward via a brush with death, which I always feel is sloppy plotting.

(I was also somewhat disappointed by the stalker's identity, though I guess it made sense.)


I wanted to expand for a moment on Inside Affair as a "gay for you" book / book that reminds me of MM romance in the early 2010s. I don't identify as a gay man, so I won't speak for them, but I frequently see on Twitter how gay men have pushed against the tropes and writing styles that dominated the genre earlier on, when many straight female authors were being published.

And "gay for you" is a good example of a trope that has been popular among straight women, due to the way it incorporates a sense of "forbidden" romance—at the cost of erasing bi/pansexuality, and also only focusing on one possible bi/pansexual experience. (There is also something a little creepy about constantly wishing straight men would turn out to be gay.)

When I talk about "books that make me think the author is a straight woman," I'm often thinking of books that have two male leads, yet the way they act is very similar to how a MF romance would be written; specifically, one of the men seems to map on to the female lead and the other one maps on to the male lead in a MF romance. This is of course a subjective standard without bright lines, but whenever I feel that way while reading a gay romance, I get really uncomfortable. (As I mentioned above, Inside Affair just about toes the line—Xander's character seemed to me that it would've been almost identical if he was a female lead in an MF romance, with Sean taking on the unambiguously "male lead" role, although at the same time Xander's behavior was totally believable as someone who's been targeted by a stalker.) (Another way a gay romance can make me think the author is a straight woman is based on how the sexual attraction is written—though that's even more nebulous since I'm not only not a gay man, I'm also ace. But it's a feeling I get sometimes when I compare these books to ownvoices gay romances.)

Again, I thought these tropes had largely died out because of general queer activism, yet apparently they're alive and well in the form of Amazon self-published books. I look at the reviews and ratings for books like Ella Frank's, and it's clear these tropes are still popular among, shall we say, a certain audience.

And isn't that discomfiting? That despite how much actual gay men and bisexual/pansexual folks have pushed for better representation, there are still people who want to read these kinds of books.

Sigh.

Welp, 2019 is almost over, and 2020 is about to be here.

To be honest, I didn't accomplish what I'd wanted to, which was to finish revising Novel #3. Instead, I crashed at the beginning of December when I realized that my current revisions weren't working out and I'd have to go back to the drawing board all over again.

That was...a pretty terrible feeling for me, and I ended up taking a break from writing to play Pokémon instead.

Right now, I have *one* more idea for revising that I want to try. And my goal is to work on this revision idea for January to see if it'll work or not.

Either I can come up with a coherent draft incorporating this last revision idea, or I can't, but in either case—in other words, whether I end up with a new draft, or whether I decide I don't know how to revise it—I plan on (1) continuing to query; (2) if no agents are interested, submitting to a small press (specifically Interlude Press and Entangled Publishing).

There's also RevPit in April, which I'm keeping in the back of my mind...but considering I had no luck getting into Pitch Wars, I'm not sure how much to count on that.

In any case, I'm really hoping to be able to start a new manuscript next year, since I'm ever so slightly sick of writing contemporary romance.

*shrug*

Oof. It's been one of those weeks where every day feels so long at work, but the week itself feels like it's been flying by. Weird.

So...new plan: I'm going to enter Novel #3 in Pitch Wars this September.

I've been pretty stressed lately due to an impending move, and I've been struggling a lot with the edits that an agent asked for in an R&R, which has only added to my stress. I've started to feel like I might need help, and Pitch Wars seems like a perfect chance for that.

Assuming I get in, of course; if I don't, I'll just have to continue to struggle alone.

What makes all this more palatable to me is that I've also realized that thanks to my lack of spoons from all of my life changes this year, I'm unlikely to begin drafting another novel this year anyway, so I might as well spend more time sprucing up Novel #3.

(I also technically still have 4 other agents with fulls/partials of my manuscript; that's a wild card in terms of me not knowing what, if anything, will come out of that.)

(Well, sorta; it's not quite that dramatic. :P)

So my original writing plan was:

1. Finish editing Novel #3
2. Start outlining Novel #4 in June, focusing all of my attention on Novel #4 as an entry into tradpub

...That's...more or less still the plan, except I've got a bunch of tag-along ideas that I'm trying really hard not to work on.

And I ended up writing a bunch of snippets for a romance novella (?) that...I guess I'll just keep as a side project to return to if I ever need a mental break??

Also, based on the reception for Novel #2 so far, it...looks like I might have to end up writing the sequel for this at some point. So that's another thing on my mind.

Aaaaaargh!

I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again: It's still absolutely WILD to me that I went from 2018 Writer's Drought to 2019 New Idea Every Week.

Once upon a time (a.k.a. in college), I *did* have the experience of juggling multiple ideas simultaneously. But ever since then, my ideas have been so few that I've become used to pretty much focusing on writing one story at a time. And now I'm trying to re-learn how to mentally juggle multiple stories again. Whew.

(I'm also starting a new job in a few weeks, and *hopefully* I'll be back to a regular, predictable schedule so I can completely focus on my writing outside of my day job!)

In 2018, I barely wrote anything. It's partially understandable because I spent a lot of 2018 studying for standardized exams. I did expand a bit on Novel #2 to make it novel-length, and I wrote about 20k words on a Romeo and Juliet retelling that ended up not going anywhere. I started freaking out due to having months of writer's block, though at the end of the year, I started working on some new projects that I was hopeful I could finish.

2019, so far, has been the exact opposite.

It almost feels as though my brain has decided to make up for the "drought" of 2018 by spitting so many ideas at me. Too many to keep up. On top of those WIPs from the end of 2018, I wrote and am editing a novel that looks like it's going to hit 60k, and then my brain has been like "How about space sci-fi? Oh, and how about a contemporary romance with a trans character?"

Seriously. I. Can't. Keep. Up.

It's honestly a bit exhausting, because when I get a new idea, I usually crest on a bit of a "high" while I tinker with it, until I can decide whether to finish it for not. And as I've said in a previous entry, I'd really rather try to steer away from writing adult queer romance anymore (I say, as I continuously fight the tidal urge to write more M/M romances).

From a logical standpoint, I have to focus on editing Novel #3, my 58k book that will probably break 60k once I'm done editing, so I can get it ready for more beta readers and for pitching during #DVpit in April. Everything else can wait until after.

But after...i'm no longer sure what to focus on. My (unfortunately) neglected YA fantasy from the end of 2018? The new space sci-fi idea (possibly YA, though I originally formulated it as Adult) kicking around in my head? Something else entirely, given the pace at which my brain keeps spitting ideas at me???

Sigh.

I just realized I haven't blogged here for a while. I was writing another story, then I decided to take a break to refresh my creativity, then I started toying with some other story ideas, and then...now I've hit a slump.

Specifically, because I was told there would be a two-month delay for my book. A two-month delay specifically budgeted for marketing alone—and not for my publisher to market, but for ME to do the marketing. (As in, I'm being told to do marketing, yet the ARCs won't be ready until three/four weeks prior to release.)

For the past few months, I've been consistently happy. Even when studying for the bar, which was horrible and godawful, I kept in good spirits. But ever since I've received that news, my mood has been fluctuating again between okay and extreme pessimistic negativity. I went from "Everything is great, even the things that are not great" to "Everything sucks. My stories suck. I've gotten too fat because of my thankless day job. No one is going to like my book so why bother with advertising."

I can't exactly rationalize why, but this two-month delay has made me want to give up on marketing. It makes me want to crawl into a hole and hibernate until the book is out, grab my own physical copy, and then retreat into my den again. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of the cumulative rejections I've gotten for this book that made me sacrifice traditional publishing attempts because I wanted to publish it faster, only to face delays that made me question that decision. I'm just tired.

I should not be thinking that my own desire to see this book in print outweighs all the other definitely more important things, like selling copies and jumpstarting my career. And yet, that's where I am now. I just want a cover and a copy for myself, and then I'm done.

I'm tired.

I'm just so tired of how long this process has been. And it's not like traditional publishing, which also takes a long time—however, most of the traditional publishing process is not spent waiting around and doing nothing.

(Or at least, if you are waiting around doing nothing, you've got an advance to tide you over.)

I'm just...I'm tired and disappointed and I just want not to market altogether. If it fails, it fails.