Quirks and quips
If you read my earlier blog posts, you will realize that the conception of my first book—come trilogy was a little bit quirky. It’s a serious story about giant cyborg insects on a far-off planet that face an autocrat and a climate catastrophe. I got into it, despite the absurd plot, as a backstory to my wife’s middle-grade chapter book. Literary trends be damned; this is a zombie-free zone. An early reader of my original novella, a big name in the Cli-Fi literature world, gave it 8-stars but told me it would never be traditionally published. I should have believed him, but perhaps because I didn’t, the story got longer and longer and better and better.
Why such an excellent rating but a poor publishing projection. I expect my reader based his doomed-for-rejection conclusion on the quirky storyline I was married to (pun intended). And the super rating I judged was because the reader appreciated my unusual writing style. Why unusual? Imagine a scientist pretending to be an ant historian writing an out-of-this-world, allegorical satire about human aggression and frailties associated with greed, power, and the hatred of the other. The premise is so ridiculous that the prose needed to match, so I unleashed my punny wit and threw in some extra quips to go with the flow. For example, Antspearean Speech—ants speaking in rhymes. Why that? Much of my early writing was influenced by my watching American News stories about the gaffs of President Trump and his administration.
My feeling was, how can one satire statements like those made about ‘alternative facts’ and ‘a stable genius’ when the lines were already so farcical? I concluded that one must get even more ludicrous and set them to poetry told by bugs! But then, if the story becomes even more ridiculous, with rhyming insects treating politics as Dr. Seuss-like stories, how does my ant historian narrator save face? Again, I turned to poetry. Around that time, I was re-reading an old favorite of mine—Watership Down by Richard Adams.
Adams’ placement of a thoughtful poem before every chapter inspired me. But instead of poems by others, I decided that my narrator would write the poems in my novel. It made sense; from a civilization that idolized speaking in rhymes, the narrator would love poetry. And to offset the silliness of Antspearean Speech, I wanted Narrant’s poems to be serious, thoughtful, and clever.
I used a third quirky technique to explain all the references to human civilization. How could ants that left Earth during prehistoric times refer to things that only humans would know? I framed the story with a podcast interview between Narrant and a human podcast host to allow that freedom since the intelligent alien insects and humans had already met. Narrant, a professed amateur humanologist, wrote the history of his planet targeted at humans as a cautionary tale.
Queue up for queries
Despite my early reader’s forecast, I went through the hoops anyway and queried my novel. Like most authors, I saw this as a necessary evil. Unlike some authors, I didn’t mind all the requests for queries, synopses, outlines, bios, summaries, pitches, loglines, and marketing plans. I found it challenging to write them and got better and better at it.
I had a spreadsheet to keep track of all the agents and small presses I contacted. I scoured the internet for potential publishers and publicists. Some never got back to me, some sent terse form-letter rejections, some explained their decision, some asked for the full manuscript, and some even requested a revised version after pointed suggestions for improvement. That’s a lot of somes. There were swim-bys and a few bites, but no one got hooked.
Over two years, fifty-six agents and eighty-six publishers rejected or didn’t answer my queries. I can’t blame the early ones since I made a rookie mistake and started querying prematurely, and for the later ones, I guess my novel wasn’t their thing. Still, I loved playing the game. Although every rejection hurt, sometimes I craved rejection letters just to get some feedback. I was most depressed when my author’s email box was empty. And from that first 8-star review, through all the no’s and ‘you should submit to our hybrid division,’ I realized I had to improve my manuscript.
So, I sent it out to development editors, line editors, beta readers, proofreaders, and my reading partner wife, who started the whole thing. All the feedback I got was fantastic and inspired me to write more and more. While waiting for a final beta read, I wrote a sequel, taking the advice of an editor who said to write something else to distance myself from it for a while. And I also realized that my too-long epic first novel could be split in two, as there was a natural break.
Then, at some point, I said to myself—it’s ready for self-publication, and I’ll do what my first reader suggested almost two years before. But now, after two books, I had a trilogy with the third on the way. Now that’s got to sell! Who wouldn’t want to read three allegorical political satires inspired by Watership Down, Animal Farm, and Brave New World? Then again, who would? Only time will tell, but at least I think they’re amazing. Now it’s on to step three of the other trilogy—writing, querying, and marketing.