Why I’m Sharing My Transgender Novel on a Fanfiction Website
For the last few years, I’ve worked really hard on this novella, determined to write it in a way that made me feel good, felt like a trans story that I was proud of and needed to be in the world, and also frankly, to make it worthy of prestige — lit fic level.
The longer I work on it, the more I’m conscious of two things:
- This is a Queer friendship romance novel
- 2. I don’t really care if cis people read it
Most of the feedback that I’ve gotten while working on both has made me feel like these projects are something I should spend a long time overhauling, changing around, maybe even starting over. Same with the unreleased Working 2050 episodes.
To lay it all on the table, a friend died the spring, and it really really made me think deeply about the ways in which Queer celebrity can help and harm the people cultivating it. That’s what “the day before your top surgery fails” is about. But I’m not convinced overhauling it to reflect my current views, especially since I wrote so much of it when I was a different person, actually it’s the most meaningful way for me to approach it.
But for both, I’m in a really different place than when I wrote it — most of last year. I’m in a really REALLY different place than when I started both projects, in…2013 lol.
I’ve learned so much about writing, the “point” of writing, and about my own strengths and weaknesses. I’ve also learned a lot about publishing, that’s just the industry, but self publishing, what people care about when it comes to reading fiction, and yes, publishing on AO3.
So much of building a sustainable career and 2021, not just as a writer, is about building trust with a group of people. There are lots of gross marketing ways to say this — building an audience, establishing a niche, “adding value,” but what it comes down to is building trust.
The value of traditional publishing for someone like me, who has no reputation/a small “reach,” is access to a larger group of people I would not otherwise be able to reach, who might dig the writing that I do.
IE — access to more queer and trans people.
In indie publishing, this can be accomplished in a lot of other ways — building relationships with people who make the same kind of work you do, being a person who has work that speaks to others, generally not being a dick, etc.
But ultimately, one of the things that I thought about a lot and making this work as that people are always talking about it as the queer and trans people are unreachable — from social justice work to small publishers that I’ve worked with in my day job, the “find the queer and trans people “market as often when I get hired for. And what I notice in those is that… Honestly?
The traditional pubs reach fewer queer people then… I kid you not. Well tagged fiction on AO3.
And just to address the elephant in the room here, not just the porn on AO3. I’m talking full on well plotted fantasy, sci-fi, historical fiction, modern modern day stories, but original works with zero alien sex in them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Cory Doctorow talks a lot about how when he released his first few books for free, money was the absolute last thing on his mind bc he wasn’t reaching the people he wanted to reach yet.
By releasing his books for free, he reached the people he was trying to reach, built relationships and trust with them.
When I think about the people who I hope read the stuff I’ve written, about who I want to build trust with, it’s queer and trans people. Not necc. people who are in traditional publishing (though DUH, that’s changing).
At any rate: the stuff that I write, now, later, on Ao3 and not, weird erotica and not, it’s always about Queer people. The dumb shit we do, The ways we show love and also fail at it, and the difference between seeming good and doing good.
