I Need a Cookie...

ladyfickle

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Yesterday I polished the first chapter of my draft. I felt it is perfection. Like a sculptor, I shaped it with perseverance until I really, really liked it. I asked members of my family and they said it's fabulous.


Today I decided to ask for comments.


So, I sent my favorite paragraph to a friend and he called my MC "a Vampire woman. I have met such women." - he added. "But why," - I asked. "I thought she is sweet." "A sexual vampire" - he insisted. "She attracts you like a magnet you can not escape. And when you stick with her you rot with jealousy and suspicion. This shouldn't happen - a man should not fall in love with such a woman." "Are you telling me my heroine is evil?""Not evil. She can be in love and enchant 15 other men at the same time. She could be the most pleasant and cool being and very wonderful for communication - but - keep your distance."


I decided it is a mistake to send only one paragraph, so I sent the whole first chapter to another friend. She said:
"If I have to explain why I don't like it - it will be strange because I love this type of stories, but the way it is worded is unpleasant for reading, at least for me. For me the story here is like in a textbook of history."


Thus my perfect story turned out to be good for nothing. I need cookies!:)
 
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Marian Perera

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"If I have to explain why I don't like it - it will be strange because I love this type of stories, but the way it is worded is unpleasant for reading, at least for me. For me the story here is like in a textbook of history."

While it's a good idea to evaluate your story, I wouldn't worry too much about one person's opinion if you don't agree with it. Someone once read the first scene of a historical romance I wrote and said that the problem was that it wasn't like a textbook of history - i.e. it didn't have lots of period details, lengthy descriptions of the characters' clothes, and so on.

Can't please everyone, so don't stress about it.
 
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ladyfickle

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Yes, Marian, you are right. You can't possibly please everybody. You have to be true to yourself at all times, except for thinking about the others.
 

jjmacdonald

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No, you can't please everyone. Take their feed back and use what is useful.

My wife hates the style of my writing. It doesn't follow the "A --> B --> C" she really enjoys with a lot of romance writing. Mine tends to jump around like "B --> C --> A" because I like to pause and thing about what's going on. She finds it distracting and breaks the flow while others enjoy the change.

Like coffee, everyone make it differently :)
 
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BenPanced

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I honestly do not know what's going on in the genre these days. Ever since the RWA metldown (resigned from my local chapter and did not renew for the national) and implosions of Dreamspinner, Riptide, and Samhain, I don't know if there are any smaller presses who publish M/M any longer. Probably need to do a Query Tracker hunt to get even a small/vague idea but it seems like everybody on my Facebook feed are all self-pubbed these days (note: I'm not willing to consider self-pub any longer. It was a nightmare that's dogged me for over five years now and I refuse to consider it for myself.) If I could still drink, I'd settle for more than just a cookie.
 

KPeepsWrites

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I feel like garbage and I feel like my book is garbage and I feel like my chances of getting published are garbage.
And it's frustrating because I love my book. I love my characters.

But I'm hoping to query soon, and finding comp titles for a "melancholy, lightly steamy, non-erotica, late-stage coming-of-age F/F romance that tugs at your heartstrings" is really freaking hard. I've even tried breaking it down and looking for titles that only compare to one of these attributes, but nothing seems right. I'm so frustrated. I can't be the only person to write a story about an introverted, closeted lesbian who never came out because she's too focused on her career to give a crap about love, until she meets the woman of her dreams.

Ugh. Total garbage.
 

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But I'm hoping to query soon, and finding comp titles for a "melancholy, lightly steamy, non-erotica, late-stage coming-of-age F/F romance that tugs at your heartstrings" is really freaking hard. I've even tried breaking it down and looking for titles that only compare to one of these attributes, but nothing seems right. I'm so frustrated. I can't be the only person to write a story about an introverted, closeted lesbian who never came out because she's too focused on her career to give a crap about love, until she meets the woman of her dreams.

Ugh. Total garbage.
Have you considered titles by authors who primarily publish with small presses, such as Georgia Beers, Morgan Adams, Lee Lynch, Katherine V Forrest, etc?
 

Brigid Barry

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I feel like garbage and I feel like my book is garbage and I feel like my chances of getting published are garbage.
And it's frustrating because I love my book. I love my characters.

But I'm hoping to query soon, and finding comp titles for a "melancholy, lightly steamy, non-erotica, late-stage coming-of-age F/F romance that tugs at your heartstrings" is really freaking hard. I've even tried breaking it down and looking for titles that only compare to one of these attributes, but nothing seems right. I'm so frustrated. I can't be the only person to write a story about an introverted, closeted lesbian who never came out because she's too focused on her career to give a crap about love, until she meets the woman of her dreams.

Ugh. Total garbage.
How I found my comps for my fantasy novel, a saga:

Internet search > Reddit > Goodreads > People who read this also liked > Library.

I found some great female driven questing fantasy with f/f slant. It took some sleuthing, but I got it done.
 

ElaineA

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I feel like garbage and I feel like my book is garbage and I feel like my chances of getting published are garbage.
And it's frustrating because I love my book. I love my characters.

But I'm hoping to query soon, and finding comp titles for a "melancholy, lightly steamy, non-erotica, late-stage coming-of-age F/F romance that tugs at your heartstrings" is really freaking hard. I've even tried breaking it down and looking for titles that only compare to one of these attributes, but nothing seems right. I'm so frustrated. I can't be the only person to write a story about an introverted, closeted lesbian who never came out because she's too focused on her career to give a crap about love, until she meets the woman of her dreams.

Ugh. Total garbage.
I'm sorry for your frustration. You're in company, here, at least. :Headbang:

As for comps, I do think focusing on the market bits rather than story will give you the most daylight. Agents will get the story specifics through the body of your query. The comps are to point to whether your premise is marketable. They really don't expect exact matches.

So. There's definitely a market for what's called "mature," or "seasoned" romances, if that is what this is. MCs 35+, a lot of them over 40. Yes, most that I have seen are MF, but you can ignore that bit. It's not a rule. Seasoned is still a marketing niche, regardless of pairings. Buzzfeed did a list: https://www.buzzfeed.com/tabbykibugi/romance-novels-featuring-older-lovers.

There is a solid market for lesbian romance. Olivia Waite has turned to writing them in historical settings, two of which are trade published. She also happens to be the NY Times Romance fiction columnist. I don't get the NYT, but I suspect if you can access it, she will have some recs and reviews in LGBTQI subgenres as well.

You could also refer to romances with a melancholy feel. I'm not exactly sure what that means in this case, but I know there are many quieter, slow burn romances with struggling characters. (For me, those seem to be the ones that involve more melancholy, but I could be way off base here.)

Also, more agents seem open to TV and movie comps now, too, and I see more and more "X-title meets Y-title" pitches on social media.

Good luck, and try to remember the perfect query-and-comps does not really exist. If "good query and adequate comps" gets the agent to read the first 3 chapters or 50 pages or whatever, you have done your job.
 
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KPeepsWrites

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I'm sorry for your frustration. You're in company, here, at least. :Headbang:


You could also refer to romances with a melancholy feel. I'm not exactly sure what that means in this case, but I know there are many quieter, slow burn romances with struggling characters. (For me, those seem to be the ones that involve more melancholy, but I could be way off base here.)


Good luck, and try to remember the perfect query-and-comps does not really exist. If "good query and adequate comps" gets the agent to read the first 3 chapters or 50 pages or whatever, you have done your job.
Thank you for this. You hit the nail on the head with what I mean by melancholy. It's definitely more of an aching/longing/pining sort of thing vs. romcom. I mean, there's funny stuff, but the main vibe is the ache of unrequited love.

I super-appreciate your kind words. :)
 

Lizzie Michaels

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I've been working on the same novel for six years--not unusual in any way, so that's not the issue. The issue is the long process of me thinking I'm doing great and then getting smacked back down by the writing gods because I'm doing major things badly either because I just didn't know what I needed to do or I was trying to shortcut.

The first time, it was that I didn't even know what structure was let alone that I needed it, so it took me two years of crits on my fourth and fifth drafts of the novel (all drafts written from scratch) for someone to tell me "Your story lacks structure." Queue research and study for the next six months--reading romance novels and advice books. Then I wrote draft six, my current one. Edited it, got it critted, beta read, and then I got sucked into watching the train wreck of YouTuber the iilluminaughtii's downfall and realized how well pieces of her behavior fit my antagonist but I hadn't fleshed them out. So I looked into it further, and that led me into a deep dive into train wrecks of all kinds in the YouTube community--not necessarily downfalls, sometimes just the people existing on the platform. Then I looked into other aspects of my novel, all of this mostly through other people's analysis of all these people's behavior (therapists and such) so I could understand it.

And I realized one major thing--while I'd gotten a lot of compliments on the book and people told me it was just about ready, I'd only dived in just below the skin on all my characters, the antagonist, and the setting. There is a chasm there waiting to be tapped, and I wasted almost an additional two years because I didn't do enough research. Now I need to research some very serious topics as well as some very unpleasant ones, and it's going to suck. Abuse (everything from DV to religious abuse), cults and the psychology behind them, and various aspects of restrictive and tightly controlled religious environments. (I'm not equating the latter two, but I'm combining them in my novel for a fictional situation.)

But my book is going to be so much better for doing all this.

The only thing is that I think it might require yet another draft, probably pushing me back from publishing another two years between researching, writing, critting, and beta reading.

AND THEN-- I already have book two written and I realized that I screwed up with research on that one too! So as soon as the first book goes into the critting process, I'm diving back into research with book two.

:Headbang:

I'm so overwhelmed and frustrated. I absolutely love the process of trading critiques, and over the last five and a half years since I started using websites like this, I've always had work to share. For the first time, I don't.

I need a cookie.
 
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Maryn

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Luckily, I was up way early and baked. Here you go!
 
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Maryn

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That sounds like an excellent deal...
 
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