Oy! I self published my poetry on Draft2Digital. 10 years ago. I've sold one copy, to my Niece; she TLDR... No one has ever read my book. I still believe I made something good, and I hope to write my memoirs, and publish them on Draft2Digital, even though I can expect the same experience. It's very liberating, very freeimg! It appears it's just between me and the Cosmos; as if I'm flirting with Eternity.
I'm 62 years old, hope to retire from the factory in 3 years, and finish my book(s) before I die.....and maybe, just maybe, someone, somewhere, someday, will read and appreciate my work.
I am Autistic and have foods I can’t eat due to sensory issues and dietary restrictions. I absolutely love when people ask me about my safe foods or restaurants! It also helps to decide where to eat a couple of days beforehand so I can go online and view the menu.
I'm mostly over my eating disorder, but sometimes I get anxious and it's really hard to eat (especially with other people), and there are some textures that are really more challenging. I too love the ability to look at the menu in advance of actually being there, because by the time I go somewhere I am already too anxious to figure it out. It helps a lot to be confident that I know that there are things I will be able to eat.
I wish you health and happiness. EDs are so hard to overcome because we have to eat in order to survive. People can cut drugs, alcohol, or nicotine out of their lives completely. We can’t do that with food. Keep fighting the fight!
Luckily my spouse seemed to intuitively know how to be supportive, while most other people did/do not. To this day my mom will stare at me while I'm eating and it makes me want to stop. Also makes me not want to eat around her.
I just knew I was going to like you from the start. I had always wondered why this mommy blog lacked an advice column. I gave you a lot of credit for dropping in and DARING TO PRESUME to give advice to a group of people who are so smart, attractive and obviously not in need of any advice and yet it turns out THEY DO NEED JUST THAT THING!
Then I watched you power through a rough patch where some people felt the need to hand you some shit! That took guts Ms. Sara. I always admire that.
And now today you share that you are COMIC BOOK ADJACENT!
So the fuck am I! I love the damn things and have done so for most of my life. I actually HAVE the comic books I collected back in the 60s and early 70s. Most of them are stashed in the cardboard boxes on top of the beat up old dresser down in the basement (BTW and FWIW- That dresser was down there when I moved in and it was covered in green house paint. The drawers are filled to bursting with paperback SF and Horror. It's the Genre Dressser!)
Grandma would give me money to walk down to the store at the corner that had a spinner rack of comics. I was a big DC guy. Then, I see this new comic, Spider-Man. Oh, I was hooked. Had #1-10 of Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, The Incredible Hulk.
I went to college. They were in a box in the attic. Mom tossed the box.
I had a great box full of comics, a complete run of Fantastic Four #9 to #112 (origin stories of Dr. Doom, the Silver Surfer etc.) plus tons of Spiderman, Thor, Hulk, etc. and some DC although I was mostly a Marvel kid. For years I thought it had not survived the move to Michigan but later Mom told me she had, in fact, lugged that box up to the new house but it was a victim of a basement flood.
If you don't mind me asking, about what year did you start reading paperback SF and Horror? Or what were the first few books or writers who got your attention? (I also have a well-aged carton of paperbacks, some 70s through some 90s...)
I cleaned and painted rental apartments and houses in a town adjacent to an Air Force base in Eastern New Mexico between 1965 and 1973. My dad was an ex Air Force Chief Master Sergent who liked having Airmen as tenants.
They left all kinds of stuff behind whenever they fulfilled their enlistment or, more commonly, got rush orders to transfer. (Viet Nam was definitely a thing.) I found all kinds of pulp fiction including a lot of SF, Horror, Action Adventure. They also often left their vinyl records as well! I had a great collection of Hendriz, Dylan, Beatles and Sly Stone.
My "employer" considered me well paid with room and board in his home and I figured the left behind literature and music to be some kind of treasure.
"Mainly, I just feel like a jerk for dragging them to a restaurant that isn’t friendly to their diet"
So let them pick the restaurant.
It's not rocket surgery.
Frankly, the inability of the writer to come up with this solution and instead berating themself as abusive makes this sounds less like a sustaining bilateral friendship and more like the individual with the eating issue actually being controlling and rolling in the secondary gain of that and the other individual being self-effacing to the point of self-flagellation.
Absolutely. If the person with the eating disorder doesn't know where she can get food she can eat lunch dates should consist of lunches brought from home.
Oh, hey, just FYI. I understand that that person is reportedly a transphobe. I don't know for sure and I stopped watching her vids years ago just due to time, but just thought you might want to know if you want to look into it.
I'd say for the friend with the eating disorder: Let your friend choose where to eat out...It doesn't need to be up to you since you're not the one with the disorder...
20 years ago I wrote the largest chapter for a technical handbook. I was amazed 2 years after the book was published I received a royalty check for $42.38. Since that time I've received three more checks for smaller amounts. Also, I found out that my book is fairly popular in Africa for reasons I do not know.
My 1st four books were traditionally published with one of the major houses in New York. (It took me over 50 agent/editor rejections before I landed a contract.) But then I decided I wanted to earn a living from my work, so I switched to self-publishing in 2014 and never looked back.
A lot of your decision may hinge on what you're writing. Fiction performs better than non-fiction. Some genres are gold in the self-publishing market. Others...not so much. The main benefit of self pub is the amount of control over editorial decisions, copy art, marketing, distribution, etc. Sales not going well? You can switch marketing tactics on a dime--change your ads, cover, blurb, whatever it takes to get the needle moving again. Pub houses tend not to move that quickly--if anything, once you stop selling they forget you're alive and focus their efforts on the next batch of newbies.
On the down side, you're responsible for everything in self-publishing. It's a lot of work. You'll be on the hook for finding and paying an editor (developmental, line, proofreader), cover artist, formatting, marketing, etc. And for the love of all that's good and holy, don't skimp on editors or cover art. If you don't create a professional product, reviewers will skin you alive.
I had no idea that my childhood "picky eater" condition had an actual name - Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. I've had it since I was a toddler, and nobody else in my immediate family has it. There are certain foods and drinks and condiments that I simply refused to eat as a child, most of which I still refuse to eat. I had no logical reason for not eating or drinking them, but the first time I was exposed to them something in my brain said "NO! BAD!" Nobody, not even my mother who had a will of steel, could make me eat something once it was on the "BAD!" list.
I also wouldn't eat any foods that touched other foods on the plate, so if a pea rolled over and touched the mashed potatoes, I wouldn't eat that pea or that little bit of mashed potato it had touched. I don't do that anymore.
I also ate all of one food on my plate before eating the next food on my plate. I still do that. I also used to refuse to eat any new foods in public - such as at school or in a restaurant or in someone else's house - but I got over that when I lived abroad 50 years ago.
I always thought it was part of my mild Autism Spectrum diagnosis. Many neuro-divergent people do suffer with varying degrees and types of OCD, but food is the only area of life where I exhibit any obsessions. It's an extremely rigid "I'd rather die than eat that" obsession, though.
My thing was eggs from the second grade onward (after I had my appendix removed). I couldn't even crack an egg for a recipe until I was 60. My mom thought it had to do with my hospital stay. I finally figured out 3 years ago it was a traumatic incident in my young life. I was grocery shopping with my parents and pushed my finger through an egg. I thought it would eat fingers off like an acid. It was actually guilt for not telling my parents about the crime I had committed. At 66, to this day I won't eat an egg, and if someone else is available, I'll have them crack an egg for a recipe I'm making. I'm just weird though.
It's not weird, it's just you, and I can totally see the connection with your childhood story. Friends are always interrogating me about my picky eating habits and trying to find a logical explanation. I tell them over and over "Logic is not involved in any way" but they don't grok.
This is why, for so many neurodivergent people, we surround ourselves with other NDs. Likeminded friends make our fight a little easier. And we in turn can make their fight a little easier. Cheers, friend.
I've published two books and have not had an agent, but not for want of trying to get one. Both books were published by small presses, one here in the U.S., and the other in Australia. The first one was reviewed by a few agents, all of whom declined the opportunity to take me on as a client. The second one I couldn't get an agent even to take a look at it long enough to say, "Nah, not for us, thanks." For that one, I took the same route as I had taken for the first, of contacting small presses to see if I could place the book. Turned out there was an editor at a small press in Sydney who was familiar with my other published work and eagerly hoping for the day I might approach his press. But jeez, I couldn't get the book published in my own country and had to go all the way to Australia.
"If you’re writing fiction, you may wish to send a novel outline with a couple sample chapters to an agent. You can look up different forms of query letters to see how that feels. You can include the outline and sample chapters as a pdf and also copy and paste below the query email. Some agents are understandably wary of opening attachments."
NO! NO NO NO NO NO -- do not do this. If you're writing fiction, have a finished first draft before you even think of contacting an agent. Don't send any materials other than a query letter/email unless you absolutely and unmistakably know based on the research you just this minute did that the agent will accept it -- otherwise, your correspondence goes straight into the trash and you have demonstrated that you are a person who will not take the time and effort to learn what the agent wants, and no agent wants to work with a client like that. It is a ruthlessly competitive business.. Your query letter/email needs to be short and sweet -- keep it down to about 250 words and stick to the facts -- what the work is about, who you are, and what are your qualifications to write such a book.
I just heard back from an agent yesterday. I hadn't contacted one in ten years, but I have a new book I'm shopping around. She's a good agent and I've known her for years. She has read my work, both published and unpublished, and has always been helpful. I was hoping maybe this time I'd land a deal, but I got what I got, which was her careful consideration of the manuscript and her notes on things about it that I might want to revise. And I can always take notes. So I will carry on, fixing what needs to be fixed and trying again (though not with the same agent -- doing that when they haven't asked to see the work again is another no-no).
And once you have your list of agents (I think both sites let you filter search results. Handy if you're writing genre fiction), go to their website for their guidelines and 𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫.
I have a historical novel set in Ancient Rome which the few dozen people who have read it think is great: https://www.amazon.com/Year-Five-Emperors-Part-Pertinax-ebook/dp/B0CBD5QP4Q/ref=sr_1_1 (part 1) and https://www.amazon.com/Year-Five-Emperors-Part-Severus-ebook/dp/B0CDJWZJV6/ref=sr_1_1 (part 2)
Now I know that my husband has AFRID. Thanks….I’d never heard of this before.
Oy! I self published my poetry on Draft2Digital. 10 years ago. I've sold one copy, to my Niece; she TLDR... No one has ever read my book. I still believe I made something good, and I hope to write my memoirs, and publish them on Draft2Digital, even though I can expect the same experience. It's very liberating, very freeimg! It appears it's just between me and the Cosmos; as if I'm flirting with Eternity.
I'm 62 years old, hope to retire from the factory in 3 years, and finish my book(s) before I die.....and maybe, just maybe, someone, somewhere, someday, will read and appreciate my work.
Look at me, I'm a writer!
I have the world's greatest proofreader. Still need an agent.
Ta, sweetheart. I wish I knew an agent.
Now. About poetry….
I am Autistic and have foods I can’t eat due to sensory issues and dietary restrictions. I absolutely love when people ask me about my safe foods or restaurants! It also helps to decide where to eat a couple of days beforehand so I can go online and view the menu.
I'm mostly over my eating disorder, but sometimes I get anxious and it's really hard to eat (especially with other people), and there are some textures that are really more challenging. I too love the ability to look at the menu in advance of actually being there, because by the time I go somewhere I am already too anxious to figure it out. It helps a lot to be confident that I know that there are things I will be able to eat.
I wish you health and happiness. EDs are so hard to overcome because we have to eat in order to survive. People can cut drugs, alcohol, or nicotine out of their lives completely. We can’t do that with food. Keep fighting the fight!
Tell me about it!
Luckily my spouse seemed to intuitively know how to be supportive, while most other people did/do not. To this day my mom will stare at me while I'm eating and it makes me want to stop. Also makes me not want to eat around her.
So I thank you for your kind words!
Dear Sara,
I just knew I was going to like you from the start. I had always wondered why this mommy blog lacked an advice column. I gave you a lot of credit for dropping in and DARING TO PRESUME to give advice to a group of people who are so smart, attractive and obviously not in need of any advice and yet it turns out THEY DO NEED JUST THAT THING!
Then I watched you power through a rough patch where some people felt the need to hand you some shit! That took guts Ms. Sara. I always admire that.
And now today you share that you are COMIC BOOK ADJACENT!
So the fuck am I! I love the damn things and have done so for most of my life. I actually HAVE the comic books I collected back in the 60s and early 70s. Most of them are stashed in the cardboard boxes on top of the beat up old dresser down in the basement (BTW and FWIW- That dresser was down there when I moved in and it was covered in green house paint. The drawers are filled to bursting with paperback SF and Horror. It's the Genre Dressser!)
Guts! Perseverance! Comic Books!
Who could ask for anything more?
Not me! Hang in there Sara!
Grandma would give me money to walk down to the store at the corner that had a spinner rack of comics. I was a big DC guy. Then, I see this new comic, Spider-Man. Oh, I was hooked. Had #1-10 of Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, The Incredible Hulk.
I went to college. They were in a box in the attic. Mom tossed the box.
I had a great box full of comics, a complete run of Fantastic Four #9 to #112 (origin stories of Dr. Doom, the Silver Surfer etc.) plus tons of Spiderman, Thor, Hulk, etc. and some DC although I was mostly a Marvel kid. For years I thought it had not survived the move to Michigan but later Mom told me she had, in fact, lugged that box up to the new house but it was a victim of a basement flood.
If you don't mind me asking, about what year did you start reading paperback SF and Horror? Or what were the first few books or writers who got your attention? (I also have a well-aged carton of paperbacks, some 70s through some 90s...)
I cleaned and painted rental apartments and houses in a town adjacent to an Air Force base in Eastern New Mexico between 1965 and 1973. My dad was an ex Air Force Chief Master Sergent who liked having Airmen as tenants.
They left all kinds of stuff behind whenever they fulfilled their enlistment or, more commonly, got rush orders to transfer. (Viet Nam was definitely a thing.) I found all kinds of pulp fiction including a lot of SF, Horror, Action Adventure. They also often left their vinyl records as well! I had a great collection of Hendriz, Dylan, Beatles and Sly Stone.
My "employer" considered me well paid with room and board in his home and I figured the left behind literature and music to be some kind of treasure.
"Mainly, I just feel like a jerk for dragging them to a restaurant that isn’t friendly to their diet"
So let them pick the restaurant.
It's not rocket surgery.
Frankly, the inability of the writer to come up with this solution and instead berating themself as abusive makes this sounds less like a sustaining bilateral friendship and more like the individual with the eating issue actually being controlling and rolling in the secondary gain of that and the other individual being self-effacing to the point of self-flagellation.
Absolutely. If the person with the eating disorder doesn't know where she can get food she can eat lunch dates should consist of lunches brought from home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrbFydtLF-Y
Liberal podcasts?
Jill Bearup has been converting a series of YouTube Shorts into an actual novel(la?), and documenting the processes.
The entire series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-axbuh6v68
Wait, people want it to actually be a book?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdteB4XQOmk
Finding an editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7QNmMkfg2Q
Editing and rewriting and publishing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWxDa3kjYl8
Oh, hey, just FYI. I understand that that person is reportedly a transphobe. I don't know for sure and I stopped watching her vids years ago just due to time, but just thought you might want to know if you want to look into it.
Shit, really? I'll have to look into that...
<googling>
Fuck. Thanks for letting me know. 😢
Yeah, it was disappointing to me as well. I rather liked her video content. :|
I'd say for the friend with the eating disorder: Let your friend choose where to eat out...It doesn't need to be up to you since you're not the one with the disorder...
20 years ago I wrote the largest chapter for a technical handbook. I was amazed 2 years after the book was published I received a royalty check for $42.38. Since that time I've received three more checks for smaller amounts. Also, I found out that my book is fairly popular in Africa for reasons I do not know.
My 1st four books were traditionally published with one of the major houses in New York. (It took me over 50 agent/editor rejections before I landed a contract.) But then I decided I wanted to earn a living from my work, so I switched to self-publishing in 2014 and never looked back.
A lot of your decision may hinge on what you're writing. Fiction performs better than non-fiction. Some genres are gold in the self-publishing market. Others...not so much. The main benefit of self pub is the amount of control over editorial decisions, copy art, marketing, distribution, etc. Sales not going well? You can switch marketing tactics on a dime--change your ads, cover, blurb, whatever it takes to get the needle moving again. Pub houses tend not to move that quickly--if anything, once you stop selling they forget you're alive and focus their efforts on the next batch of newbies.
On the down side, you're responsible for everything in self-publishing. It's a lot of work. You'll be on the hook for finding and paying an editor (developmental, line, proofreader), cover artist, formatting, marketing, etc. And for the love of all that's good and holy, don't skimp on editors or cover art. If you don't create a professional product, reviewers will skin you alive.
Good luck on your publishing journey!
I had no idea that my childhood "picky eater" condition had an actual name - Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. I've had it since I was a toddler, and nobody else in my immediate family has it. There are certain foods and drinks and condiments that I simply refused to eat as a child, most of which I still refuse to eat. I had no logical reason for not eating or drinking them, but the first time I was exposed to them something in my brain said "NO! BAD!" Nobody, not even my mother who had a will of steel, could make me eat something once it was on the "BAD!" list.
I also wouldn't eat any foods that touched other foods on the plate, so if a pea rolled over and touched the mashed potatoes, I wouldn't eat that pea or that little bit of mashed potato it had touched. I don't do that anymore.
I also ate all of one food on my plate before eating the next food on my plate. I still do that. I also used to refuse to eat any new foods in public - such as at school or in a restaurant or in someone else's house - but I got over that when I lived abroad 50 years ago.
I could not deal with fibrous foods. Lettuce and cabbage, absolutely not. I liked orange juice if it had no pulp but could not possibly eat an orange.
It sounds like a variety of OCD
I always thought it was part of my mild Autism Spectrum diagnosis. Many neuro-divergent people do suffer with varying degrees and types of OCD, but food is the only area of life where I exhibit any obsessions. It's an extremely rigid "I'd rather die than eat that" obsession, though.
Interesting
My thing was eggs from the second grade onward (after I had my appendix removed). I couldn't even crack an egg for a recipe until I was 60. My mom thought it had to do with my hospital stay. I finally figured out 3 years ago it was a traumatic incident in my young life. I was grocery shopping with my parents and pushed my finger through an egg. I thought it would eat fingers off like an acid. It was actually guilt for not telling my parents about the crime I had committed. At 66, to this day I won't eat an egg, and if someone else is available, I'll have them crack an egg for a recipe I'm making. I'm just weird though.
It's not weird, it's just you, and I can totally see the connection with your childhood story. Friends are always interrogating me about my picky eating habits and trying to find a logical explanation. I tell them over and over "Logic is not involved in any way" but they don't grok.
This is why, for so many neurodivergent people, we surround ourselves with other NDs. Likeminded friends make our fight a little easier. And we in turn can make their fight a little easier. Cheers, friend.
Very true. Neuro-typical people can't grok us at all. Cheers to you too, friend.
IK,R? ~heavysigh~
I've published two books and have not had an agent, but not for want of trying to get one. Both books were published by small presses, one here in the U.S., and the other in Australia. The first one was reviewed by a few agents, all of whom declined the opportunity to take me on as a client. The second one I couldn't get an agent even to take a look at it long enough to say, "Nah, not for us, thanks." For that one, I took the same route as I had taken for the first, of contacting small presses to see if I could place the book. Turned out there was an editor at a small press in Sydney who was familiar with my other published work and eagerly hoping for the day I might approach his press. But jeez, I couldn't get the book published in my own country and had to go all the way to Australia.
If you're looking for an agent, please allow me to recommend you try the Poets & Writers Literary Agents database at https://www.pw.org/literary_agents, or the Literary Marketplace at https://www.literarymarketplace.com/lmp/us/index_us.asp.
"If you’re writing fiction, you may wish to send a novel outline with a couple sample chapters to an agent. You can look up different forms of query letters to see how that feels. You can include the outline and sample chapters as a pdf and also copy and paste below the query email. Some agents are understandably wary of opening attachments."
NO! NO NO NO NO NO -- do not do this. If you're writing fiction, have a finished first draft before you even think of contacting an agent. Don't send any materials other than a query letter/email unless you absolutely and unmistakably know based on the research you just this minute did that the agent will accept it -- otherwise, your correspondence goes straight into the trash and you have demonstrated that you are a person who will not take the time and effort to learn what the agent wants, and no agent wants to work with a client like that. It is a ruthlessly competitive business.. Your query letter/email needs to be short and sweet -- keep it down to about 250 words and stick to the facts -- what the work is about, who you are, and what are your qualifications to write such a book.
I just heard back from an agent yesterday. I hadn't contacted one in ten years, but I have a new book I'm shopping around. She's a good agent and I've known her for years. She has read my work, both published and unpublished, and has always been helpful. I was hoping maybe this time I'd land a deal, but I got what I got, which was her careful consideration of the manuscript and her notes on things about it that I might want to revise. And I can always take notes. So I will carry on, fixing what needs to be fixed and trying again (though not with the same agent -- doing that when they haven't asked to see the work again is another no-no).
Write on!
And once you have your list of agents (I think both sites let you filter search results. Handy if you're writing genre fiction), go to their website for their guidelines and 𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫.
And you can do multiple submissions to agents.
Gym Jordan's "work" will never see the light of day. He has destroyed any credibility he had even with with own colleagues.
𝗝𝗶𝗺 𝗝𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗮𝗻 𝘀𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗵𝗲’𝘀 ‘𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸’ 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘁 𝗯𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗛𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗮𝗰𝘆 – 𝗨𝗦 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2023/oct/20/jim-jordan-house-speaker-third-vote-us-politics-latest-updates-live
Hunter Biden's Penis, here we come!
Where "work" = "16+ years of empty wingnut performance art."
Fuck Gym. And the idiots who keep sending him back to Congress deserve exactly what they get - i.e., not a goddamn thing.
Did he finally get the point that America loathes him?
And by "work", he means bullying and threatening his colleagues into submission.
The bully isn't terribly good at thinking creatively.