#i know us and it would work right now

[lover-of-mine]

look. you have known him for 12 years and the way you describe your relationship- i- okay

let's just ask ourselves this: is there any possibility that you could make this a not long distance relationship? because if that is the dealbreaker then you should change that.

you know how they always say "marry your best friend" yes you should totally get on that because if i had a best friend in a messy on and off relationship (that clearly does not work easily because otherwise it would not be an on and off relationship) and i knew there is something there between us then oh boy. this is something if you do not try and find out if you can make it work in any way possible then you will regret it when you are 40 and 50 and 60 and 70 and you will keep thinking about the what if no matter what.

this sounds like one hell of a love story

Look, I know, I mean, am typing things out to tell you guys and this is surface level stuff, there's 12 years of stuff he did for me that are legit book stuff, I have used shit he did in fics before because it was all so *gestures vaguely* but I also know neither one of us are in a place where we could actually work in a relationship with each other, because I know that man like the back of my hand. And the long distance thing is more of a deal breaker for him than me, so not something I can fix (but there is a chance I might be moving to the same town he lives in the beginning of next year, so if we are both in a better place by then and I actually do end up moving there, I'm sitting him down and having this conversation) but he needs to work some shit out and I need to work some shit out, he's my favorite human, I don't wanna dive in when we are both not in a great place and that would definitely fuck our odds of working out up. And I know it sounds like I'm making excuses, but we talked a lot about relationships and about shit we want for the future and we both need to figure stuff out before getting into this relationship if it ever happens, because if we go there, there's no turning back and we deserve a fighting chance if it's meant to be.

[detentiontrack]

A lot of people think my autism is “getting better” but I think a lot of it has to do with being an adult and being able to make my own decisions. I used to have frequent meltdowns and shutdowns and on the outside seemed more “obviously” autistic. But I’m 19 now, so I have a lot more say in my life. I only buy one brand of socks. I only own 2 types of shoes. All of my clothes are the exact same. I only eat what *I* want to eat and think feels safe. I can drive and can choose when to leave for appointments and obligations. If I were still a child and forced to wear socks with seams in the toes or clothes that fit me wrong or foods that trigger my sensory issues or have my routine thrown off by other people, I would have A LOT more issues. But since I’m an adult, I have control over most aspects of my life. I’m not “less autistic” now, I just have more free will and know myself well enough to avoid triggers.

[lazylittledragon]

right now i'm very torn between "taking critique is important as an artist and it's not an attack on me personally" and "people commenting about my same face syndrome under my posts upsets me an unreasonable amount and i wish they would stop doing it"

[cocogum]

Yugo: “So yeah, in the end I no longer have my child body, I defeated and accepted my alter egos who have been ruining and messing around with the world, I saved Nora with some friends, I told our mother to leave if she wasn’t going to do anything, I became king of the eliatropes once again, and I got married to my childhood friend/crush which is why we got a last name now-”

Yugo’s old incarnations: “WE GOT LAID?!?!??”

[dunmeshiminimumwage]

back when i worked at [large chain coffee store], i tried to unionize my workplace. my manager sat me down and gave me a very guilt trip-y talk. lots of "but i thought we were a family :(" and "you don't *really* know what unionization does, do you?" i played dumb and managed to avoid being fired, but. chilchuck momence.

[bizarrelittlemew]

i was hoping to make a post like this under happier circumstances, but here goes.

as some of you know, everything with the cancellation and renewal campaign has happened right on top of the worst part of my mom's cancer treatment (plus the show was cancelled on my actual birthday 💀). i won't go into details, but it's been tough. lots of ups and downs, mostly downs, luckily ending (for now) on as much of an up as circumstances allow. the whole thing has been weirdly tied to the cancellation for me, kind of amplifying every feeling. the grief got mixed up, and there was so much of it - mourning the loss of the kind of future i thought i'd have with my mother and the time we might not get, mourning the end of a show that means so much to me and is such a big part of my life. different types of grief, sure, and of different magnitudes, but in one big ugly swirl. i sort of had a breakdown right at the start of february, and it was because of news about my mom, but it morphed into my brain telling me everything i'd ever written was shit and wanting to delete it all. stuff like that, spilling over.

anyway. i was holding off on writing this post to see if the show got picked up by someone else. but i still want to say it. because what also spilled over was the support and community from this fandom, and being in this space (despite the rough times and high emotions) helped me through it, because of all of you here. whether we talk regularly, or you left a comforting reply or simply a like on one of my posts about having a hard time (i tried to keep them few), or wrote a nice comment on a fic, or said something funny or nice or insightful in the tags of a gifset, or was active here (or on twt) in any way, talking/sharing/creating stuff about the show - THANK YOU.

you all helped me through all the ups and downs, and i am so grateful. thank you for being here, listening, distracting, helping me feel some joy despite the horrors. i love you and i love this incredible show and all it has brought and will continue to bring and inspire, and although it should go without saying, i'm not going anywhere. just do me a favor and give yourself a big ol' hug from me, and know that you made a difference for some random guy on the internet (but in reality for many more, and for this fandom as a whole, just by being here and being you) 💕

[skunkes]

never underestimate a cheye's ability to think "what if this is as good as it gets" about any situation

[ryllen]

"I decided it's my break day today, Oh coincidentally, I'm gonna sit here, and watch you work." also it's too cute how Nemo just came run at me whenever i sat on a bench

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[infiniteglitterfall]

pretty please, my fellow progressives

Could we please all keep in mind that the concept of "The Jews In General, or A Specific Type Of Jew, Controls Education, Government, Media, and/or Banking", is a longstanding antisemitic trope?

And most of all, that it is false??

No, a marginalized group does not also control education, the government, the media, and/or banking?

No, Jews do not secretly control these things and just pretend to be marginalized? No, Jews have not secretly been accumulating power since the Holocaust, granted by too-generous gentiles, out of pity?

No, it isn't better if you just mean a specific subgroup or kind of Jews. It's still specifically Jews.

It's like when people who hate trans/queer people are fine with rich white cis gay men. So they think it's not bigoted to blame "people with blue hair and pronouns" for the downfall of society.

We all know this means, "I only see some of you as human like me. You have to speak and act a certain way to count. Everyone in your group has to pass a test to get into the Good group."

Doesn't work.

Sure, it gives them plausible deniability to the people who matter to them. But everyone else can see exactly how they feel.

We've all known for years that it's bad to think of a marginalized group as having some "good ones." Rein it the heck in, please.

Because YES, all of those examples are ones I've seen implied, or stated outright, over and over, within the progressive community. This month alone.

[millidew]

maizuru and milsiril are my favorite fucked up dungeon meshi mother figures

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

.

[the-paris-of-people]

The past couple days online have been... interesting. I consider myself a leftist, think capitalism is corrupt, and think that it needs to be seriously reformed/overthrown. I admit that while I've thrown around phrases and terms like "burn it all down" and "the revolution needs to come" out of frustration without actually thinking about what a revolution entails: excellent organization, unity, and strategy to defeat the United States, the world's largest military superpower which has inflicted political and social destabilization across the majority of countries around the world. There also needs to be superb infrastructure and community to support the disabled, elderly, and poor populations who rely on government assistance and programs, healthcare, and accommodations while this so-called revolution rages on.

All I've received from the far leftist movement are lectures from condescending intellectuals who rattle off academic citations regarding ideological theory rather than practical, tangible steps to advocate for change in our local and regional communities. I have not seen one of them actually discuss conversations they've had with their friends, family, or Americans about what they want to see reflected for the future of the country. I have not seen one of them discussed how destructive, detrimental and traumatic a Trump presidency was for social prejudice and morale in the United States. I understand that for many marginalized groups they've been living in a facist state for centuries so the possibility Project 2025 doesn't galvanize them to see the two parties differently, but I don't think it is fair to white leftists falsely equivocate the election of both parties for the entire American population at all??? Or like at least specify the issues you're referring to in which you view both parties as the same????? Literally one TikTok creator who I used to follow talked about how true leftists are so much better than liberals because they aren't waiting for a presidential candidate to save the world NOW due to the accelerated apocalypse due to climate change but when asked how to change the world they suggest sharing ideas of your future utopia with other leftist groups. How the fuck is sitting around talking about living in a walkable community is great considered "saving the world now"? How are you going to dismantle and restructure American infrastructure to create these communities? How are you going to remove existing racial and social tensions to create a community where everyone lives happily side by side? Do people not consider reality at all?????

And is it not wrong for people to have a fucking sliver of optimism and hope at incremental change that's achieved within the corrupt bipartisan system of American politics, even if they know it's propaganda??? Is it wrong for people to have a singular fucking moment of relief in feeling like their values, beliefs, and lives will be better protected and THEY can advocate for change better??? Is it wrong when there's a couple months until the most pressing election in recent history for people to make the choice they feel will reduce the most amount of harm???

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia

Feel free to ignore if this is unwelcome, but have you ever thought about publishing traditionally to sublimate your income and draw in new readers? I know you've self published two books already and that you didn't feel like they did very well, but maybe the experience would be different if someone else was in charge of marketing and all the other business stuff?

Obviously everyone's experience is different but as an author myself who's published both trad and self, traditional publishing has been a completely different experience and has allowed me to focus more on writing because I'm not the one responsible for advertising/marketing/financing anymore.

There are a ton of literary agents nowadays that want to represent diverse and lgbtqia+ fiction, some of them even in Australia.

Websites like Reedsy, AgentQuery and Jerichowriters have extensive directories to find literary agents.

(This is lengthy folks so I'm putting the other two parts (and my response) under a read more! Also putting it under a read more so the anon can skip my response since it's very 'here's all the reasons I can't do this' and they just might not want to read that, lmao)

(continued -> )

Trad publishing houses have better resources for marketing and helping authors get more attention than any self publishing website could.

Obviously most authors, unless they're really prolific, don't get a huge advance (the average is between $1000 - $5000) but getting your foot in the door or on the traditional publishing "ladder' so to speak can have a huge benefit for your serials. Because it gives you more exposure. Plus it's in the agent's best interest to find a publishing house that accepts stories that contain darker themes and negotiate the best deal for you.

For some reason places like Amazon and the like accept and keep up more "dark" books that are traditionally published than they do with self pub ones. Maybe because they have more respect or leniency for publishing houses? I have no idea. But you could use this to your advantage. I think I remember you mentioning that writing novels felt quite isolating to you? But you already have 2 completed novels (3 if you count the fae one) that you could potentially revisit or rewrite to your liking and get them represented by agents.

You already have a loyal readership and that's very attractive to trad pub houses and agents.

As well as trad publishing, you could also make s simple website that doesn't require much maintenance. It could be just a landing page that says something about you and then has links to your tumblr and patreon where you're more active. That way you increase the chances of getting your serials found by additional readers and also come across looking more "professional". Not that you're not professional now. You are and I admire you greatly, but the unfortunate reality is a lot of people still judge by appearances and some will be more drawn to an author's website than a tumblr page, at least at first. So I think having a simple landing page would open up another door for you to benefit from.

Trad publishing is work but definitely not as much as self publishing, and you can continue on with your serials. Getting an agent can be time consuming but I personally believe the pros outweigh the cons and I also believe that your stories would be a huge treasure to the growing lgbtqia+ market. Seriously there needs to be more!

These are just suggestions and thoughts and like I said before, feel free to ignore. But I know you've mentioned wanting to grow your career in the past and I genuinely believe you can do so with some of these pathways.

~

Okay, my response. Posting this because firstly I think the suggestions could work very well for other authors reading this! And I hope they take the advice to note, and secondly because I haven't talked about this for a hot minute so let's talk about it again.

So the TL;DR is yes I have considered traditional publishing. I have actually been traditionally published in short stories, poetry, and also had my art published on covers and re: interior illustrations. But my Fae Tales works got soundly rejected when I sent them to publishing houses that were doing open calls for that sort of material. I've never heard back from an agent and I never expect to, heh.

~

Now for a bit more detail

I have been traditionally published before (it's how I got my writing out there long before I ever wrote serials), and yes, I have approached publishers with my writing since then. In fact Tradewinds was written for the traditional publishing market, and it got soundly rejected, and then shelved. The reasons it was rejected ran the gamut from 'I don't like that these fae eat humans no one is going to relate to these people' (while the editor then went on to publish vampire books idk) to 'There's too much worldbuilding you can't expect readers to keep up with this' to 'Your stories are too long, no one wants to read characters talking all the time.'

Meanwhile in my online serials I was getting feedback like 'my favourite chapters are the ones where the characters just sit in a room and talk' lol.

The traditional publishing world is also not quite as utopian for most authors as you make it seem. I'm friends with a lot of authors who are traditionally published because that's the world I came from, and unless they're solely in KU and doing generic rapid release formula romances, none of them are making that much money. Certainly not enough to live off. It may have been that you were very fortunate, anon, but I know hundreds more traditionally published authors that left trad pub to make money, and I know about 5 in trad pub personally who are making enough to live off of.

Only one of those is really writing what she truly loves to write, and even then, publishing houses have refused to commit to her entire fantasy series (and she's regularly in 'Top 10/20 Women Fantasy Authors in the World' lists) and forced her to finish the series prematurely. Something I never ever have to worry about in self pub.

The reality is that in trad pub these days, you're still in charge of most of your marketing unless you're one of the big earners for the publishing house. In fact I'd be expected to keep even more of a social media and marketing presence than I do now. I don't do almost any of the things you're supposed to do as an author in marketing to be appealing. I don't have a Facebook author account. I don't have an Instagram author account. I don't maintain or regularly send out newsletters (which automatically puts me in the like 0.05% of authors who make money doing this lmao).

I don't know if you ever have looked that closely into what m/m publishing houses expect from most of their authors, but the newsletter swaps, cover releases, review circuits, interview circuits and more are fucking grueling. We're expected to be responsible for our advertising and our marketing to a fairly massive degree. Some traditionally published in m/m still have to pay for their release blitzes out of pocket. These publishing houses, by and large, do not offer advances. You say most authors don't get large advances. I don't think most authors in this arena get offered advances at all unless they're somehow miraculously acquired by a Big 4.

We're expected to have an already established social media presence because of that (that's why it's so appealing to publishers that we have social media presences already, anon, so we can market, they can save money, and we still see only a minimal cut from the royalties).

And you still have to focus on your finances, because publishing houses like Dreamspinner straight up didn't pay a whole bunch of authors for so long they destroyed careers. They still haven't paid some of their authors. And they're still running a business and people still buy their books.

Trad publishing houses have better resources for marketing and helping authors get more attention than any self publishing website could.

This is true if a) they're a big publishing house and not an indie publisher of which most LGBTQIA+ publishing houses are and b) they're willing to use them on you.

The authors that make the most money get the most resources. If they believe you're going to earn back your advance and move thousands or tens of thousands of units per book, then yes, you will get those resources.

I have been told so many times now - even from friends who run publishing houses, including one who works at HarperCollins - that my work will never be mainstream enough to have broad appeal. They literally told me not to keep trying re: trad pub, because that was my dream for a long time. These folks have given me rock solid advice in the past, it's one of the reasons I'm doing so well now via Patreon + Ream. But they were like (paraphrasing) 'you don't write 60-80k romances and you don't want to and that's not your strength anyway, you're multi-genre which makes you hard to market, you write psychological and literary trauma recovery which is hard to market, you write character studies which are hard to market, publishing houses often don't commit to series anymore if the first two don't move units and if they pulled the plug you'd be contractually obliged to never finish that series until your contract was up.' I could go on, but it was like yeah...actually. Fair.

For some reason places like Amazon and the like accept and keep up more "dark" books that are traditionally published than they do with self pub ones. Maybe because they have more respect or leniency for publishing houses?

They do, but most publishing houses want very formulaic dark romance which is not what I write.

I have a 300k omegaverse slowburn that still hasn't had any penetrative sex in it, anon. Publishing houses don't want that. They don't expect anyone will wait 4 full length novels to get to literally a single penetrative sex scene.

But you already have 2 completed novels (3 if you count the fae one) that you could potentially revisit or rewrite to your liking and get them represented by agents.

If I rewrote them to my liking, trad pub wouldn't want them. They'd be too long! I think agents etc. take one look at me and go 'oh god, no thank you!' I'm not an easy sell, by any means.

Plus I'm very e.e about all of that with the knowledge that they then give me only about 10-15% of the royalties on the sales, vs. self-pub where I get around 70%, or subscription where I around 80% of it. When someone subscribes to me, they don't have to worry about 85-90% of their subscription fee going to a publishing house. I don't have to think about how many thousands and thousands of books I'd have to sell to make the same amount that I do now via subscription.

As well as trad publishing, you could also make s simple website that doesn't require much maintenance.

If it was that simple, I'd be doing it. I don't mean this in a facetious way, I mean it in a: I've made a lot of websites, in fact I run one at the moment not connected to my writing (I've been running it for so long it's now in its 20s and can probably has a driver's license). I find it so tedious that I barely remember to check in on it. But forgetting about it means there's always maintenance to keep up with when I get back to it.

Running websites is simpler than it used to be, but it's still not simple. There's hosting and hosting costs, there's server changes, there's back-end maintenance etc. I'm considering it for down the track, but there's a reason I decided to go the route of Patreon over my own site. There are authors (like Christopher Hopper) who actually do subscription through their own domain, but it's a lot of work.

Even placeholder sites are still work. They need updating, details change, story titles changing etc. Maintaining my Patreon + Ream About pages is enough, they're always both a little out of date, lol.

Not that you're not professional now.

Oh no, I mean from a 'traditional publisher looking at me to see what kind of candidate I am' I'm really not though. Like I said, I don't have the newsletter (100 subscribers who get one newsletter a year is not really a newsletter), I don't have the Facebook/Tiktok/Insta/Twitter/Bluesky/Threads accounts, etc. I write multi-genre across multiple steam levels, and I'm allergic to writing serials shorter than 150k. One of my best performing original serials was an 800k contemporary story with no sex in it but a lot of BDSM. It can't be marketed as clean or sweet, it's not high steam, an entire chapter is 'boy saves snail from rain.' Also he was cruel to animals, so not exactly what I'd call a sympathetic main.

And yet that story did so well for me via Patreon + Ream, because people want the kinds of stories that publishing houses generally don't want and I happen to be writing them.

Trad publishing is work but definitely not as much as self publishing, and you can continue on with your serials. Getting an agent can be time consuming but I personally believe the pros outweigh the cons and I also believe that your stories would be a huge treasure to the growing lgbtqia+ market. Seriously there needs to be more!

Anon I just literally do not believe an agent would want to represent me. I have 0% belief in that. Not from a self-deprecating angle but from a 'I am not a good bet for the trad market' perspective. From a 'I have so many friends who are trad pubbed authors who stare at me like I'm insane for writing serials as long as I do' perspective. From a 'professionals in the industry have told me it's amazing I'm doing so well in serials because there's no way they'd take a risk on what I'm doing' perspective. From a 'just because it's queer and diverse doesn't mean it hits literally any other thing a trad pub is looking for' perspective. I've been doing this for 10 years. There are agents who represent work similar to mine who know what I'm doing and wouldn't touch me with a ten foot pole. They're not missing out on a trick, they know I'm not broad appeal, and they're right.

Also the only way I'd have the energy to manage trad pub is by quitting serials. And honestly, I never found trad pub all that much fun while I was doing it for non-novel stuff. It was fine, and it is nice to have my stuff out there, but it was a ton of admin and a lot of going back and forth between people who really only care about marketing a product, and that's great and what they excel at! But I'm too disabled to turn this job into something crushing just to potentially make more money, I'd rather just quit and go back onto a full Disability Pension. I can't see any way I still get to write the stories I want to write, in the way that I write them, and be remotely appealing to a single reputable trad pub or agent.

Also *gestures to everything in this article*

[disposal-blueeee]

halloween thing i drew for an art trade with @cherry-207 ! she asked for edgar and scri dressed as angel and devil . you can see her part here !

edgar vargas belongs to jhonen vasquez

scriabin belongs to @zarla-s

[tj-crochets]

Hey y'all! Slightly weird question, but you know I love making and giving themed gift sets: Do you have any recommendations for board books or picture books with a sunshine or lemonade kind of theme? The set so far is a pink and orange and yellow quilt, a plushie sun, and a pair of pink and yellow baby booties with lemon slices all over them. It's good as-is, but I think if I can find a book to tie them all together it'd be even better