#queer writers

[goodluckclove]

You Don't Need an Agent! Publishers That Accept Unsolicited Submissions

I see a few people sayin that you definitely need an agent to get published traditionally. Guess what? That's not remotely true. While an agent can be a very useful tool in finding and negotiating with publishers, going without is not as large of a hurdle as people might make it out to be!

Below is a list of some of the traditional publishers that offer reading periods for agent-less manuscripts. There might be more! Try looking for yourself - I promise it's not that scary!

Albert Whitman & Company: for picture books, middle-grade, and young adult fiction

Hydra (Part of Random House): for mainly LitRPG

Kensington Publishing: for a range of fiction and nonfiction

NCM Publishing: for all genres of fiction (YA included) and nonfiction

Pants of Fire Press: for middle-grade, YA, and adult fiction

Tin House Books: very limited submission period, but a good avenue for fiction, literary fiction, and poetry written by underrepresented communities

Quirk Fiction: offers odd-genre rep for represented and unagented authors. Unsolicited submissions inbox is closed at the moment but this is the page that'll update when it's open, and they produced some pretty big books so I'd keep an eye on this

Persea Books: for lit fiction, creative nonfiction, YA novels, and books focusing on contemporary issues

Baen: considered one of the best known publishers of sci-fi and fantasy. They don't need a history of publication.

Chicago Review Press: only accepting nonfiction at the moment, but maybe someone here writes nonfiction

Acre: for poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Special interest in underrepresented authors. Submission period just passed but for next year!

Coffeehouse Press: for lit fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation. Reading period closed at time of posting, but keep an eye out

Ig: for queries on literary fiction and political/cultural nonfiction

Schaffner Press: for lit fiction, historical/crime fiction, or short fiction collections (cool)

Feminist Press: for international lit, hybrid memoirs, sci-fi and fantasy fiction especially from BIPOC, queer and trans voices

Evernight Publishing: for erotica. Royalties seem good and their response time is solid

Felony & Mayhem: for literary mystery fiction. Not currently looking for new work, but check back later

This is all what I could find in an hour. And it's not even everything, because I sifted out the expired links, the repeat genres (there are a lot of options for YA and children's authors), and I didn't even include a majority of smaller indie pubs where you can really do that weird shit.

A lot of them want you to query, but that's easy stuff once you figure it out. Lots of guides, and some even say how they want you to do it for them.

Not submitting to a Big 5 Trad Pub House does not make you any less of a writer. If you choose to work with any publishing house it can take a fair bit of weight off your shoulders in terms of design and distribution. You don't have to do it - I'm not - but if that's the way you want to go it's very, very, very possible.

Have a weirder manuscript that you don't think fits? Here's a list of 50 Indie Publishers looking for more experimental works to showcase and sell!

If Random House won't take your work - guess what? Maybe you're too cool for Random House.

[cruelflesh]

forget who’s the top or bottom, which one of you is nursing a fresh bite-sized wound and which one of you is licking the blood off your teeth

[rs-hawk]

Your Siren Boyfriend eventually tricking you into the water after weeks of just chatting to you on the docks. He never sings or tries to convince you to come in. He sits in the water, his arms propping him up on the low dock so you two can talk. His eyes dark as a trench, and you can’t help but worry about all the light on the surface hurting him. Even at night, it’s still brighter than where he’s from.

The night you bring him sunglasses is when he knows you’re going to be his mate. He feigns confusion and asks how to put them on. You giggle and lean forward, setting them on his face. He takes that moment to grab your wrists, yanking you into the salt water. You barely manage to catch a breath before hitting the water, not that it matters because as soon as he kisses you, you suddenly can breathe.

You want to be angry at him, but he looks so happy. He starts clicking and chirping, something he hasn’t done in a few weeks since he realized you can’t understand him. It must be like when you gets excited and revert to your mother tongue.

His shark teeth gently nip at you neck as he tugs at your clothes, encouraging you to slip out of your swimsuit. You know that you shouldn’t. This isn’t right. But you can’t help yourself. The feeling of your Siren slipping inside of you makes you whimper. He pushes you against the shifting sand of the ocean floor, slamming into you roughly. You can’t help the moans and sounds that escape your mouth. Thank God you can breathe under water now because there’s no way you could have contained yourself.

When he’s done, he eases back, burying his face between your trembling legs. His fat tongue encourages you to finish, and you do rather quickly. Once he’s satisfied, his kisses make their way back up to your lips.

“You’ll stay with me, won’t you?”

[absurdlyinaccurate]

me, the motherfucker with over 50 abandoned works in progress: i have an idea

[byoldervine]

Types Of Writer’s Block (And How To Fix Them)

1. High inspiration, low motivation. You have so many ideas to write, but you just don’t have the motivation to actually get them down, and even if you can make yourself start writing it you’ll often find yourself getting distracted or disengaged in favour of imagining everything playing out

Try just bullet pointing the ideas you have instead of writing them properly, especially if you won’t remember it afterwards if you don’t. At least you’ll have the ideas ready to use when you have the motivation later on

2. Low inspiration, high motivation. You’re all prepared, you’re so pumped to write, you open your document aaaaand… three hours later, that cursor is still blinking at the top of a blank page

RIP pantsers but this is where plotting wins out; refer back to your plans and figure out where to go from here. You can also use your bullet points from the last point if this is applicable

3. No inspiration, no motivation. You don’t have any ideas, you don’t feel like writing, all in all everything is just sucky when you think about it

Make a deal with yourself; usually when I’m feeling this way I can tell myself “Okay, just write anyway for ten minutes and after that, if you really want to stop, you can stop” and then once my ten minutes is up I’ve often found my flow. Just remember that, if you still don’t want to keep writing after your ten minutes is up, don’t keep writing anyway and break your deal - it’ll be harder to make deals with yourself in future if your brain knows you don’t honour them

4. Can’t bridge the gap. When you’re stuck on this one sentence/paragraph that you just don’t know how to progress through. Until you figure it out, productivity has slowed to a halt

Mark it up, bullet point what you want to happen here, then move on. A lot of people don’t know how to keep writing after skipping a part because they don’t know exactly what happened to lead up to this moment - but you have a general idea just like you do for everything else you’re writing, and that’s enough. Just keep it generic and know you can go back to edit later, at the same time as when you’re filling in the blank. It’ll give editing you a clear purpose, if nothing else

5. Perfectionism and self-doubt. You don’t think your writing is perfect first time, so you struggle to accept that it’s anything better than a total failure. Whether or not you’re aware of the fact that this is an unrealistic standard makes no difference

Perfection is stagnant. If you write the perfect story, which would require you to turn a good story into something objective rather than subjective, then after that you’d never write again, because nothing will ever meet that standard again. That or you would only ever write the same kind of stories over and over, never growing or developing as a writer. If you’re looking back on your writing and saying “This is so bad, I hate it”, that’s generally a good thing; it means you’ve grown and improved. Maybe your current writing isn’t bad, if just matched your skill level at the time, and since then you’re able to maintain a higher standard since you’ve learned more about your craft as time went on

[mx-ryder]

Hey Writeblr,

I have a very specific request.

Will you tell me about your old OCs? I'm talking like middle school/high school edgy OCs. The ones who make you cringe when you remember them, because they're so awful. The Mary-Sue's, the self-inserts. The ones you would never ever ever resurrect because oh my gods they're irredeemable. The over-powered ones. The dark-haired boys with crooked smiles and ocean orbs. The girls who are so not like those other girls.

I'd like to hear about them please! I desire to know them!

[so-many-ocs]

babe are you okay? you’ve barely touched your word count

[ink-flavored]

i wear women’s deodorant and men’s cologne i mix pink and blue to match my birthstone amethyst, creating a synthesis a dialectic speaking my singleness womanly chivalry and masculine grace a twist of the wrist that turns on its face bending borders into a threshold equal parts silver and gold i lead and i follow a solo in parts it’s hard pill to swallow if you’re scared of the arts i’ve never been more one than my two perhaps this will give you a breakthrough— the illusion that arose of oil and of water proves that opposition serves those opposed to the other as for me, i’ll keep my duality it beats a boxed-in, binary, banality

                                       – bigender means

Poetry Taglist (Check out my Google form to get added): @elegant-paper-collection​ @polyphonetic @qelizhus @liv-is @maxdamax @auroblaze

[hiddenjane]

Poetry and picture by hiddenjane

[queerism1969]

[longlostlesbian]

accepting that love isn’t purely romantic is so difficult. but it’s true. love is everything and everywhere. its your friends. its the soft embrace of a warm spring breeze. it’s picking up a new hobby. it’s the sea spray during summer. it’s the small corner store you went to as a child. it’s everything. the world is built on love.

[goodluckclove]

Listen: I accidentally drank more than I expected tonight. I'm about to play Rollplayer with wife but before I do let me just throw it out there that when I hit 200 followers (I'm at 175 now) I'll post the human on robot sex scene I wrote for a failed novel like five years ago.

It's the only erotica I've ever written and I don't think it'll count as erotica to most people but I don't actually think it's terrible.

Don't let me forget. Clove commits to the bit. I love you all drink water think about a friendly frog.

[rookthebird]

the most important ingredients for a male character are

-beautiful, flowing hair

-the saddest most pathetic and downtrodden vibes you've ever seen in your life

hope that helps!

[rs-hawk]

A mtf werewolf girlfriend that hates shifting. She struggles with being so hairy, and how huge her cock gets at that time of the month. The only thing that makes her feel a little better is when you point out that you both have a “that time of the month”.

However, you start complementing her when she shifts, much to her confusion and surprise. Of course you love how furry and hairy she gets. You love her hair and her fur is so soft and it smells like her shampoo. She’s big enough to literally crush you but she could step on your throat and you’d thank her (that always makes her laugh). No, her cock doesn’t make you think she’s less of a woman. She’d have to dick you down with a strap if she didn’t have it and this adds excitement to your breeding kink, especially if she would just give into her primal urge and fucking knot you already.

You know that it’s not going to help eradicate her dysmorphia, but you hope it helps, because no matter what your Werewolf Girlfriend is the most beautiful woman in the world.

[windspoem]

august

[byoldervine]

How To (Realistically) Make A Habit Of Writing

To clarify: Works with my autism. WORKS WITH MY AUTISM!!! I’ve been meeting my goals since I made them my New Year’s resolution! Anyway I’m so sick of all those ‘how to’ guides that don’t actually tell you what the process is they’re just like ‘just do it, but don’t burn yourself out, do what’s best for you!’ because you’re not telling me what I’m not supposed to be burning myself out over but okay, so I made my own. Hope this helps

1. Choose your fighter metric. What works better for you as a measurement of your progress; time spent writing or your word count? Personally I get very motivated and encouraged by seeing my word count go up and making a note of where it should be when I’m done, so I measure by that. At the same time, a lot of people are also very discouraged by their word count and it can negatively impact their motivation to write, and in that case you may be better off working from how much time you spend writing rather than where the word count is

2. Choose your starter Pokémon time frame. How often can you write before it starts to feel like a chore or a burden rather than something fun you look forward to? Many people believe that they have to write daily, but for some people this can do more harm than good. Maybe every two or three days? Weekly? Figure out what fits your schedule and go with it

3. Choose your funny third joke goal. Now that you’ve got your chosen time frame to complete your goal in, what’s a reasonable goal to aim to complete within that time frame based on the metric you chose? If your metric is your word count, how much can you reasonably and consistently write within your chosen time frame? If your metric is time spent writing, how much time can you reasonably and consistently spend writing within that time? Maybe 1000 words per week works, or maybe 10 minutes per day? The goal here is to find something that works for you and your own schedule without burning you out

4. Trial and error. Experiment with your new target and adapt it accordingly. Most people can’t consistently write 1667 words per day like you do in NaNoWriMo, so we want to avoid that and aim somewhere more reasonable. If you feel like it’s too much to do in such a short time frame, either give yourself less to do or more time to do it in. If you find yourself begrudgingly writing so often that it constantly feels more like a chore than something fun, maybe consider adapting things. And if you think that you gave yourself too much wiggle room and you could do more than this consistently, give yourself more of a challenge. Everything needs to suit you and your pace and needs

5. Run your own race. Don’t feel like you’re not accomplishing enough in comparison to others or not working fast enough to satisfy some arbitrary feeling of doubt. Everybody works at their own pace and slower work doesn’t mean worse work. You could be on one word per day and you’ll still see consistent results, which is still one word per day more than you could originally count on. All progress is progress, regardless of its speed