Yesterday and today, I worked on planning what I will be doing for the next few months. I know that I have a few deadlines that will all hit at the same time, including one that I anticipate problems with, so I needed to work out a game plan. I have the usual HoC episodes to get out, but after March 14th, I will have run out of material written this past November for NaNoWriMo. So I need to get back to writing new sections, as I’ve been coasting up to this point. There’s another SSBB issue scheduled for April and it’s historical. Historical has always been a genre I would love to get into, except the prospect of all that research and needing to get it right has scared me off. So I need to give myself as much time as possible.
Also in April is Script Frenzy, an event put on by the same lunatics who brought us NaNoWriMo. I’ve done Script Frenzy three times and each time has been such a stunning flop that I now think of the event with no small amount of shame, fear, and desperation. Uh, yeah. So I’m thinking maybe script-writing isn’t for me. But I know there are always some people who use the time to do an unofficial NaNo again and I was thinking of doing the same. I’m not sure what I want to do exactly. I was thinking a novella, but I could be tempted into doing something longer and just using April as a jumping-off point.
And following naturally from the plan to write something new and long was my search for more publishers. Prompted by a conversation with my mother, I went hunting to see what I could turn up. I went looking specifically for lgbt (q, i, a, p and so on — the list seems to get longer every time I see it) romance publishers. I got a few lucky hits and found some interesting possibilities. I’ve heard some rave reviews of Samhain Publishing, which is taking submissions for a broad range of romance combo plates. And I stumbled on Carina Press, which I gather is a new, all e-book imprint of Harlequin. They both want genres I’m interested in and their submission guidelines were certainly enticing. Unlike (and I will name no names, of course) some of the other publishers I turned up today. My reaction to a few was to ask, will you be handing out the paint-by-numbers kits or are we permitted to purchase them ourselves? My reactions to others bordered on rabid weasel. Mm, yeah. Fun stuff. But these two sound great and now I’m hungry to write something that could go out to them.
(On the topic of publishers and rabid weasels: can I just say how utterly ridiculous it is to classify all gay/lesbian romance into the highest “heat” rating, regardless of actual content? Yes, fine, I should be grateful that publishers have become open-minded enough to take lgbt stories at all. Except, wait, no, I do not accept the lowest possible standard of not sucking. Because, hey, radically unfair to lump all lgbt stories in a category that is otherwise defined not just as explicit sex and kink, but also as multiple partners and violence. And I am quoting one publisher’s submission guidelines on that bit, so I kind of want to gnaw someone’s arm off. If you’re going to do lgbt romance, get it right [which is to say, open your eyes and notice that it runs the same gamut as any other subgenre in romance]. Otherwise, don’t do it at all. No one really needs you to reinforce the notion that all lgbt people and their relationships are deviant, promiscuous, and/or abusive in some way.)