Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
A kinder person shows you what it looks like.
AFTERWORD II
THIS SERIES WAS FIRST STARTED on a whim as a standalone title. His Cocky Valet, written in a week of spite-fueled, Twitter-enabled mania in which thousands of people watched along while I wrote that book as one of many droves of authors who started pumping out novellas and novels with “cocky” in the title and series name, a challenge to another egotistical author’s attempt to trademark the use of “cocky” series-wide and prevent other authors from ever using it, as if you can ever own a single common use word that way.
That author discovered that Romancelandia does not fuck around.
While I discovered what happened when thousands of people watch you write a novel at breakneck speed, and then dive into their curiosity about what you could possibly have done in that time, and with such source material.
That curiosity changed my life.
This series changed my life, in some ways for the better, in many ways for the worse.
I’ve always been a fast writer. I gained the ability working as a CPRW, on the hook for multiple deadlines daily, hating the work and thus putting it off until the last minute—where I’d have about an hour and a half to parse sometimes dozens of pages of client data and then render it down into a comprehensible two-page, 750-1,000-word document. Procrastination will teach you to be superhuman, before it teaches you what burnout feels like.
But even with that ability, I’ve always second-guessed myself into writing slowly when it came to my fiction. There are a thousand tenets of thou shalt not in professional fiction writing, including fast writing is bad writing, and as someone who used to work in publishing on the other side of the desk, I can tell you that publishing only has one universal truth:
Thou shalt not is absolute bullshite.
For every thou shalt not, there’s always someone who said I shall and made it work, and work beautifully. There’s always someone who challenged the status quo and dared to point out that so many of our thou shalt nots are rooted in classism, elitism, privilege, established rules set out by a traditional publishing industry that hasn’t changed for the better in so many years. Those thou shalt nots set up a framework to judge others not by whether or not their work is good, but whether or not it fits into a palatable box.
And those thou shalt nots get under people’s skin long before they ever get to the point of finishing books, especially for marginalized writers like myself.
Before I struck out into self-publishing, traditional publishing told me in no uncertain terms that it did not welcome stories like mine. Crit groups mocked my sci-fi stories when a hint of queerness peeked onto the page, making “bow-chicka-wow-wow” porn noises whenever two queer male characters even spoke to each other, then dismissing the story in derision, saying they expected better from me than lowly romance. Agents requested partials of my magical Black girl YA novel, then soundly rejected it for the sole reason—every time—that they didn’t believe the minor incidental character detail that a fifteen-year-old Black girl in Chicago could possibly take AP chemistry courses; nevermind that as a fourteen-year-old part-Black kid in New Orleans I’d already passed that AP course and moved on to others. A teenager who could talk to the air and have it talk back was fine. AP classes? For a Black girl? Horribly unbelievable. And when I rewrote the story as upper YA sci-fi with mutants and alien invasions, I got so many full requests I couldn’t keep up with them.
Without fail, every agent who requested said they stopped connecting with the main character in the middle of chapter three.
The middle of chapter three, by the way, was where the main character openly and explicitly stated she was Black, rather than just dropping context clues.
Go figure, huh.
Just a coincidence, though, right?
The first book I ever sold, I was asked to write an article for a major national romance blog as part of a promotional tour for its launch. I spoke about being marginalized in this industry, about the pain of it, the frustration, the defiance.
The article was rejected, sent back, called too violent, too hostile. I was asked to write something more pleasant and positive.
I did.
And it felt so false it tasted like plastic on my tongue.
Play nice, play nice.
Thou shalt not make people uncomfortable with their privilege.
The small (at the time) publisher I wrote that book for contracted me for another book. While also hiring me into a job there as an editor, and informing me in no uncertain terms that although I originally came to them as an author, I would be expected to make a choice between writing and editing at some point, because I wouldn’t be able to balance both. The clear expectation was that I would choose editing. That I would realize my stories had no value, and my time was better spent editing others’ stories, particularly stories depicting people who weren’t marginalized like the ones I wrote about.