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)
Well enough that it made a lot of people really angry.
Even though I had a bit of popularity under my real name as an editor, I was honestly not prepared for the amount of attention His Cocky Valet brought my way, both positive and negative. I never expected any more than 10 people to buy it—versus, at the time of this writing, over 8,500 ebooks and paperbacks sold since its inception, and 5,100,000 KindleUnlimited page reads.
Yes. That’s million. Not thousand, not hundred thousand.
Millions of pages read.
But beyond people just reading the books—some of them going in to hate read, ready to sneer at it, and some were pleasantly surprised, others fully vindicated, the book was wildly polarizing and people either loved it wholeheartedly or hated it from the depths of their souls—I was just…barraged with questions. How did I write it so quickly? How did I come up with the idea? Did I have plans to make it a series?
And with those questions came the rumors.
That I was a shitty opportunist who used the #CockyGate situation to promote myself. Just me; none of the other authors writing cocky books to help protest the trademark action. Those authors were fine, but me? I’d done something wrong, violated some unspoken rule. Nevermind that it was actually Twitter’s idea, and they egged me on, enjoyed the entire process, found it something fun in a depressing situation to see someone taking a strike back where they couldn’t. Nevermind that I could never have predicted the book’s success, and was just as shocked as everyone else. You know those dirty opportunistic POC, don’t you? Always manipulating people for a dollar, for a dime.
That I had no class, and didn’t seem to understand that just because I could do the thing didn’t mean I should do the thing, because didn’t I realize how unfair it was to other authors who didn’t write that quickly? I must be trying to make other people feel bad.
That I was mentally ill, there was something wrong with me, something sick, for writing a fairly mild care/dependency kink for the sake of a story that reflects nothing about my real life or preferences. That I should quit writing and get help. Even that I must be a pedophile, because frequently I write cis men who still have trans-coded body types, a way of pushing my own comfort zones closer and closer to being comfortable writing a trans main character, and some have conflated describing bodies that don’t fit heteronormative cis ideals of masculinity with describing children.
Ew.
Then there’s the rumor that I didn’t actually write the book in a week. I just took some old Black Butler fanfic—mine or copying someone else’s, depends on who you ask—and repurposed it, which doesn’t even make sense, because somehow the book’s at once so shitty it’s obvious I wrote it in a week, and yet simultaneously something I already had finished and waiting to be polished. Nevermind, again, that I haven’t written or read fanfic since 1998. And nevermind that it was actually inspired by Noctis and Ignis in FFXV, but with Black Butler references intentionally thrown in to make fans of the manga and anime laugh since I knew exactly the nature of the beast I was creating.
That there had to be some trick to it, no way I could have written it that quickly at all, let alone writing it that quickly and letting it be anything decent, because if they couldn’t do it, how could someone so clearly inferior pull off such an accomplishment?
I could pretty much see what was happening, now.
I violated a few too many thou shalt nots.
I wrote a book very quickly, and it dared to be something a large volume of people enjoyed; something people found good, worthy of their time and their $2.99-3.99.
I proved that when you push QTPOC to do difficult and even impossible things, we shine, because we’re already used to working twice as hard to get half as far.
I dared to have any measure of success while visibly brown and queer; I forgot my place, got a little too uppity, stole the attention and praise others felt was their just due.
I wasn’t upset enough by—didn’t even notice—the people who hated the book and wanted me to cower away, wringing my hands and apologizing to the world for being such a terrible writer. For existing at all, let alone where people had to be aware of me.
And for that, I had to be punished.
Some of it was born of racism, ableism, queermisia. Some of it was born of pettiness and insecurity. Some of it was because people just don’t like me as a person and needed only the smallest excuse to gleefully prove I was objectively A Bad. Some of it wasn’t even personal, it was just the carnivorous enjoyment of a scandal, and wanting to feed into it because the more salacious it is, the more delicious it is.