Static Edition of Elements of Arousal

This book was written as a complete guide to producing gay erotica in a publishable form, marketing the finished work, and establishing a freelance writing business. While the particulars of gay erotica provide most of the examples in this book, the qualities of good writing, the methods of marketing literary work, and practices of sound business are the same, whatever the kind of work.

Those who hope to write for publication on any subject must begin with an ability to write a reasonably good sentence. This ability ought to have been acquired in high school grammar courses, and anyone who can write a coherent business letter or a book report has it. Unfortunately, many beginners believe that simple literacy is enough, and having made good grades in English courses, they think they have all the writing skills necessary to produce a best-selling novel.

Writing for publication, however, requires more highly developed and specialized writing skills. Bridging the gap between mere literacy and the ability to write for publication is the subject of this book.

While I wrote this book with the affection I feel for the subject and I have made many examples light and pertinent, parts of this book are not especially entertaining. If there is a giggle in the part about taxes, I do not know it. Some parts are meant to be used as a handbook, to be kept at your desk and referred to as necessary. Points of editorial style and manuscript preparation, like any other technical material, should be skimmed in armchair reading. The part on taxes will be helpful when you set up your account book, but much of it will be easier to follow when you have the tax forms in front of you.

There are two kinds of material in this book. The material in the latter part (of this edition) is about setting up a freelance writing business, preparing the manuscript, and selling the finished product. Such material is factual. Occasionally you may find an editor who wishes you to handle some detail differently. Tax rules may change. A beginning writer should follow the directions in the latter part of the book until or unless he or she knows a very good reason to deviate from them.

The material in the first part of this book is of a different kind. It deals with composing the literary work in general and the work of gay erotica in particular.

Gay erotica is the principal historic form of gay literature. Literature is an art. In art, rules and principles are hardly more than good advice, the best surmises of the modern and ancient masters of our craft. If the latter part of the book is knowledge, in the first part I have put into my own words and passed on to you what seems to me to be wisdom.

Unfortunately, wisdom does not always succeed and folly sometimes does. Hardly anything I recommend in the first part of the book is done all the time by every successful writer. At least one genius has provided a counterexample to each rule I give. What I give you is the main chance, the things most likely to make your stories good if you do them most of the time.

In the latter part of the book I say to use white paper for manuscripts. In the first part I advise against writing in the second person. Some second-person stories do appear; editors hardly ever buy stories submitted on lime green paper. In the first part I advise against shifting tenses. But I have shifted tenses at times with some success. In the second part I say never staple a manuscript; I never have and I never will.

In a few cases I have not defined some peripheral terms. I hope that you will take these opportunities to establish a closer relationship with your dictionary. Of someone who is becoming a writer, this is not too much to ask. I have taken some liberties with other terms, saying for example "the verb of the sentence" rather than "the predicate." Many students are never exposed to the more precise terms, and I hope those who know better will indulge my attempt to make this material broadly accessible.

I have sometimes revealed my assumption that the writer of gay men's erotica is a gay man. In principle there is no reason this should be so. Although, especially in books, lesbian literature now does relatively well commercially, in the past lesbian authors have written successful male romances. Several good writers of gay erotica are women, both lesbian and nongay. Gay men sometimes write nongay erotica. At least one author in the gay men's market is a man who is married to a woman. Nonetheless, a person with doubts about gay sexuality and gay culture better work in another market. If you can write convincingly about things you do not believe in, there are plenty of things more lucrative to write about while you do not believe in them.

I assume no reader of this book needs a lecture on the naturalness of gay sexuality in gay people, the value of gay culture, the justice of the gay liberation movement, and the importance of literature that serves gay people. In places I make unflattering remarks about Political Correctness. Those remarks, of course, are not directed at the principle of serving gay people through gay literature, but at the superficial, simpleminded application of that principle. It is an infantile disorder to insist that all fictional gay men be admirable fellows, that no characters be drag queens, that every story read like a safe-sex manual, that every occurrence of a very large cock is reprehensible, that readers will emulate every act described in a work of fiction, and that every evil that exists in the world can be blamed on white, nongay, male capitalists.

To entertain gay readers for a while is laudable; entertainment is sufficient reason for gay erotica to exist. We cannot expect cardboard, bloodless, unsexed characters to be very entertaining. But if we can do our duty to entertain and also tell something of the truth of our history, show some of our pride in our gayness, reveal the justness of our cause, or illuminate some neglected possibility; so much the better. Gay people deserve not a propaganda, but a literature, a literature as full and rich and complete as any people ever had. Such a literature cannot be encompassed by doctrine, bounded by dogma, or imprisoned by the lefter-than-thou.

Beginning writers often have misconceptions of what they need and do not need to succeed in writing. Certain misconceptions are so common and so predictable, that anyone who raises such issues will be identified immediately as a rank beginner. Although many of the following points are covered in more detail in appropriate parts of this book, they are the concerns that beginners always raise, and in raising the points mark themselves as rank amateurs. The answers are provided here, so that you need not embarrass yourself by asking the questions at a seminar or workshop.

You do not need to worry about copyright. Do not put copyright notices on material you submit in the ordinary manner to established magazines and book publishers, and do not even ask about copyright registration.

I do not know why beginners believe piracy is a big problem. But they do believe it. In fact, piracy is extremely rare. These remarks apply only to print; the situation in screenwriting is different.

The mundane facts of copyright are explained later in this book. Do not worry about theft until you are producing material worth stealing. Meanwhile, if you have the opportunity to question a writer in a seminar or elsewhere, do not waste the opportunity by asking about copyright.

Fortunately. You cannot get a real agent. Some contributors of gay erotica are active in other markets; their agents may handle the gay erotica as part of a package deal. Most writers do better marketing in this specialized field than any general agency could.

Although the reasons differ, the resulting advice is not much different for beginning writers in other markets. You are unlikely to produce enough material that does well enough that an agent could make a profit representing you. From time to time agents do accept new clients who have small, but promising careers. This is speculation on the agent's part. Fifteen percent of what a beginner makes will not cover the cost of the phone calls, postage, and copying required to sell his work. More usually an agent is engaged when a writer is negotiating his or her first book contract with a major house.

Manuscripts must stand on their own merit. A writer who sent a work to every appropriate publication in the market without receiving an offer does not need an agent, but needs to learn to write better. The beginner who moans "If only I had an agent!" may entertain his or her friends with this routine, but knowledgeable people will understand the complaint really is "If only I had some talent!"

Unfortunately, the belief that an agent can work miracles with unpublishable material leads some would-be writers to employ services that seem to be literary agencies, but are not. Real agents get paid only when they have sold a manuscript. Real agents accept only writers who are already producing marketable work. Real agents do not attempt to teach their clients how to write. And real agents do not charge reading or consulting fees. Agencies that advertise for clients are criticism services (or worse), not literary representatives.

When he cannot recall how many of his books are in print, or when she falls behind in her bookkeeping because the checks are arriving so often, a writer will have little difficulty in engaging a real agent. However, a lover or roommate pressed into service as a business manager may do as well, and exactly this solution suits several mass-market writers.

Yes, I have an agent. And truly, I did not make a great deal of money from writing until I had one. But I had sold several dozen stories, was selling virtually every story I wrote, and had two books in print before I got an agent. My agent is not really in the business of being a literary representative, but is a successful novelist who represents, besides me and himself, only one other client. Here is something my agent did for me:

He submitted several chapters of my memoir to a prestigious magazine. The editor said the magazine might like to run the piece in its reprint section. But to be reprinted, the piece had to be printed in another publication first. The editor suggested a little literary magazine that might be interested in the piece. My agent submitted the piece to the little literary magazine, and sure enough the editor of the little literary magazine snapped it up enthusiastically. When my agent got back to the prestigious magazine, however, interest had evaporated. My agent sold a second piece to the little literary magazine.

Up to this point, my agent had done nothing more than I would have done, had I had the audacity to approach the prestigious magazine in the first place. Then my agent did something that would never have occurred to me. He sent the second piece to the prestigious magazine. The prestigious magazine ran an excerpt of the second piece in its reprint section, and this event proved to be the turning point in my career.

Having been through the loop once with the prestigious magazine, my personal feelings of rejection would have prevented me from sending anything to the prestigious magazine again. But my agent did not have his personal feelings on the line. What he perceived of the first rejection was not the rejection, but that the editor of the prestigious magazine had been interested in my work, interested enough to have suggested the little literary magazine. My agent, in other words, saw a positive sign, where I would have seen only a negative one.

He did not take the editor of the prestigious magazine to lunch. He did not use his literary clout, because he did not have any big-name clients to use as leverage on the editor. He simply went about marketing my work systematically and objectively, just as I might have done, had I been marketing someone else's work. This was my agent's first sale to the prestigious magazine, his first two sales to the little literary magazine, and besides his own work, his first sales outside the gay market.

A less-sensitive writer with a mailing address could have done everything for him- or herself that my agent did for me, and any writer's friend or companion with a head for business and copy of Writer's Market might have done the same. That does not make my agent's or any agent's services less valuable. I merely mean to point out that having an agent is not a mystical, magical key to writing success.

The advantages of a computer are so great that any writer ought to get one when it is within his means. A new system more than adequate for a writer's needs costs less than $1,500. But I began writing on a typewriter, and my first computer came from a Dumpster.

Although now I write on a computer and could hardly do the work I do without one, computers do have several drawbacks. The principal drawback is that computers can make attractive manuscripts of even the most inferior material. Making revisions with a computer is very easy, but sometimes a manuscript may look so pretty that the writer will not realize a revision is necessary. Many things can be done with computers that seem to be work, but do not actually produce new material. Computer files could always be better organized, old work can be called up for review with a touch of a button, material needs to be archived and backed up, new programs which promise greater efficiency can be installed, and the computer has some very enticing games---one can spend whole days at a computer without having written anything.

The desktop publishing features of many computers may entice beginners to attempt to produce work in camera-ready form. Editors will not bother reading material prepared in this manner, but a writer may continue to produce his dream-world books in this manner for a long time before someone enlightens him. Some beginners will spend time worrying which computer to buy and learning to do useless things with the computers they do buy when their time would be better spent in learning to write.

Time spent learning to use a keyboard, however, is not wasted. Modern typesetters will not work from handwritten manuscripts. Publishers will not pay for typing. Most editors will return handwritten manuscripts unread. Whether you compose early drafts in pencil or do even the first sketches at a keyboard, the entire manuscript must be keyed or typed---perhaps many times over. Few writers have the resources in either love or money to get someone else to do this work. Manuscript preparation differs from general typing or word processing; an office typist, even if his or her services can be obtained, will need detailed instructions to prepare a manuscript properly.

Since each keying or typing of the manuscript is a chance to make minor revisions, the writer does not need great typing speed, but the hunt-and-peck method is too tedious. If your fingers know the locations of the keys and you achieve a speed of 20 or 30 words per minute, that is adequate for a beginner. Those who cannot type at all can borrow a touch-typing manual from a library, and can learn the locations of the keys within a two-week loan period. Speed is achieved through practice that, it is to be hoped, the writer obtains by writing.

The QWERTY keyboard (so called by the letters over the left hand's home row) will remain the American standard. Writers who feel limited by the 60, 80, or 100 words per minute obtainable on the QWERTY keyboard may investigate faster keyboards (such as the Dvorak) with the understanding that skill in a system other than QWERTY will restrict a writer to special-order typewriters and to word processors with programmable keyboards. (But writers who do not have full use of two hands should investigate special Dvorak keyboards designed for them.)

Writers' clubs offer several advantages: opportunities for book signings and other promotions, group insurance or credit union membership that may be unobtainable otherwise, programs and speakers, discounts on workshops, cooperative purchasing of materials, and exposure to working writers. A writer in the gay market may blame the gay market for his problems: late payment, disadvantageous offers, and slow reporting. The horror stories of writers working in other markets will put the gay writer's experiences in perspective.

Drawbacks of writing clubs are many: many are not ready to deal with frankly gay, frankly erotic material or its author; some writers' groups become mutual admiration societies that avoid the sharp criticism a writer has a right to expect from her peers; others are literary snake pits in which criticism of the writer's work is little different from criticism of his character or personality; many members of writers' clubs are the hopelessly unpublishable whose advice, criticism, and company may be worse than useless.

As will become clear, you need a good, current, college-sized, American dictionary---no matter how well you spell and no matter how much confidence you have in your electronic spelling checker. The name Webster's alone is now a generic name used freely by publishers of dictionaries both good and bad. Some authoritative dictionaries do not use the name Webster's, and many dictionaries that bear the name Webster's are not reliable.

Several dictionaries are authoritative. If you have a current edition of an authoritative dictionary, use it. If you are starting from scratch or if your dictionary is ten years out of date, you cannot go wrong with the current Merriam-Webster Collegiate, which contains as many entries from gay patois and erotic language as any general dictionary.

An unabridged dictionary is unnecessary. Unabridged dictionaries, besides being unwieldy, are not revised often enough to be useful for ordinary composition. If you own one, use it to resolve points not resolved by your college-sized dictionary. For consistency's sake, your college-sized dictionary and your unabridged dictionary should be issues of the same company. Consult first the current college-sized diction and prefer its usage.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is available in a tiny-type, so-called compact edition. It is the historic record of English. People who love words can derive many hours of pleasure from the OED, but it is worthless as a daily tool in modern composition.

Stunk and White's Elements of Style is an inexpensive paperback. It is the crowning jewel of the English language, a mentor and an exemplar, and a fountain head of wisdom and beauty. Get a copy and study. After you have read it through several times, retire it to the throne room where it can be reviewed in odd moments.

A thesaurus is helpful if the tip-of-the-tongue sensation of knowing a word without being able to evoke it occurs frequently. That sensation is the proper reason to consult a thesaurus. Word-shopping to gussy up your prose with words you do not command would be unwise. The better way of enriching your vocabulary, if you need to do so, is to search out new words in their natural habitat, which is fine literature.

Bruce Rodgers's Gay Talk (New York: Paragon, 1979; formerly The Queen's Vernacular, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972) is a guide to gay dialect, present and past---and some entries are very past. It is valuable if used with restraint. Many seminal documents of the modern gay liberation movement were issued as mass-market paperbacks and can be had secondhand for a pittance. Classics of gay erotic seldom appear at used-book shops, but many of them have been reissued by Badboy Books and other publishers.

The Chicago Manual of Style (not to be confused with A Manual for Writers, which is about academic papers) is an expensive book that contains many details not pertinent to fiction. For an understanding of issues of editorial style and the publication process the latest edition is not necessary. If money is an issue, borrow this book from a library or obtain a previous edition secondhand.

Fowler's Modern English Usage, even as revised, is badly dated. Fowler's principles remain sound, although scattered in an annoying alphabetical system. Many myths Fowler exposes are with us yet, and Fowler is good company. Several other modern usage books call attention to contemporary controversies of English usage but are sometimes wrong and are seldom more helpful than the usage notes in the Collegiate.

The Writer's Handbook is inspirational: short on matters of style, strong on techniques of fiction, worthless as a market guide. One edition will do for a whole career. If you have one, read it when you are feeling stuck or hopeless. The Writer is a related magazine. The few issues I examined years ago caused me to wonder whether The Writer knew the gay market existed or would care to know. The general market listings include many first-rate magazines, but not so many that seem promising to beginning writers whatever their subject or genre.

Coverage of the gay market is slight and often misleading in The Writer's Market (although owing to the way it is compiled, its editors probably are not to blame). Writer's Digest is the related magazine. Many editors of gay magazines would just as soon not be listed in Writer's Market or Writer's Digest. When Writer's Digest mentions a gay magazine, that magazine is flooded with submissions from the large part of Writer's Digest's vast readership that has yet to learn what "Know your market!" means. Unless your byline is recognized by the editors of the publication, your fine erotic story will wait a long time in the slush pile with stories of how God cures homosexuality, poignant heterosexual romances, booklength poems about being gay (cheerful, joyous, carefree) and other inappropriate submissions. No doubt the same thing happens to every magazine mentioned in Writer's Digest, but the logjam effect is especially pronounced at periodicals with small staffs, which includes virtually every gay title.

Although editors of gay magazines are especially open to submissions from new contributors, they suppose---and rightly I think---that writers likely to come up with an appropriate submission will find the right place to send their submissions without the guideposts of listings in Writer's Digest or Writer's Market. Nonetheless, Writer's Digest is full of good advice for beginning writers. Anyone beginning a writing career might benefit by subscribing for a year or two.

But Writer's Digest, or anyone else, has only so much to say to raw recruits. Writer's Digest's advice is repeated, year after year, with only slight variations. Some beginners do benefit from much repetition of good advice, and Writer's Digest repeats good advice often. Until you can put magazines containing your stories or your book on your coffee table, you can put Writer's Digest there so that callers will know you are a writer. Beware, however, of ads in Writer's Digest that suggest money can buy a shortcut to publishing success.

Some professional writers use The Literary Marketplace and subscribe to Publisher's Weekly, both of which are expensive and unavailable in general-interest bookstores.

Market information, however, dates too quickly to be accurate in any book (and for that reason no market list is included in this book). As will be made clear in the chapter on marketing, the theory of marketing according to someone else's published list is wrong. Consult market books at the library to be sure you have not overlooked something, but market according to your own list.

No market listing is as telling as the recent issues of a magazine you want to sell your stories to. Writers in the gay market have to get recent issues to discover where to send their stories; writers in other markets are the ones most tempted to overlook recent issues as source of market information. Read as many books of gay erotica---or whatever your subject is---as you can. The kind and number of reference works a writer needs depend upon her subject. Many economies are possible. Last year's almanac will serve a fiction writer as well as the current edition. An old stack of National Geographics may still contain some maps that will be superior to the maps in a very expensive atlas, and the stories may suggest locales, both nearby and exotic, both recent and ancient. Part of the game in textbook publishing is issuing new editions that entail only trivial changes but that students must buy; the old editions can be had for a dime on the dollar.

Contrary to a popular notion, you do not need to know somebody to break into the gay market or into any other. Maybe sometime, somewhere, a writer got into print because he became familiar with the right person. That, perhaps, works once at one magazine. Whether you have been published once, a dozen times, or not at all, an editor will make a decision whether to buy your story according to the quality of the words that are under your byline.

I am sorry to be the one to tell you: readers do not notice bylines. In the gay market, only three or four writers have anything like a following. They did not get that following until they had published several books and many dozens of stories. Four or five stories will not make you famous in any market. The bright side of this is that editors know this too. Although they would like to put a very famous name on the cover, most editors would prefer a good story by you to a mediocre story from a regular contributor. Your name will not sell magazines. The regular contributor's name will not sell magazines. As far as the fiction sells magazines at all---which is not so far at most magazines---printing the best stories he can get is the editor's best strategy.

A working writer does develop contacts as a result of working in the market. These contacts help him to get the right manuscript to the right place at the right time---perhaps. Such contacts are primarily business relationships of the sort that exist in any other kind of commerce. There is no arcane brotherhood or literary mafia.

Aaron Travis reminds me of a way a beginner can obtain some contacts, although it is hardly necessary to do so. In Chapters From an Autobiography (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1981) Sam Steward (Phil Andros) tells how he came to know many of the principal literary figures of his youth. He wrote to them.

Write a fan letter to a writer whose work you admire. Send the letter to his or her book publisher or to a magazine in which his or her stories appear. Ask the editor to forward the letter. Only a few of the most popular mass-market writers receive an overwhelming amount of fan mail. The letter will probably reach the writer---although there may be an inordinate delay in forwarding---and the writer will probably read it.

Try to say something perceptive about the writer's work. You might hint that you are interested in writing yourself, but a fan letter should mostly concern the work of the person you are writing. I advised you to write to an author whose work you admire so that what you write might be sincere. Do not request a reply, but do not be surprised if you get one. Once you receive a reply, do not request that the writer tell you everything he knows about writing and the gay market. Your letters should have the character of a correspondence, not that of an interrogation. You may ask for a specific bit of information that you cannot easily find elsewhere: Does magazine X pay on time? Is magazine Y really staff written (the same bylines appear so often)? Do not try the writer's patience by asking him to do your leg work, or by asking a beginner's question that could be answered by reading the remainder of this book or simply by inquiring of a reference librarian. You must treat as confidential any inside information you obtain, such as the true names of those who use pen names. (You may not publish material from letters you receive without the permission of the person who wrote the letters.)

Never send a writer a manuscript without his permission. He may offer to look at some of your work, but you must not request that he do so. Recall that you are asking for something valuable: information he has acquired through hard work and hard experience. It is his to give, though he may give it gladly, not yours to demand.

Writers who are very popular or who have recently received a great deal of publicity will not be able to give your letters the attention they deserve, no matter how much the writer wishes to do so. So far, I have read and answered all the fan mail that has reached me, but at times I had difficulty justifying the time and expense of doing so. I have not yet resorted to a form letter, but I have been stung by the accusation that I use one. If you think you received a form letter you ought to accept it with good grace. But if your original letter was couched in very general terms, you may never know whether the reply you received was a form letter or not.

A vanity press (or more politely, a subsidy publisher) prints books for authors who pay.

At their best, subsidy publishers provide a means of publishing important, often scholarly books expected to sell only to a few specialists and libraries. Once subsidy publishing was the only way to get research and thought on homosexuality into print. Gay people are better off today because subsidy publishing allowed a few authors to keep a candle burning through the Great Darkness. Today, although homosexuality is not the hot mass-market topic it was in the early 1970s, important work on the subject is printed by general publishers and university presses at no expense to the author.

Vanity presses have had their success stories. Poetry, for example, is virtually impossible to publish except by vanity press. Several renowned poets have paid at one time or another to have their work printed. But so have many more poets manqué who remain unknown. Possibly a novel, thought too kinky or too narrow by publishers of gay books, but published by a vanity press, might tap a new vein in the gay market. It is hard to imagine such a novel. The most likely reason that publishers of gay books do not want a gay novel is that the gay novel is not good enough.

At worse, vanity presses are scams. Although they often promise to promote works, their lists are not taken seriously by bookstores or critics. Distribution is a serious problem. Distribution of gay books is difficult enough for publishers who deal exclusively in gay books. A vanity press, which prints books for all comers, will not know how to promote or to distribute a work of gay erotica. The odds of an author recovering the major part of his money are slight, and much less that the book will turn a profit. A rich queen who cannot get published otherwise and who merely wants copies to give to his friends and to force onto his tricks will get his money's worth from a vanity press. Of course, the rich queen who has used money in place of talent and merit to get published can never expect to enjoy the esteem of real authors, however much his tainted volumes may impress naïf young men.

Since computers have made so-called desktop publishing possible, writers who are willing to pay can now get into print through self-publishing. Vanity presses take the author's manuscript, edit it, design the book, have it printed, attempt to distribute it, and promise to promote it, all for a fixed fee. Self-publishing, although often as much in vain, is a bit different. A self-published author may edit and design the book electronically, take bids directly from printers for the printing of the book, and promote and distribute the book himself.

Certainly no one should self-publish who cannot afford to lose the investment. Publishing from top to bottom is a risky enterprise---the next time you pass a remaindered table you might consider the hopes, dreams, and hard cash that each of the failed volumes represents. While investing in yourself is, in general, a good policy, investing your life's savings in your book may not be.

Some kinds of self-published authors have a chance of success. A poet, who is making the coffeehouse circuit anyway, who is giving well-received readings, and whose audience begs for more than can be fit into a single reading, ought to consider having a small volume printed up. But a poet, who thinks he or she can have some thousand volumes printed, drop them off at B. Dalton, and retire to his or her ivory tower to wait for the checks to roll in, would better put the money in a mutual fund.

A traveling minister in a small sect who has his most inspirational sermons printed up and who hawks the books to the congregations he visits may make a profit on his book. Like the coffeehouse poet, he has access to groups with a special interest in his subject. The minister will sell far more books to a hundred people in a congregation he visits than he ever could to the next hundred people walking into Barnes & Noble. He is traveling to these groups anyway and he does not mind schlepping the books around.

Civic and church groups have had great success in raising money by selling self-published cookbooks. Of course, the success of these ventures depends upon selling many books to those who contributed recipes, to other members of the organization, and to friends and relatives of the aforesaid. Like a cakewalk, the book has not really generated much revenue from outside the interested group, but has succeeded in lightening the purses of those affiliated with the group. In a similar way, little poetry groups can sometimes break even by issuing little anthologies, whereas a chapbook by a single poet might have a less desirable bottom line.

Evidently some would-be novelists believe that very good novels (i.e., their own) will be overlooked by big publishers. This is untrue. Oh yes, Gone with the Wind was rejected by very many houses. But someone did buy it at last. Publishers are looking for marketable novels---finding them is how they make their money. A manuscript may be overlooked at one house or given to a dyspeptic reader at another. But if ten people at ten houses, who rely on their literary judgment for their livelihood, think that your book is not marketable, there is a distinct possibility they are correct.

Almost everyone who makes a success of self-publishing (or of any other new small business) does so by finding a niche in the market that is not being filled. A few writers in the gay market, who already had considerable followings and conventionally published books in print, have had mixed success in issuing small books and booklets devoted to narrow fetishes or scenes---one offered stories tailored by computer to the subscriber's checklisted preferences. These writers had special access to groups likely to be interested in their subjects---one of the writers had a mailing list because he operated an adult mail-order business, another had access to free advertising in a magazine that reached readers likely to be interested in his subject. The potential of making a small profit exits here because these markets are too small to be served by larger publishers. But for that exact reason, one's market is soon saturated and everyone who is interested in the book has either bought it or decided not to. This sort of operation is nothing for a beginner to undertake with the object of making a profit or advancing a writing career.

Possibly because I am too lazy to motivate myself otherwise, I always think that whatever I am working on at the moment is the best stuff ever written. In retrospect, however, I find some things turned out better than others. Not many authors, and especially not many novelists, have any capacity for accurately evaluating their own work.

If you are a poor salesperson or if you do not have special access to groups with interest in your subject, you will have a hard time with a self-published book. You will find it difficult or impossible to get bookstores to carry your book, but even if you do get your book into a bookstore, it will be only one title out of the thousands available in the store. The big houses have the clout to get their books prominently displayed---sometimes. You do not.

Do not deal with vanity press and do not self-publish.

Physical space is a valuable asset. An area of five feet by five feet is adequate to begin with. More is not especially useful since the idea is to arrange things within arm's reach. Such an area will hold the essentials: a table large enough for the typewriter or word processor and the copy, drawers for gadgets and supplies, a bookcase, a not-too-comfortable chair, a cardboard box to hold files.

The home office expense cannot be claimed on your tax return unless your work space is closed off from the rest of your home and used for no other purpose than your work. But a beginner will have difficulty claiming any writing-related expense until the writing enterprise is showing a profit, so you might as well set up where you can and get started.

Many writers have done without a special space, have set up on the kitchen table, worked, and afterward stowed the writing gear. No doubt that promotes an orderly way of working. One of my most productive periods was spent in a boarding house when I did not dare leave the writing gear in the public area where I worked.

The essential kind of space is not physical.

Writers are difficult people to live with. Perhaps the television cannot be turned on when the writer says he is working. (A publishing writer I know of made his lover throw a TV in the garbage.) When the sun is shining and the spring zephyr is sweet, the writer wants to sit in a stuffy room, typing. When it is dreary out, the writer does not want to have some friends over for cocktails.

Compelled to attend a party, the writer disappears for hours and is found crouched in a corner, scribbling away on paper towels. It is not as if he made a great deal of money at it---certainly nothing compared to what other professionals make at similar stages in their careers.

Not all of a writer's requirements are owing to amateurish temperament. Many of a writer's problems are shared by others who work at home. People do not respect the workplace in the home as they would a "real" office. They do not understand that though the writer is home, he may be working. They do not identify the things on a writer's desk as tools. ("What does this button do?")

When the Muse is singing, it is difficult to lure the writer away from the keyboard. "I'll be there in a minute" means in a kind of minute that may last for hours---days is not unheard of. A writer's lover wonders, "If there is a fire, will he save me or the manuscript?" Silly question.

Nothing funny happens if a man tries to come between a writer and his keyboard.

Only a special kind of person can be a writer's lover or roommate. Some who think it would be romantic do not have what it takes. The talent for loving a writer may be rarer than the talent for writing itself. It certainly is more mysterious.

Books are not dedicated for nothing.

While classroom study is usually not necessary, some talented writers may learn this way when they can learn by no other. Freelance writing in any market is not especially lucrative. One way writers supplement their incomes is by teaching courses and workshops. Occasionally writers to whom the honorarium is next to meaningless will teach a course out of their dedication to the craft.

The best courses spend time on the fundamentals of marketing and writing. Most students will hear the instructor repeating the maxims: "Know your market!" "Write every day!" "Write what you know!" and so forth. This cheerleading is useful to some students. Unfortunately students demand courses like "How to market your screenplay" when they have never taken a course on "How to write a marketable screenplay." Look for the courses of the latter kind.

One advantage to such courses is the chance of observing the process of word-by-word revision. The realization that this is something that people really do may be the most valuable part of a revision demonstration. One course I taught had only four meetings and I asked students to revise a page of manuscript before I had the chance of treating the subject of revision in lectures. I discovered that most students could do a fairly good revision. They simply had not revised their manuscripts until someone told them to do it. Very well, I will tell you: Revise your manuscripts.

When there is time, student papers may be revised in class. But when your own work is under consideration, the outrage may be too great to bear. Perhaps more can be learned by observing what is done to others' works and then perpetrating similar acts, in private, on your own work.

Mail-order course lack the personal interchange and the experience of the process as it unfolds---which may be the only worthwhile parts of writing courses. On the other hand, correspondence courses lack the intrusions of know-it-all students. If you feel you need and can afford a writing course, you may be more comfortable studying by mail. Ask if the school will deal with gay erotic fiction. Correspondence courses have no trade secrets to teach you. What you need to know is in this book, is also available in other books, and is taught in workshops and community college courses.

Blue-pencil and criticism services, the less honest of which advertise themselves as literary agents, are essentially ghostwriters who work with your outline. Marking up a manuscript is a laborious task that requires a specialized skill. A person who believes that he needs such a service should expect to pay for it. He should not think, however, that the result will be a marketable manuscript, that writers gain their professional status thus, or that criticism services are likely to teach him the skills he needs to work on his own.

The elements of a successful writing career are persistence, talent, and luck. You can get by on two out of three, and the more you have of any one of the qualities, the less you need of the others.

In general, physicists are washed-up if they have not done their principal work by the time they are thirty. Writers, the occasional much-celebrated boy genius aside, reach the peak of their powers much later in life. Often the boy genius is a stylist. Literature of substance requires experience in living, or so it would seem.

That does not mean that you must put off writing if you are young. Indeed it is desirable to learn technique as early as possible. Someone has said a writer must write a million words of shit before he can write anything worthwhile. The sooner you start, the sooner you will be through the million words.

If you are determined to make writing your career, you must prepare yourself to see your classmates progress ahead of you in life, garnering material advantage and the esteem of society while you seem to be getting nowhere. You must be prepared to be the object of taunts and, what is worse, of pity. Save an extraordinary stroke of fortune, you will see others achieve most of the milestones of life, while you have hardly advanced beyond the starting line. If this seems like the fable of the hare and the tortoise, it is---except that it is your fable, and you will not be sure of the moral of the tale until you come to its conclusion. And even should you win, you may end wondering whether the race was worth the running.

Fortunately, the gay market has plenty of room for youthful work. A writer in the position to portray the youth scene authentically is hardly handicapped. (Have you ever read a punk story by a writer who has missed the scene by at least twenty years?)

Persistence is valuable both in a career as a whole and in marketing a single story. You will hear the tales often: the story that was filed away as unsalable, but which sold immediately when taken out again after many years; the book that is now a best-seller, but which was rejected by publisher after publisher; the writer who suddenly is in demand after many years of obscurity.

In fact, the gay market often provides more encouragement sooner than other markets. That does not diminish the importance of persistence. Things will seem hopeless. No one else will believe.

"Yes dear, I liked it very much," or "Why do you waste your talent on trash like that?" or "It was very hot. I got off on it," is not criticism. What you need in a reader is the ability to spot typos that are always invisible to the author until the story appears in print (and thereafter are the only parts of the work that the author can see): misspellings, omitted prepositions or articles, wrong tense endings.

Few writers have available readers who can be of more service: tell her she is being too laconic to be understood, distinguish errors of grammar from stylistic usages, notice if a minor character is called by different names, or discover a violation of viewpoint. Even knowledgeable readers are apt to confound their estimation of the author with their evaluation of the work, and this effect occurs quite independently of any conscious desire to flatter or to disparage. Good criticism is scarce in any case, but some writers cut themselves off from valuable help by reacting temperamentally the first (and last) time, serious, knowledgeable criticism is offered. The beginner's mistake is that of rejecting criticism. The experienced writer is more likely to err by taking ill-founded criticism to heart.

"Write what you know!" "Write every day!" "Keep a journal!" "Always write at the same time and place!" "To be a writer you must love to write!"

Rules are excellent advice for most people. The rule "Write every day!" exists because some people like to think of themselves as writers and to be regarded by others as writers, but never get a word on paper. Some writers who really are writers do not write every day---at least not on paper---but they work sporadically, perhaps forty-eight hours running and then not at all for a week. Writing every day is a good habit, one that every writer should try to form. But it is not the only way to work. If you get words on paper, you need not write every day.

Keeping a journal is a good idea. A scrap of conversation is overheard. A peculiar coincidence occurs. A smell unlocks a memory. A detail of experience disrobes and lolls about in the tall grass. The journal keeps such moments from being lost. But if keeping a journal is an artificial drudgery, if it is only filling so much space on a page when the writer is tired, when the keenness of the moment is lost, then the journal does little good. You can have the good of keeping a journal by jotting little notes on scraps of paper and putting those scraps into your wallet until the wallet must be emptied into your scrap box.

It is good if a writer likes to write. Some superb authors take such pains with their writing that every moment is agony.

"Write what you know!" is good advice. This does not mean that if you work in a sewage plant, you must write watersports and scat. It means to write about the human things you know. It means write so that even if your protagonist is a robot with microchips for a soul, what you write about it will interest human beings.

The rules are expressions of underlying truths. The tendency of beginners is to think of themselves as exceptional. I do not mean to encourage that often destructive tendency. You will be bound by the underlying truths, whether you observe them or not, but if you do observe them, you may not have to follow the letter of every rule meant to express them. I mean to encourage those who do work, but who work in their own ways. Do not give up if you work differently from the way the books say to work. What counts is that you work, however you do, and that you not kid yourself when you are not working.

To my knowledge, no one is making a living solely from writing gay erotica. This situation is unlikely to change because the gay market is relatively small. Moreover, not many people are making a living writing in any genre.

I was surprised to learn of the number of writers who appear to be successful in literary terms but could not support themselves on their writing incomes alone. I have now met many mystery and romance writers who are in situations I thought only those in the gay market experienced. They have a new hardback book from a major publishing house every fall. The books do well enough that publishers welcome the next volumes, and the titles invariably go into paperback. But, the authors tell me, they would be unable to keep body and soul together if they did not have spouses or companions who have good incomes, or inheritances, or day jobs.

Anyone who can be discouraged by this news probably ought to be. The realities of a writing career are much more discouraging. Writing as a hobby or a sideline is one thing, but the commitment to writing as one's principal vocation should not be undertaken lightly.

Some writers, of course, do eventually make a living from writing, if not altogether from novels, then from a combination of novels, articles and stories, and writing-related activities such as lecturing and teaching. But a beginner ought to have some alternatives in mind in case such success is delayed.