So I wrote this book. This entire book. It's made-up so it's a novel. I spent two years writing it. I finished writing it one year and four months ago. I've sent out five query letters to agents (1), asking them if they'd like to read some of it and maybe represent me in my quest to sell it, and they've all declined to ask for sample chapters. (2) And while I'm not giving up on trying to sell the book, because I think it's a good book and I think people might enjoy reading it, enough time has passed that I can say with some honesty that, though I figured when I wrote it and I figured when I was sending out my query letters that it was going to be tough to get this book published, now I know it's going to be tough to sell it. (3)
It's a matter, in some part, of genre. I'm not saying I've invented a genre with this book. I'm not even saying I'm blurring the lines between genres. I'm just saying that it's not a book I feel comfortable labling with a genre tag. (4) In my query letter I pitch it as a "literary" novel, but it's not literary the way Hemingway or Byatt or Eco or Franzen are literary. It's mainly that I'd rather think of this as a literary novel and pick up whatever novel-baggage that entails than think of this as a science fiction novel--which it could be classified as--and wind up picking up that set of associated baggage. (5)
There's a lot of things happening inside my novel, each of which might lend itself to certain genre or cultural classifications. Like, for instance, my novel deals with twenty-somethings who have problems, mostly related to sex, alcoholism, and friendship. There's a certain market out there that that portion of the book could probably handily be marketed towards. But then, my novel also deals with the mother of the narrator (6), who thinks she is a psychic, but the novel strains to make her not seem silly, but to seem quite likeable. I'm not so sure that fits into the twenty-something novel genre--is there a market classification for psychic mother novels? Then there's the narrator's father, who is a brilliant scientist (7) who is obsessed with the Cold War (8) and is who is hip to pop culture and who likes to make references to movies like Heat or Ghostbusters while discussing Game Theory. If there's a pop-culture loving scientist novel market, baby, I've got it cornered. Then there's the fact that the novel deals with a six-mile-wide perfectly cylidrically shaped cloud of smoke whose properties seem to change and which might be the key to ending war forever by replacing the nuclear bomb as the newest, hottest weapon on the block, the one that all the nation states are going to be standing in line for, with their pre-paid pre-order ticket stubs eagerly clenched in their tight fists. I can't even guess what the hell market this shifts the book into, and, certainly, it's times like these, when I think about what I threw into the book, that I remember why writing up my query letter was such a pain in the butt, not to mention why I always had such a hard time answering the question that everyone asked back when I was telling everyone in earshot that I was writing a novel: "So, what's it about?"
Well, see, it's about...
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