Three Dollar Quill

In this post:

• I had a list (below), then I tried to come up with a sampling of books (ahead of the next post), and things went a little off the rails.

There are a few things I want to see guaranteed by the publisher:

• queer-positive
• feminist

In terms of subject matter, I have various areas of interest I could look into, and a few things I don't want to read.

• supernatural or aliens, particularly if it avoids garishly hued space women
• polyamory, especially mmf
• realistic bdsm
• mindplay? (I admit I'm not sure what this would look like; like I'm pretty sure something would have to give in terms of realism, probably telepathy would be involved?)
• probably not a lot of guns and violence
• amazon?
• avoid blackmail
• I think I'd rather not read stuff with vampires right now
• Now that I think about it, if there's any serious amounts of alien lesbian pirate romance, that'd definitely be a thing to look into

I had a look at some recommended novels, looked at the publisher, and there's other books there I might look into, but they don't have their submission guidelines up, which means I also need to look into other publishers if I don't want to be caught off-guard.

An initial sampling of publishers to look for books from:

• SMP Swerve
• Bold Strokes Books
• Carina Press
• ImaJinn Books
• Less Than Three Press

Looking over the submission guidelines, where applicable, I see that I haven't happened to stumble across the same publisher Rutskarn submitted to, because these submission guidelines are focused way more on themes than on structure. I'm going to still try to put together a reading list from these next post, but I think I'm going to have to synthesize stuff from how-to guides for outlining, rather than just find some handy submission guidelines. (The submission guidelines were useful for picking which publishers/imprints to look at.)

Next time, in addition to setting myself a reading list, I'm going to try to pull together some guides, so I'll have something to look over when I've got more experience with the genre.

One other thing I want when I try to apply this, is to set myself some expectations for content ahead of time. If I find myself deviating from those expectations, instead of discarding the expectations, I will back-burner the current attempt to satisfy them, and start over. I want to see what happens when I'm focused on satisfying some conditions, rather than just Following My Muse™. Nothing personal against My Muse, but I'd rather follow some guidelines, try to accomplish specific objectives; this is something I haven't really been doing as a writer.