The Outing
When I started writing The Outing my head was inside a different story. I remember sitting down to write and looking out the French doors (they really were doors in France) with the early spring sun trying to warm me. The night’s snowfall was forming puddles on the outdoor furniture and the white sheen over the field rolling down the slope to the olive grove was turning green. Opening my laptop I decided to check the news before getting underway. Classic procrastination. But this time it led to the start of an obsession.
A headline caught my eye. The story was about a thirty-year-old suicide verdict in the NSW Coroner’s Court being overturned. It was now murder. A gay hate crime. And as I sat thinking about this poor man and his family, I almost wasn’t surprised to feel tears rolling down my face. It brought up all the fears I’d had for my own son.
It also stirred an urge to know more. I tried to talk myself out of it. I was working on a project and I needed to get on with it. But the feeling wouldn’t leave, and I began reading the original articles, then looking at other news about other gay men who’d been attacked and killed. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a gay-panic get-out-of-jail-free card. And probably because of the police involvement, the story about an Adelaide man stood out. It was like they were all my son, and I couldn’t lose the horrible guilt, the sense of powerlessness, the overwhelming sadness and the anger that was settling over me like a heavy cloak. It was stifling and suffocating and I couldn’t not tell the story that was fomenting in my mind.
Writing a book is hard. At least it is for me. It takes years. This one took close to three. And at the end of it, you’re not at the end of it. After you’ve finished, you have to get the book into the hands of readers. Traditionally that involves a process entirely outside of the author’s control. In the process, the book goes from being a passion to being a commodity. And commodities are controlled by market forces. And market forces involve a business model of gatekeepers and preferences and quotas and what’s working for us now, and is this on-trend, and teams for selecting and selling what other people think other people might want to read. And sometimes also, whether they think there is enough appeal about the person who wrote the book – a sort of who’s the story behind the story. It has to be compelling.
In the traditional publishing world, the first hurdle post-writing is the find-an-Agent one. Without agent representation, you, your interests and your novel simply don’t exist. Finding one involves researching what and who they already represent, and what they say they’re looking for, their experience, their successes, the strength of their agency with regard to rights and more. The objective being they will have publishing contacts who like and are looking for ‘your type of novel’.
Sounds like a reasonable and workable model. There are downsides. The ‘what-I’m-looking-for’ could be aspirational – they like your work but don’t have the contacts and can’t make it happen, so facing that reality they decline; the similarities they are looking for can result in ‘I already represent name-of-author or type-of-story and you/your novel is too similar’ and so declined; and it applies to both agents and publishers and is by no means a complete list of ‘sorry no thank you’ and ‘this business is so subjective’.
The result is the same. Instead of bursting over the finish line, arms outstretched and breaking through the winners tape triumphant joyful and excited, you’re lining up again at the start without even getting to the end of the sprint. And you do this again, and again till you’re scrambling exhaustedly over more and more hurdles. Finally and more realistically you find yourself crawling across the line, grateful that this run has at last come to an end.
After a year of hurdling, I was completely out of breath and willpower and I hadn’t got to the end. But I needed to stop running. I needed to look at my situation objectively.
The distance between my first hurdle and the next one, was five months. And that should have told me something. To explain: I had interest in my manuscript very early. It wasn’t even properly polished. It was declined. If I’d paused for breath then, and asked myself why, (you can’t ask them – because they don’t have the time to explain), keeping in mind the realities of commodification I’d have saved a lot of my own valuable time (and probably a lot of other agents’ time too). I would have realised that having liked the writing and the story, and knowing it would be further polished, had the agent thought there was a traditional publisher out there for it, The Outing would be represented and I’d have been working on rewrites and edits, the polishing, with their commercial interests in mind. Happily and willingly.
But I stayed on track, jumping over more hurdles, querying more agents and also submitting to some publishers myself (which is acceptable in Australia where there aren’t many agents). In hindsight that was another clue. If the publishers themselves weren’t showing me any interest, then an agent, should I ever get one, probably wouldn’t get them to take it on either.
So what now?
I have a book, that I want people to read. I want people to know what happened. I also don’t want people to forget what happened to all those men, because today’s freedoms, which are by no means secure, standard, accepted by all, or universal, are necessarily tied to the struggles to attain them. I could keep trying to get an agent, and that agent could keep trying to get a publisher and I could wait for three years, or ten years, or forever. Or I could bypass the traditional model of publishing.
And that’s what I decided to do. Because as much as my ego wanted to walk down the street or through an airport and see my novel in the bookshop window, my heart knew it didn’t matter where people bought the book, as long as they got to read it.
Still lurking though, was a lingering doubt. What if my writing was shit (ahem… simply woeful) and that’s the real reason it didn’t find a traditional home. Several people including some of the queried agents, have assured me it isn’t. Several people have said they ‘loved it even though that’s not the right word’. They’ve said it’s real and moving and powerful. Those several people weren’t all family and friends, although some of them were. Those were the ones who helped to define and refine The Outing during its multiple edits. I’m both honoured and grateful for their support and encouragement, their engagement and insight.
Validation and professionalism are still tied into the public perception of being a ‘real’ author if you have a penguin on the spine of your book and that you’re an amateur playing around, if you don’t. Undeniably, there will likely always be a part of me that holds onto some disappointment that the book didn’t follow the traditional route. At the same time, there’s another part of me is saying that breaking out from under the traditional constraints and perceptions is what this book is about. So perhaps it’s appropriate that a book about that, about changing laws and rules and attitudes follows a non-traditional path to people’s bookshelves.
I won’t say I hope you enjoy the book. It’s not warm and fuzzy and up-lit (that’s scheduled for the next book), but I do hope you enjoy the writing. And I hope you find discovering a different time and experience enlightening. Mostly, I hope the story moves you and that you feel… Because when we feel something strongly it leads us ultimately, to hope and to love which is all we really want.
