The Care and Feeding of a Manuscript by Everett Maroon

Many things look cloudy to the emerging, unpublished writer---getting an agent alone requires a great idea, intriguing query or synopsis, and perfect execution, just to get them to request a partial or full manuscript. So many expectations abound that it can distract from the reality that the "finished product" of the work is likely to go through a number of new iterations. The agent may want to see changes before or after agreeing to represent the project, and then the editor at the publisher will work with the author to make at least one more pass through the manuscript.

For me it's been a process of tightening, cutting, tightening again, as if I'd used way too much cow hide on the bongo drum I've been shopping around town. A bloated word count of 104,000 has shrunk now by 21,000 bon mots. Some were scenes that okay, in hindsight, I didn't need for the story. Those were the no brainer cuts, but some of those scenes---half a dozen in all, maybe---felt a bit closer to important and it hurt a little to let them go. I got good at reflecting on the bigger picture, asking if this moment or that was worth a fight with the editor or the publisher. But in this electronic world, some of those words may get resurrected as a sort of outtake on my blog or Goodreads author page. Long live the Internet.

I'm grateful I've worked over the past several years to find a balance between loving my projects and understanding that they are commercial products to other people. Actually, books are all over the map with what they mean to the people who encounter them. They're life boats, cheap escapes away from reality, new friends, profit drivers, door stops, rabble rousers, disappointments, laugh motivators, livelihoods, precursors. Heck, they can be all of those things at once, or they may move through those effects over time, even for the same individual. A manuscript, even if the words never shift on the page again, never stops moving. Because we never stop moving.

I didn't pay attention to any of this when I started shopping my memoir to agents and publishers. I had a project, a lovely project of personal proportions. It's not every day that someone writes a book about how hilarious their sex change experience was. But I knew that my concept was out of left field for most people in publishing. I faced something of a dilemma: there are funny books, and then there are books about transsexuals. But there aren't really any funny books about transsexuals, or to put a finer point on it--there aren't many funny books about transsexuals in which someone other than the transsexual is the butt of the joke. Even Lambda Literary, the largest LGBT literary interest organization in the United States usually doesn't receive more than 10 trans-themed books in a given year for its awards program. I was working what looked to people, on the surface, like an extremely small market.

[caption id="attachment_10358" align="alignleft" width="195" caption="One of the versions of the cover"][/caption]

Rejections rolled in, most of them personal and not standard form rejections, and so I took that as a good sign. Agents seemed to like my writing voice, but didn't know how to advocate for the project, and so they looked forward to having me send them something else, someday. One agent congratulated me on my bravery, which made me roll my eyes even as I understood he was coming from a sincere place. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen rejections. I Tweeted: Hooray, I have received more rejections than JK did for Harry Potter. Take that, JK!

Damn it, if I was going to write a book about what makes gender transition funny, I was able to see book peddling as funny, too. And I told myself on more than one occasion, selling a book to agents isn't as hard as a sex change. And frankly, it isn't.

I learned from Andrea Hurst, who requested the whole manuscript, that she wasn't going to represent this because it was just too long, but if I could cut 20,000 words out of it, she'd look at it again. I went to the chopping block and got it down to 90,000 words and then got stuck again. At this point Ken Shear from Booktrope heard about the project and it was all I could do to have a conversation with him without his laughter interrupting us. He was like a giggling Whack-a-Mole game, popping into my pitch at the Pacific Northwest Writer's Association time and again, so I wasn't surprised when I heard back a couple of months later that he wanted to take on the project. Another 10,000 words came out of the manuscript, most of them little asides that didn't contribute to the characters or story arcs. I learned to stop beating myself up that the book needed pruning and became grateful that I'd put so much work into it at the outset.

Bumbling into Body Hair comes out next week, in trade paperback and as an ebook in multiple formats, and now the next phase of work begins. I'll talk about the book, do readings, interviews, anything to help it get out there. I may be working on other projects right now but I've spent so much energy loving this project--which I think is ripe for mainstream crossover interest as a self-deprecating humor book and love story--that it's only right I follow through on all of the marketing push. The manuscript may be finished at last, but the story will continue to reflect different impressions over time, and I couldn't be happier about that.