The genres have lately divided like they think they’re continents rather than dialects, and the ground is shifting. I’m not in any way, shape, or form claiming to have invented the wheel. If anything, I’m just trying to figure out how to point at it.

Look! There it is!

We’ve been saying quite a lot with Sc-Fi since the beginning of time. And I’d understand, truly I would, if you were telling me my personal book wasn’t flowing, it wasn’t making sense, heck, it wasn’t vibing! I’d understand “it’s not vibing.”

“It’s a bit too literary,” one agent responded with, and I wanted to scream. You are a literary agent!

Talking about it makes me feel guilty.

I feel like those dudes that write a self-insert “satire” that’s just some dude jerking it and being brilliant and no one wants to fuck him, and then claim it’s too deep a cut for anyone to understand. I feel like some fresh faced kiddo with their first novel, a portal fantasy, and there’s a crystal, whatever, it certainly was me but it’s not, now! I want to plead with them: it’s not, now.

This is good, is the thing I know. Am embarrassed to know. But it is.

I feel like a hypocrite. Cuz of this, I want to stress from my very core: it is the handling of science fiction I’m abhorring, here. Really really.

Really.

I fell in love with this genre because it said something in a language I understood. It cut me to the core and gave me hope. And there are amazing science fiction novels coming out all the time these days! But too often the genre skews, words like “upmarket” and “speculative” are used, I’ve even heard it said out here “that’s not science fiction, it’s more literary,” as if the two are oil and water, as if they haven’t been one and the same since Mary Shelley first put pen to paper.

I understand this is just one step in the journey, and that the rest of those steps shape my book stronger, and I am eager for that, I’ve done all I can do on my own. I love anything that makes words slip sweeter out, I love anything that improves the writing, because the writing is it, is me, is the only way I’ve ever been able to actually fucking say something!

Just please, please. Say that it needs work. That my individual manuscript needs work, instead of claiming that it’s got too many feelings / queer folk / politics for the genre. Tell me my book’s garbage, I can take it! It’s not like I was gonna stop writing. That’s not an option! At my lowest point I tried...

There is nothing like the hopelessness of claiming feelings, queers, and politics have no place in the visions of our future, though. What.

Please.

Too many literary agents out here saying they rep Sci-Fi, so none of that mushy shit. Too many literary agents out here saying they don’t rep shit with aliens, they rep more literary works.

What!!

C’mon, y’all! Get it together!