Platform Shift

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These past few days after the announcement that my yet-to-be-published novel, The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon, has been shortlisted for this year’s Dundee International Book Prize, have been strange to say the least. It’s hard to know just what to expect when something like this happens, but the course of events so far has been nothing like I could have predicted. To those of you who have sent me congratulations or compliments on the published excerpt, I thank you deeply.

I want to take a moment to mention that I’ve set up a Facebook page for The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon for those of you who want to follow news on my manuscript as it journeys from this point to, I hope, publication. Not only will this page help me spread news about the novel, but it should also help when it comes time to find an American publisher (which I’ll need even if I win the Dundee), so I hope you all will Like the page.

Although I’m over the moon at the honour of being shortlisted for the Dundee, it does place me in a strange position in terms of how to go about marketing. I’ve been mulling over how best to market the novel since I first wrote it, but I’d always assumed that I would have a book deal under my belt when it came time to start marketing. Now, not only do I not have a book deal, but I can’t even pursue one right now because the Dundee is for unpublished novelists, so I can’t really seek a deal until the competition is over, but I’m at the right moment to start publicity because of the shortlist announcement. I’m hardly the first author to have to deal with this problem, but this set of circumstances is so rare that there really isn’t any advice out there for this particular set of circumstances.

Complicating matters is the fact that effectively marketing The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon will mean changing things around on the .org, and to a lesser extent my professional life (such as it is) as a whole. I’ve kept details of the story to a minimum until now, mostly because I knew I had a top-notch concept and I didn’t want anyone else to run with it and get to press before I could, but also because going public with the idea, and trying to promote it, would mean playing up sides of myself I’ve kind of kept under the radar, at least on the .org and my social media outlets, since I got my MA. I had good reasons for doing so at the time, but now I have even more compelling reasons to take a step back and change things around again.

To put it bluntly, expect more talk about sex on the .org. Although sex and sexuality plays much less of a part in The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon as you might think from the title and the excerpt in the free e-book of shortlisted titles, it does play a considerable part. In the story I draw from my experiences as a safer sex educator, both in organizing safer sex presentations at the University of Toledo when I was President of Spectrum, and my own work as a bondage/BDSM/kink educator. Once I’d finished school and entered the job market, I thought it prudent to downplay my past work in those fields; I never denied it, but I made a point of never bringing it up in professional matters. In trying to get The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon published and sold, though, it’s actually advantageous for me to play up that part of my life.

This doesn’t mean I will be talking about my own sex life here; I’ve been celibate for nearly six years now anyway, so there’s not exactly much to talk about there. However, the politics of sexuality has always been an issue dear to my heart, because I believe that people trying to tell consenting adults that they can’t do (fill in the blank) activity in private, sexual or otherwise, is not only stupid but offencive as well. To an extent this isn’t so controversial when talking about same-sex activities — although keep in mind that there were still anti-sodomy laws on the books in some states less than ten years ago, before Lawrence v. Texas invalidated them — but the grey legal area that many “kinky” activities reside in, and the stereotypes and unrealistic portrayals of kinky people/activities in our culture and mass media, make them much more difficult to discuss. There have been times these past five years when I’ve wanted to write about some story in the news about the kink community, or some misportrayal of kink in the media, but I’ve stayed silent in order to avoid possible damage to my professional life. Now it will be to my advantage to blog about these things, and I intend on doing so, possibly as soon as my next post.

To be clear, what I will be writing about here will be less about sexuality itself, and more about the politics of sexuality. I might still say something that could provoke squeamish reactions from some of you, but my intent here will still be to debate, not titillate. Needless to say I’ll still be writing chiefly about things other than sex, but I won’t be avoiding the topic like I’ve been doing for the past five years.

In keeping with this development, I also intend on relaxing my self-imposed restrictions on using certain words (of the “four-letter” variety) online. I cop to having used curse words quite gratuitously in the past; these past five years I’ve worked at keeping the language on the site PG for the same reasons I avoided talking about sex and sexuality. I don’t intend to use these words as gratuitously as I did before, but especially now that I will be discussing issues relating to sex on the .org, there will be times when such words will be appropriate. Any writer will tell you that word choice is one of the most important aspects of writing well, and even though all three phrases may mean the same thing more or less, there is a clear difference between making love to a person, having sex with that person, and fucking that person. Sometimes I will need one of those “four-letter” words to describe something adequately, although I will try to keep those instances to a minimum.

I don’t think that these changes will be too jarring for readers of the .org, but it is a significant change from how I’ve run the site the past five years, and I wanted to be up front about this change. Ideally, of course, I’ll be too busy writing about the growing success of The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon, but I’m trying to keep a realistic perspective on that. Even if the novel does turn out to be successful, it will still take a lot of hard work to achieve that success, and I’m making these changes to the .org  in a calculated effort to promote my novel and get it published. Sex sells, so I’ll be sure to generate a lot of new traffic just based on the words I’ll be using in some posts now, but I hope that I don’t lose many, if any, readers in the process.

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