Sellin'

There's a short swath of my personality that wants nothing more than to call my best friend TEO, and cry, and say, "Why don't employers and agents WANT MEEEEEE???"

But the truth of it is, I'm actually a professional about writing. That swath doesn't dominate the rest of my drive, and my drive is going somewhere. No question.

I wonder, though, if there is a certain proportion of gender difficulty here. I don't mean NO woman will ever want my work. But the extent to which it is exceptional and unusual for a woman to *write* what I have, I think may also inform the extent to which a woman will want to represent it. This is just a perhaps, but it's not unreasonable.

Much female-authored histfic tends toward romance (see: Victoria Holt and the like), and some toward feminist exploration (Marion Zimmer Bradley). It's all wonderful stuff, but few authors seem to live in the world Mary Stewart, for instance, was willing to take on when she wrote her Arthurian series - first person - from the point of view of Merlin. Stewart has certainly produced her share of more romantic works, but she didn't stint in writing from a male character's perspective.

But this is unusual. Apart from Robyn Young, I can think of (nor find) many women who seem to write anything like my own work. Some fantasists write extremely brawny work. But in historical fiction, in epics, etc., it tends to work out that women take other kinds of ground.

I had a previous meeting with an agent, three years ago, who listened to my description of this novel, asked me about other work, I pitched her the not-exactly-a-sequel, which is ALL about women, and at that one she lit up.

I suspect the agent from this year might have found it easier to generate passion for the second work as well.

My old king, though, demands his primacy. And with me, he does have to come first.

And so I plan my list-of-agents research, and I'll pay attention to how many of them are men. It's an interesting consideration (no biological plumbing will prevent my submissions; but I will notice, I think, the comparative responses to my work).