Welcome, creatures! For the past couple years I’ve been working on a novel; in this newsletter I’ll talk a little about it, and also ask for your help in finding readers for this draft.
Dream City
The working title is I Was Dreaming, I Was Dead. And, as the diptych title suggests, this is really two stories intertwined. The first story is the life of Felicia Webster, a D.C. native who lives through the end of the Chocolate City I grew up in. Felicia joins a grade-school pastry-theft ring; she’s a queer punk homeless teen and then a drifting, drunken college student; she works terrible jobs, making and shedding and making and shedding deciduous friends; and every night, she has these dreams, more constant to her than love or home.
The second story is her recurring dream, set in a classic YA-style dystopian future of slavery based on personality tests. One night, while cleaning a jewel-encrusted mammoth, a slave has a vision of beauty. That vision turns his society upside down. And it will overturn Felicia’s, too, if she can just figure out what it means.
This book is a tragicomedy, just like Plautus said all stories must be where gods and slaves converge. It’s got jeweled skeletons riding fossils, a longing gangbanger and a living gargoyle, a haunted house and a serial killer, a child-saving clown and the seedy underbelly of the bouncy-castle rental industry. Heartbreak and spectacle! It’s got a playlist, from L7 to Nas. It’s got an inspirational slogan: Beauty will save the world. But first, it will piss you off.
It’s got, also, a Black heroine, and this is where you guys come in, I hope. As I write Felicia and her world, I know my own race and experience are distorting the picture. With both Amends and Punishment: A Love Story, as I worked on the books it became clear that I was writing characters whose worlds I didn’t know. I found people who could give me guidance (and sometimes much-needed rebukes!) from their experience of Ethiopian Orthodox life, incarceration, psychiatric treatment, etc.
It’s obvious to me that their help made the books funnier, more incisive, just a brighter and weirder kaleidoscope of life than I could have come up with from my own experience and hazy projections. People throw around this term, “sensitivity reader.” Sensitivity is a part of what I want—I write to press on my own bruises, and if I’m gonna press on other people’s, I at least want to know that I’m doing it! But the more specific words for what these readers helped me with are things like humility and comedy and truthfulness.
I paid them when they’d accept payment. There was actually a very sweet, funny, I think mutually humiliating exchange with one of these books, where I kept trying to pay somebody and he kept trying to convey that he was helping me as part of his spiritual practice and therefore couldn’t take money for it, which is absolutely the sort of thing that would happen in the novel itself, well done everybody.
But yes, long story short, I am looking for Black readers who like literary realism and science fiction and who are okay with fairly harrowing material. I am very willing to pay for editorial services and will give specifics on that if you email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com (or reply by email to this newsletter). If this is you, please get in touch; if this is somebody you know, I’d very much appreciate it if you’d pass this along to them. Details and some questions you may have, below.
Why though? So in general my novels start from some dumb phrase or idea: some collision of a joke and a tragedy. In this case it was the old-school gay interjection, “Jessica Christ!” (Look, I didn’t promise this would be an edifying tale.) Jessica Christ started out, lo these many moons ago, as the story of a queer girl growing up in DC, who becomes a Christ figure because that’s in the title, although I never did figure out how that part was going to work. Instead I realized that this could also be the story of the death (and resurrection?) of the city I grew up in: “Welcome to Washington, DC. The local time is 1987.”
As I explored that possibility, the girl as microcosm, it became kind of obvious that if you’re working on an even slightly allegorical level, rather than pure point-of-view realism, you can’t tell that story through a white person’s eyes. If Felicia is my hometown, she has to be Black.
What makes you think this is a good idea? I don’t know if it is! I have confronted the possibility that you guys will tell me, “You are just not the person who can tell this story—it isn’t working and I’m not convinced it can.” I’ve put a lot of time and work into this but lol I’ve put a lot of time and work into a lot of things that didn’t work out. I have other novels I can do instead. Obviously I hope this is not the answer I get but I’m not just gonna shake you like a Magic 8-Ball until you float me up the little white scrap of paper that says FINE WHATEVER.
I’m Black, but I don’t know if I’m much like your character. Felicia moves through a lot of different spheres: different class strata, different generations, different worlds. If you’re interested in doing this, I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to offer a good perspective on at least some of what she sees, even if you have never had the hard delight of queer punk teenhood.
How long is it? It’s 530pp. I know. I know!! If you want to do this, but tap out in the middle, I am very happy to prorate any editing fee.
You said “harrowing.” Yes. Bad things happen to both Felicia and her constant dream companion. There is a lot of sexual assault in the dream chapters, and Felicia’s chapters also sometimes involve sexual harassment, coercion, or manipulation. The dream chapters include torture and socially-sanctioned cruelty to children, and Felicia’s chapters include a fairly long passage where she’s pretty close to despair. There is an anti-gay exorcism and some other religious homophobia. There are few depictions of explicit, intentional racism, but a lot of systemic and/or well-intentioned degradations—as well as a couple short discussions of Blackness and Black identity which I think may be “off” enough to be irritating.
I think those are the things I’d “warn for.” One thing I can say is that if you don’t want to read two intertwined stories about bad things happening to a Black woman, well, neither did I—one thing I knew very early on was that the enslaved visionary in her dream would be a white man. Also, although I can imagine writing an unrelieved, purely lacerating novel where I’d intend readers to feel devastated and shaken at the end, this very much is not that novel and not the kind of ending I think I’ve written.
I have another question. Email me! eve_tushnet@yahoo.com
Okay, again, if you are at all interested in this please do get in touch, and if you know someone who might be interested, please pass this along. THANKS.
Now Playing
Prayers, “Gothic Summer”
The Last Washingtonians
> "It’s got an inspirational slogan: Beauty will save the world. But first, it will piss you off." <-- YESSSS!
> "he kept trying to convey that he was helping me as part of his spiritual practice and therefore couldn’t take money for it, which is absolutely the sort of thing that would happen in the novel itself, well done everybody." <-- yay. that is something I wanted to happen in MY UNIVERSE.
> "she works terrible jobs, making and shedding and making and shedding deciduous friends; and every night, she has these dreams, more constant to her than love or home." <-- This is haunting. and I love (but grieve over) the description "making and shedding and making and shedding deciduous friends."
Sorry, I think I have no help in any of the above categories, just random encouragement. Bless you for the courage in creating this!