chocolatepot | Finished! Finished!

I spent about an hour and a half at the boba cafe and finished the rewrite/edits!

I'm just really in love with it right now. The rewrites were such improvements that it feels like they took a decent story to a higher level. One of these edits involved dialing up Patience's lack of self-esteem, because a) I love writing Stede's self-loathing and other people love reading it, maybe it's not self-indulgent or Mary Suish or whatever to go there (I am so afraid of doing anything to make people feel "too" bad for my characters, which is ridiculous), and b) in a more realistic version of Cinderella, you've really got to have a reason she doesn't just leave, and "she's been made to feel like she only has value if she's doing chores for people even before her father died" is a pretty good one. Another one was sort of accidental - I added an older sibling and heir to the throne so that Will had more allowance to do whatever she felt like, and since I made him a stick in the mud it meant she got to be annoying to him, which was quite fun and gave her a little more depth.

I named the king and queen Albert (after George VI) and Winifred (after Winifred the Woebegone, lol) and at one point I thought they were Alfred and Winifred and was horrified with myself before I remembered.

The story ends with Will being like, "I will literally make any arrangements that will keep you with me, pls pls pls, you can be one of my mother's ladies in waiting if you feel like you need a job," and I was imagining Patience getting a new wardrobe for it, winning over a skeptical Queen Winifred (and everyone else in the palace), and becoming emotional over being paid for the first time and thinking it's too much and trying to give some of it back and just :) :) :) I'm mentally writing fanfic of my own story because I love it so much!

Oh also I'd forgotten that I channeled a bit of Ineffable Husbands in there - when I got to the tea dance (in my rewrite) and Will is just happily watching Patience enjoy the sweets, it was a lovely surprise. As a hopeless hedonist, "I'm fine without this luxury but I really enjoy watching you enjoy it" is a major romantic vibe for me.

Submitting to publishers feels so daunting, mainly because coming from the fanfic tradition of "the romance is the plot, but not in a romance novel way," doesn't feel like it fits into real-world books so well. (Think all the GR reviews complaining about Winter's Orbit being too SF for romance readers and too romance for SF fans.) Then it also has the issue of clearly not being set in our universe - so it's not historical - but there isn't any magic or anything in it - so I feel like a lot of people would look askance at calling it fantasy. But it fits under the heading of specfic, I think! I even changed a reference to shillings to be florins so it's more clearly fantastical. I feel like it would be best with a press specifically for queer SF/F, because I feel like a lot of queer specfic probably comes from the fanfic tradition so it'll be in good company. Not a lot of those, though.

First off I'm looking at Luna Press, which is where my 20k goal came from . However, their novella covers look really serious. :| So I'm not sure they'll like how light it is ... but maybe that's an unfair judgment, and they just want bare-bones covers for aesthetic conformity. But their submission period is literally just March 16, so it makes the most sense to try them first as who knows when I'd next be able to get a shot. Then there are a bunch more which don't have open/closed periods - I started to link them all here but it's boring. I'm keeping their submissions pages open in tabs, and I ought to make a list of which ones allow simultaneous submissions and do all of those at once.