Writing Career Speedrun [any% no MFA]
i love books i love writing!
Today this blog is a year old <3
This was the year I started to write every day, being consistently both housed and employed all twelve months — a career first. (🎉.) I had my basic needs met the whole time and that gave me the capacity to plug away at stories, zines, blogposts, and book promo on a daily basis. This wasn’t even close to my first year of writing, I’ve been doing this all my life. But it felt like a First Year. It's hard to express just how much easier it feels now to work creatively.
Like, I get to have goals now. I get to buy my friends’ books and read them. I get to keep up with publications of authors I like, and read their newsletters, and follow literary markets (kind of). I get to be in community with other writers. I get to have a schedule that lets me go out to events more than once or twice a month, meet new people, collaborate with them. After a year of this, I’m shocked to think I was able to put a book out any other way. No wonder The Tears of Other People took me half a decade, that shit was way harder.
So it follows that 2025 was the year I started to expect discipline and achievement from my work, not just fun or creative expression. I don’t think of writing as a hobby anymore. Now it registers in my mind more like a career. Having a “writing career” doesn’t mean I’m trying to make money off my work, I’m not really. For me, a career means that I’m thinking a lot more about progression now—in craft, in opportunities, in the scope of my audience—and I'm trying harder to make a social and emotional impact. By those metrics, 2025 was a great start.
But being just a start, I now look at how far I still have to go and I feel insane. Having “a career” means comparing that career to the career of my fellow woman. And the second I start doing that, I discover I’m off schedule. I’m a child making baby shit for babies; also somehow a washed up hag writing for a world gone by. On my birthday this year my friend Vic told me “There are no 27-year-old wunderkinds” and I’m afraid they're right. Makes this post from Jamie Hood resonate a lot:
I’m humbled by the number of things I haven’t accomplished yet. But then, I’d be an asshole not to at least recognize some of the stuff I did accomplish this year.
list of accomplishments this year that are not just my book
+ got my first short story published (excluding self-publication), “Never Ever” in Imposter Review
+ got my first creative nonfiction piece published, "There's a Word For It Now" in Transfix Magazine Issue 06
+ wrote my first novella, Jagged Entrance, finished in August & on submission
+ made a couple zines
+ had fun w/ blog
+ recorded 11 of 14 chapters in The Tears of Other People audiobook
+ started work on a novel (draft’s at 50k words not saying shit to anyone til it's done <3)
Ok what else.
i also loved my friends a lot
I made an effort to show up to more stuff this year and deepen relationships with people doing similar work. There's no way to encapsulate all that in a list, but here's some highlights:
+ TOOP book tour, obviously!!! The launch event at Hive Mind Books was one of the best nights of my life. I was honored to have Aamir Azhar and Antonio Rodriguez as guest speakers at that event. I also got to bring my friends Cat, Shiv, and Kline along on tour with me in New England, where we did three events and only one of them was weird <3
+ I was a guest speaker last month at the release of my friend Daisy Thursday's excellent zine Sex Change USA: Lost in Transition, where she delves into trans representation in tabloid news before the advent of the internet. Great stuff! Fun event!
+ Back in July-ish (I think?) I was a guest speaker at L'or N.O.S.'s launch event for the new Fuckin' Transplants, a t4t smut zine I fuck with and recommend often
+ I had the pleasure of beta-reading and friend-editing a number of works, which I love doing! And I will probably do it for you if you ask! Not all the works are public yet but a couple are: Interview with a Male Transsexual by Olivia Madeline Abigail (horrifying tale of historical trans surgery) and Feeding the Cat by Glen K. Rodman (vampires!). Both are great zines you should buy.
i had some friction with the literary culture i’m a part of
Glad I’m in it, but I don't always gel with a literary environment. Before this year I made my home in punk and DIY spaces, which famously have their own problems. One thing those spaces aren't usually accused of, though, is a lack of open and earnest politics. After wading around in NYC trans lit for a year, I’ve got more than enough evidence to accuse us of exactly that.
Speaking if I can mainly to fellow whites, I’m put off by the narrow focus on individual success. I’m put off by how, when we do work/speak/act as a collective, it’s usually within the still-narrow scope of “t4t.” I’m concerned with how we treat New York as mainly a backdrop for the drama of our literary lives. We engage with the city less as a theater of struggle and more as a hobbyist might engage a diorama. I'd like to see our preoccupations move a little further beyond the aesthetic.
I'm forever a trans person pulling for the success of other trans people: I’m not outside these problems, I’m in the same boat as anyone else. But I think success for us should not look the same as success for straight people. Individual acclaim is cool and I also want it, but—and this isn’t fair—trans artists have a responsibility to hold our art to a higher standard of political engagement for the sake of our liberation and our neighbors. Even if the work involved is separate, I think between an organizing meeting and a gay literary event the sense of pressure shouldn't feel so different. Right now, I move between those spaces and I get a fuckin nosebleed. It's like we don't know what's at stake. With so much love, a lot of writers here gotta get out more and join an org, help out with a distro, be part of a thing that is collective and making a material difference. If we can't do that, I'm afraid the conditions they impose on us next are gonna make it a whole lot harder to appreciate the work of the nineteenth-century American realists.
what next
In 2026 I wanna spend more time in mixed company. I hope to always find a home in other transsexuals, but next year I’m ready to invest more time and energy into relationships outside of that niche. Hmu if you live in NYC and also want to do this and we’ll try a new open mic together, or something.
In 2026 I also wanna get a little better at writing blog posts. Not a lot better — it’s still not that serious. Just a little.
Finally, in 2026, I really, really want to finish and sell my first novel.
As always, thanks for reading :)
you can get this in email form at my buttondown newsletter. i also post on instagram and substack @everzines. i left bluesky cus i hate it. email me at eviewrites@duck.com.
your gay coparent,
evergreen <3