Well, sorry for this long reply. Don't worry about reading or answering if it's too much.

But hey, thank you for the support. The best thing about the publishing world is that when they reject your work, they never tell you why. A bunch of publishers rejected this novel about my in-laws, and I don't think it was for political reasons, since the book was barely leftwing at all when I first wrote it two years ago, but who knows? Setting a novel in an American neo-colony and making the main characters neo-colonial subjects is itself a political act.

The editing now is really hard for those character-related reasons I mentioned, but the prose is also super clunky. I always streamline sentences as much as possible, but I guess I wasn't as good at that back in 2019. The last really popular novel about Korea I can think of was Pach*nko (hexbear won't let me write the slur in the middle of the title), and that book was so ridiculously rightwing I couldn't get past more than a few pages. Right in the beginning there's this character wandering through a snowstorm. He's so poor I don't think he even has a coat. He randomly meets a total stranger who tells him about some family members who are in trouble. And right in the middle of this snowstorm, this guy drops down on his knees to pray for these total strangers—because he's a good Christian. Fuck that! Also, I obsess over details with historical fiction, I want to get everything right, and Packnko, as far as I remember, is almost nothing but dialogue, and I want to say it's because it's a lot easier to write historical fiction when you don't have to worry about accurately portraying what the world around the characters actually looks like. Compare it to a book like Salammbo, which is packed with so much detail it could be used as a textbook in a history class.

As a lib teenager I read the entirety of A People's History of the United States without realizing that it was a communist book. I thought it was about "America bad" rather than "communism good." If you look at that book now, almost every page is like: rich people suck, workers are good. I'm worried about pissing off libs and chuds though because I self-published some lib SF novels a few years ago and made the mistake of mentioning Hillary and Trump by name. (It was an extremely lib story about libs and chuds working together to fight alien invaders.) Readers fucking hated that. So yeah, I have to do a better job of flying under the radar. Sometimes the original Star Trek gets away with "political" storylines by setting them on other planets with aliens, but a lot of SF I've seen just kind of pretends that socialism doesn't exist. (I'm thinking of golden age SF as well as David Brin and Vernor Vinge.) They depict societies that are either liberal capitalist, fascist, feudal, or hunter-gatherer.

A kind of weird trend in publishing seems to be that SF is actually thriving in the self-publishing world but nearly totally dead, as far as I can tell, in traditional publishing. If you look at Amazon's SF bestsellers, it seems like readers really can't get enough of this shit—there's just, like, book after book about spaceships and space marines full of white dudes blasting aliens—but publishers almost invariably refuse to touch it. My agent has told me that basically this is because white dudes can't get ahead due to the reaction against Trump. Is this bullshit? Like, if you were a white dude before Trump, and you made a shitload of money selling books, you're good to go—keep doing what you're doing. But if you're a white dude who isn't a celebrity? Good fucking luck! I'm hesitant to talk about this because of how racist and sexist it sounds. I don't know that I believe this opinion myself. I'm just putting it out there for comment I guess. My agent (a white dude) seems to think it's virtually impossible to publish anything unless we do so under my wife's name. We've tried to do this a couple of times without any success. I write the books and she checks them over, but her (Korean) name would have appeared on the cover first, if these books had actually been published.

In reality, as we all know, this world is fucking built for white men, which means, I think, that if you're a Black woman writer, just finishing a fucking novel in the first place is a feat in itself since the entire fucking world is literally trying to kill you every single fucking day. So many literary agents say that they're interested in historically un-represented voices, but I strongly suspect that it's very difficult to find writers like this in the first place. Any writing class I've ever taken has always been packed with two types of people: white people, and Jews (like me), who are themselves sort of white but not really?

When I'm re-editing I just plow through the whole fucking thing from beginning to end, sometimes checking back as I proceed. I've been wondering: if you have a hard time editing, does that mean the book sucks? (Maybe!)

It's really nice of you to say that about this book, and I had never encountered this idea about collectivist, anti-individualist characters. I'm trying to put as much of my in-laws into these characters as possible, but again, it's frustrating because they're frustrating. Just a few weeks ago I asked my MIL if she was interested in communism, and she was like: "nope!" This is a woman who's been a slave her entire life! I also referred to my wife as a comrade during this conversation, and my wife told me later that her mom was not happy about it. So sometimes in the book the narrator is like: "they aren't perfect because they didn't grow up in perfect circumstances." I've been thinking about Octavia Butler's Kindred and how she wrote that book as a defense of African slaves—like, basically, they didn't overthrow their slavemasters en masse, but they did the best they could under the circumstances. Just to fucking survive was a feat in itself.

There is a dialectical tension between the subject and object, the individual and the world, and more mainstream books definitely push much harder in the direction of the individual, and writerly advice seemingly always emphasizes strong relatable characters—except for Vladimir Nabokov, ironically a white Russian anti-communist piece of shit who never got anywhere as a writer until he started writing novels about pedophilia. Humbert Humbert is a pretty memorable character, but maybe that's more because of James Mason than Vladimir Nabokov. Flaubert also pretty clearly thinks that all of his characters are pieces of shit. So who the fuck knows? Making the characters less unique is definitely an interesting idea though.