I Wrote a New Book! Ask Me Anything.
Writing a book is hard. Here's what I learned along the way.
Hi Write and Seek Readers,
My new book Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons (NYU Press) comes out on 9/19/2022—exactly two months from now! In case you’re unfamiliar, it chronicles the everyday experiences of queer sons of immigrants in Los Angeles—how they navigate their families, schools, and communities across different chapters of their lives.
The book is available for pre-order wherever you get your books (e.g., Bookshop, Barnes & Noble.com, etc.), but if you order direct from the publisher, there’s a 30% discount! (Just enter code: OCAMPO30-FM).
Last week, I got THE ACTUAL COPY OF THE REAL BOOK in the mail. I turned in the book to the publisher a year ago, and so I kind of forgot about it, but when I held it in my hands, all the memories of how hard it was to write came flooding back.
Sometimes when the book’s done, it’s easy to forget those growing pains, and so I took the opportunity to reflect on the process by doing an AMA (Ask me anything) about the book on Instagram (if my shenanigans and misadventures are of interest to you, follow me on IG at @anthonyocampo.phd).
For my first ever newsletter, I thought I’d share the first batch of questions folks had here:
Happy reading!
Anthony
How did the writing process of writing Brown and Gay in LA compare to the writing of your first book The Latinos of Asia?
It was very different! At first, I was like, “I’ve done this before, the second time will be easier.” But I was wrong. Very wrong.
By a lot of measures, my first book did well. It was featured on NPR (an academic’s dream!), it was read by people in the Filipino American community, and a lot of educators started assigning it in class. I got a lot of really nice emails from college and high school students across the country, and a lot of those emails made me cry. I didn’t get any academic awards for the book, but whatevs because the book has sold like 10,000 copies—way more than the average academic book (#YesImPetty).
This is all to say, I set the bar really high for myself.
I felt a LOT of self-imposed pressure to make sure that BGLA did as well as TLOA. I got in my head to the point where I couldn’t sleep. In retrospect, my biggest mistake was that I was chasing the reception of the book way before the book even got written.
ALSO! I didn’t realize how hard it would be to write a book without first having written a dissertation. With the dissertation (that the book was based on), I had time to work out the ideas and a whole crew of grad school buddies to riff off of. I had taken comprehensive exams that coincided with the topic of the book.
For book #2, I had to learn a whole new field on my own (gender and sexuality) and honestly, I was insecure a lot of the time I was writing. Plus, I was working full time and didn’t have my same community to bounce ideas off of. And so I had to manufacture a new community to help support me through the writing of the book.
My friend Badia Ahad and I have a whole ass conversation about the perils of the “sophomore” book in Season 1 of our Podcast Professor-ing. Check out the episode here.
How long did it take you to write Book #2 versus Book #1?
*THE LATINOS OF ASIA, 1999-2016
For The Latinos of Asia, which was published in 2016, I’d been marinating on the ideas for most of undergrad (1999 to 2003). I wrote a few college papers on Filipino American identity vis-a-vis Asian American identity, and those papers contained the seeds of the book. I started grad school in 2004, and I wanted to keep pursuing this topic as my dissertation research, but sadly, most of my sociology professors didn’t get it, so I took that as an indication that my idea was bad.
I gave up this project for 5 whole years!
I picked it back up in 2009, and wrote the proposal, conducted the research, and wrote the dissertation over the next two years.
The actual book writing started in 2011. I revised the dissertation into a first draft of the book, and I swore I was done by early 2012. I turned the book draft into a publisher in 2012. Of course, my ass got humbled real quick when the editor told me my manuscript was still too dissertation-y. They offered some good suggestions for how to turn it into a real book, and while those suggestions were cool, they didn’t really fit my vision for the book. I revised it more, and submitted the manuscript to Stanford Press in 2013. Revised it even more and turned in the final version of the book in 2015. Publication takes a year, hence the publication date of 2016.
*BROWN AND GAY IN LA, 2012-2022
My first interview for BGLA took place in 2012. The last one took place in 2016. I first wrote an academic article on the book in 2013, but the actual book writing started in 2014. I wrote up a book proposal, and drafted two or three chapters by 2016.
Then the Pulse shooting in Orlando happened.
I got sad and quit the book for like a year because writing, honestly, felt useless. It took me a long time before I could get myself to write about queer communities of color again. When I did start writing again, I started experimenting with creative nonfiction. My first drafts of the book didn’t feel urgent enough for the moment we were living in. I took a couple writing workshops with writers like Kiese Laymon, Kima Jones, and Imani Perry, and through creative nonfiction, I found my way back to the book in 2018. Once I was back on it, it took me about 2 years to write the book, and another year or so to revise it. I turned the book in to NYU Press in 2021.
Full disclosure, I could have probably turned the book in like two years earlier, but I made the decision that I wanted to write a different kind of book from my first one. I wanted BGLA to be less academic-y (btw, absolutely nothing wrong with academic writing at all—I just wanted to do something different). I wanted to weave memoir and personal essay into the book.
Learning new styles of writing required a whole lot of reading and practicing. Had I decided to write the book in the same style as TLOA, it would have probably been published in 2019. I knew though that I’d be mad at myself if I didn’t at least try to push myself creatively (trust me, there were MANY, MANY times I wanted to quit doing the creative nonfiction thing and revert back to the academic style of writing). The journey wasn’t exactly fun, but it definitely feels rewarding now that I’m on the other side with a bigger platform, an agent, and a new book deal with a big 4 publisher.
Damn, I didn’t realize I’d only be able to get through two questions. I’ll be sure to send out another newsletter next week with the remaining set of questions that folks had.
And please don’t forget to share your thoughts!
Thank you so much, Anthony! I’ve been told by each committee member that my dissertation is NOT a book. But another mentor said, “You should think about your diss as a book and prep for that IF you want to publish it. Now, being in my dissertating year (goddess willing, final year since I was granted a completion fellowship, not a flex, but reality), I feel as if I’m writing separate academic articles for one big project and trying to wrap my head around the academic writing style I want to *invoke*, which has been challenging. Prior to this program, I wrote art criticism (even though I do not identify as an art critic (have been calling myself a writer) for a decade. Pivoting from that style of writing (for the general public albeit art and tech community) has not been easy. I’m doing the best I can and witnessing your journey is helping me understand where I want to be and see myself (as a writer as artist-scholar). Many thanks again for sharing this comparison. Give me so much perspective. Congrats!!! 🎉 Can’t wait to get BGLA and have it next to TLOA on my bookshelf! ☺️