Zoo Gang Girls started out as a story that I intended to enter in a short fiction contest in 1991, but its word count soon exceeded the contest's limits, the entry deadline passed and I was left with the beginnings of a full-length novel. Having already written three yet-to-be published novels, I was more comfortable with that format anyway, so I dove into finishing it without the slightest regard for how long it might turn out to be.

I worked on an old Smith Corona WP6 word processor that my mother bought for me in 1988. One of its features was a spell checker that emitted a little "beep" every time you misspelled a word. Well, you'll see once you read Zoo Gang Girls that I use an alternative spelling system that replaces any arrangemynt of letters that spell "man" or "men" with "myn," so as to create a myntal climate that is unrelentingly hostile to men. But the work of flagging all those mispellings was too much for the poor thing and it simply gave up the ghost halfway through the first re-write! The rest of the word processor continued to work till I gave it away in 1998, but that spell checker never functioned again. I swear to Goddess that's true.

As I worked, I took chapters to writers' workshops for feedback, and the reaction I got from other aspiring authors was so negative that I knew I was on to something. One group that I wanted to join even voted me unworthy of membership, based on excerpts they'd read. Bouyed by their sneering, I plodded on.

Once the rough draft was finished, I passed it around some friends and got much more positive feedback, but I knew it still needed a lot of work. So I re-wrote the whole damned thing.

Finally when I felt it was ready, I started sending it out to publishers and collected dozens of rejection slips. So I started looking for an agent who could get a foot in the door for me, and again got more rejections. "We can't represent you unless you've already been published," was the message I got from many of them, whereas publishers would tell me: "We won't even look at your book unless you're represented by a recognized literary agent." Still I persisted and went hungry from spending every last dime on postage and copying. I did that till I'd queried every single publisher and agent in the Literary Market Place whose listing indicated they had the slightest interest in books such as mine. Finally I had put it on the back burner while I wrote another novel and pursued my visual arts career, always with the intention of trying anew to get it published some day.

Than came Dolly the sheep in 1997. Since Zoo Gang Girls has a theme of cloning, I sprang back into action, hoping to capitalize on the buzz around her birth. Another frantic re-write, flurry of submissions and deluge of rejection letters. For years I sporadically sent out query letters or sample chapters to new publishers I found in the annual Writers' Market. Around 2000 or 2001, a number of publishers began accepting mynuscripts by email, which saved untold copying and postage costs, but the rejections still came.

Finally in 2003, a small Feminist E-publisher in San Francisco called Artemis Press offered me a contract! And I was delighted to find that they would give me nearly complete artistic freedom, insisting on only a few minor changes for clarity. On January 20, 2004, it went on sale as an e (electronic) book or POD (Print on Demand) hard copy, and Joan Arndt, college dropout, recovering alcoholic and brain injury survivor was a Published Novelist!

Sales however, were very poor and I declined their request to extend the Contract for another five years so I could regain total artistic control and begin working on the graphic novel version of it. Featuring an estimated 1,600 full-color illustations (with virtually all the original text included in side panels,) the printing, paper and handling costs would be prohibitive, to say the least. Besides, I hate the idea of murdering innocent trees just for my silly literary vanity. With the arrival of jump drives and email accounts with gigabyte-sized storage capacity, keeping a huge project like this strictly electronic is entirely feasible, so if not another scrap of paper is ever used on this book, I'd be entirely happy.