How I Got My Agent
My writer origin story 🖊
2018, Montreal
I really don’t understand why us New Yorkers insist on visiting Montreal in the middle of winter, but we do. And friends, it was cold. One day it was so cold that there was nothing for my husband and I to do but sit in a cafe and read.
Something miraculous happened then. I outlined the plot of my first novel in one furious sitting. It was a YA fantasy, an epic and questy fantasy. No comps, just vibes. This was the story that had lived in my head since I was 16 years old, the one I had been trying to write for ages. Before that, my writing habit consisted primarily of journaling (poetry, philosophical ramblings, stream of consciousness) and I was pretty consistent about it.
Once I had the basic outline down, I found that I was able to write *scenes*!
Back then I was working at McKinsey (the management consultancy) which was extremely demanding, so I could only write on weekends. After that Montreal trip, it was like the floodgates opened. Every Saturday and Sunday without fail, I’d walk from my Brooklyn apartment to a coffee shop and write for hours on end. (Sidenote: I sorely miss the Williamsburg coffee shops!)
When I sat down to write, it felt like the skies parted. That summer I quit McKinsey. I was a disillusioned corporate-burnout millennial. I shifted to working freelance so I’d have more time to write. I’d been bit by the writing bug and I was determined to make it as a novelist.
And write I did. I picked up momentum by writing every day. It’s still the backbone of my creative practice. Momentum is everything and then some. There’s nothing more delicious than starting the day with a morning writing session and a foamy latte (no bubbles! I don’t want a single bubble in that foam.)
It took me 8 months to finish that first draft, and maybe another 6 months to revise the first few chapters enough to start sharing with critique partners, betas, etc.
I turned 30 and had a birthday party at a rooftop in Brooklyn.
In the summer of 2019, I was accepted to the Yale Writers’ Workshop with the second draft of my YA Fantasy, The Wonder Beneath. My group was vicious—they tore each other apart. But my pages were well received. I was encouraged.
I spent the next few years revising and rewriting and overhauling and reworking. Oh, did I mention rewriting? A new incarnation of The Wonder Beneath was born. Some of my friends had kids and moved into the suburbs. I got critiques and gave critiques and attended workshops.
I got married just before the pandemic hit in 2019 (luckily). We promptly moved out of Brooklyn and bought a house in CT. The house had a magical study with built-in bookshelves and a bridge arching over a river. Instead of kids, we got ourselves cuddly dogs and nature trails. We adopted 2 “coconut retrievers” from St. Martin, where my husband is originally from.
In 2022, after finishing the umpteenth revision of The Wonder Beneath, I could not look at it anymore. I thought I had given it my all, but looking back now, I had over-worked it. If I could go back in time and do one thing differently, I would have actually spent less time on this book, and moved on sooner to the next book — for reasons that will become clear later.
But anyway, I finally set out to query it. The book of my heart, the story I had in my head since I was 16, a story that was so special to me, was going out into the world.
I joined an online group of querying writers where we cheered each other on with borderline-delusional optimism.
I got full requests. Then partial requests. I was thrilled. It was a huge rush getting those request emails. The worse case scenario (0 requests) was avoided. Agents were interested in my concept and loved my sample pages!
But the months dragged and The Offer Email didn’t come. Full rejections started trickling in. Other writers in the online group started getting agents. Why not me? Instead, I got more full requests. Then more full rejections.
At this point, I knew it would be reasonable to pause querying and revise again. But I had already been revising and re-writing this book for several years now, and I felt I had done the best I could on my own.
The most critical realization was this: doing yet another massive overhaul of The Wonder Beneath would take almost as long as writing a whole new book. Deep down, I knew I was better off moving on to another book than spending yet another year revising and rewriting the same book that had already been rewritten countless times and wasn’t landing offers of rep.
And Thank Fucking God I made that decision. Because right now I might still be revising/querying that first novel if I hadn’t moved on when I did. Much credit to agent Jessica Faust at BookEnds for giving the brilliant baking analogy on a YT video: you’re better off baking a new cake than re-baking the same cake over and over again. I’d been re-baking the same cake for 4 years by this point.
So in early 2023, after more requests and more rejections, I made the decision to shelve The Wonder Beneath. I was gutted. I got a flare-up of a chronic illness and had to increase the dosage of meds. I think this was partly due to the stress from querying. It took months for the flare-up to go away.
There were so many close calls with The Wonder Beneath. One agent said my prose was “compulsively readable”. Another agent said “I held onto this for so long because I had a hard time letting it go.” I think it could have easily gone a different way, but now, looking back, I’m so glad that The Wonder Beneath didn’t get me an agent. It wouldn’t have been the right agent nor the right book to debut with.
Shelving The Wonder Beneath was absolutely heartbreaking. I had poured my heart and soul into it. I sat on the riverbank and cried.
Then I rage wrote the next book.
My short-lived (book) affair
What do you do if a book fails to get picked up? You write a prequel to it, obviously.
This next book was a prequel to The Wonder Beneath. I already had the whole plot living rent-free in my head by this point, and it was a villain origin story. I furiously drafted it in 2 months. 100k words. But I never revised it, never shared it nor queried it, and it’s still sitting in my hard-drive. I’ve not looked at it since then. Why? Because friends, right then I got a new idea that lit a fire under me. Wild horses were not going to keep me from it.
Alexa Donne has a video where she gives this sage advice: “always be working on the next book. Because you never know which book is going to be the one, and very often it’s the next one.”
This new idea, much darker and twistier than anything I’d ever written, was THE ONE.
Spring 2023
I wrote draft 0 of this book very quickly (in about 1-2 months), and by then I understood that it was a gothic horror. This was a glorified outline, but I also spent just as much time thinking of how this would be positioned in the market, something I had not done for my prior 2 books. By now I was no fool. I wasn’t about to make the same newbies mistakes I made with my first novel. This time I knew my comp titles, my genre, my hook, and my final twist from the first draft.
In “Writing The Breakout Novel,” Donald Maas says we should embrace our inner sadists. Most pre-published novels don’t push the central conflict far enough. We must put our characters through hell and then some. I followed this advice and it was a game changer for my writing.
I absolutely LOVED the process of writing it. And revising it. And querying it. And everything that has happened since. This books was, and continues to be, lightning in a bottle.
I knew exactly what my twist was going to be and thus I started weaving in threads of misdirection from draft 1.
I finished draft 1 in 3 or 4 months. I spent the fall of 2023 revising it. I attended the Writers Digest Conference in NYC and got partial requests from all 3 agents I pitched to, but the book wasn’t done. So I told them I’d send the partial in a “few months” when it was ready.
I wasn’t done revising it when I applied to Round Table Mentor, a new mentorship program that seemed really good. Not only was I selected, but I was selected by two mentors! They explained that they both fell in love with my gothic horror and decided to co-mentor me.
Mind you, The Wonder Beneath and its various incarnations never got me into any mentorship programs. Yet here this book got me into the very first mentorship program I applied to, and I hadn’t even finished revising it. And I had been selected by two different amazing mentors.
I titled my gothic horror Shadows Falsely Seen.
My mentors Holly Riddle and Dorian Ravenscroft gave me a brilliant editorial letter and in February of 2024 I began working on draft 3 of Shadows Falsely Seen.
It took me about 3.5 months to complete the revisions. I completed them on a Sunday, on the heels of a writing retreat. That Sunday, I sent off the revised draft of Shadows Falsely Seen to both my mentors. That same day I also sent the 50-page partial to the 3 agents who had requested the partial back at the Writers Digest Conference last fall (remember that?)
Things happened VERY quickly after that.
My plan until that point had been to wait until I heard back from my mentors before sending out batch 1 of cold queries. I knew from my first time querying that agents typically take weeks or months to respond to partials and fulls. I figured I’d hear back from my mentors first, then make a final round of edits prior to sending out the first batch of queries in the fall. I’d spend the rest of the year querying, and hopefully I’d land an agent at some point this year or maybe in the first half of next year.
Friends… I heard back from one of the conference agents in 24 hours. Within 24 hours of sending her the partial, she asked for the full. I was shocked. Then, only 2 days after confirming receipt, she emailed me again asking for a Call.
The first agent I sent off my full to. With my last queried book (The Wonder Beneath), this email never came, even though over 40 agents had requested materials. How could this be?
It’s a fucking fantastic feeling and I wish this for all of you.
This was a great agent at a well-known and well-regarded agency, and they wanted to have a call with me and loved my book!
We had a fantastic call. I nudged some other agents and got a bunch more full requests. Over the next week, several more agents offered representation.
My mentors were INVALUABLE in helping me decide which agent to go with. They tapped into their whisper network and gave me perspectives to consider. All offering agents were great agents so it came down to which one I loved the most. I chose Caitlin Mahony from William Morris Endeavor.
I am now an agented writer! ✨
Reflections…
Looking back, I am SO happy that I didn’t spend yet another year rewriting that YA fantasy. Shelving that book was heartbreaking, but it’s what allowed me to catapult my skills to the next level. I needed to start fresh with a new story, new characters, and allow something new to rise out of the ashes.
Since signing with my agent this summer, my year has only gotten better. It’s been a whirlwind of dreams come true, but that will have to be a topic for my next post: I’ve been sworn to secrecy. ⚔️ 🤐