The "How I Got my Agent" Story

 This will be quite long, FYI. And I also want to highlight two caveats to this “how I got my agent” story:

1. In the grand scheme of things, I had an easy querying experience. This is my first completed manuscript, and I had been querying it for exactly 35 days before I had an offer of representation in hand. I fully recognize that timing and luck were on my side.

2. This story is also intimately tied with grief. I don’t share this to somehow try and make my querying experience seem tougher than it was. It wasn’t. I had an easy querying experience, and I was also grieving during it. Those are just two co-existing facts. If you don’t want to read about all the heavy grief stuff, I’ll share my stats below and you can skip the rest. 

The Stats

51 total queries

13 full requests, 1 partial

26 query rejections

9.8% request rate before offer nudge/27.5% after

11 passes on the full/partial

11 CNRs on query, 1 on full

2 offers of rep

I) My Writing History

I am somewhere between the “I’ve written since the day I popped out of the womb” and the “I’ve never written a word before in my life” crowds.  I wrote poetry in middle school and won an award for it when I made a funny little iMovie project with my poems (this will come into play later). I continued writing poetry throughout high school, played around with short stories, and briefly convinced myself I was going to be a writer. I even got the “Most Likely to Write a Novel” superlative in the 7th grade and I wrote fan fiction for fun and did all the typical teenager writing things.

Then when I got to college, I just stopped. I would randomly try and pick up projects again, but they would fizzle out. So, I retired the dream of being a writer and focused on all of that “becoming an adult” business. 

In November 2020, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. This wasn’t the first time I’d tried, but I always fizzled out after around 10,000 words. This time, I just had fun. I wrote a very derivative fantasy project (Fire Emblem: Three Houses, anyone?) and outlined almost the entire novel in detail. This time, I won NaNo and successfully pumped out 50,000 words in that month. I started entertaining the idea of writing seriously again. I’d continue chipping away at the project until it reached about 80,000 words, but I eventually lost steam in the third act. But the project was a lot of fun and I learned I could actually pump out thousands of words if I really wanted to. Tip: if you’ve struggled to finish a novel, try to write according to an outline even if it feels unnatural. It gave me a clear goal to write toward each time I sat down and helped tremendously.

II) Writing “the Book” 

In April 2021, I had an inkling of an idea and I started to outline and write. See my Discord note to myself below (please note this story is 100% not a horror, I don't know what I was thinking lmao):

I will admit, this was fully an idea hatched in the pandemic. This story was a reckoning with the devastating sadness of the moment, and an envisioning of a world-ending that was centered on care and not people hoarding scarce resources. Even in the bleakest of circumstances, could I not imagine strangers helping each other?

The second inspiration for this idea was the role spirit mediums played in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. For families who’d lost relatives miles away from home, spirit mediums helped bring back the dead for proper mourning rituals. Or, they helped to cure those afflicted by spirit illness from aggrieved spirits who’d died in the violence. Gertrud Hüwelmeier and Mai Lan Gustafsson were the scholars who helped shaped this idea in my head. 

I decided to try and submit the first part of the manuscript to Simon & Schuster’s newly announced “First Novel Contest” with their Gallery Books imprint. After a few readers, I decided to hire a freelance editor to look through those initial pages. Big caveat: hiring an editor is NOT necessary. But as someone who had taken such a long break from writing, I wanted to get professional feedback I could use as an overall learning tool. What weird writing habits did I have? Where was my dialogue or plot off? I worked with a very efficient and sweet editor who provided both in-line comments and an editorial letter. After implementing her changes, I sent off the initial pages to the contest.

This also gave me a built-in deadline. In September, if your manuscript was selected for another round, you would have to submit your completed manuscript. I had grand ideas of finishing with time to spare for a major revision, but that did not work. 

Around late August/early September I finished the manuscript. I’d done some light revisions along the way, but it was essentially very close to a first draft still. This was also when the Avengers of Colour (AoC) submission window opened up. I decided to submit, even if it was just to get my work out there and fully commit to this “being a writer” thing. Hearing nothing back from AoC or The First Novel contest, I prepared to undergo revisions on my own after a break from the manuscript. 

Then, on September 14th, I received an email from June Hur letting me know she enjoyed my manuscript and was choosing me as her mentee. I was elated and in shock. I knew mentors typically asked for additional pages before picking their mentees. I worried that June would get my first 30 pages and go ‘wow this is bad. I really should have asked for more before I picked’. Alas, my insecurities did not come to fruition. She was an absolute gem to work with. 

 TW for here on out: grief and parental loss

What I didn’t mention earlier is that me finishing my book and submitting to AoC coincided with a trip hometown for the first time during the pandemic. I hadn’t seen my family for over a year. This project was already personal for me. I’d used my life as the skeleton to pour this story into. The protagonist and I were both Vietnamese American women who were raised in Iowa and went to college in California. We were both the third born in our families. In this fiction story I’d written, she could hear the dead and had survived the apocalypse caused by unexplained and sudden deaths. The climax revolved around her making amends with the departed spirit of her own mother, who too had died from the same affliction.

During the trip home in September, I would see my mother for what would be the last time. For the first time in a long time, we had easy conversation. She told me stories about her childhood and answered questions about growing up in Vietnam, questions she had dodged for as long as I could remember. I left feeling optimistic that she would continue opening up and telling her stories to me.

When I returned, I worked on light revisions and submitted my manuscript to Pitch Wars. I did already have the mentorship with June but decided to shoot my shot since eyes on my complete manuscript would be a definite plus. I received a full request from one mentor pair, and they sent back notes asking if I was comfortable with their editorial vision. I ultimately did not get selected and was a little sad about it. But I essentially had revision notes on my complete manuscript! One of the mentors even reached out and offered to continue reading for this project outside of Pitch Wars, which was so, so generous. 

I started working through my revisions (none of these made it into the final querying draft), and in November, received an urgent text from my brother back home. Our mother was in the hospital and unconscious, and I needed to come home if I wanted to see her for one last time. In a daze, I wrangled communication with my other brother and my brother-in-law and flew back home that day. 

My mother suffered from a ruptured brain aneurysm and was on life support. By the time the plane landed, and I visited her at the hospital, the nurses let me know she had already stopped having pain reactions. 

It was a whirlwind of emotion. I won’t get into the details. But, over the Thanksgiving holiday, we spent time as a family for the first time in years, coordinated with the organ donor network, and planned a funeral. At 2 am on a quiet Sunday morning, we walked with our mother for the last time as she was taken from the ICU to OR to start the organ donation process. As she insisted on so often when she was still alive, this was her final wish. 

I took a long break from the manuscript. I informed June, my readers, and my lovely fellow mentees. 

And I wrestled with the thought that somehow, I’d brought this into being. That I’d written a story in which the character’s mother died suddenly, and now my mother too was gone. An irrational thought, I knew, but one that played repeatedly in my mind regardless.

For anybody here who last dealt with it, I’m sure you’re aware of the common advice: you don’t grow beyond grief, you grow around it.

I think the break was good for me. I wrote 20k of an entirely different project and generally let grief have its way with my life. I went to therapy and accepted my loving partner’s offer to cook, clean, and generally keep me safe. 

But I kept finding myself thinking back to the manuscript. Thinking back to memories of my own mother. I dreamt of her. I thought of her constantly, even in small ways like when something was on sale at the grocery store, or I used the mixing bowls she’d given to me for my first apartment. I poked and prodded at my manuscript, scribbling down ideas on revision as they popped into my head.

From February to March, I revised and rewrote almost the entire manuscript. This was a story about family, and major structural changes needed to happen to do that effectively. I poured my grief into the story. It was hard, but it let me feel, even temporarily, close to my mother again. And just for a moment, I imagined being the protagonist instead. Of hearing my mother’s spirit and being able to be with her for one last time. 

III) Querying

After finishing revisions and going back to line and copy edit, I sent my first queries on March 10th. I’d incorporated mentor suggestions, notes from writing friends, and advice from the PubTips subreddit. Was it premature? Maybe. I knew that it would be a better idea to sit on the MS and do another revision. But I didn’t want to. I just wanted to start getting this story out there. 

Because it was so intimately tied to my own grief, I didn’t think I had it in me to go through querying and revision hell. I could probably do it with an agent; once there was an end goal in mind and a professional to guide me.  But on my own? I didn’t want to keep revisiting this project and dealing with an inundation of rejections. 

The Pitch Wars mentor who had offered to read for me was going to be providing feedback, so I planned to do one more small round of querying once I got back their notes. But otherwise, I was preparing myself to shelve this project if querying wasn’t initially successful.  Shoot my shot and get on with it. 

On top of being a quiet story, despite the “I talk to dead people and the world has ended thing”, my manuscript also does a lot of riskier things. It has a dual timeline structure. There’s a prologue. There’s even a tense AND POV shift in the climax. I knew that it was giving agents every initial reason to say no.

In the first week I received 2 requests, and then continuously sent a bunch of rounds of 8-10 agents to exhaust my list. I participated in #SFFPit (this occurred prior to my first queries) and #MoodPitch and topped out at 51 queries. There were plenty of rejections too. Almost all form. The only pre-nudge rejection that had any sort of customization was essentially a referral. I had a little tracker of rejections printed (alongside some affirmations) and stuck on a star sticker for every rejection received. I was consumed by checking Query Tracker and my email. 

In the middle of all this, I met with an editor I’d won a submission package review with during a charity auction (reiterating here again, you don’t need to pay for professional help in order to query successfully). Though, the auctions are a good way to support a cause while getting a little help yourself if you have the resources. I will also mention here I’d done something similar way earlier with the first version of the manuscript and gotten query letter feedback from an author during a different charity auction event. 

IV) The Offer

In one of the last rounds of queries, I received a full request the day after I sent the query letter. In these final rounds, I had implemented the query letter changes the editor had suggested. Looking up the agent who requested on Query Tracker, there were a handful of stories in which they offered representation almost immediately. I let myself daydream a little, but after a few days of silence, sent off another round of queries and tried to pull my expectations back down to earth. Exactly a week after sending the full, I received an email from this agent asking for a call. I screeched, scared the crap out of my cats, and sent my boyfriend this absolute nonsense text message:

The next day we had the call and had a wonderful conversation. She found my story haunting and loved all the parts of it I thought an agent might hate (the dual timeline structure, the climax). She offered representation and the next few days were a blur. Technically, I had 32 queries and full/partial manuscripts out. I nudged all of them (don’t do this, lol). I fielded full requests and conversations with the offering agent’s current clients. 

Then, a few days after the offer, it finally hit me. That one of the first advocates for my writing wasn’t around to share my joy. My mother was so proud of my writing. In typical immigrant mother fashion, she never uttered the words. But she showed it, constantly. That weird little poetry movie I made in 7th grade? She made DVD copies and showed it to all her friends. A guest would visit and (to my preteen horror) she would put it on the TV. And when I became an adult and the writing faded, she told me she looked at my Facebook photos every day. 

And, after all the dust settled, I realized that the version of the manuscript that would get me my agent existed because of my mother’s death. It’s a complex network of bittersweet emotion I can’t even begin to untangle. So, after the emotional high of the offer, I also sat with a few days of acute and raw sadness.

I did receive another offer from an absolute gem of an agent. I went through the whole process again and was now more confused. Both agents were equally stellar, and both had an editorial vision that resonated with me in different ways. Both agents offered calls with their agency heads, and I accepted. Both conversations were wonderful (again in different ways). 

I only gave myself a day of padding between the deadline for my agent decision and the deadline for other agents to get back to me. I don’t recommend this—give yourself a couple of days if possible. A day before the deadline I was extremely stressed because I was still undecided.

Finally, the night of, I drafted my pretend rejection emails (which feels like crap by the way), and it clarified things. I knew which agent I was going with. Katelyn Detweiler at Jill Grinberg Literary Management 😊

If you've read all of that, thank you for reading my words. I am so grateful for what lies ahead, even it if will be quite daunting. I'm still going to therapy, trying to take care of myself, and naming my feelings as they come up. I am not the first person (nor will I be the last) to pour grief into my art. I'm sure there are more challenges ahead. But you know what? I couldn't imagine another story I'd rather try and debut with. 

Hope you all are holding yourself in care too 💕💓