Pure Chance and Circumstance: The Story of My First Full Request
Hello Funny People,
Two Cents Logo by Devora Johnson
The Post in Question from Threads (redacted for privacy)
The DM in Question
Reply, edited for privacy
Email, edited for privacy
As the constant readers among you (all seven of you), will know, I've been deep in the query trenches since January. Only a month in, I got my first bit of decent news, but the sheer craziness of how it came about was something I knew I needed to commit to paper (or in this case, pixel). Hopefully, it'll help to hearten those among you who are struggling in the trenches alongside me or are preparing to do so soon. Who knows? You might gleam some wisdom from this too.
A Brief Recapitulation
Last year, I managed to complete not one (1), but two (2), novels: my YA/Adult crossover Wizard Fantasy and a Space Opera. I really did it as a threefold exercise.
1) I was making up for lost time. I'd spent the better part of 2022 working on revising my first novel. This left me some time to work on shorter fiction, but little time to focus on another novel. So, given I'd lost most of a year to developmental edits, line edits, proofreading, and so on, I knew I needed to get some more new work done.
2) I wanted to see if I could write something different. I am no one in the grand scheme of the world of writing and publishing. Nobody knows me. Nobody thinks of me as that "guy who wrote so-and-so." I have no reputation (yet). On the one hand, that can be frustrating (nobody who works hard at something they love wants to be ignored), but on the other, it's a tremendous opportunity. If no one knows who I am, and therefore holds no expectations of me and my work, I'm at liberty to do whatever I what because nobody cares. So, given I'd written two novels, back-to-back, that were secondary world fantasy and set in the same world at different times, I wanted to try writing something absolutely different.
Given that Space Opera is somewhat like the Epic Fantasy of Science Fiction, I opted to go with that. I discovered a love for the genre as I read during the early half of last year, so why not try my hand at writing something in that genre. More so, I decided to write something, on a prose level that was absolutely different. All the books I'd written to that point were 3rd Person. So, I decided to try something in 1st Person. My previous book had only two viewpoints. This one would have more than that, despite the viewpoint. All of these were challenges, and like most creatives, I love a good challenge.
3) I wanted to see if I could do it, just cos. This is probably the most petty reason if the three, but it's still valid. I wanted to see if I could manged to draft two novels in one year. I wanted to see if that ability was within my capacities to di.
Despite how exhausting it was, I managed to finish that second novel 11 days before the end of the year, December 20th, 2023. My brain wasn't mush by the end, but it was close. Despite how tired the effort left me, though, doing this crazed thing turned out to be a brilliant move on my part.
The Open Call
Naturally, this story begins with my friend, Ari Rubin.
Near the end of this past January, an agent (who shall remain nameless), posted an invitation on their Threads account. Ari, aware that I'd been writing this Space Opera all the way through the latter half of 2023 from my periodic social media posts about it, decided to bring my attention to it the only way he could. He replied to the post and tagged me in it.
Given that I'd intended to query more, I decided to see what the agent was specifically looking for and how they wanted to go about this.
Their instructions were simple. If we had a Space Opera that bore a reminiscence of Becky Chamber’s The Wayfarers series (the most famous installment of which is The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet), featuring BIPOC characters, and if you yourself were a BIPOC author, they wanted to see a pitch for the book. We could show them that pitch one of two ways: either by replying to the above post or by DM-ing our pitch to them via Instagram.
Given I'd planned on using Chambers' book as a comp in my query, wrote the book specifically to center a BIPOC cast, and (despite my yt-coded name), I am such a writer, I decided to take a swing. After all, the worst the agent could say was no, not interested.
"This is Not What Happened"
Shortly after I finished the first draft of the Space Opera, I created a mock-up of a query letter for it, not thinking I would be using it this year. From that query, I pulled two paragraphs to pitch the book via DM to the agent.
To repeat my motif on these blogs, when it comes to all-things publishing (say it with me), when all you know is failure, that's all you come to expect. So I sent this pitch to [Name Redacted], not expecting them to give me any sort of time of day. The most I anticipated was a polite "Thanks, but no thanks."
This is not what happened.
Instead, I received the following reply.
For those of you who don't know how word counts equate to pages, 5k roughly equals twenty (20) pages of typed manuscript (in standard manuscript format). Additionally, that the agent also wanted me to send it to their personal business email, not the usual submission query pool email, was promising. The only thing I was going to need to swing was the synopsis (something I hadn't realized until I started querying), for which nearly all agents ask.
For those also unaware, a synopsis is typically a one to two (1-2) page summary of the entire plot of the novel. In this document, you tell the intended recipient everything that happens—the beginning, the middle, the end, and any related backstory they might need to know that's not present in your query sample. Most writers I know hate writing synopses with a passion, especially ones like me, who veer more toward writing by the seat of our pants. Personally, while I did find distilling the plot of an 80,000-word book down to just two pages challenging, it wasn't quite the agony most make it out to be. You know me; I love a good challenge.
So, I prepped the necessary material. I personalized the query letter. I polished the first 5000 words exactly. (When an agent asks for a specific amount of your text, be it a number of words or pages, it's always best to give them precisely what they ask for, no more, no less. Why? For the simple reason that they want to see if you can follow directions.) I wrote the synopsis over the course of two(-ish) writing sessions and made sure its prose was as clean as possible. Two full days later, I sent it all, again thinking I'd receive a terse but polite brush off.
Again, this is not what happened.
The Thursday before Super Bowl Sunday, where the KC Chiefs whooped the SF 49ers asses, I received yet another email:
Only after reading that did I realize how much trouble I'd gotten myself into.
So, What Did I Do?
The next three days became a prolonged revision and polish session. I went from one end of that book to another,.polishing, revising, rewriting, every sentence I could, trying to make it as presentable as possible.
I should also admit that part of that process also involved adding a fair chunk of new material. See, in my query letter, I'd claimed that the novel was in fact 80,000 words long. Why? Twofold reasons: 1) I'd heard that 80k was the minimum agents would consider space operas at, and 2) because that was the word count I'd planned to revise the novel to when I got around to it. The first draft, however, was only 73k. So I had to add 7000 words to this book before I sent it.
And I did. By expanding on my typically sparse descriptions, layering in more character-focused details, further clarifying other details, and a myriad of other things. I also added an extra 1000-word chapter at one point, but only one. In a few other places, I also re-organized a few passages, moving them around to better anchor the continuity.
Once I reached the end of my polish, I sent it off and crossed my fingers.
Conclusion
As of this writing, I've yet to hear back from the agent in question. I'm not quite sure how long the proper wait time is in the publishing world before sending that "nudge email," but given that we're now in June, and I had this exchange back in February, I figure the nudge time is drawing near.
Will this lead to me gaining the representation I'm hoping for that'll in turn lead me to a successful career as a published author? I don't know. It's possible, but it's not a certainty. I will say that the agent's apparent enthusiasm for the project, which I can only guage from the rapidity of their responses, is promising. But as much as I am holding out hope that this leads to something, I am definitely not holding my breath.
That all being said, I can't help but feel amazed at all this happening. Had I not taken the time, in the latter half of last year, to write a second novel, and to make that novel a space opera of all things, none of this would've even happened. Curious how making a simple decision can lead to such astonishing things.
— IMC 🙃
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