How I Got My Agent(s)
PART ONE: ALL YOU'VE GOT TO DO IS TRY
CW: talk of mental illness and treatment, drinking, death of a family member, COVID-19
I’ll be honest with you. This is the third (or fourth or fifth) time that I’m sitting down to write this post. So far I’ve done nothing except write WAY TOO MANY pages detailing every minute happening of my life and how it led me here. And every single time I scrap it and try again, I can’t help but write it all the same way. So here I am, again, trying my best to be concise.
But, in an effort to spare your precious, beautiful eyes, the entirety of my story will be split into three posts. This one covers my life as a writer and my querying journey all the way up to my first call. The second post will cover my subsequent offers and two week decision period. And the third post will cover what went down with my first agent, why I decided to leave, and how I got my second agent.
If you’re just here for the stats and not all the other details and nuance, don’t worry! I got you! Look at these two cutie graphics I made!
I suppose a part of the reason why I find it so hard to be concise though, is because on the surface my story seems like a unicorn of sorts. It’s not the kind of story that will make you feel good if you’ve been in the trenches over multiple years with multiple books. But, what I lack in time in the trenches I make up for in resilience and survival beyond all reasonable doubt. But that, I think, is a story for another day.
So take heed: if you’re not in a good place mentally while in the querying trenches or if a story about a relatively short and unusual querying journey might send you over the deep end, maybe tab this to come back to later. It’s okay, I totally get it and you should protect your mental health above all else.
PART ONE: READING IS FOR LOSERS
I don’t have one of those quintessential author-y stories where I tell you that I always knew that I wanted to be a writer and that I filled billions of notebooks as a kid with stories about princesses and sentient cupcakes and dragons and stuff. In fact, when I was a kid I hated reading.
Gasp! HATED READING? Yep, you read that right. Growing up I was a certified gifted kid™. I begged and begged my mother to teach me to read at a young age and cried endlessly when I just couldn’t get it. Then, on Christmas morning 1999 I opened a gift, took one look at the package, and sounded out my first words. I ran around the house screaming I CAN READ! I CAN READ! I CAN READ! It was a Christmas miracle.
But the excitement was short-lived.
In hindsight I don’t think I necessarily hated reading, but instead I found learning the logistics of reading and grammar to be intensely boring. I would spend our time doing Formula 3 grammar exercises in school doodling flowers and eyeballs in the margins of my workbook and talking to my friends instead of listening. To this day I struggle with grammar and spelling and don’t even get me started on figuring out how to properly use a semicolon.
As time went on though, my childish antics got me grounded more often than not and my evil genius of a mother ensured that when I was grounded there was only one thing I could do outside of going to school and self-care necessities: read.
And so I did. A Lot.
And I fell in love.
How hadn’t I noticed before that reading was a portal into another world where I could leave behind everything that sucked about being a preteen in the early 2000’s? Despite my newfound obsession, I still didn’t see myself as a writer. I think there was definitely a part of me that would finish a good book and think “wow it’d be cool to make someone feel like this one day.” But I never put any action behind those words.
Instead, when I wasn’t reading, I spent copious hours watching Trauma: Life in the ER, Monsters Inside Me, and pretty much anything I could find on Discovery Life. I dreamt of the day I’d be a doctor in the ER running down the hall screaming CODE BLUE! CODE BLUE! GRAB THE CRASH CART! GIVE ME ONE OF EPI! Or whatever.
When I got a bit older and my emotions were too intense to hold inside, I discovered writing poetry. But even this was never done with any ambition or seriousness, I was just writing what I felt. I think, somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that maybe I was low key kinda good at it, but I still never saw writing as something I could pursue professionally.
And then I read the Twilight Saga and I learned what it felt like to be absolutely feral for a series. A passion bloomed within me and I began devouring books at an unprecedented rate. Part of that was because I loved a good story and part of it was because of the state of my life and mental health. Often, books were my only escape and in a lot of ways, they saved me from myself. This time in my life was crucial and I was churning out multiple HIGHLY emo poems a day and secretly posting them on this super Y2K-ass website from the basement computer room of an inpatient mental health treatment center.
I’d taken a turn for the worst and was trying desperately to claw my way back to stability. During one of my darkest times, I read Blue is for Nightmares by Laurie Faria Stolarz, and something inside me changed. I tore my way through the series and suddenly, there was an idea churning in the back of my mind.
What if I wrote my own book? I loved reading, I enjoyed writing poetry. What if I wrote a book about a boy and a girl who are prophesied to be together, to save the world, and to destroy each other in the process? What if I called it TO UNLOCK A PROPHECY?
PART TWO: A FOUR LOKO, A NURSE, AND A PANINI WALK INTO A BAR
I tried desperately, to fill notebooks with this story but time and time again, I failed. I could never find the confidence to see it through. Even after I won Poet Laureate of my entire High School during my sophomore year, I simply didn’t believe that I could do it. So I didn’t. Instead, I oscillated between many other dreams: Interior Designer or Zoologist or FBI Behavioral Analyst or Plus Size fashion Designer or Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist…
Sometime around my senior year I finally settled on something, I was going to write for television. For as much as I love books, I’d be remiss to not mention that I LOVE TV. My first love, my baby, I’ve always loved a good story, and the first form of storytelling that I resonated with was television. So, why not combine my love of stories and writing with my love of television? Obviously that’s got to be easier than becoming an author, right?
Now, to be clear, I knew absolutely nothing about what it takes to become a television writer but I was eighteen and had a fresh acceptance to a NYC liberal arts college. So I moved to the big city and pursued a degree in Communications with a concentration in Media Studies.
I lasted one and a half semesters.
My new found freedom was A LOT. I ditched my anti-anxiety meds, learned that nearly any NYC club is willing to overlook underage IDs as long as you show up with enough hot girls, and that you can buy clear ice cups from the bodega down the street and fill them with four loko and no one will bat an eye.
During all of this, my grandmother's health was going downhill, my health was becoming increasingly concerning, and I decided, once again, that I simply didn’t have what it takes to become a writer.
I just didn’t have the passion for it.
I didn’t have the cut throat attitude needed to push aside every other young, TV writer hopeful.
Maybe it was the months of perpetual hangovers, or the lack of serotonin despite being in my absolute favorite city in the world, but I packed it up mid-semester and hauled ass back to podunk nowhere, North Carolina.
It’d been a few years since I last devoured books at an unhealthy speed but back at home with no job and no prospects, I read a record breaking (for me) hundred or so books and at the end of that literary binge I threw away my dreams, again, and decided to go to nursing school.
I am nothing if not an enigma wrapped in mid 2000’s pop culture references.
I’d come mostly full circle. I always wanted to work in the medical field, I pretty consistently lacked the confidence to pursue my super secret true passion, and I yearned for the rush of one of the most difficult and traumatizing careers possible.
So I enrolled into a local university and started working my way through my prerequisites. Three weeks into the semester, my grandmother died.
She was more than just my grandmother, she was my mother. She was the woman who had raised me. In her last days in hospice, I cared for her and I realized that I was on the right path. I was meant to be a nurse, not a writer. I was meant to help people and care for them. To help people feel human and have dignity even when the absolute worst things were happening to them. This was only reinforced by my grandmother who, on her deathbed, grasped my hands and told me that I had found my calling.
So now I like, definitely didn’t have a choice.
Instead of grieving the loss of my grandmother, I poured myself into nursing school. I studied eight hours a day every single day just to claw my way to a degree that would mean something. Just so that I could prove that she was right to believe in me and that in some way, her death wouldn’t be in vain because it would have led me to my passion.
I graduated and started working nights in the pulmonary ICU stepdown. I worked my way up to charge nurse and fought through near debilitating anxiety on the way to work every single day just to prove that I could do it. But when I reflect back on that time, I don’t think that I was happy. No one can prepare you for what it feels like to be responsible for people’s lives, and their deaths.
Despite this, in December of 2019, I finally, finally, reached my life long dream.
I transferred into the Trauma ER.
Three months later COVID-19 hit North Carolina.
I was also five months pregnant with twins.
This is when everything changed.
We had no PPE, I had no protections at work, I would not be exempt from caring for COVID positive patients. We had no idea what the virus would do to pregnant people, let alone pregnant people with high risk, multiples pregnancies. My management basically told me to get over it, all while there were pregnant nurses all over the country falling ill with COVID and ending up on a ventilator.
So I made a choice and quit my job.
What the hell was I supposed to do now? My ENTIRE LIFE’S PURPOSE since the death of my grandmother was nursing. And now I’d abandoned my fellow nurses during a global pandemic because it turns out, I wasn’t willing to put my life or the lives of my unborn daughters on the line for my job. It wasn’t very Florence Nightingale of me, I suppose.
But what was done, was done. I spent the first year of my daughters’ lives waiting to go back to work. Waiting to return to the bedside. Dreading the anxiety and panic that came with the job. But, then an opportunity arose.
My partner and I decided to pack up our lives and move across state to the coast. We were going to take over an ice cream business and it was seasonal! This meant that outside of the months of May through September, we’d be free to potentially pursue other endeavors.
I hadn’t said much to anyone, but over the first year of the twins' lives I’d begun to wonder what it would look like if I started writing again, but for real this time. I was 26 years old. It was thirteen years after the idea for TO UNLOCK A PROPHECY first came into my head, thirteen years after the first time I told myself that I’d never have what it takes to write a book. I’d never be good enough to be the exception. I’d never, ever, be an author, so why try.
For the first time, instead of thinking “why try?” I found myself wondering, “why not?”
PART THREE: SAYING NO TO ALL ADVICE ISN’T ADVISABLE BUT SOMETIMES WORKS
We packed up our house and our kids and we moved to a new town and took over a new business.
On July 15th, 2021 I logged onto twitter for the first time and jumped into the writing community with both feet. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I knew nothing about story structure, or pacing or character arcs. All I knew about writing I knew from the way it felt. The way the words just came out of me when I wrote poetry. The way that the words made me feel when I read my favorite books.
So I bought Save the Cat Writes a Novel and in between long days solo-parenting my twins while my partner was out working all day and night, I studied it. I made notes. I began to brainstorm how to turn TO UNLOCK A PROPHECY into something that I could really write.
It went from some vague fairytale retelling, and passed through many, many iterations until I landed on something that finally spoke to me. By August I was outlining, in September I took pages that I’d secretly written over the years and began transforming them into the beginning of my story.
In October when the season was well and truly over, I sat at my computer all day, everyday and I wrote. And wrote. In November I participated in my first ever NanoWriMo and I wrote over 65k words. And on December 3rd, 2021 I had my completed first draft of BLACK MOUNTAIN ACADEMY.
I’d taken the raw, starry-eyed teenage dream of TO UNLOCK A PROPHECY and poured my wisened 26-year-old soul into it. Now, it was a story about a girl and her grandmother, about grief and love and generational trauma, and at its core was still a prophecy that would bring together two unlikely teens in ways that would change them both forever.
Thirteen years in the making, I had finally proven to myself that I could do it.
When I think back on this time and how I was able to crank out this book, I know that two things are absolutely true:
I was immensely privileged to be able to work on this book full time while my partner took care of our twins. This is not something that escapes me and I know that I would have likely never gotten this book done at all, let alone in the time that I did it, if I wasn’t able to stay home with my partner and have the support that I did.
I didn’t know LITERALLY ANYTHING about publishing. So I wasn’t writing for a particular market, I wasn’t full of advice and trends and tropes, or any outside influences. I just wrote the story that was in my heart. This has come back to bite me (I wrote the first of a YA fantasy TRILOGY in this market?!). But at the time, I think that writing what was naturally flowing from me without the stress of meeting some market expectation helped me write both well, and quickly.
In November, I participated in an event on twitter called #CPMatch. This is where I met some of the most incredible CPs and betas who took a look at that first (messy ass!) draft and helped me figure out what the hell I was doing. I love them so much and honestly would have never made it to this point without them.
In January 2022 I rewrote the book from scratch. Some things I kept, but I went through every single sentence and edited the book to the best of my ability. I sent it out to another round of readers.
This is where I’m going to lose some people, I think.
All of my beta readers had the same feedback. The pacing was off, the beginning was too slow. And here’s the thing, I knew they were right. But at the time, I just didn’t know how in the world to fix that. I was still so close to my manuscript that every single thing felt precious and important. I brainstormed with people, I rewrote the beginning and then promptly threw that new version out. I scoured the internet for advice on what to do but always found myself sitting there feeling like changing it further just wasn’t the right decision. And I’ll be honest with you, dear reader, and this is awkward to admit, but I just knew.
I just knew that I had a good story. It had good bones. Even if it wasn’t perfect. Even if it had pacing issues and I had no idea how to fix them. I thought that maybe, maybe, my book was good enough at its core to attract an agent. Maybe if I could get an agent who loved my book as much as I did, they would know how to fix it.
So much of querying advice says that you’ll know you’re ready to query when you can no longer make the book any better by yourself.
But they don’t say it has to be perfect.
I’d done the best that I could do at the time. So I wrote a query. I had two whole people look at it. I took a LITERAL shaking deep breath, and hit send on my first batch of queries on February 18th, 2022. Exactly one year ago today.
I’d spent the last six months immersing myself into the writing community. I knew that querying was a ton of rejections, and I knew that this was my first ever full length novel–odds were that I’d have to shelve it eventually. So once my query left the warmth of my bosom and was out in the trenches, I panicked!
I think I read somewhere that the average time it takes for an author to get an agent is 5 or 6 books in the same amount of years? So I was in this for the long haul. (this could be a completely made up fake statistic, do not commit this to memory or apply it to yourself)
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. And when the rejections slowly started coming in, I knew that I needed to get another look at my query package.
Through Twitter I was able to connect with a query critiquing group. I submitted mine, mostly looking for validation that myself and my CPs were on the right track.
BOY HOWDY, I was dead wrong.
My query letter was obliterated. I mean, just totally annihilated.
I cried all day long.
No seriously.
All day.
Every time I thought about the critique I burst into tears.
How could I be so stupid? How could I ever have been dumb enough to believe that I could write a book and query it and get an agent on the first try?
I read and re-read the critique.
I sat with it.
And that night, I wrote a new query.
I think, for the most part, I cried because I knew they were right.
My query was way too vague. There was no way to distinguish it from any other YA fantasy query. Once someone with an objective eye who HADN’T READ MY BOOK took a look at the query, they could see everything I’d missed. And they were right.
They were super mean about it, but they were right.
So I pulled myself out of my puddle of tears, and I changed everything about the query. I sent it out to more objective people. I changed it again.
When I could finally muster the courage to face another round of rejection, I sent out another batch.
I got more rejections.
But, I knew that I needed to give it more time, just to be really, really sure.
On February 28th, 2022, ten days after I sent my first query, I got my first full request.
I simply cannot express what that felt like.
What an incredible, incredible feeling, to know that maybe I wasn’t stupid for pursuing this.
Maybe I was brave.
I gave my manuscript one more once-over and sent it to the agent. And then I totally spiraled about it.
The next few months were full of rejections with a smattering of requests here and there. Even though I was getting requests, I received a few pieces of feedback that confirmed what I already knew–my pacing was off, or maybe I was starting in the wrong place. It was all consistent with my beta feedback.
Maybe I was too hasty in querying. Maybe I should have revised again first. Kicking myself, I applied to a mentorship program in order to try to have an editor take a look at my manuscript and help me revise it.
I did not get in.
And not only did I not get it, but ALL THREE EDITORS used me as an example in their #10queries. Each had a slightly different opinion about what was wrong. My manuscript’s tone was too “horror-y” (even though in my query I literally say it’s a genre blend of fantasy and horror), the pacing is off, my query isn’t compelling or it lacks needed information…
Depressing. Soooooo depressing.
I tried to put that stuff out of my mind. I participated in pitch contests and actually did quite a bit better than I was expecting. I had ONE good pitch that typically got me likes and I used it over and over and over again (for different events, not during the same event). I’m sure some of my moots could recite it from memory by the end.
I sent in more queries.
Now here’s where things get a little bit more interesting.
In March I received a personalized rejection on a query. The agent seemed to really enjoy my voice but, as we can all guess, thought that I started the story in the wrong place which dragged down the pacing. They gave me a few suggestions and said that if I ended up revising it, they’d love for me to requery.
I mulled this over for a long time but in the end I felt that while I agreed that the pacing was off, I wasn’t sure that this agent’s suggestions were how I would want to go about fixing it. So, I didn’t revise.
Then, in April I participated in another pitch contest, and this same agent (plus another agent who had form rejected my query) liked one of my pitches. I sent the agent a message and told them that I really appreciated their like but I didn’t revise or apply any other their feedback, did they still want me to requery?
They said yes! So I sent off my query, confused but hopeful. Both agents who originally rejected my query ended up requesting my full!
Two weeks later I got four full responses in one week. Two kind R&Rs, a form rejection, and a referral to another agent within the agency.
I was overwhelmed, confused, hurt, and seriously doubting myself. After my rejection from the mentorship contest, I’d started working on a new project instead of worrying about revising BMA. But now I was feeling insecure again and wondering if I should jump back into it. So one particularly emotional night, I decided to apply to a different mentorship program. But when I was notified that I was being seriously considered by one of the mentor groups I started to wonder if I’d made a mistake. At this point I had eleven fulls out, I think, and I was nervous about potentially having to pull them to revise. I was so deep into querying that the thought of having to pause and pull everything for revisions physically made me sick. So, I decided to pull out of the running.
Then I learned about DVMentor. The way that the mentorship was described was that you didn’t have to revise. It was more geared toward supporting the author through all stages of the publishing process for a 6 month period. There was a part of the application where you could say what things you were interested in getting mentorship on so I asked for help with other things, but didn’t mention wanting to do an edit.
On May 28th I was informed that I had been chosen as a ‘22 Mentee! I was really excited! Until I learned that the mentorship did include a developmental edit.
I was torn. But then I spoke to my mentor. Her notes were spot on and even though I was scared, I could start to see the beginnings of the new draft. And when I asked her if I needed to pull any of my fulls she said no! Well actually, she said not to pull my fulls because I was 100% getting an agent and the edit would just give me a head start on preparing for sub (the SQUEAL I SQUALLED WHEN I READ THAT??!!)
Buuuuuuuut I didn’t get a chance to do my edit.
Why?
Because I was in my first trimester of pregnancy and absolutely DYING. My exhaustion was out of control and at this point the summer had come back around and our business was in full swing.
I tried slowly to reread my manuscript in between fighting my way through the trenches and full rejections and form rejections. Then around mid June my inbox turned into crickets. I remember tweeting a ton, just totally desperate for an answer, like ANY ANSWER AT ALL LIKE PLEASE GOD JUST A CRUMB AT LEAST!
And then, out of nowhere, a lake in the middle of a desert.
On Thursday, July 14th at 5:59 pm I got an email.
PART FOUR: UNO REVERSE
It’s the way my brain just totally rebooted itself as I stared at my phone. I was sitting on the floor of my living room with my mom and kids. Normally, when I got response emails I would read the little preview before I opened it just to try to prepare myself for the rejection. But this time for some reason I just opened it and didn’t even register who it was from until I was staring at a request for THE CALL.
THE CALL.
FOR ME AND MY SILLY LITTLE GRIEVING GIRL AND HER DUMB FATED HOT GUY?!
And get this, this was the agent who gave me the personalized rejection. The one who decided to ask me to requery even though I didn’t make any changes based on their original feedback. I never saw this one coming. Not in a million years.
I was sweating, I felt nauseous, I genuinely convinced myself that I was getting sick. I just couldn’t believe it! I messaged my bestie CP in complete shock. The email asked if I would be willing to have a conversation. WHAT THE F DID THAT MEAN?! Was it an R&R??? Freaking out, I set up a time to have the call with the agent the next day.
Then I blasted out queries to the rest of my list. Up until this point I’d been taking it kind of slow, but now was my chance to get in some last minute queries to people I felt would be a good fit. There was also an agent I’d been in contact with on and off who’d shown interest in some of my pitches. My full had been out at that agency with their colleague for several months at this point and I’d nudged with no response so I messaged this agent to ask if enough time had passed that I could send them my query. I mentioned that I was going to be having a call soon and I wanted to give them a chance to take a look since I thought we’d be a good fit. They said yes and told me to send them my query and full at the same time!
That night I barely slept. It was all happening! I was having THE CALL.
After my decade of doubt, of believing that I couldn’t do it, that I’d never be good enough, I’d finally worked up the courage to just try and exactly one year after I created my writing twitter account and five months since I’d started querying, I was having a call with an agent.
Even after everyone told me my pacing was off, even after I was becoming more and more sure that I’d made a mistake by trusting my gut and not revising my manuscript despite all of this feedback, I was having the call.
***Now I just want to make it clear, I’m not advocating for ignoring a bunch of similar feedback from multiple sources, instead what I’m saying is that I knew that everyone was right, but I also knew that I wasn’t going to be able to fix it without collaboration and I also believed that despite this pacing issue, my story was compelling enough to potentially get me an agent. I just so happened to be right about that, but THAT’S WEIRD. THAT’S NOT NORMAL. DO NOT COMPARE ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR JOURNEY TO THAT BC IT’S BIZARRE. Trust your gut, work your manuscript until you genuinely don’t know how else to make it better on your own, make sure to work with quality CPs and betas, and at the end of the day, the only thing you can really, truly do is try.***
I didn’t breathe all day. I was shaking and my heart was beating out of my chest. I was SO NERVOUS. I have intense social anxiety and trouble even making calls to the doctor sometimes, so knowing that I was going to have to talk on the phone to a real literary agent who’d read my book? I was dying.
The agent was nice! But the call didn’t necessarily go how I imagined it would. She asked me a few questions about what my goal was with my story, what did I think my characters motivations were, what was my reasoning behind some plot points… in hindsight I think she was interviewing me to see if I had what it takes to process what she was going to say next. Because the rest of the call was about an hour of her telling me everything that she would suggest for revisions. And by the end of it, it was clear that she was suggesting a near complete rewrite.
I was so overwhelmed and I even messaged my CP multiple times telling her that I thought it was an R&R. To be honest, if we weren’t literally on the phone because the agent loved my book, I would have thought she hated it. Some of her suggestions were absolutely genius, but some of them gave me pause. By the end of the call my brain was mush and I was excited, creatively buzzing, and terrified.
After so many critiques in a row and no clear understanding of what was going on, I asked the agent if this was an offer or an R&R and she said it was an offer! A real life offer of representation! From a real life agent!
A real life agent who wanted to change nearly everything about my book. Internally I was panicking. What if this was my only offer? Was I really willing to make all of these changes? On one hand the agent was super kind and seemed really communicative and supportive of her clients. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure that she really got what I was trying to do with the book.
I didn’t have long to consider that though, because ten minutes before the call ended I got another email. Less than 24 hours after receiving my full, another agent wanted to set up a call. I could have fainted.
To Be Continued…
Noelle’s February 2023 Recommendations!
Be sure to subscribe so that you can be notified when Parts Two and Three drop! I’ll walk you through my two week wait, the decision making process, what it was like to sign with an agent and what happens when that agent isn’t the right fit!