The Tragedies of Trying to Get Agented

OK, I’ve been putting this off for a while and by “a while” I mean four months, but it was difficult for me to formulate this into words because tbh my journey to getting an agent isn’t light and fluffy. It’s full of big and small tragedies in my life. In 2008, I dropped out of high school at sixteen years old due to chronic illnesses and immediately enrolled into a nighttime GED program. Being at home during the day, my hobby of writing turned into a career dream. At seventeen, I began my studies as an education major in college. As I dissected and digested children’s literature as apart of my coursework, I worked on my writing craft. There were many many false starts. I lost count of how many stories died at 10K or less. I wrote completed six stories through my early twenties, but I didn’t believe I was ready to begin the next step toward publication until I began my first year of teaching in 2015.

I was a bright-eyed second grade math-and-science teacher at an inner city school, tutoring a group of fourth graders afterschool. Fourth graders who weren’t fond of reading because they didn’t see themselves in the characters they read about. So, I wrote a story about a Black boy, secret government agencies, a subterranean society of aliens, and a dog named Teeth. My fourth graders were my fans. As I wrote each chapter, they read it the next day. It took me a year to finish this story. By then, my sweet fourth graders were now hotshot fifth graders who were eager to get their hands on the last chapters.

After I handed over the grand finale, that’s when one of the kids blindsided me with a single sentence:

Can you make it into a library book so I read this to my baby brother?

It was easy to fall in love with the idea of choosing this book as the first one I’d query, but I soon discovered the hard part was (you guessed it) querying. It was late Fall of 2016. I learned querying was much more than just sending a letter to the agent of your favorite authors. Research quickly became the frenemy I spent far too much time with. A lot of mistakes on my part led to all no’s on queries and fulls. During that time, I also struggled with the results of the presidential election. Though I didn’t query many agents, my tanking mental health led to me trunking this story and I took a hiatus from writing.

For the first half of 2017, I was depressed and angry. Trump was president. My workplace was a swamp of toxicity. The bank kicked my parents and I out of my childhood home. We were living in Air BnB’s while I finalized the details on my first house. During all of that, I acted as a referee between my parents shout-matches as their marriage fell apart. Oh, and while we moved out of an Air BnB to my new house, one of my dogs ran away during the transition. Not enough flyers, searching miles and miles by foot, and going door-to-door could bring him back to us.

Needless to say, I was a mess. By June, I was depressed, tired, and angry. I went on an nostalgia kick, devouring movies that brought me joy as a kid. Though I had 3 more movies to watch after Practical Magic, I never got to them. I fell asleep on my couch watching a classic about witches, the consequences of love potions, and sisterhood. I dreamt of a cynical pink-haired witch. Writing her story wasn’t a want but a need. Her story allowed me to explore and unpack all the grief and rage within me. From June 2017 to September 2019, I wrote LOVE MONSTERS.

I had just missed PitMad by a few days. So, I had my eyes set on October pitch parties and Pitch Wars. I applied for PW and while I waited, I participated in PitDark which got me 2 agent likes and DVpit got me 5 agent likes. I sent out my queries to these agents, but I also sent out cold queries (unsolicited queries) as well. In total, I sent out 21 queries and received 4 full manuscript requests. All fulls except one ended up being a rejection. I marked the last one as a no-response and trunked LOVE MONSTERS in December 2019. I ended up with a few no-responses for queries as well. BTW, I did not get into Pitch Wars either.

Going on another writer hiatus was the best choice for me because January-June 2020 was a hot goddamn mess. In January, I traveled to California for my mom’s college graduation and came back severely ill. I’m 99.8% sure I had COVID. The hospital sent me home because when they asked if I had been outside the country, I told them no. I was sick for 2.5 weeks. February-May was state shutdowns, teaching virtually, more unarmed Black people losing their lives, and BLM protests.

My friend, Erin Grammar, came to me at the end of May and encouraged me to do June’s PitMad to pitch LOVE MONSTERS. I honestly didn’t want to at first. I hadn’t looked at LM since December 2019. It mirrored what was happening across the country so closely it hit a nerve for me. But in the end, I decided to give LM another shot and drafted up some pitches.

On my birthday, June 3, I got a query rejection from an agent I had marked as no-response eight months prior. I was informed the first 10 sample pages was so bad my story wasn’t even ready to be queried. Immediately, I thought:

IGHT, IMMA HEAD OUT

It was the day before PitMad and with a rejection like that I didn’t even want to participate, but all of my friends were like ‘naw, you’re doing this, chick.’ My salty behind scheduled my pitches into TweetDeck and left it to God. Well, the response to my pitch was overwhelming and my entire mood that day was WTF IS GOING ON. In the end, I received 1.1K retweets, 200+ likes, 32 agent likes, 9 editor likes, and 4 indie press likes.

I queried 10 agents first. By the end of the day, I got back several full manuscript requests. This led to me sending out more queries. In the end, I had 19 queries sent out and received 13 full requests. During this time, I also joined 3 query support groups and met amazing writers in the query trenches. ❤

A week later, I received an offer of representation that was eight months in the making. Yup, you read that right. Remember that no-response on a full manuscript? Well, it wasn’t one. It was a hold-on-chick-I’m-reading.

We set up a time for The Call ™, I re-watched Alexa Donne’s video on agent call questions 100 times, and in my spare time, I was in a near-constant state of panic. The phone call went amazing and I was 100% down for being represented by Agent #1, but I had to send out nudges to 19 agents. There were polite step-asides and aight-bet’s. Then I got an offer from Agent #2, but I got an interesting email from Agent #3. It wasn’t an offer, but a I’m-halfway-thru-and-I’m-digging-this.

I had a call with Agent #2 on a Thursday and the following day, I received an email from Agent #3 that he finished the story and wanted to set up a call. This was allllll new to me so I was confused. Agent #1 and Agent #2 informed me by email they wanted to rep me. Agent #3 just wanted a phone call. So, naturally I freaked out. I had convinced myself that it’d probably be an R&R call, but that weekend, another tragedy came.

My best friend and my best-best friend’s boyfriend, Nikolai, passed away from a heartattack at 22 on Saturday, June 27. There were no rules for mourning during a pandemic. That Sunday night, 10 of us met at the beach, his favorite place in the world. We flung roses into the ocean, we held hands, listened to little eulogies, hugged each other, and cried with our masks on.

On Monday, I was numb, but I had a call I had to do. Right off the batt, Agent #3 let me know he wanted to offer rep and we had a lovely phone call. I didn’t get to celebrate long as I got a phone call from my fiancé informing me that there were an active shooter situation at his job and he was hiding behind crates at work. Another tragedy. A life was taken and others were injured. Hours after his shift was over, the police released everyone to leave. I had to meet him in a bus stop parking lot. I was thankful he was OK.

In the midst of this, I had a difficult decision I had to make with three offers of rep to consider. My friend and accountability partner, Amelia Rivers, even made me a spreadsheet with all the pros and cons. We analyzed it together, but eventually, it went beyond data. I thought about what I wanted for my book, for my career, for my future. So, I signed with John Cusick from the Folio Lit Agency because he understood my story and its importance to me.

LOVE MONSTERS has seen the best of me and the worst of me. Even if it doesn’t end up on bookshelves, this story was the one victory I needed to endure all those tragedies.

And that’s all that matters.