I’m about to sign with a literary agent. Here are 10 things I learned
It took me eight years.
UPDATE 12/30/21: I’ve decided to make both my books (Ophelia, Alive and Murder-Bears, Moonshine, and Mayhem) permanently available for free to everyone who signs up for my Substack. Click the link below to start reading both immediately:
I don’t want to jinx anything so I won’t name names, but … I just got an offer from a literary agent. After more than eight years writing “seriously,” after two books published, after working on this new book — on and off — for about six years, after three (-ish?) separate rounds of pitching the thing … I finally have an offer. I haven’t signed any contracts yet, so it feels a little bit like being engaged — and it feels nerve-wracking in the exact same ways — but it also feels like the culmination of a decade of work. Let me tell you how it happened — and what I learned in the process.
1. Don’t be afraid to revise. And by “revise,” I mean “throw out your stupid ideas.”
I started this novel — it’s called The Girl with the Ghosts inside Her — way back in 2015, right around the time I sold my first novel, Ophelia, Alive. It started as a road comedy about sex addicts and werewolves, which turned out to be as terrible an idea as you’re probably imagining. When I read the thing back, months later, my immediate thought was “I have no idea what I was thinking with the main plot, but the side characters and backstory are good” — so I ended up doing what you might call a “plot-ectomy.” I kept the peripheral stuff, but changed the central concept to be about possession and a father-daughter relationship.
I finished the second draft in 2017; as I was thinking about finding a home for it, though, I was interrupted by another offer — from the nonfiction world.
2. Take the opportunities in front of you.
When I got a call from Lexham Press, offering to put out my long-languishing nonfiction project — the one that would become Murder-Bears, Moonshine, and Mayhem — I was honestly reluctant to step away from The Girl with the Ghosts, but when someone says, “I’m going to pay you to write a book,” you don’t say no. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get The Girl with the Ghosts out of my head — but then I got a random note from my friend April-Lyn: something along the lines of “You better send me the manuscript for your next book.”
I sent her what I thought was a very rough draft, but … she loved it. Those were her words: “I love this book.” And that was when I began to suspect I was really onto something with it — an overconfidence that proved to be more of a hindrance than an asset. But as soon as I finished my first draft of Murder-Bears and sent it off to my editor, I dove back into a new draft of The Girl with the Ghosts—and that was when another opportunity presented itself.
3. Don’t be overconfident. You probably suck.
As I worked on The Girl with the Ghosts, I noticed that Crystal Lake Press — an indie publisher I have a lot of admiration for — was going to open for submissions at the end of the year. That gave me something to shoot for; it also made November of 2018 a grueling month, as I rushed to finish the final draft in time. The last week of the month was spent at my in-laws’ for Thanksgiving, and then on the road for several days afterward as we took the long route home to avoid a blizzard; many of the final chapters of The Girl with the Ghosts were written at three a.m. in hotel lobbies. Then, having completed the thing, I sent my draft and my pitch for it off to my friend K.B. Hoyle (another talented writer whose books you should buy right now), who wrote me back, “I hope the Crystal Lake thing works out for you, but this book rules and you should absolutely be looking for an agent for it.” I ended up taking her … way too seriously about this.
4. Don’t listen to the depression. Depression gives bad advice.
So, take a guess. Was the day Crystal Lake rejected me (1) The day after my birthday, (2) A dreary, gross forty-degree day where it rained on top of the snow and everything turned to muck, or (3) The day I had planned to start my second draft of Murder-Bears (which I had almost no enthusiasm for at the time)? Yeah, it was all three, you win the door prize or whatever, good job.
Anyway, the point is, I felt awful about myself at the time, and that’s why I made this next decision: to start randomly carpet-bombing agents with my manuscript of The Girl with the Ghosts.
5. Actually know what you’re selling.
So, here was the thing: Everyone who had read this book (a few people, at this point) had told me they loved it — again, in those exact words. Unfortunately, that led me to the mistaken conclusion that everyone who read it would love it — “I just have to get it in front of their eyes,” I told myself, “and the fame and riches will roll in [or … something].” What this led me to do, though, was to pitch it as literally whatever the agent in question was looking for. Was it horror? Fantasy? A thriller? Literary? Sure, all of those! Was it adult? YA? Why not both?
Now — to be clear, I wasn’t stretching the truth that much. I tend to mix genres in my writing (people who slavishly follow genre conventions are boring), and the two main characters are an adult and a teen, so pitching it as both adult and YA wasn’t that absurd. But imagine someone trying to convince you chocolate chip cookies are peanut butter, just to get you to try them. That’s a stupid, stupid approach, and it’ll make you more likely to hate the cookies. But at the time, I didn’t really get that.
By April 2019, I had queried 200 agents and gotten 200 no’s. And I couldn’t figure out why.
6. Get used to disappointment. There will be a lot of it.
Around this time, I figured I’d just chill, wait for my nonfiction project to come out, and see if that opened any doors (“Christian humor” and “dark fiction” are obviously light-years apart, but … you never know) — which seemed like a great plan, until Lexham canceled Murder-Bears.
I got notice that Murder-Bears had been dropped from their release slate about four days into my kids’ summer break — so at that moment, I realized I had wasted my whole year finishing two books that nobody wanted, and I wasn’t going to have any time to do anything about it for the next three months. It’s enough to make a guy give up on writing — which I did, for a few months, to focus on launching my podcast, Changed My Mind.
I vowed not to think about my books — unless an opportunity was screaming me in the face. In the case of Murder-Bears, one actually did: By the end of the summer, HarperCollins had picked it up.
7. Use the connections you have, no matter how tenuous.
Right as the launch window for Murder-Bears was ramping up, that whole COVID-19 lockdown thing happened. I had also given up on ever getting The Girl with the Ghosts traditionally published, so I was seriously thinking about just self-releasing it for free. Instead, my friend Blake put me in touch with a guy named Matt Ruff.
Matt’s not exactly a household name, but he’s got decades of experience writing fiction, and he wrote the novel Lovecraft Country, which HBO turned into a hit series last fall. Anyway, he read the book, said it was great, but then he looked at how I was pitching it and told me it was all wrong. “Don't shy away from being funny —” he told me — “it's one of the book's big selling points, that it's funny *and* serious, and the query should reflect that.”
Welp.
8. Sometimes it pays to take things slow.
I confess that in the back of my mind, I was nursing a fantasy that, when Murder-Bears came out, it would blow up the bestseller charts and agents would start banging on my door, begging me to let them represent whatever my next book was. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
With no clear path forward, I decided I’d just start putting the thing out there again. In January of 2021, I gave myself a firm deadline: Find a home for the book by the end of the year, or else just publish it myself and be done with it. I worried that I might have already burned through every agent on the planet, but at the same time, I didn’t feel super confident about going with a small press, so I decided I would just flip a coin every day: heads, try an agent; tails, try an indie press. I figured I’d try to send out one query every weekday, and see where that got me. Initially, it got me nowhere. Again.
9. When things start working out, figure out what you’re doing right.
By June, when it was clear no one was interested in the book, I decided it was time to start carpet-bombing again. I figured that if I burned through every possible small press and agent, then at least I’d know — and I could just self-publish the thing and cut my losses.
Thing is — shortly after I started the carpet-bomb process, I suddenly found myself buried in requests for the full manuscript. By the first week of July, I had the thing out to nearly a dozen agents and small presses. Took me a while to figure out what had changed, but eventually I realized — wait for it — that I had finally figured out how to pitch the thing.
I hadn’t thought too hard about this until I started getting results, but I had actually rewritten my query letter — yet again — in mid-May. The new one tightened up the pitch (cutting it down to about 100 words), and added one line: “The Girl with the Ghosts inside Her is The Exorcist–meets–The Wizard of Oz.”
I honestly thought this was one of the dumbest sentences I’d ever written. But it nailed the essence of the book, and it (apparently!) finally grabbed people’s interest. And, well, here we are.
10. Getting everything you thought you wanted is … a lot.
Here’s an analogy: When I was kid and I heard people ask grooms and brides if they were “nervous” on their wedding days, I was always so confused. Why would they be nervous? If they thought there was any chance they weren’t marrying the right person, they presumably wouldn’t be here.
And then, later, I got engaged (and then married), and I was like, “Ohhhhh, I get it.”
It’s not nervousness in the sense of “Whoops, what if I’m not doing the right thing?”—or, at least, that’s not most of it. It’s just a lot of strong emotions all at once that you don’t know how to process. Obviously, there’s an intense affection for the person you’re marrying, but there’s also a profound awe of the gravity of what you’re doing, a strange sense that years of your life have been leading up to a single moment, and the realization that nothing will ever be the same.
Ultimately, emotions are physiological — your brain reacts to stuff, which makes your body react to stuff. Intense arousal (not sexual arousal, just the regular kind, get your mind out of the gutter) can be brought on by really good stuff as well as really bad stuff, but when it’s intense enough, it starts to feel like anxiety or even a panic attack.
But yeah. I have zero chill right now. I fully expect to end up having a mental breakdown and getting into a nude shootout with cops, or something.
Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately
So, confession time. I wasn’t really paying attention when I wrote this article. I was mostly playing Crypt of the NecroDancer.
Yes, I know this game has been around for six years — I’ve been playing it on and off for about three — but it’s just so great. And when you really don’t feel like writing — say, because you’re distracted by the fact that you’re about to sign with a literary agent — it can be a good way to coax the words out. You say, “I’ll write a couple of sentences, and then I’ll do a run of NecroDancer on my Switch.” The average run takes a minute or two, so it’s not the hugest waste of time.
For the uninitiated, NecroDancer is a mix of two cult game genres: roguelike and rhythm. A roguelike is a sort of complex, randomly-generated dungeon crawler; a rhythm game is a game where you tap buttons to the rhythm. The former can be slow, methodical, and heavy; the latter can be simplistic and mindless; but when you put them together, something magic happens. NecroDancer asks you to explore deep, dark dungeons, making use of mysterious spells and weapons — but you also have to do it on the beat. Once you get the hang of it, every run is a perpetual state of “flow.”
My one regret is that I haven’t been able to try it with a dance pad. I bought a GameCube adapter and a GameCube dance pad for my Switch, but while each of them appears to work, they don’t seem to work together. Alas.
Me, elsewhere
If you’re interested in my dark fiction, maybe you should read Ophlelia, Alive? I’m told it’s good.
Interestingly, I did a podcast episode with everyone mentioned in this article. Here’s how April-Lyn became a Christian, how K.B. quit the Religious Right, how Blake realized all history is revisionist history, and how Matt lost his faith.
I’m still cranking out content over at Grunge. Here’s one for people who like the Bible, one for for people who like Nazis, and one for people who like Bibles written by Nazis.
For me the "nervousness" leading up to getting married was definitely more the "Whoops, what if I'm not doing the right thing?" kind. I can't speak for anyone else, obviously.