I Thought I Was Done Writing My Book. I Was Wrong.

Disclaimer: I just started querying again (see below).

Here’s my experience writing, editing, writing some more, paying for feedback, and basically re-writing this book, as a story of pride (don’t give up!)

The doubt was real. So was the desire to look at what everyone else has achieved when I closed my laptop the day I finished my first draft. Still I was proud.

Here’s how that went.

I started writing last summer in July or August.

By the middle of January I had a draft of my YA portal fantasy.

The stats:

It was 57,000 words.

3rd person, single perspective.

MG or YA portal fantasy (more on this distinction later)

In an overzealous fever dream of accomplishment, I queried 6 agents.

Pleasantly, I got 6 rejections. 5 of them were form, but I’d been preparing myself for nothing. Not even a rejection, so each of those emails that took some one 30 seconds to send, meant something.

1 of the rejections was personal, and noted the book’s charm but lack of ability to fully connect.

What I took away from that was to write closer to the character.

So I edited it again, and then I submitted it to Alyssa Matesic and her team for developmental editing services and secured them (shoutout to Sara who is amazing).

The reason:

The truth at the heart of the sister relationship was…so-so

The interiority was…so-so.

The plot was…below so-so (which I knew).

My writing was aiiight, like it wasn’t gonna win any awards but it wasn’t the worst ever.

Quick note: Between querying and the next round of editing, I had added a prologue in my first revision, and it was undoubtedly my favorite part of the book. It also took me an hour to write, whereas other scenes took hours and didn’t reach near the level of emotional impact and truth of that one.

But as Stephen King has said in his “On Writing” book:

“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.”

When I got the feedback (1.5 pages of positive things and 13.5 pages of what to fix), I leaned into the good first.

And I reveled in the content of those 1.5 pages as long as I could, until the water was cold and the bubbles gone. I stayed there almost long enough to forget the other 13.5 pages existed.

But they did.

Some of the feedback (in my own words) included:

Make it dual-perspective (I did)

Add drama to the beginning chapters (I did)

If you want to make it YA, moral ambiguity is more common (I did)

The “lushness and immediacy” of the prologue were enjoyable (!!!)

So after querying another 6 agents out of fear and for validation (I heard back from only 1 of them), I wrestled with the plot to make it more interesting, ended up heavily editing the 1st 1/3, and more or less rewriting the second 2/3, focusing on adding the dual-perspective.

I did it fast.

Suddenly, by leaning into the feedback of “lushness and immediacy,” I could be the characters. The more I wrote, the more I inhabited them. And it was so much fun!

After I had finished I went back and edited some more.

And I love it. Love it, love it. It feels like a love song to my daughters. And it IS a love song to me, the teenage girl me, who needed validation from herself.

In publishing, less is promised and to fewer than ever before.

So all I could do was write the book I could, from what I knew about people based on 40 years on this planet (primarily informed by my relationships with my mom, dad, daughters, and sister). I did that, and I’m proud.