(Part 1 can be found here.)

So, where were we? Oh, yes—a coffee shop in Tanzania. After six years, I had just written “The End” on a piece of paper containing the last page of the first draft of my novel.

Andy was still up on Kilimanjaro somewhere, so I went out for Indian food with a Norwegian girl I’d met that day. I had a celebratory beer. The next morning, Andy came down off the mountain, and the morning after that, I packed my manuscript back in my backpack and we got on a bus for points west. I didn’t take it out again for eight months.

Finally, in June of 2011, our travels ended and we found ourselves back in New York. I typed up my novel and sent it out to my writers’ group (and also finally let Andy read it). Everyone gave me excellent feedback, most of which I proceeded to ignore. I had already spent so much time working on the project, I just wanted it to be done.

(I had also spent so much time working on it that BOTH of the agents I had met in the years before—the ones who had said they’d be happy to look at my book when it was finished—had left agenting. Oops!)

So if I wanted to find an agent, I was going to have to start from scratch. I’d have to send out query letters (one-page letters pitching the book to prospective agents) and hope that an agent requested to read some pages…and loved them so much that she requested to read the whole book…and loved the book so much that she requested to represent me forever and ever, amen.

While there was plenty of information out there (thank goodness for writer and agent blogs!) about the querying process, the numbers seemed to be stacked against me. For every kindhearted post I found on how to write a great query letter, I found another about how agents receive 100+ queries a day and are looking for any reason they can find to reject you.

Luckily, that’s when my friend Julie introduced me to the wonderful Eugene Myers, who had been through the whole querying process and come out the other side with an agent and a book deal. He gave me tons of querying advice and the most spot-on critiques a person could hope for on my query and synopsis. (He could tell just from my synopsis that the beginning of my book was too heavy on backstory—an important issue that I, in my hurry to get querying, once again chose to ignore.)

In August, I e-mailed my query and first 5-10 pages to seven agents. Some took only days to respond and others took several weeks, but the results were all the same:

I won’t lie—it felt like crap. Tears were shed. I felt like I had made my book as good as I could on my own, and that even if it wasn’t quite perfect, it needed that professional feedback that only an agent or editor could give to take it to the next level.

But then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that wasn’t true. I already had plenty of feedback to work with—all the stuff my writers’ group, and my husband, and Eugene had told me. My book wasn’t as good as I could make it yet. I could do better.

So I fired up the computer in my parents’ basement and got to work on the hardest part of the whole process: major revisions. I cut my first two chapters. I wrote three different new beginnings for my book, scrapping days of work each time I decided one wasn’t working. I took the metaphorical hatchet to my trademark long, comma-ridden sentences. (And cut them down. Into shorter sentences.)

I also discovered Miss Snark’s First Victim. Every month, that blog hosts a “Secret Agent” contest in which an agent critiques the first pages of entrants’ novels and picks winners. I read through months’ worth of contests, learning what kinds of entries appealed to agents, and what appealed to me. I learned how to write a first page that grabs the reader. And when I finally finished my big revision in October, I entered that month’s contest…and ended up with my first partial request.

Then, a few days later, I got a request for a query and five pages from another agent who had seen my first page in the contest. I sent it to her, and the next morning I had an e-mail saying that she wanted to read the whole book. Hooray! That agent was Ammi-Joan Paquette.

With renewed confidence, I started querying again. I got more requests for pages. I still got rejections—more rejections than requests—but they began to hurt less. I entered more contests, including the annual Baker’s Dozen Agent Auction at Miss Snark’s First Victim, in which agents “bid” on how many pages of your book they’d like to read. Three agents ended up bidding for my full manuscript within seconds of each other…and a week later, I had two offers of representation. A week after that, I had two more.

In the end, five wonderful agents offered me representation, which is kind of a ridiculous dream situation for a querying writer. They all brought different and compelling skills to the table, and I found myself faced with a difficult choice. But the agent who was the best fit for me turned out to be the first one who ever requested to read my whole book: Joan.

So, I signed the contract…

…and am now an agented writer! 😀

Phew—story complete! However, if for some reason you have a hankering for EVEN MORE details about the writing of Gladys Gatsby Takes the Cake or the querying process, you’re welcome to check out this interview I did at QueryTracker, which also includes my query letter for Gladys.

Also, without the support of my friends and family, Gladys and I never would have made it to this point, and there are a few more people who deserve extra thanks for their help during this process: Katie, Jessica, Evelyn, and Miriam (the brilliant ladies of the Breadbasket Writers’ Group); Hoi Ning, Aunt Judy, Brooke, Christine, Nomi, and Cath (my beta readers); and Ann (the very best companion a girl could ask for in query hell).

Much shorter entries to come in the near future, I promise.

Let’s get right down to it. I’ve been hinting for a few days now that I have exciting news to share. Well, here it is: I have an agent!! Last Friday I accepted an offer of representation from the lovely Ammi-Joan Paquette of Erin Murphy Literary Agency.

Hooray!!!

Not only is Joan an accomplished agent for children’s books (pictures books through young adult), but she’s an author herself. If you like Thailand, adventures, mysteries, and/or beautiful, lyrical writing, you should check out her debut novel Nowhere Girl, which I loved. (And how beautiful is that cover?)

So, Joan and I will be working together to try to get my middle-grade novel (that means ages 9-12, approximately, though I like to think that it has crossover adult appeal, too) published. I’m working on some revisions right now (OK, not RIGHT now, right now I’m writing this blog post, but right after that I’m going back to the revisions, promise!) that will hopefully make the book as strong as it can be before we present it to editors.

Exciting times are ahead, for sure. But, you may be wondering, how did I get here? Well, that’s a longer story.

How I Wrote a Novel and Got An Agent, Part 1

I first heard about literary agents as a college sophomore, when one of my Creative Writing professors (the wonderful Ernie Hebert) devoted a day of workshop to telling us wide-eyed writer-wannabes about the cold, hard business of publishing. I don’t remember many specifics, but the gist of the talk was that getting your novel published is really hard, but having an agent represent your work to publishers increases your chances.

“OK,” 19-year-old me probably thought, “So when my first book is finished, I’ll need to get an agent.” Since my professor already had an agent, I figured I would just write something that blew him away so much he had to introduce me to her.

A couple of years later, I did end up meeting his agent at a department event, and she was nice enough to offer to take a look at my work if I ever finished a book. At that point, I was writing a novel as my senior thesis, so I felt confident that by the end of the school year I’d have something to show her. I already had a pretty good Chapter 1, and starting is the hardest part, right?

Wrong! The WHOLE THING is the hardest part. I had no outline, no schedule, and next to no idea what I was doing. I never made it past Chapter 2.

But in the years after college, I kept her offer in mind, even while I focused mostly on writing plays rather than fiction. Then, while my first full-length play was running in the NY Fringe Festival in 2007, the assistant director introduced me to a friend of hers who was a literary agent in NYC. This agent was also very nice, said she enjoyed my play, and when she found out that I was working on a novel, invited me to submit it to her when it was finished.

Whoopee! I thought. Two agents out there are just waiting to read my novel! Hm, I’d better get cracking on that.

This was a different novel from the one I’d started in college—it was a novel for kids. In the early and mid-2000’s, I’d started reading a lot of the amazing kids’ novels that were becoming so popular then: the Harry Potter series, the Lemony Snicket series. I fell in love with these books, and decided that if I ever attempted another novel, it would be for that audience. But I knew that it had to be a really good concept. Finally, one day, I got this brainwave about an 11-year-old girl from the suburbs who becomes a restaurant critic for The New York Times. Her editor has no idea that she’s a kid, since they communicate only by e-mail, and her parents are microwave-loving, fancy-food-fearing foils to her secret career. As my brother-in-law would say, “Shabam!” I had my big idea.

So I wrote when I could. My writers’ group set me deadlines and cheered me on, telling me I had to finish the story. But I also worked full-time, freelanced, produced another play in another festival, and planned a wedding. Then in 2009, Andy and I quit our jobs, sold all of our stuff, and embarked on a two-year, round-the-world honeymoon.

I packed my half-written novel in my backpack and vowed that I would come home with a finished book. I wrote by hand whenever I had a chance, and during the week in 2010 when Andy climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, I parked myself in a coffee shop in Moshi, Tanzania, and wrote until I reached The End.

(I found this sign in Moshi. My main character’s name is Gladys. Coincidence??)

Hooray! I thought. I wrote a novel! The hard part is over!

But I was wrong about that, too.

To be continued…