nine years of dreaming...
my publishing journey from nanowrimo ‘14 to finding representation in ‘19 to the furnaces of submission
Having done a few craft posts in a row, I felt it time to reflect on my writing journey and share how it’s been going so far. So in this post I’ll be rambling about the idea that sparked it all, gaining my footing during Pitch Wars ‘18, the elation of finding representation and the battle of hope and despair while on submission.
My journey has been lucky in some ways and arduous in others; hopefully some of you will find it relatable or interesting or at least a way to get to know me more!
part one: how the delusion began…
I say delusion because I started out so full of hope of becoming a full-time author. Then reality sank in. Writing is difficult and publishing is messed up and why am I doing this willingly?!
At the beginning though, one night in the autumn of 2014, I had a story idea that, in my imagination, blossomed into a bestselling trilogy that would help me out of my uncertainty over the university degree I was working on.
On that high, I smashed out 50k during NaNoWriMo, then took a couple more years to complete the first draft in the summer of 2016.
I was so delusional then. The naivety of thinking writing full time was easily achievable! The utter lack of comprehension as to how bad that book was! In a way I miss that exuberance. Now, I’m a better writer, but also more jaded, less optimistic, and incapable of drafting without critiquing myself to hell and back.
Here’s a list of the foolish things I did back then, so you can take heart in how you’re probably way more sensible than past-me:
Sent readers a 250k first draft after only line-editing it. (Yeah, I’m going to burn in hell for this. To everyone who read that hot mess, I am so sorry.)
Querying a still 250k draft with a query that:
Misrepresented the stakes (I did not realize needing to creatively twist my plot meant the book needed lots of work.)
Labeling it as fantasy when it was science fiction (I’ll never stop cringing over how I had heated discussions with strangers on query forums over this.)
Revising it down to 125k then 115k completely through condensing wording instead of actually challenging my plot, world, and stakes (which were terrible.)
Needless to say, querying did not work out in my favor. I actively queried that book from November 2016 to January 2018, and finally withdrew it in February 2019. However, by then, I had other things brewing…
part two: pitch wars 2018 and transforming as a writer
In early 2017, I first had the idea that would eventually become Shimmer in a Blue Sky, a YA fantasy about a girl with an invisible dragon—not an imaginary one, as she vehemently reminds the doubters.
I began this story in NaNoWriMo ‘17 and completed the first draft soon after.
After revisions (that were still surface level), I felt I was ready. I had a marketable idea, the voice was quirky, I knew my genre, and my word count was reasonable. My ventures into #DVpit, #QueryKombat and #PitMad seemed to support this confidence.
I began querying again in the summer of 2018. The rejections still rolled in, but I wasn’t being ghosted anymore, and most of the rejections were nice and even personalized. One feedback was fairly consistent: the book read like it should be MG.
This came just before Pitch Wars 2018 submissions opened and though I doubted any of the MG mentors would take on revising a 90k YA fantasy, I took the leap...and was completely taken aback when I was actually chosen.
The next four months were some of the most grueling of my life.
I completely rewrote Shimmer, did another draft for scene-to-scene logic, and one more pass for line edits. All while having an 80-hr work week and undergoing emotional breakdowns weekly over realizing something was wrong with my career path and I needed to figure things out.
It was worth it, though, because I grew so much as a writer during the process. I’ll always be seeking to improve my craft, but Pitch Wars was formative in teaching me how to make a book compelling and tense and good.
part three: offers of representation and the intolerable nudge period
After the Pitch Wars showcase, I ended up querying 21 agents (a combination of showcase requests and cold queries) soon after the showcase ended, and planned on sending more, but—
Roughly 48 hours later, I woke up to my first offer of representation. No joke, I screamed so loudly I suspect my cat still enacts revenge over it by screaming as much as he physically can for no reason.
That same night, I received my second offer.
I arranged calls with both agents and loved them both, and sent out nudge emails with a two-week deadline. And then I began waiting.
It’s not often talked about, I feel, but the nudge period kind of sucks. It pushes rejections that normally would be spread out over weeks and months into being delivered all at once, and every one of them still stings. Also, the worry of being a failure that comes with each rejection is not assuaged by previous offers.
Were those two agents misplacing their judgement? If only two people in the world cared about my book, how would it possibly sell? More people disliked than liked it, or I’d have more offers, right??? Some days I still feel that irrational sting of I should’ve known this book wouldn’t sell because I didn’t get more offers.
Anyways, if you’re wondering whether you’re an ungrateful whiner for hating the nudge period—you are not alone.
24 hours before my deadline, I got a third offer.
I’ll make a post someday about the factors involved in picking an agent, but I ended up getting a spectrum of choices:
Agent 1: a new agent at a solid agency, with a good agent mentoring her and a very editorial approach
Agent 2: more established, also at a good agency, also editorial and with a good amount of experience in fantasy
Agent 3: head of her agency, objectively a big agent, with lots of experience and connections, but seemed to mostly sell romance
To cut a long story short, I accepted the third agent and was full of hope and expectation that Shimmer would sell and my author career would begin…
part four: submission hell consumed my confidence
So far, Shimmer has been on three rounds of submission since 2019, and while editors mostly replied to the first batch, for the latest one most of them have ghosted.
I never want to be a whiner, and am forever grateful for the opportunities and support I’ve received and that I’m represented by an excellent agent. But while I certainly prefer being agented to suffering in the query trenches…
There’s something terrifying and depressing about losing control.
Maybe I’m too type A, too fond of having everything in my grip, but in the trenches I could deal with rejection by firing off more queries and control some part of it all. In comparison, submission isn’t really in the author’s hands. There’s communication, I have a pitch list, I’m forwarded rejections, but that extra level of separation made me feel helpless.
The obvious cure would be writing the next book. Yet I proceeded to not finish a single new first draft from 2018 to 2021, and though my agent has been nothing but understanding over it, I still hate myself because I feel like I wasted years of my life moping, but there were so many factors and levels to it:
Moving on from a very polished story, everything I wrote felt so wrong. That feeling was heightened by how I knew by then what made a book good and could clearly see my feeble attempts weren’t good.
I felt no connection to my characters. They were flat and uninspiring and I didn’t care enough about them to struggle through my other difficulties.
I also had terrible mental health and pretty much lost the will to live for a while. After recovering, I began a new, very time-consuming job, and writing sucked more energy out of me than I possessed.
Finally, submission—rejections and ghostings and failed R&Rs—broke my confidence. Giving up free time and mental peace over a story only for it to very likely amount to nothing just didn’t feel worth it.
That was a dark period for me. I never completely gave up, and started and stopped roughly four projects during this time, but ended up scrapping first drafts at 10k, 20k, 40k, even 80k because I knew in my heart they’d have to be completely rewritten.
Most of the time I felt like a fraud, a one-trick pony, a writer who only had one mediocre (as proven by submission failure) story in her.
Over and over, though, I came back to one particular story, Blood Red Poppies, a YA fantasy my agent picked out of my list of ideas back in 2019 as the one she felt most compelled by.
And one day, zoning out during a work conference in late 2021—I had an epiphany.
part five: rekindling passion and continuing to dream
It’s funny how one concept can make a book come to life. For Poppies, a simple, random thought made the characters finally real to me. No spoilers, but it boiled down to: What if I made the main character kind of an asshole?
(If you take anything away from this post, let it be this: when confronted with writer’s block, try making your characters assholes.)
Of course, things weren’t smooth sailing. My plans to start drafting were derailed by my (neutered) cat getting testicular cancer (I know, wtf) and taking care of him (because he’s not smart and needed 24/7 care to not lick his wounds into sepsis), and then the actual first draft was a massive struggle to get through (I much prefer revising to drafting).
Then there was alpha reader feedback—draft two—betas—draft three—more betas—draft four. Finally, four years after my agent approved of the pitch, I sent a Shiny New Thing to her in February 2023.
It wasn’t easy. Over the past year, I’ve done multiple deep revisions (rewriting everything prose-wise twice, amping up the world, tearing up entire acts and reworking scene by scene), sometimes within 2 months during 50-hour work weeks. There have been a lot of days where I felt on the verge of a breakdown.
But throughout it all, I had a feeling of rightness. I finally found another story I was passionate about and, I believed, could be really good. And though I’ve become cautious about hoping “this will be the one,” I have hope for the first time in years.
Additionally, over the past year, writing again has brought me back into the community. It’s been a wonderful (albeit nerve-racking) thing to share my stories with people again, and beta read amazing stories in return—which is another important aspect of building writing craft I’m working on.
As I near the nine-year mark of having my first story idea, it can be difficult to not feel discontent and sad; I had expected more for myself. So many people I met at the start of my journey are published. Writers much younger than me are succeeding in much shorter time periods.
In future though, I think I’ll be glad I went through these tribulations and grew through them. Even if Poppies is another story destined to die on submission, I will cry my eyeballs out hope to carry forth what this past year has taught me: that I have more resistance, creativity, and passion than I believed, and that there are so many more stories waiting inside me to be written.
Ending this post with something else I’ve also begun doing since returning to writing—commissioning art. This one is for my main couple in Poppies and is such a great source of serotonin and motivation.
nine years of dreaming...
Sorry I'm just now catching up on your post! I remember reading the invisible dragon story and going through PW '18 with you. Your struggles and challenges really resonated with me deeply. After PW'18 I suffered from burn out and pretty much stopped writing for several years. Reading about what you went through, I had no idea you struggled too. The feeling of being left behind is real and hard to assuage. I'm in a much better place now and have actually gotten back to my MS. I still have a long way to go before I start querying, but reading your post has reminded me we each have our own journey to publication and we're all doing our best given the solitary nature of writing and the mercurial aspects of the writing industry. Shimmer holds a special place in my heart and I'm looking forward to Poppies! Congratulations Tiffany!
Thank you so much for sharing. This was enlightening to read.