It’s been a while! Too long a while, really. Too, too long a while if I’m being really honest but I have an excellent reason for that and it’s in the post title up there.
We had a kid!
A little girl to be specific, and she’s incredible. But along with all her brilliant, beautiful, adorableness (trust me, that’s a word), came a really huge problem: time. Turns out that wonderful little kids eat up a TON of time; both the time they demand because they truly need it and the time you give them with joy because they’re incredible and being with them is like holding happiness.
Except when they make a huge poop. Then it’s like holding, well, a huge poop AND happiness. Which isn’t quite as good.
Naturally, I couldn’t give up time with the kiddo or her mommy. And I couldn’t give up time writing my books–though I did actually have to start sleeping less and writing in the middle of the night just to get any writing done at all, but that’s a story for a post about my new book :)–so I gave up posting here and doing much on social media in general.
I do really want to have more posts written here in the future. It’s a goal I intend to hit. But not at the expense of my family or the stories I love writing more than anything.
So this post is to tell you that I’ve been gone… but I’m coming back! But only in the form of weird, happy, little posts from time to time as I have something to say or something I think is fun to share.
First on that list HAS to be the story of how I wrote this new book. I say new, but I’ve been working on it for quite a while (see the whole “middle of the night” business mentioned above). It’s finished, beautiful, and… OUT ON SUB!
Here’s to the next stage of the adventure, my friends.
8+ years 7 finished manuscripts 200+ rejections 1 dream come true
Honestly, this is about the level of chill I have regarding all this.
After more than 8 years of queries and 7 manuscripts, I’m happy to announce that I am now represented by the wonderful Melanie Figueroa of Root Literary! I’m thrilled beyond belief to have found an agent that believes in my voice, writing, stories, and self. To have reached this milestone floors me. I still can’t believe it.
As writers often do when they get an agent, I wanted to share my journey to reach this point. Both because I hope it can offer some information and encouragement to others still looking for their agent and because I think my path was a little stranger than most. You see…
I never planned to write books.
I was a poet. And I don’t mean, “I wrote poems for fun when I was a kid” (though I did 100% do that). I mean, I deep-dove on poetry all through high school and college, including writing an Ars Poetica for my degree’s senior honors project to go with a true epic poem. Not to mention that I really, REALLY wanted to be a poet for my career. I’d been writing since I was a little kid—it’s been my passion for most of my life—but the only prose I wrote were fragments of short stories and the occasional start to novels that I never finished because I didn’t believe I could write a good book.
‘Poetry,’ I thought to myself as I graduated with degrees in English and psychology, ‘poetry is a stable career into which I can launch myself!’
Have I ever mentioned that I’m an idealist… and sometimes a hopeless optimist?
Yeah, that didn’t work out. Shockingly, there weren’t a copious supply of full-time, well-paid poet positions available on the market in 2011. Or, y’know, ever. So I did what I needed to do in order to help support myself and my (awesome) wife: get a terrible job at an insurance company. I was an Agency Sales Support Assistant (or A.S.S. Assistant). Weirdly, no one at the company wanted to call it by that acronym. The job was absurdly boring. I worked hard, did well, but my brain was dying from lack of stimulation, so I decided to do something crazy: write a book.
I couldn’t do this on my work computer, of course, so I took the sheets of used printer paper (the to-be-recycled cover sheets from faxes and such where one side just had a date on it) and started writing one line at a time with a pencil. Finish a work task? Write one line. On my single 15-minute break for the shift? Write a few more.
Ultimately, I wrote a 123,000-word epic fantasy that way. My first finished novel.
I adored it… It was full of big ideas and over-the-top action. It was great, dense, and definitely terrible.
In anticipation of this post, I dug through old emails and found evidence that I had sent some queries (all form rejections, of course) before I tried to write something new. And hopefully better.
I’d gotten bitten by the book bug. Bitten BAD.
My 2nd book came not long after. My first kids book (a YA fantasy), it had a lot of great ideas that were all executed pretty poorly. Also it ended on a horrific cliffhanger. But I learned A LOT in writing it. Most especially, I realized that I loved writing kids books. Something about the dynamism, joy, realness, and wonder of kids books really clicked with me. Still does.
I queried my 2nd finished novel around 15 times. All rejections. Bummer, but I already had a new idea.
My 3rd novel took much longer than the 2nd. It was my first science fiction outing (I adore sci-fi), built around AI and questions of humanity centered on a kid protagonist. For the first time, I felt like I’d crafted a complete, engaging story that others could enjoy. It was also a lot more grim and intense than anything else I’d done. In part because that fit the nature of the story, but I also had an incredibly stressful job as the Research Director and Managing Editor for a healthcare advisory firm at the time. When I started the novel we were cruising upward in success, working with healthcare leaders across the country.
Then an outside firm purchased our start-up and I was forced out by a change in management. It was mid 2017. I thought I would get another job in 1-3 months. My wife and I could handle that.
It took 15. 15 months of looking at jobs every day. Applying for everything I could that fit my experience and skills. Hundreds of attempts. 15 months.
And to keep myself sane during that time, I worked on what I loved: my stories.
I wound up finishing my 3rd novel in the immediate aftermath of my healthcare position. I threw myself into the work: revising, editing, polishing, striving every day to make it the best story I’d ever created.
I made a writer Twitter account and participated in my first Twitter Pitch events. I made my first Twitter writer friends. And then I queried my 3rd novel, a YA Sci-fi, 20+ times. I don’t know the exact number. I wasn’t keeping the best records yet; that came later. I submitted to PitchWars and other manuscript/editing contests. I tried as hard as I could.
(It’s worth noting that I queried 20+ times, but I closely considered and researched WAY more agents than that. I’ve always been really picky about who I submit to as I tried to find someone who seemed like they would love my stories and fit well in a working partnership with me.)
All rejections. No requests. Just rejections. It was the best thing I’d ever written. My beta readers loved it. But it still wasn’t getting any success outside of my small circle. And yes, I know I could have sent WAY more queries than that, but throwing myself into what I felt would be more rejections on top of the job rejections I was getting was too much. It hurt.
No matter how many rejections you get, they ALWAYS hurt. That vulnerability is simply part of sharing your creativity and art with the world. And it’s worth it.
But anyway, as I waited to hear back on those queries, I threw myself into writing the sequel to that YA Sci-fi. Most of my books (at that time) took over six months to write. This one took 1.5 months, flat. It was crazy. Time and a desperation to find satisfaction in creativity really drove me forward.
But no one wanted that book either. ~30 queries. Many, many pitch events. No requests. All rejections.
I definitely felt like a winner.
All of this takes us from 2012 through 2017. By the beginning of 2018, I came to a decision that would change my life: I was going to write something just for myself. I wouldn’t worry about genre, age category, or comp titles. I wouldn’t even think about what anyone else would get from it. This new book would be just for me. Only for me. Because I needed something to go my way. I had nothing to lose. With my incredible wife’s support, I started on a book featuring a character some of you may have heard of: Iri.
Iri’s story would be a secondary world fantasy inspired by the style, themes, and tone of North American Indigenous oral mythology. I wanted to celebrate the ancestry I carry. Embrace a world filled with people whose skin looked like mine. A world full of stories and beauty and wonder.
I started writing Iri in March of 2018. Finished in less than 3 months. Edited the whole book immediately afterward. I got my first agent request for Iri from a pitch event in July. Then came the big fall pitch event combo: #PitMad and #DVpit, barely a month apart. Iri blew up. I got dozens of agent requests, received likes from editors at major publishers, and met a bunch of really great writers that I’m still friends with to this day.
I wound up with a bunch of full manuscript requests. FULL MANUSCRIPT REQUESTS!
To someone who had gone 4+ years without even getting a partial, I cannot express how revolutionary this felt. People—cool, publishing industry people—wanted to read something I wrote. And many of them enjoyed it… but none of them loved it “enough.”
All querying writers know the line: “I just didn’t fall in love with [BOOK]”. I also got some “this would be great if it was traditionally written.” And a few, “your voice is wonderful BUT…”.
In the end, despite all the successful pitches and queries, I didn’t get any offers. I realized something that had been true from the beginning: my books leaned literary, which could make it hard for them to push an agent over the “offering line”. But I knew I was close, so I kept working. And anyway, I love writing stories, so why would I stop? Honestly, if you had told me at any point over these years that I was destined to never get an agent, I still would’ve kept writing purely for the enjoyment and satisfaction of it.
My 5th book, an MG portal fantasy built around video games like Pokémon and Jade Cocoon, was drafted before the middle of 2019. 21 queries.
1 full request from an agent named Melanie Figueroa.
This would prove to be very important.
I waited for a reply on that full with an enormous amount of anticipation. Melanie was from a terrific agency (Root Literary!) and her interests leaned literary, just like mine. She seemed upbeat and excited about kids books. A few months later (April of 2020, no less), her reply came: a rejection… but the BEST kind of rejection. The kind where she told me what she loved and what didn’t quite work for her. She encouraged me and told me that I had a wonderful voice for middle grade. Even better, I could tell from how she described the book that she got it. What the story was really, truly about.
I’m a firm believer that fantasy and sci-fi novels should use their fantastical settings to tackle real world issues that can be difficult to address in contemporary stories, and I could tell Melanie understood. She instantly shot to the top of my list of agents to query with other projects. A lot of writers talk and joke about their dream agents; Melanie became one of mine. She was on the shortlist from that day forward. (Fun fact: around this point, my wife decided that Melanie was her preferred agent for me to get someday!) In the last line of her rejection, Melanie said she would be happy to see something else from me, and I just so happened to have this one story about a girl named Iri and an adventure across two worlds.
Now, this wasn’t the Iri that I’d first queried to agents in 2018. Nor the completely revised, rewritten, and queried version from 2019. This was a third, brand-new version that I’d been working on since the pandemic started. Now an MG fantasy, I’d worked SO hard to bridge the necessarily complex style of storytelling with easier-to-approach narration and a smoother runway to the core plot and conflict. With her permission, I sent the first chapter to Melanie. She asked for the full the next day.
I may have been a little hyped. Or a lot. Okay, very much a lot.
This was it. This had to be it.
Here was an agent who got my style. Loved my voice. Enjoyed my work. And I’d just sent her the best thing I’d ever written. This HAD to be it. I’d sent ~90 queries for Iri. Pitched it in at least 15 events. Gotten 15 full requests plus requests from editors at five major publishers, including an open invitation to submit Iri directly to one. I was SO close. I just needed to wait a little longer.
Of course, 2020 interfered with everyone’s everything. We all fought to survive the disease, our anxiety, our fears, our depressions. We lost loved ones. We grieved. We struggled to be creative and hope even as the world around us seemed dim.
I started writing a new book—a YA space opera—and got 40,000 words in before something more joyful stole my attention: a modern YA fantasy involving a magic food competition. Still waiting for Melanie’s reply, I spent the last months of 2020 feverishly drafting this new book.
And then the email came in the first days of 2021. It started so good. Again, she loved my voice. Loved the beauty of the descriptions and the stories. BUT…
She had some concerns. She wanted to know if I would consider revising and resubmitting.
I admit, that hurt a little. Sure, it wasn’t a No. But it also wasn’t a Yes. Still, I know that one of the most important things to reaching your dreams is perseverance, so I told her I was interested because of course I was. She was still one of my dream agents.
Still, I know that one of the most important things to reaching your dreams is perseverance
I had finished my edits on my new YA Fantasy—my 7th finished manuscript—and gotten that querying as I waited. And despite my and my beta readers’ sky high hopes, my queries weren’t doing great. With Melanie’s Iri email in mind, I started reworking Iri.
I had a small number of queries still out on the YA Fantasy as I worked on revisions. No other prospects. Nothing particularly promising to talk about. 4.5 months had passed since Melanie’s last email. I was thinking about how I would pitch my new book in the June #PitMad. And then, one Wednesday afternoon utterly out of the blue, I got an email. It was Melanie. And she wanted to talk to me on the phone about Iri and some other things like my new project.
An agent. Wanted. To talk to me. On the phone. HOLY CRAP.
This had never happened before. In the eight years since I sent out those first queries, no agent had ever asked to call me. Let alone an agent I liked.
Some of you may immediately have thought, upon reading this, AND YOU KNEW SHE WAS GONNA OFFER.
But you’re wrong. I didn’t know that. Sure, I had the crazy, distant hope that she was calling to offer… but offer on what? She loved two of my books, loved my writing and my voice, but she’d gently declined both full manuscripts. I convinced myself she wasn’t going to offer in anticipation of our call a few days later.
And I was wrong.
Actually my face during the call.
Melanie went on to explain that she couldn’t stop thinking about the voice of my stories and the way I write. She explained the potential she sees for me and my career. And it was everything I’d been waiting more than 8 years to hear. I notified the few agents still considering my material, some of whom asked for (and got) full manuscripts and shared glowing words with me, but none of them held a candle to what Melanie offered. Like I (and my wife) felt over a year ago, Melanie gets my stories. Gets why I write. She understands what I’m trying to do and agrees that kids books (especially MG) can have such a big, positive impact for their readers. She wants to help me bring my stories to the world.
Of course, I accepted the offer.
And now, here I sit, writing this gargantuan post to tell an honestly short version of a gargantuan story. There’s so much more I want to say; want to explain. So many moments of triumph and utter heartbreak. So many times I was cut down by someone and uplifted by someone else. So many times I watched friends who started querying long after me succeed long before me as I cheered them on despite the part of me that hurt. But that’s the way of things. Everyone’s journey is full of uncountable details. Innumerable little moments where we choose to go forward when we want to give up. Choose to try again even though the last 200 attempts have failed. And sometimes that feels like insanity. That’s what people will say, of course: that doing the the same thing over and over expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. But in the words of activist Olga Misik: “I guess hope is insanity.”
Everyone’s journey is full of uncountable details. Innumerable little moments where we choose to go forward when we want to give up. Choose to try again even though the last 200 attempts have failed. And sometimes that feels like insanity.
And I along with my wife, my parents, my sister, my in-laws, and my friends, have had so much hope throughout this journey. Even in the darkest, hardest days.
We have even more hope for what wonders the future will bring.
With all that said, I want to end on gratitude:
Thank you to God for making all this possible and inspiring me to write.
Thank you to my wife, Reneé, without whom I would be lost. I believe in the you that believes in me. I love you so much.
Thank you to my mom, who always treated every story like a good one… even when they definitely weren’t.
Thank you to my in-laws, who have become such fierce supporters to me on this journey.
Thank you to my friends, who have been cheerleaders, beta readers, and all-around cool people.
Thank you to Melanie, who believes in me and my voice. Who has a vision for the stories I’ve dreamed about for so long.
I can’t wait for what comes next. I can’t wait to show you all the worlds I imagine and the characters I love. It’s time to find out what the future holds.
-Christopher
(If you have questions about querying and my journey or simply want to discuss, feel free to comment here or find me on Twitter via @Dreamertide!)
I’ve been a Pokémon fan since I got Red for my Gameboy Pocket a long time ago. I’ve played at least one game in every generation that’s released since then (8 for those curious), and while my love for the games has diminished over time, they still hold a fond place in my heart.
One of the reasons that I don’t enjoy the games as much as I used to is that they’re made for children and, well, I need a little more difficulty to keep things engaging. To solve this exact problem, members of the gaming community came up with Nuzlockes: a self-imposed Pokémon challenge run that comes in many variations but which generally share three rules.
You can only catch the first Pokémon you find in each route.
You have to name every Pokémon you catch.
If a Pokémon faints, it’s “dead” and can no longer be used for the rest of the attempt.
I’ve never tried a Nuzlocke before, in part because doing so would require deleting the save from one of my existing games. However, for Christmas this year, I received a copy of Pokémon White 2, a sequel game from the 5th generation, that I’ve NEVER played. Naturally, my first thought was “I should do my first ever challenge run in a blind playthrough! What could go wrong?”
A lot, dear reader. A LOT.
So much, in fact, that my wife (who gifted me the game) requested I document my hardships and triumphs for you. And those hardships start with Waddles.
Heroic namesake seen here. If you know this reference, I like you.
In every Pokémon game, you have to pick a starter. I generally lean Fire type in this choice, and I lean even more strongly that way in the 5th Generation because I’m not a big fan of the Water or Grass starters. Thus, I chose the Fire-type pig, Tepig. And since Nuzlocke rules demand I name him, my Tepid became known as Waddles.
I was very proud of Waddles. We got off to a good start by beating our rival trainer (the weirdly intense Nigel) twice. We met other Pokémon like a Patrat I named Timom (was supposed to be Timon, but I mistyped) and a little caterpillar I named Nibbles. To be clear, I had no intention of using Timom or Nibbles. I was hoping to catch the Dark-type cat, Purrloin. Or even a Lillipup, since they’re cute and evolve into a solid attacker.
But no. I got a misnamed gopher and a caterpillar wearing a leaf hat.
At least I still had Waddles.
The first gym comes at you fast in White 2. Waddles was level 13. Nibbles was level 8. Timom was level 6. There weren’t any other trainers to battle. Grinding for more experience would be a SLOG since the only mons around were very low level.
So I took a stab at the Aspertia City Gym, battling its leader, another kid named Cheren who really liked normal type Pokémon.
“No problem!” I thought to myself, like an undeservedly confident fool. “This will go fine!”
It did not go fine.
Cheren led with his own Patrat (it did not have a name), which Waddles successfully overcame with some mighty Tackles. The leader then dug deep into his collection of 2 Pokémon and threw out his mightiest…a Lillipup. That’s right, a tiny little puppy named as a reference to the diminutive people in Gulliver’s Travels.
Sigh.
This little puppy hit HARD. It exclusively used the move Bite. Since I needed to heal Waddles from the gopher battle in the first round, I used a Fresh Water, which brought my pig back to full strength: 41 hp.
In comes the first Bite for…19 Damage?!?!
Seen here: my heart and my brain at that moment.
I didn’t expect anywhere near that damage out of the puppy. Waddles had fine defenses. I assumed he could take 4 or 5 hits before getting low. Nope. Not even close.
I used a Potion to heal him back to full.
Another Bite for…18 Damage.
“Okay,” I thought, “It does a little less than 20 damage per Bite, so I can get in an attack before I heal again. Great.”
No, Christopher. Not great. MISTAKE.
I ordered Waddles to launch his most devastating assault, and he surged forward like the champion he was surely destined to be, leaving the Lillipup inches from fainting.
Then came the expected Bite. But it didn’t do 18 damage. Or 19. It did 22.
22!
For anyone doing the math, Waddles had 22 hp at that point. And in one terrible CHOMP, Waddles was no more. See, I knew that almost every damaging move in Pokémon has a range for the specific amount of damage it can deal. I did not know the range could be as high as 4 points so early in the game. This wasn’t a crit. No extra luck or stat changes involved.
Just a slightly bigger bite that ruined my dreams.
I looked at the rest of my team and saw a misnamed gopher and a caterpillar named Nibbles who wore a leaf on his head.
With nothing else to lose, I tossed Nibbles out…
AND NIBBLES WON!
HE NIBBLED THAT PUP UNTIL IT GAVE UP AND I TASTED SWEET VICTORY!
Except that I lost my best Pokémon in the process. In the first gym of eight. Barely an hour into the game.
Meaning my only hope for success remained a Disney knock-off gopher.
And this fierce guy:
Find out what happens next in Nuzlocke Part 2: Leaning on a Caterpillar Is Not a Good Plan, coming to this blog soon!
Naturally, since I’m a writer and you’re here reading my writings about writing, I think it makes sense to provide you with a little peek into my approach. Right?
This will sound absolutely insane but here we go:
I create a world, put characters in it, and watch things unfold.
In case you weren’t sure, I was being sarcastic about the “sound insane” thing.
In all honesty, though, I think this approach is far less common than it should be. It’s incredibly easy as a writer—especially in the brainstorming stage of a creative project—to get wrapped up in an idea. Often, that idea is the kernel of the plot: tormented man fights giant whale, family gets trapped on an island and must learn to survive, halfling destroys incredibly powerful ring of doom, etc. Inevitably, finding this idea gets the writer excited, and they launch into drafting or taking notes, shaping characters and details around it.
None of that is inherently bad or wrong. The problem is when the plot becomes an absolute ruler to which all other facets of the writing—world, characters, contrivances, outcomes—must bow. The stories that come out of this approach often “work.” They make more or less sense, move from point to point effectively, and achieve whatever end state they had in mind to some effect.
The issue is that they aren’t believable. Your life isn’t driven by a plot. You, a real person with history and experiences guiding you, make decisions based on the stimuli generated by the world and other people around you. Stories arise out of this all the time, definitely. But at no point does your world abruptly stop and shift to serve a plot point. The world inside a good story shouldn’t either.
More than almost anything else, plot-focused writing will knock me out of fully enjoying a movie, TV show, book, or video game. I do have a tolerance for it if I’m having enough fun with whatever’s happening, but I will question mystifying character actions later.
All of that said, when I approach writing a story of any kind, about anything, I start with that same kernel of an idea that anyone does, but then I build around that a full world with rules and fundamental laws. I mean things like gravity, physics, average familial relation; not “don’t steal” or something of that sort.
From there, I develop characters that live within that world and obey the laws and rules I’ve set out. Often those two types of development mesh, with each inspiring the other. At the end of the process, though, my goal is to have a world full of stimuli that drive and motivate characters as actors within whatever they face.
Once I’ve moved beyond brainstorming and into full drafting, I sit down at the computer (or at the location in which I can notebook successfully) and pick up the characters wherever they are in their lives and document them as they move forward. Inevitably, this can lead to very unexpected developments in my stories, where the plot takes a turn I—as the author!—didn’t expect.
And that’s just fun for me. I think it’s fun for readers, too.
As Ernest Hemingway so wonderfully said: “When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
