The Cure to Your Last Book is Your Next Book
Why working on your next manuscript is the best response to the waiting game
IF THERE’S ONE thing I’ve learned since I began my MFA, it’s that you need to keep your mind occupied whenever you’re waiting for updates in the literary world. By using your time productively while waiting, you can create something new that is artistically important and autonomous while you distract your mind from your daily obsessions.
And all writers are obsessed about something since the art of writing is a compulsive act.
When one of my novels was on submission with my first agent, I made the classic mistake of spending every waking hour wondering if this was it, had she just received good news from an editor, would I get a phone call any second, did the editor want to talk to me first, had there been talk of a second book, would there be an auction, how big was my advance, would I be asked to visit them in NYC, what was the editor’s response, what kind of PR campaign would there be, would I get on Oprah? I pretty much thought myself into circles based on the sheer possibility of selling my then first novel and it nauseated me.
I genuinely thought that getting an agent was the hard part and for a while it was. But what no one tells you is that selling your book is almost as hard as getting an agent, depending on the vagaries of the market, the reputation and client list of your agent, their connections in the industry, & the current zeitgeist when your book is out on submission. But as an author, the only thing you can control is your manuscript and if you’re lucky, which agent you sign with. That’s it!
My first time around, I waited nine months for The Call and it ruined my fucking life. It really did. I slept terribly but woke up irrationally hopeful every day. You would have thought I’d learned my lesson but no. The first thing I did in the morning was check and then refresh my inbox. Then I did that again five to twenty times a day. Every day. I asked LB what she thought, if she had a good feeling, which imprint she thought was going to buy my book, I asked her why my agent was ghosting me, I asked her so many unanswerable questions until she lost her mind too right along with me. The least I could have done back in 2016 was not to bring guests into the asylum. But I was lonely and in love, which has always been my problem.
Never was I more convinced that agents/editors and writers lived in different temporal dimensions than when I was waiting to hear good news from my first agent. What felt like six weeks to her and six days to editors was actually six months in real life, and it felt like six years to me. If you’ve ever read the writing of Henri Bergson, then you understand that there’s objective time and then there’s subjective time. It took being on submission for me to truly understand the man. Imagine standing in front of the stovetop for nine months waiting for water to boil and you get a glimpse of how slow time went by for me back then. The subjective experience of time passing while on submission was infinitely worse than any other time in my life. Normally, life is just life, but when you’re on submission, you’re literally one yes away from becoming a published Big-5 author, which is why each rejection hurts so much and why each weekend drags on forever.
This time around, I waited a couple years to query agents because I was busy promoting my books from 2021-2023 and that took up all my energy, imagination, & creativity. When your art becomes material (and by that, I mean available on Bookshop and your favorite local bookstore), the rush to publish dies down for a while. Furthermore, I wanted to avoid the mistakes I’d made the first time around, namely, writing to please an agent instead of writing my books in the way that only I could write them and telling my stories in only the way I could tell them.
While it’s always discouraging to get rejected by an agent, especially a big-name agent, in the long run, it’s better to be represented by somehow who loves how you write and who wants to be part part of your long-term literary career than it is to be represented by someone who wants you to be a different writer or who barely has time for your own artistic evolution.
These days I don’t mind waiting a little longer to get the right agent. I’m extremely loyal, my work ethic is second to none, I write prodigiously, I’m patient, & I’m always coming up with new book concepts, so I know that as far as clients go, I’m a catch. At the same time, I’m proud of the three books I already published about mixed-race identity, AAPI masculinity, travel, & the redemption of love in a broken world because I spent decades writing and rewriting them. I’m proud of the writing, the ambition, the ideas, the character arcs, & the creativity of those three books despite their flaws. Just telling a stranger that I published a conceptual short story collection, a backwards novel, and a choose-your-own-adventure memoir says a lot about my body of work. I’m proud of those books because I almost didn’t write them, because I almost gave up being a writer after the avalanche of rejections from agents and editors buried me in sadness for thirteen long years from the first year of my MFA until the first year of my tenure track job. I guess it’s the pride of survival more than anything.
Now when people come up to me at readings and writing conferences and tell me they love my books, I honestly want to cry in gratitude each time. It takes so much self-control not to hug every reader who says that. It takes enormous self-restraint not to pledge my love to them and buy them Earl Grey and chocolate croissants.
At the same time, I hope that I never have to promote my books again the way I did as a small press author because that shit was exhausting. For two years, I never wrote anything new, I just copyedited my books, going from one galley to another and then to the third and then back to the first and second and third and back and forth over and over again with only a few weeks to breathe in between. This is why I’d love an agent for my linked, sophomore, short story collection, The Miseducation of Jessie Hayashi & His Cosmic Dictionary of Loss. Not only is it easily one of the best things I’ve written but also with an agent and an editor and a publicist, I can let them do what they do best and just be the literary talent for once. Of course, I’ll still promote my books, but that won’t be my job anymore. They can rock the world with their cultivated skills and I can write the fuck out of my sentences and scaffold complicated mixed-race characters and talk about relationships and ideas and love and music and culture and travel.
This brings me back to the beginning of this newsletter. I currently have six agents reading The Miseducation of Jessie Hayashi & His Cosmic Dictionary of Loss. Most of them are extremely well known. A few are loved and deeply respected within the NYC literary community. But all of them represent amazing authors. Some of my favorites, to be honest. I’m legit happy that so many agents are reading my linked short story collection. Maybe the publishing industry is finally opening up to mixed-race stories and mixed-race story collections. My fingers are crossed on that one. But here’s what I’m not gonna do, here’s what I learned from my last time querying agents: I’m not gonna spend my time wondering what they think about my book. After all, I’ll find out soon enough. I’m not gonna read every single interview with these agents on Poets & Writers. I’m not gonna re-read all of their clients’ books for good karma. In other words, I’m not gonna obsess about getting an agent like I did last time because that helped no one.
Instead, I’m gonna obsess about my next book. To be honest, it’s made for obsessing. I mean, how do you NOT obsess about a novel with a family of mixed-race prodigies that has a geography genius, a music genius, a language genius, & an acting genius who all reunite in Chicago for a few weeks before they go their separate ways. If you’ve ever read one of JD Salinger’s Glass family books and gotten totally absorbed with Franny & Zooey, Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenters, Seymour: An Introduction, and Nine Stories, or if you were slightly obsessed with The Royal Tenenbaums as I was when it came out, then you totally know what I’m saying when I say that there’s just something about those kinds of stories that are just so easy to obsess about. Prodigies are fascinating, but quirky prodigies even more so. And that’s where I’ve been channeling my obsessions, my fears, my hopes, & my dreams this year. If I don’t get the agent I was hoping for in 2024, then I have a new book that gives me life. If I do, then I have the perfect chaser for my short story collection. This is the only productive way I know how to deal with uncertainty and hope and possibility and heartbreak. This is the only thing that I can control. The one thing that gives me joy almost every day even when nothing else makes sense.
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