The story of my big, sexy debut
And all the writing advice I followed, and didn't
I am presently living in a sick house, with a very sick toddler who isn’t sleeping well or napping at all, and I texted Andromeda in a panic that I had no idea what I was going to write for today. Andromeda met my request for “phone it in ideas” with SEVEN excellent ones. (Find a better Substack partner, you cannot!) This piece is a combination of two of them: the story of my debut, which I wrote while working full time, coupled with common writing and publishing advice and whether I think it’s good advice.
Some of you may know that I worked as a lawyer for five years before putting my law license on ice after I sold my first book. I spent my first two years after swearing in working as a law clerk to Maine’s appellate court, which is primarily a research and writing job. Then I worked on court-appointed cases for two years, mostly doing juvenile defense and child protective cases, with occasional appellate cases (more research and writing), and also working as a guardian ad litem. Essentially, my whole life was kids and families in crisis, and soon I felt like I was in crisis, too. My final year as a lawyer, I moved to a civil litigation firm with work that was less emotionally taxing but wasn’t quite the work of my heart.
Meanwhile, I was writing a novel.
I’ve always been a strong writer and storyteller, and writing a novel was always a vague goal in the back of my head. About a year into doing my court-appointed work, I had a specific idea for one. It came to me one day on a long drive back to the office from a family’s house, after I’d finished listening to a recording of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” (It’s a short story with a great twist ending, and it triggered me to think of the ending to The Damage, although the endings are quite different.)
I started working on The Damage while teaching myself how to enjoy reading novels again, let alone write one. (I’ve since heard that many lawyers don’t read for pleasure because we’re so tired of reading for work all day.) I won’t go into my writing routine or related advice here; I already did that in a recent post. But a related piece of advice that I do agree with: if you want to write novels, you’ve got to read lots of novels.
I started that first draft with almost no sense of what I was doing, and I broke a fair number of “rules” writers may learn as they search the internet or attend conferences. Two common pieces of advice: don’t write shifting timelines or more than a couple points of view in your first novel. I think there’s good intent behind this advice: basically, keep it simple, because your first novel is going to be complicated enough. But I hadn’t heard that advice, so I set off writing five points of view in two time frames because I had no idea an agent might raise an eyebrow at whether a newbie was capable of doing that. I think part of why I wrote the book that way was because of all the early reading I was doing: Stephen King was the one who got me back into reading for pleasure, so you know I thought it was appropriate to have a bunch of characters talking!
I spent a few months writing the first draft of The Damage, and I let my husband read it right away because he was dying to see what I’d been doing every morning before work. As for myself, I waited six weeks to read the draft, because Stephen King advised that long of a break in his book, On Writing. (I like that advice: give yourself six weeks between ending a draft and picking it up again, so that you have the chance to forget it a bit and come back with fresh eyes.)1
As for editing advice, I mostly used the intense but satisfying method taught by Susan Dennard on her website. It took months but was very thorough.
Then I gave the book to a friend to read; she’s a big reader and works with sexual assault survivors, and my book involved sexual assault, so I wanted her thoughts on the earliest draft I was going to show anyone besides Ben. This brings me to some common advice: seek out early readers. In general, yes, hard agree! But as for those who say it has to be a certain kind of reader (alpha reader, beta reader, critique partner, writing group, writing class, paid editor or book coach) I think it just depends on who’s available and what you like best. Let your loved ones read it, but don’t put pressure on them to give heavy-hitting feedback. Seek out people who are big readers in your book’s genre. Otherwise, you do you.
Then I rinsed and repeated. I took six-week pauses then tackled edits again, incorporating feedback from whoever had read it this time, and I did several rounds of edits like that. I also applied to the late Pitch Wars contest, for which I wrote my first query letter and synopsis of my novel. I didn’t get selected as a mentee for the program, but I did get helpful feedback on my query letter. (Pitch Wars still has resources on its site.)
When I couldn’t figure out how to make the book any better, I decided to query agents.
I read query letter advice on Query Shark and Susan Dennard’s website. I wrote a template draft and shared it with my library’s writing group, asking if the other writers could identify the novel’s stakes from the query. (A truly humbling experience.) And I started collecting names.
The very first agent’s name I wrote down was from the dedication of Shari Lapena’s bestseller The Couple Next Door. I thought my book was probably domestic suspense as well, and I was interested in the agent who’d earned a dedication, not just a mention in the acknowledgments. (Good advice: look in the acknowledgments for the agents who are repping the books you love or the authors you aspire to be like.) That agent was named Helen Heller. For better or worse, I didn’t end up querying Helen in my first round of queries; I decided to shoot for newer agents, thinking I’d have better luck being picked up by someone who was building a client list. I sent out eleven queries and got mostly crickets, a few polite passes, and one revise and resubmit.
The agent who sent me the revise and resubmit had great feedback, and I agreed with all of her editing suggestions, so I stopped querying and started editing again. Meanwhile, I pitched an agent at a crime writing conference (Maine Crime Wave), and that agent requested the full. I told her I was working on an R&R, and she said she wanted the edited draft when it was done. (Going into that meeting, I got great advice from author Chris Holm and book reviewer Katrina Niidas Holm: I asked them if I should tell the agent about the R&R, and they said absolutely. Agents don’t waste their own time, so an invitation to resubmit a manuscript meant I was onto something, and the new agent would know it. They were right!)
One long month later, the conference agent sent me a form rejection. I wallowed, then a writer friend (megastar Jeneva Rose, who’d become a friend through an online writing group) told me to buck up and start querying again. She also told me to pay for Publisher’s Marketplace so I could look up agents’ sales. Like a good masochist, I started by looking up the agent who’d just rejected me, and I saw she was making big big sales. First I wallowed more. Then I remembered Chris and Katrina: agents don’t waste their own time. This amazing agent had thought I might be worth her time! I queried Helen, and a few other hotshots I’d been afraid to try the first time around.
Helen requested my full less than half an hour after I’d emailed her. I sent her the manuscript that night after work, and the next day she called at lunch and asked to represent me.
Thinking back on our initial phone call, I am reminded of a piece of querying advice I’ve heard many times: you must nail your book’s genre and/or subgenre in the query letter, and if you don’t you’ll never get an agent. This simply wasn’t true in my case, because Helen disagreed with the two genre terms I’d used to describe my book, and it didn’t matter one bit to her. I’d called the book a “domestic suspense” novel2 and wrote that I thought it would fit her “commercial thriller list,” which was language I’d seen in her agent bio. To her, this indicated that I’d done my research and wanted to work with her, specifically, even if I hadn’t actually written a commercial thriller. She wasn’t worried about my ability to tell an editor where this book plugged into the marketplace; that was her job.
More advice: your manuscript must be polished before you send it to agents. On this one, heck yes. First off, a polished manuscript makes a better impression than one that has typos and funky formatting. A well-edited (meaning, developmentally edited) manuscript makes you seem like a better writer. And the whole situation impresses upon the agent that you take this job (and their time) seriously. If those weren’t enough reasons, you also never know how quickly your agent might want to send it out. You want to capitalize on your agent’s excitement: give them a manuscript you think is ready for submission, even if you’re open to the possibility that it isn’t.
Because in my case, Helen thought it was ready to rock. My timing was ridiculously good–I don’t think I could have repeated my own experience, with the same agent and same manuscript, if the timing had been different. We had a phone call about what her plans would be for the book. She was heading to the Frankfurt Book Festival to network, with nothing to peddle. I had happened to query her maybe a week and a half before she left. She thought if she moved fast enough, she could sell the English world rights and cruise into the conference with translation rights to sell…and that’s exactly what she did. Pardon my French, but she sold the shit out of that book.
She sold the novel in pre-empts to Penguin imprints in the US and UK, which divvied up the world rights, and then she sold a handful of translations at Frankfurt. By the time she was done, I was dragging myself to the office in a stupor while my husband and my best-friend-slash-coworker waited for me to admit that I wanted to take a break from being a lawyer at all. The US and UK contracts were two-book deals, so I even had the excuse of a second novel to work on. This brings me to my final piece of advice: don’t quit your day job. Even Helen advised against it, because of the singular pressure it puts on your writing. Did I listen?
Here I am at my retirement party.
But should I have quit my day job?
For me, leaving full-time law practice was absolutely the right call. But asking writing to be my full-time job has not worked for me. I’ve needed to build in other responsibilities, escapes, and even income sources, in order to feel fulfilled as a novelist. I worked at a local library just before the state shut down for the pandemic, and then I had a baby, and then I took on mentorship and teaching commitments and started this Substack with Andromeda and joined a library board. I’ve even done some contract legal research and writing, and I’m keeping my law license active. For me, quit your day job, don’t quit your day job…the part that really matters is not to ask writing to be everything in your life.
This is all to say, I still have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m figuring it out.
One day I will write a part two about having to follow up a big, sexy debut, but I have not quite reached the point in my therapeutic journey where I am going to write that piece.
I once told my mom that I was taking a six-week break from the novel “because Stephen King said to,” and she said, completely seriously, “You’ve been talking to Stephen King?”
I can’t remember what Helen herself said on this point, but I suspect it’s that my novel lacked a lot of the hallmarks of domestic suspense that readers who seek out the subgenre on purpose would expect. Shari Lapena’s The Couple Next Door, AJ Finn’s The Woman in the Window, and Melissa Adelman’s What the Neighbors Saw, on the other hand, are definitely domestic suspense.
I love a rags to riches and onward to…a somewhat normal life trying-to-write-and-find-a-balance…story! And I hope that bottle of clear liquid on your desk is some straight-up hard alcohol rather than, say, hand sanitizer. But seriously, loved the inside deets on a fabulous debut.
"You've been talking to Stephen King?" LOL
Another great, super informative post on the nuts and bolts process of getting a book out into the world.
THANK YOU!!!