To spare you the excruciating details of why it took me so long, I will summarise:

1. I started this book in my second year of University (double major & minor — so I was Busy).

2. When I wasn’t studying, I was interning in my field (data science) usually while taking additional courses.

3. I had way too many drafts (more on that later).

I did, however, take one summer off to write this book. It was the first time I fully committed and prioritized writing my novel over my potential career in data science. Not only that, but it wasn’t acceptable in my circles to “take a summer off” which meant I had to tell people that I was spending the summer writing. This inevitably meant that people would follow up on this, and if it failed, I would have to tell them that. I couldn’t hide this part of my life anymore.

To be honest, the only reason I took this leap was because I was crazy and hopeful enough to believe that I wouldn’t fail. I had absolute, complete faith in this novel, and every fiber of my being believed in it. If you’re wondering why I would ever be naive enough to think that, you should know that I managed to convince myself that the concept had enough hook to make up for my possibly average writing (if at this point you’re wondering what this book was about, I will be attaching my query at the bottom in true How I landed my agent style, but the content isn’t really the point).

However, this is when problems started to occur. I liked the idea of the story more than the story itself. So I re-drafted. Again. And Again. And Again. It took me 8 drafts and even then I wasn’t fully happy with it. I just didn’t know what else to do about it anymore.

It was my first real attempt at finishing a novel, and nobody told me about the dissonance between where we would want our level of writing to be versus where we actually start. So, I just kept trying over and over with the same novel. I kept telling myself that I would query in X number of days, only to continue to feel unhappy about the novel and decide to do another draft instead.

I spent an additional year pushing querying back and ended up doing it January 2024 after nearly 3 years of effort.

Things only went downhill from here.

I was insecure about my query package, frequently flip-flopping between different versions of it. I watched query tracker like a hawk, noting which query was sent into maybe piles, and which queries resulted in clicks to my website (pro hack btw). In true A/B testing style (one of my majors was statistics), I thought I could find the optimal query, but in doing so, I was constantly restless.

As you all know, literally none of this mattered.

I’ll spare some of the details (the most important one being that I reached out to a recently agented friend in a discord server who is now one of my greatest friends and who rewrote my query for me).

Here are my stats:

Queried: 52

Full Requests: 1 (very exciting day for me lol, but happened at the tail end of my journey)

Offers: 0

I did pull ~10 queries out 6 months in when I started to realize that I didn’t want this book to be published anymore.

Watching those rejections roll in was brutal. There is no easier, more sugar-coated way of talking about it. I cried every single day for the first two weeks, then my 11-year-old pup fell sick and the tears didn’t stop for weeks. At this point, I was doing my last semester of school while working a corporate data science internship part-time (some weeks it was more like full-time) and it was A Lot. That semester, I spent more days crying than I spent not crying.

My dog got sicker and the nonstop rejections kept rolling in. There were no full requests until July, so there was no light at the end of the tunnel, there were no good days, and no small wins in the form of requests.

In April, my dog passed and with the realization that this book just wasn’t going to land an agent, I was grieving two things at once.

Originally, I’d planned to spend Jan-Apr 2024 drafting a new novel, but by the end of April, I’d written maybe 10k.

And yet, those 10k were the best words I’d ever written. It was not the grief or sadness that made me a better writer—I will not reduce my dog’s passing to a cheap clickbait redemption story. It was the years of redrafting that made the difference. 3 years spent rewriting meant 3 more years of writing practice that I didn’t have when I first started writing. It was 3 extra years spent reading craft books and analyzing novels in my genre. I also joined my local online writing group, and while I only ended up attending a few sessions, seeing the stages that the other writers were in, and receiving feedback and kind words made a huge difference toward my self-esteem.

My boyfriend introduced me to the “We Regret to Inform You” podcast about the rejection and hardships that screenwriters, singers, actors, and big companies faced before their breakthrough. It helped to know that this is just part of the process. I convinced myself that we only fail when we stop trying.

So, I started drafting again.

As of now, I’m just about to finish the second draft of my second novel. I foresee maybe another draft or two after beta reading, but I won’t be needing 8. I was supposed to query this book Oct 2024 (queen of missing deadlines), but I will probably end up querying it closer to the new year (please hold me accountable).

And I love this book. I love it in a different way than I loved my first because this time I love my words as opposed to loving publication. This time, I love the story, I love my characters, my plot, and my world. I know in my heart of hearts that I’ve written a good book, regardless of whether it gets representation or not.

It’s so cliche to say that I’m glad my first book didn’t get representation, but it’s true. I was never quite happy with it, even after so many drafts. I wasn’t sure if it was the regular author woes of never being able to appreciate our own work, but I know now that my gut about that book was right. It wasn’t my best work.

But anyway. Onwards and upwards.

Will this next book get picked up? Who knows? Will it suck any less to get rejections? Probably not. Is that going to stop me? No! What else would I do with all that time if not writing?

This is just part of the process, but I thought I would share this story as someone who’s still in the thick of it. Who’s still figuring it out. Who’s dealing with the same hardships you are, reader, without the fortune of knowing how the ending of this story turns out.

Stay strong.

As promised,

Dear [AGENT],

FOUR OF FORTUNES (95,000) is a coming-of-age YA fantasy set in a luscious world inspired by the occult tarot cards. It combines the folktale worldbuilding of THE GIRL WHO FELL BENEATH THE SEA by Axie Oh and the found family themes of Akshaya Raman’s THE IVORY KEY.

17-year-old Ortania’s future was already written until her parents disappeared, leaving her with no money, no prospects, and no bodies to grieve. All she has is the research her family left behind, speaking of a world where tarot cards come to life to rule divine kingdoms–a world that nobody else seems to want to talk about.

Her only solution, of course, is to bring them back.

When Kentaro, her infuriatingly flirty childhood crush, offers Ortania a way to the tarot world, she doesn’t hesitate to agree. He takes her to meet Sun, the powerful sun tarot who can manipulate the weather, but Ortania doesn’t belong in a world of tarot cards. And, as she unravels her family’s history of manipulating divine magic, she questions whether she knew her parents at all. Especially once she finds the remnants of their plans to create a new, all-powerful tarot card.

When Ortania refuses to hand over her family’s research to Sun, Sun and Kentaro – who’s been working with Sun all along – trap her in an attempt to steal it. Ortania strikes a bargain instead. She needs to find an ancient relic that was destroyed centuries ago, all before her family’s disappearance turns into her family’s demise. 

With nothing but her parents’ research and a bargain forcing her to spy, steal, and kill the tarot cards, Ortania must decide just how far she’s willing to go to retain the life she’s always known. Assuming her growing distrust of her parents doesn’t destroy their relationship first.

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