Hey there! I've drafted and redrafted this first newsletter so many times, over the past few months. I was so anxious about being useful—dispensing practical craft advice! Sharing takeaways from my journey that other writers can use! But also not seeming like a know-it-all, or denying that luck and timing play a big role in publishing. And, I mean, what do I know?! So I overthought it, and didn’t start.
I think, in the end, I'm probably not going to be very useful in this first newsletter. Maybe I'll be useful later.
Right now I'm just a puddle of emotions because I got to announce this!
I've been sitting on this news for almost six months. I had a lot of time to think about where I was when I started with this book, and how things have changed since then.
I've wanted to write novels since I was really little, for basically as long as I can remember. I made some attempts in elementary and middle school, which have since been lost to time (probably for the best).
I got discouraged about writing sometime in college, because I thought: Getting published is so unlikely—why try, and get my heart broken in the process?
So I graduated, started working, and I didn't write fiction anymore. I went around for years feeling vaguely like something was missing, like this important part of my personality was being suppressed.
About three years ago, a lot of things were going wrong. In my personal life, at work, in the world, with a global pandesal. I got to kind of a dark place, and thought: I need to write. Everything is in chaos, I can’t really conceptualize the future right now, but I just need to write.
I felt such relief, because in that moment I didn’t care about getting published. I thought: not writing is a worse way of getting my heart broken, actually. For maybe the first time since I was a kid, I was finally in a headspace to write for myself.
I feel nostalgic for that time now because that feeling was so pure, and as I've gotten deeper into pursuing traditional publishing, the feelings have gotten more complicated.
So here's what it felt like:
I started waking up at 4 a.m., when the apartment was quiet, and it seemed like the world was asleep and far away. Part of what held me back from writing, for a long time, was feeling ashamed of it. I felt guilty because people in my life told me it was self-indulgent, frivolous, cringey—because it was just for me, and there was no way it was going to pay off and become "worth it." (It turns out there were much bigger problems in my relationships with the people who said those things, but anyway, that's not the subject of this newsletter).
So when I came back to writing, doing it at 4 a.m. appealed to me because I didn't have to feel guilty about what I did with that time. No one else was staking a claim to those hours, anyway!
In the beginning, it was kind of like I was possessed. I would go to bed early (to be fair, it was the middle of lockdown, so not a lot was going on) and just spontaneously wake up at four, so excited to write. It was like years of suppressed desire to write were bubbling up, pushing me out of bed.
I'd pull on a hoodie, fight the spiders in my old apartment (I am terrified of spiders, and as luck would have it, the apartment I was living in when I started writing this novel was crawling with them. It became part of my writing ritual to secure the perimeter around the table before diving in 🤪). I would pour coffee, eat a banana, put on my noise-cancelling headphones and set a timer for ninety minutes. I’d tell myself: For these ninety minutes, you have permission to write badly. And I would get to it.
Out the window, the sky would be this soothing, deep blue. I started writing a story about a girl who's struggling against the parts of her home life that don't quite make sense, who can't sleep and sneaks out in the middle of the night. About a boy who seems like the total opposite of her in some ways, and in others, like the only one she can talk to. I wrote about how they'd meet in secret for driving lessons, and how they'd push each other to confront the things about their families that are keeping them up at night. It became a nice place to go in my head, a nice place to spend time.
I wrote from the perspective of someone who isn’t me, but shares some of the infrastructure of my life, the kind of person I didn’t see in books growing up—mixed Filipino American, cut off from her culture, raised in a single-parent household, in conflict with her family. Her personality is her own, but I gave her my diaspora angst, my sense of dislocation. I’m writing about an experience like mine, like it’s normal, I remember texting a friend at that time. Like it’s not too niche to be universal, like you don’t have to over-explain.
The whole time, I'd tell myself: Just finish. Finishing it will change your life in some way. Even if it's bad, it's going to give you something. All you have to do is finish. Finishing it will change your life.
And I did feel different, when I finished.
This story is a work of fiction—but it's kind of like how, when you have a weird dream, you can see the different parts of your life that went into it as ingredients. And even though the way those parts are remixed doesn't resemble real life, even if it's kind of bizarre or absurd, sometimes a dream can help you see things in a new light.
When I finished the draft, I felt this peace I hadn't really experienced before. I made more sense to myself, on a deep level, and felt more like myself than I had in a long time. That, on its own, was pretty life-changing.
So what happened next?
I thought: Well, shit, I have this now! I might as well try to get published! So I queried too soon and it fell FLAT.
It was total crickets in the trenches. In some ways, my ignorance about publishing helped me here, because I didn't even know how upset to be about it. I wasn't on writing Twitter, I didn't know other writers and didn't have anything to compare my months of silence to. So I was like, well, okay! While I wait, I really enjoyed writing a novel-like thing, let's do it again!
So I put the first one aside, because I didn't really know how to revise then and wasn't sure what else to do. I wrote a second book, put even less pressure on it than I did on the first one, had so much fun with it.
That book was not good, really. It’s shelved now, and I don’t have plans to come back to it. But I figured a lot of things out, just letting myself play around and be free with it—about voice, about characterization and arcs.
As I worked on the second book, rejections came in on the first one, and it really hurt. And I thought: oh no, this is the "getting your heart broken" thing I'd been so worried about! I would lose days to spiralling over rejections. It brought up a lot of old, painful stuff, a lot of that shame about writing.
But I think it helped that, at that point, I'd decided I really wanted the writing more than I wanted the publishing. And working on the second story had given me so many new ideas that I wanted to take back to the first one.
I was reading every craft book I could get my hands on, at that time, and bingeing podcasts about writing and publishing. I remember listening to this interview with Emily X.R. Pan about how many times she rewrote The Astonishing Color of After, and I felt so inspired and fired up.
So over the course of a summer, I replotted and rewrote the first story from scratch. It took about three months, and at the end, I applied to Pitch Wars (a mentorship program that sadly doesn’t exist anymore).
And I got in??
My mentors were, and are, the absolute best. (Zoulfa's book is one of the most shatteringly beautiful things I've ever read, and you can buy it here. Molly's book is gorgeous and page-turning and you can add it on Goodreads here).
I learned so much from both of them, and they guided me through rewriting the book top-to-bottom again. It was a lot of hard work, but it was exciting, too—it felt like I was getting closer and closer to the heart of the story, to the best version of what it could be, with each full rewrite. It took another three months, roughly, working in basically every free moment, several hours a day, before and after my day job.
During this whole period, I met so many amazing people. Before Pitch Wars, I got to know people who were getting ready to apply; during Pitch Wars, I got close to other members of the class; after Pitch Wars, I started hanging out with some other writers who knew me from my showcase entry. It's another way that finishing this book (and re-finishing it and re-finishing it, again and again) changed my life.
At the end of Pitch Wars, I signed with my agent. I have gotten super lucky—publishing is made up of so many moving parts and factors that are wildly out of your control, and the stars happened to align for me. I worked hard and I also got astonishingly lucky.
With my agent's guidance, I set out to rewrite the book a third time before going on submission. Doing three full rewrites back-to-back over the course of a year was grinding, but also so joyful. I had a lot of fun taking a spin through this story again and again, really getting to know these characters, getting closer to right each time. Maybe I’ll share more about what I learned during those rewrites in the future.
So that’s more or less how I started, and how I got here. And this takeaway might not be the most useful, but if you’ve been longing to write a novel, I would recommend giving yourself the gift of starting it, and finishing. I can't tell you what will happen with publishing, because it's wild and unpredictable and deeply structurally broken. But there are lots of different ways finishing the story can change your life. 💙