Miscarried Manuscript

After participating in a podcast last year, I had a deus ex machina moment when a literary agent from a top firm slid into my inbox to ask about my next book.

It's incredibly hard to query and connect with an agent and the big publishers (Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, etc) don't accept unagented manuscripts. Therefore, you need an agent to enter the larger marketplace.

So for the past year, I worked really closely with the agent trying to craft a book proposal to meet market demands. I worked hard. I came close. But in the end, I couldn't get the manuscript to work. My interactions with the agent were positive all throughout the process even down to the last moments where we knew this particular book wasn't going to work and consciously uncoupled.

But oh, it hurts to let it go! Not because I want to continue this particular iteration of the book, but because I sunk so much time into working on something that doesn't have a purpose beyond pitch.

You could write a novel that no one wants to buy, but at the end of the process you still have a novel. Someone might want to read it one day, even if it's (unfortunately) not in your lifetime. Angie Cruz when she spoke at our college last year said that a publisher kept a novel she had submitted for over a decade and when the market was right, cycled back to her to publish it. Cruz's Dominicana went on to be a New York Times notable book and winner of multiple awards.

But a failed book proposal? Not even your mother wants to attempt to read an almost 100 page failed marketing pitch for fun.

However, I do have one completed chapter of the miscarried manuscript that I will read excerpts from at Lit, Live! in October (see details below) if you'd like to hear it.

Ultimately I think I need to shift the genre. I'm working in the spaces between literary memoir and investigative nonfiction and I need to veer more closely toward one of those lanes. But, in order to figure it out, I need to write the bulk of the book. I'm going to take a brief hiatus from the project and in the meantime I am cycling back to my poetry manuscript that got put on hold while devoting time to the book proposal. My poetry book had been long listed last year (again) for the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Prize from New York Quarterly, but not winning doesn't sting. I still have the book manuscript and I am proud of what I have written. It hasn't found its audience, yet. Returning to the poetry book also gives me some necessary distance from the other nonfiction book project, so that during my winter break I can look at it with fresh eyes. Ultimately, it's a story that I know is important and one that I need to birth.

Fall Events

October 9 -Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Sao Paulo, Brazil (Zoom) - Doctoral Colloquium Panel on Visibility, Collaboration, and Funding with Lynn Schofield Clark (University of Denver) and Crystal Abidin (Curtin University, Australia).

November 17 - Lit, Live! Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program at Nassau Community College. On campus: 2nd Floor Library. Zoom: https://ncc-zoom.zoom.us/j/94992104068

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