My Writing Journey (4.5 Books and an Agent)

The Last Few Years

In September 2022, my husband Ian and I moved to Cardiff, Wales. We’d spent three years in the Netherlands for his job, and now had another three-year (at least) stint in Wales. A couple of months after we moved, I got a job as a copywriter and editor at a tech company. My work was busy and mentally consuming, but writing fiction was my first love, so I tried to fit it in as much as I could. For me, that meant a half hour every morning before work started.

The Class That Started It

Fast forward a bit and Ian and I made a bunch of friends in the area. Some of those friends were fellow Fantasy writers and suggested I try a Sci-Fi and Fantasy Writing course at Cardiff University. I signed up! And that’s what led me to write my latest novel.

In October 2023, I started the course that inspired me to write my Comedic Fantasy novel, “The Reluctant Mentor”.

We were assigned a few Terry Pratchett Discworld novels to read. I had never read anything by Pratchett, but I immediately fell into his Douglas Adams-eque style of unhinged but heartfelt characters.

The grumpy old wizard character Athragast came to life in my brain in an instant.

I wrote in my notebook during one of my classes:

[Parody of Gandalf—people always discard older people]

The Parody Begins

I wrote a couple of chapters about this old wizard character, then moved on. It wasn’t until a few months later, in the winter of 2023, that I picked it up again and decided to make a book about Athragast.

I finished the first draft of that book at the end of May 2024.

I let it sit for a few weeks before I dove into revisions. I edited the book. I re-edited the book. Then I edited it again. I sent out a few testing queries to literary agents in August 2024, but I wasn’t getting any bites. I knew the story needed more work. So in November 2024, I decided to hire a developmental editor to go through my manuscript.

A month after hiring her, I had a shiny, polished manuscript. I dove back into the query trenches immediately. I felt confident about this book and the story I wanted to tell. This is the one, I told myself.

The Writing That Led Here

Before “The Reluctant Mentor” book, I’d written a few others. But I’d bitten off a lot. I wrote a couple of goobers back in my early twenties that were so bad that they will never see the light of day.

I keep stats and dates like a big nerd, so get ready for an accurate timeline…

2020

My first serious project was an epic Fantasy duology. I started writing the first book, “Tide of Sands”, in 2020, following our recent move to the Netherlands. I wrote 30,000 words, then dropped it for a year.

2021

I picked it back up in May 2021 and wrote until I’d hit a 135,000-word count by July 27, 2021. I then edited and re-edited that for a year and attempted to send some queries to literary agents. But I understood nothing about the business at that time.

In that time, I had also written a Young Adult (YA) Rom-Com. It was short, kind of cute, and very therapeutic. I wrote it in 30 days for the Nanowrimo competition, from November 1-30, 2021. After I finished writing my Fantasy duology, I went back to this book and made some edits, but the story just wasn’t there yet, so I left it alone.

2022

I wrote the sequel to “Tide of Sands” called “Sea of Shadows”, starting Jan 13 and finishing Aug 29, 2022. I didn’t realize that it’s almost impossible for a debut author to get a literary agent from a series. The industry begs for standalones if you’re just starting out. Alas, I hope to eventually return to these books, as they were my first loves.

Two days after I finished writing the second book of my series, we moved to Wales.

2023

Here’s where I joined a Sci-Fi and Fantasy writing course at Cardiff Uni and started writing “The Reluctant Mentor”.

2024

I finished writing “The Reluctant Mentor” at the beginning of the year. I edited it a bunch. Tried a few queries in August. Hired a developmental editor in November and started a new round of queries. This is when I started getting full manuscript requests from literary agents, meaning they wanted to look at the whole book, not just my one-page pitch and sample chapters. I was excited—but afraid to get too excited. I know how hard this industry is, where rejection is the default.

June-July 2024, I wrote a Literary Fiction Novella. It was quite dark and depressing. Perhaps some day I’ll share it with the world, but for now, it was an exercise in a style of writing I don’t normally do.

July 2024: We bought a house in Wales! That was a good distraction for a while.

In October 2024, I joined another Novel Writing course at Cardiff University and tried to come up with the next project to write. But I struggled to stick with anything. I’d written several novels at this point and received so many query rejections that I was starting to lose hope. I loved writing, but what if I spent all my mental and emotional energy on something that I wasn’t good at? The imposter syndrome was at an all-time high. I mean, it’s always there. But it was bad. 2024 was a rough winter creatively for me, with my full-time job taking up most of my mental capacity.

2025

On Feb 13, 2025, I participated in a Twitter pitch event where you post a guide or moodboard to your project and if an agent “Likes” it, you can follow up with a query to them.

I got an agent like on this day—from an agent I had queried two days prior!

I emailed said agent on the day and she asked to read my full manuscript. I sent it. Three days later, on Feb 16, as Ian and I were moving furniture around the house (as one does on a Sunday afternoon), I received an email back from the agent.

She loved the book. And the characters. And she wanted to represent me. Eek!

The Agent Journey (So Far)

That Tuesday, we discussed everything on Zoom, and then I had two weeks to reach out to other agents and mull things over. (I wanted to say yes five minutes after the meeting ended, but I’d read a lot of author blogs warning not to do that).

On March 4, 2025, I signed the contract with my agent, Madison Potter at Olswanger Literary Agency. I’m so beyond excited to work with her and to hopefully see my book on shelves some day.

The Big Announcement

I have a Literary Agent!!!! Meaning I’m one step closer to my publishing dream!

What’s Next

The next step is to work with Madison to polish my manuscript even more and discuss possible changes to the story. This will likely take a few months (at least), but the tentative plan is to go on submission (submit the story to editors) by the summer—and hope one of those editors likes my book enough to want to publish it!

You’re all caught up for now. Let’s see where the rest of this adventure takes us!

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