The world of publishing has changed dramatically since the period of time in literature that I am most interested in, the Lost Generation of the 1920s. There will never be another Maxwell Perkins. What there is is schmoozing and networking and writers conferences and MFAs and social media and personal author websites and LinkedIn, and there is the all-dreaded query letter, which one must perfect in order to get one’s slush elevated from the rest of the slush and God help us all. No matter the quality of one’s writing, mess this up and it’s a good bet no one will ever see the prose you labored over for years, working menial jobs just to have the time to write, sacrificing friendships and relationships in order to rework that last chapter just one more time.

Oof.

From that introduction you may have guessed it, but I’m dusting off the old query letters for my novel and attempting to rework them to try to grab an agent’s attention. I finished the first draft of this novel way back in 2014. When no one showed any interest in it, it sat on the shelf until 2022 when I picked it back up, decided I still liked it, and went through page by page rewriting it. I had spent the two years before that sick and barely writing anything, convinced I’d never write again. (When your brain in stuck in fight or flight long enough it shuts down what it sees as unnecessary, such as digestion and creativity. Evolution aside, both of those are kind necessary for me…)

Short aside here – I highly recommend Kevin Maloney’s recent article on LitHub entitled, “It’s Not My Job to Understand Agents or the Marketplace. My Job is to Write.” In it he details his struggles to write something that an agent will like. This quote immediately hit me – “Suddenly, the two most beautiful words in the English language occurred to me—fuck it. It wasn’t my job to understand agents or the marketplace. It wasn’t my job to figure out if my books had value other than the joy I experienced in writing them.”

Yes, yes, and yes. Okay, back to my own struggles…

The point here is that if I want to be published in 2025 I need to accept the current state of publishing, no matter what I may think of it. And as Kevin Maloney writes in his article, I need to write for myself first, with as much clarity and truth as I can. Screw everything else.

The endless number of agents online is overwhelming. Some have terrible websites, and many have no interest in debut authors. (“First, prove you can write a book that sells before I try to sell your book…”) It’s a hard slog, so why do it? Because writing is the one thing I’ve carried in my heart through everything I’ve been through in writing is what I want to do. As for all the things you “have” and “are supposed to” do – fuck ’em. I may accept the state of things, but it doesn’t mean I have to become part of it, even as I ask them to give my work a fair shot.

Good luck to all the real writers out there. And to the ones who just try to follow the trends – please stop. You know in your heart it’s not satisfying, not for a real artist.