Letter to My Agent (Who is Still to Be Determined)

Dear STBD:

Before anything else, let me start off by just telling you how grateful I am that we've found each other.

I know I’ve said it before—to the point that you want me to stop—but I can’t help repeating myself here. I mean, honestly, all along I've been dreaming, like most novelists do, of partnering up with someone who shares my sensibility and interests. It means a lot to me to work with someone who will follow me down rabbit holes, who believes in what my novel has to say, who has contacts with publishers who believe in the same things.

Thank you for actually reading my manuscript and not doing what others do – sending it off to a hired reader to supply their opinion instead.

I know your job isn’t easy. Sure, as a writer, I have plenty of challenges staring up at me from the blank page, but I definitely wouldn’t want yours.

On being an agent

You have the incredibly tough job of marketing the written word to a public that prefers social media and gets its stories from Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Novels demand the kind of patience that many people just don’t have anymore. It’s been conditioned right out of them. It takes time for a novel to unfold. I know sales of serious literary fiction aren’t great. That’s because most people want everything to be easy. They want stories to quickly get to the point, and I really admire you for rejecting that and standing your ground.

You (and publishers like you) are trying to convince people that it’s worth it to swap time on their phones and spend it on a genre invented in the 18th century. It’s like me trying to get someone to buy a horse and buggy instead of a Tesla. I get it. I really do. I just needed to say that again.

Ok, I’ll stop now and get to the point of this letter.

On past rejection

Even though you know my work well, you asked me to explain what excites me about my novel, SORRY FOR THE INTERRUPTIONS—why I think it speaks so much to our present moment even though, at first glance, it looks like an escapist historical story.

I’ll be honest with you. At first that’s all it was. Just another escapist story. Many moons ago, my book started off under another title as your typical genre piece, set in the late 19th?century. It went nowhere. It was peddled all over New York publishing and totally rejected.

I wasn’t just disappointed, I was really surprised.

The story takes place in the 1880s. A young Roman Catholic priest, freshly ordained, is given a terrific assignment with a London church. Most new priests in England at that time were being sent off to the country’s furthest corners, to small villages and towns. But thanks to a strange series of events, Father Michael Frost lands at St. Martha’s in Chelsea. He meets Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the leader of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, who happens to live in the area. He crushes (hard) on a friend’s wife (which isn’t good). He gets involved in a supernatural situation involving Rossetti. Things don’t end well—for him or the artist. His situation is so bad that he leaves London and exiles himself to a place far away—a small village in a place that would one day become Western Ukraine.

As far as gothic novels go, the storyline seemed pretty solid to me. So did the timing. When I was first peddling it around, the public was smitten by Harry Potter and Dan Brown’s mysteries, and my story had much in common with these and their clones. It had the occult, gothic puzzles, a strange conspiracy, sex, violence—how could it lose? And besides that, I had the obvious other bona fide: my position as an L.A. Times writer and editor, which gave me a presence online and some name recognition.

Well, it didn’t happen.

To be perfectly honest, STBD, once some time passed and I could look at it objectively again, I could see the story wasn’t ready. The publishers who gave it a thumbs down actually did me a favor. The book was missing something. I didn’t know what that was, so I just put it away. I didn’t give up on it—just let it go for a while. I moved on to other things. I had a family to support, a busy day job, other projects, other deadlines, yadda yadda yadda.

And then the coronavirus happened. And the pandemic. And that’s when I saw what was missing.

The other half

I was like most people during quarantine—working from home, horrified at the hysteria sweeping across the internet. I tried hard not to get caught up in it (and still did anyways). It was impossible not to: There was this increasing general ugliness that made going on Twitter or Facebook or TikTok even just for five minutes an upsetting experience.

I know human nature is not great. I’m not na?ve. Quarantine was a time that really magnified how bad people could be. And that’s when I heard something. A voice. I realized that it belonged to Alex Shepherd, the narrator of my novel.

He didn’t have a name or an actual identity in my book’s earlier version. At that point, he was just your typical third-person voice. But in the new version of my novel, the narrator has evolved. He’s an actual character. Gradually he begins disclosing things about himself even as he continues to present the narrative of Michael Frost in 19th century London. He tells us that writing this novel is a form of therapy. He really needs it.

For a long time, Alex worked for various political communications consultancies as a writer of all things—public remarks, social media content, various kinds of outreach to constituents, white papers, internal messaging, you name it—for the clients hired by his employers. He falls in love with a beautiful woman in the same business who is clearly out of his league. They make it work for a while, but the fallout from this failed relationship (I won't get into the details here) really hurts and upsets him so much that his life turns dark. He also has some really bad experiences with bosses who reveal their psychotic sides, and that doesn’t help. He ends up venting his desperation and unhappiness via his day job, via the work he does on social media, and it results in a tragedy he never expected. Or wanted.

I realized I could have Alex tell his story alongside Michael Frost’s. They would complement each other. Both are confronted with something unpredictable and scary: for Michael, it’s the occult … for Alex, it’s social media.

It isn’t an exact parallel, though. I don’t follow the formula that says each situation must strictly unfold in alternating chapters. Sometimes that does happen, but at other times Alex is just telling us about Michael and then can’t help relating something that happened to him. Hence the book’s title (I love getting a chance to use “hence” in a sentence). Sticking closely to a regular pattern felt too contrived to me; I wanted this to be more organic. More real.

On being real

That four-letter word means more to me than anything else.

Real.

If fiction--even in the heavy-duty genre categories—can’t speak to the world we’re living in now, what good is it?

That’s what I realized as I was rewriting and reimagining Alex and Michael’s stories. That’s what I changed about my story. That is why I’m so proud of it now.

That’s also why I gave the novel an additional framework that is set in Western Ukraine.

After leaving London, the elder Michael Frost is living in a village, happily married, with his sons and their families. They share the same house and work together in the fields. He’s tried to forget his traumatic past, but it still haunts him. This novel follows him as he engages in an actual nightly ritual practiced in my father’s village. As he performs the ritual, he has a chance to revisit his past and think about what went wrong. I know this village really well thanks to the many stories my father told me about it … and thanks to the considerable time that we actually spent there. It was amazing. It’s still there.

I didn’t add Ukraine to this story just to be topical. I didn’t decide to insert a slice of village life as a cheap marketing ploy since more people know about Ukraine today because the Butcher of the Kremlin decided to invade.

Sure, it may appeal to some because of that. Others might see this aspect of SORRY FOR THE INTERRUPTIONS as a nice tribute to Ukrainian culture—which is beautiful and distinct (no matter what Putin the Murderer thinks)—but my main reason for including this was mainly for my father. And my own sons. And their families. I did this so that, one day, they might turn to this story and get a glimpse of an important part of who they are.

On being bold

I think that’s it. I hope this letter helps you. I hope it shows why I’m truly proud of this book now.

My novel is traditional and unconventional at the same time. The narrative is disruptive, and the voice is pretty darn sincere. An agent who only wants to pitch what’s familiar or what’s safe or what’s currently trending won’t understand this book. I take some narrative risks even though, like I said, the book still embraces (and reveres) literary tradition.

I know there’s a considerable audience for this. I know that not only in my gut, but because my many beta readers have told me the same thing—and this wonderful group is a mixture of non-literary folks and some respected names in the business.

SORRY FOR THE INTERRUPTIONS needs an agent who can appreciate these things. That’s why I want to thank you, STBD. I couldn’t have imagined working with a better partner.

Sincerely,

Nick

For more about me, visit Impressive Content here.