The Bomber Jacket from First Page to Finally, Published!
Agent Search—Hope, Disillusion and Loss of a Friend
My cover letter and synopsis were done. Time to search for an agent. But how to begin?
It felt so overwhelming and intimidating. Then once again, my editor friend Dani came to the rescue. She had invested so much in the editing process, and though I had paid her for her time and expertise, she wasn’t ready to let go of this book. By this time, it meant as much to her as to me. So, she generously offered to do the agent search in exchange for a percentage of the advance royalties I’d get once the agent she secured arranged a book contract with a publisher.
Which left me free to start working on my next projects: a contemporary rom-com with fantasy elements and a mother-daughter generational story told in parallel timelines.
From February to August of 2017, Dani queried eighteen agents. That meant sending the cover letter and synopsis and usually the first three chapters or 50 pages of the manuscript. It can take weeks or months to hear back, if you hear back at all. For her efforts she got eight “thanks, but no thanks.” Those responses usually consisted of a brief, formal letter that said something like, “Thank you for your recent query regarding your novel, The Bomber Jacket. Unfortunately, this project does not meet our current needs. We wish you the best in your future endeavors.” Or some other bland paragraph. Nothing about why they rejected it. The plot? The characters? The writing? They didn’t like the book title? They didn’t like my name?
The other ten queries received no response at all. Not a thing. Not even a sentence such as “Your book sucks, so just give it up.” The queries disappeared into computer la-la land, the indefinable ether of the Ethernet. Dani and I knew from our research and attending writing conferences that if you got no response, it basically meant, DON’T BOTHER US WITH YOUR REDICULOUS ATTEMPT AT WRITING A NOVEL. Well, maybe not really quite so insulting, but it felt that way.
In August, Dani gave up the agent search because her cancer, which had been in remission for five years, had returned. She decided given everything, she wanted to fulfill a lifelong dream of living at the beach, so she and her husband David moved to Lewes, Delaware.
I started making the 3.5-hour trips from my house to hers every couple of months. We would walk on the beach, wander around Lewes, paint (she was a talented artist and I was taking watercolor lessons at the time), and talk about our latest writing projects. In the evenings we’d watch movies or television show. We both loved international TV shows with English subtitles. We watched Love Rain, a 16-episode Kdrama (South Korean television). It’s since become my favorite form of entertainment.
But by August of 2018, she was struggling. The treatments weren’t stopping the progress of her cancer. With each visit, I found her ever more frail, her appetite dwindling, her energy diminishing. In late February 2019, I spent four days with her. She only had the energy to go out for an hour or two at a time. We went to Cape Henlopen. It was a struggle for her to walk from the car to the beach. Most of the time we sat quietly at her house talking, or she slept and I read or painted or took a walk in her neighborhood. When I left, I knew the future was uncertain.
Less than two weeks later David called to say Dani had taken a sudden, drastic turn for the worse. He had called in hospice. He was distraught. Come soon, he said. Two of my sisters and I made a hurried trip to Delaware on Sunday March 10, arriving about 6 p.m. Another drove in from West Virginia, arriving an hour later. Our other sister was unable to make the trip. Dani was as much a sister to us as we were to each other.
The four of us, along with her husband, took turns sitting with her. During my moments with her, holding her thin, frail hand, I would whisper, “Dear Dani, know that you are utterly loved, surrounded by love. Float on the ocean of love. Be at peace.” The next morning, we were all by her side as her breath grew more and more shallow.
At 8:57 she drew her last breath. And my heart broke in pieces.
Some months later I returned to my search for an agent. I wanted to bring The Bomber Jacket to print to honor Dani. I spent weeks compiling a list of WWII historical fiction published in 2017, 2018 and the beginning of 2019. Then I began researching which agent/agency had represented the author. Sometimes that information was available on various internet sources or the writer’s website, but a lot of times I’d have to go to the bookstore and read the acknowledgment page to find the sentence, “…and thanks for my agent, so and so.”
When I was finished, I had a list of 34 agents. My results were pretty much the same as Dani’s. I still have her spreadsheet listing agents queried and the results. I recently searched all through my office and on the computer for my list or copies of the query letters or their responses. All I found was the original computer spreadsheet, but not the printed one on which I noted rejections and NR (no response). I do clearly remember I only got one response out of the 46 (my 34 and Dani’s 18) which actually said they thought my story had promise and sounded very intriguing…but it didn’t fit their current needs.
By March of 2020, a year after Dani’s death, the Pandemic was shutting down the world. And I shut down my search. Instead, I occupied myself, like everyone else, with figuring out how to navigate the upside-down world we were living in. I continued to write, but had put The Bomber Jacket to rest. Maybe forever.
