I like to think of myself as a fairly organized person when it comes to professional matters (all things personal is another story, of course). But my inbox can be a real, sabotaging dingus. An underhanded gremlin of subterfuge and Mercury-in-retrograde-style pranking. It regularly hides important emails, like comments on posts, or editors reaching out for opportunities. Sometimes it just deletes them all together, shuffling them among the thousands of J. Crew sale announcements and old listserv notifications I can’t manage to unsubscribe from. Yet, among all those unfortunate email misses, there’s one that I still get panicked thinking about, to this day.
When my agent, the wonderful Abby Walters, reached out to me a year and a half ago, her lovely note went straight to my spam folder with the fake McAfee order confirmations and the Russian spambot messages. I don’t know what prompted me to check my spam in an unusually timely manner that week, but I did. (What if I hadn’t? my over-anxious mind likes to ask.) And when I tell you that my heart raced through Abby’s lovely, life-changing message—
One sentence stood out to me, like a glowing beacon I could not tear my eyes from: I'm a literary agent at Creative Artists Agency and I'd love to chat more about book ideas and opportunities and the possibility of working together in the future.
I kept blinking my eyes, uncertain that I was reading correctly. After over a decade of kind (and brusque) rejections from agents, or outright ghosting, a dream agent was reaching out to me. About a book idea. Was this real life?