Query Quest
On May 17th, 1998, I was run over, triggering years of reconstructive surgeries and medical appointments and waves of hope and fear. Today, May 17th, 2024, I have submitted my novel to nine different literary agents.
Every year on this day, I think about what it means to survive — and what it means to thrive. This is the first year that I am addressing this moment and all my complex feelings about it without my mother. I miss talking to her. I miss her enthusiasm about the future, the way she spent too much money on books. I wish more than anything that she were here after I sent out these nine queries.
Sending out the first query was among the bravest things I have ever done. I know that I have worked so hard on my novel, so very hard, but trusting it to the capricious winds of the world, to watch it drift and move and grow and possibly be rejected, that takes a lot of courage. I did not know that I had that courage.
My query quest is in its infancy. I am on day nine of this journey — I have not even heard back from anyone — and I am navigating it without her. I am glued to my email, scrambling at every beep on my phone. Wiser people than me have called this process “a rollercoaster.” I find that it is akin to standing on a swaying bridge, pushing oneself to get to the other side before the collapse in the rain and the churning, frothing waters below.
But finishing this novel, I have time to work on my newest book, Project Novocaine (so named because I had to have cavities removed on the day I committed myself to it). This was my mother’s favorite thing that I have brainstormed and written, and so, along with my poetry collection, will be dedicated to her.
This is what I have been doing with my first nine days of querying:
Portuguese, Italian, Swahili.
I have had two dreams in simple Portuguese. Lately, I have been working my way through beginning Italian, a language that I had never been particularly interested in. I’m interested in the comparisons between languages, how Italian is the infant of Latin, the cousin of Portuguese and Spanish and French.
Swahili is a newer obsession. I have a single textbook and Duolingo to guide me through this one. When I was in the hospital, one of the nurses spoke to me in Swahili because I told her that I liked languages. I’ll never forget her.
Reconsidering graduate school.
I have long wanted a PhD. I was in the application process last year when my mother’s passing swamped through my plans. I needed time to grieve, time to assess what it is that I want. I love studying literature. I love studying cognitive science. If I could understand even a bit of why we humans are storytelling animals, then I will consider myself happy, closer to the core of our identity as a species.
I want to study comparative literature, linguistics, and computer science. I want to know how Dante crafted The Divine Comedy. I want to know how a machine can understand story and write its own novel. It is all so dizzying, this love of so vast a field.
Reviewing some math.
I love math, but it is not something I naturally excel at. I’ve been going over all the tricks that I don’t recall learning in school, quadratic equations and ratios and calculus. I’ve always done better as an autodidact in math than as a formal student, but something about having a sense of numeracy is comforting, soothing.
Most of all, since today is twenty-six years of survival, I want to live in a certain gratitude that all these things lie not ahead of me but within me. The query quest is only beginning, but I have such hope. I’ve felt quietly decent about this book, though sometimes I despair that it is the worst thing ever put to paper. Sometimes I am more fragile than other times.
I’ve hit submit. That is the best I can do for now!
