January 2025 Update 🖤
...a lot of chaos but also renewed hope?
Hi all,
Today is January 15, 2025 and somehow the last two weeks of January have felt more like two months (and not in a good way).
I was planning to start off my new year feeling refreshed and starting off strong—on New Year’s Day, I even did a full decluttering/rearrangement of my bedroom, journaled my personal summary of 2024, wrote down all my specific but simple intentions and goals for 2025, and even started coming up with a good, structured plan for what the next week and month ahead was supposed to look like for me in personal, professional, and creative areas of my life—and then all hell broke loose the first week of January.
On a personal level, I won’t get into the details here…but I was feeling particularly hurt & anxious the first week of January when all I wanted to do that week was focus on prepping 🕷💋 WIP for my beta readers to start reading it and getting some overdue health appointments done and over with—and that wasn’t painless, either! lol I got blood drawn and finally received my updated Covid vaccine—but because of unexpected personal chaos I had to deal with, I had to push my writing goals back by a couple days.
So now I’m behind on my previously planned beta reader schedule, and therefore my querying schedule for 🕷💋 WIP, and because I also didn’t feel great with the side effects from my health visits last week, I had to spend a couple nights just resting and not working on anything—and then cram in a bunch of writing/editing time pulling late night sessions and losing sleep to make sure I didn’t miss my beta reader deadlines (my own deadlines that I implemented, of course).
And if that weren’t exhausting enough…
That same week, I finally heard back from the agent who had my full manuscript, and not only was it a rejection—it was an essay-length rejection detailing what the agent didn’t like about my book with suggestions for scenes I should add to my book to change it and make it more of what she believed the heart of my book should be…and not what the heart of my book actually is.
She was at least respectful, and some of the criticisms were fair…but while she took the time to write out several paragraphs and really go into detail about what she didn’t like/would have changed about one single aspect of my book, she didn’t include a single sentence of any positive feedback for my book. There was no positive or negative constructive critique of my writing style/prose either; so this feedback didn’t really help me at all. It was a majorly disappointing end to a query journey that had given me so much hope back in August & September.
But you know what’s weird? Even though this was the full request that made me cry out of joy when I received it, I didn’t shed a single tear for this rejection.
The other interesting thing about this rejection is that it really made me reevaluate my story that night—and then reaffirm with more confidence what I believe the heart of my story is and realize that there was nothing wrong with my book as a story. This agent just wanted a different version of my book where my MC’s most important relationship ended up being a different one than the relationship that actually is at the heart of the story (which I think I’ve even talked about in a previous newsletter).
I think that’s why I didn’t get emotional; because the agent’s feedback just felt so weird to me above all else because I was like “how did you read this entire book and come away with this opinion?” (sorry if this is vague, but I don’t want to get too specific about the feedback just in case that agent wanders over here lol)
I followed up with her to clarify if her list of suggested changes meant this was a R&R situation (because she didn’t state so in the first email, it was basically a “good luck finding someone else” closing), and she said while she would take another query from me if I made those changes, that I shouldn’t change my MS just for her because the story could resonate with another agent the way it is??? I don’t know why someone who would admit that their opinion is highly subjective and then tell me I shouldn’t change anything in my book in case another agent loves my book the way it is…would write me a several-paragraph-email telling me in detail exactly how they would want me to change my book… 🤷♀️ like just give me a form rejection instead, especially if you’re not going to add a single positive note to your feedback! That would make all of this so much less frustrating and befuddling!
Well, all I can do is shrug and move on, because clearly this wasn’t the agent for me if she didn’t connect with my book’s story the way it was written—and that’s fine.
But… you know how I said in my last newsletter that I was done querying TBOAD?
Well, I have to go back on my word because I got so fired up by this rejection, determined to find an agent who would get my story and get excited about it in the right way—and a few friends who have already read the book got it and loved TBOAD so who’s to say another agent won’t? so I ended up sending 2 new queries last week…
and I just got a partial request for one of the new ones a couple days ago????!!! 😱
The moral of the story is…don’t let a brutal punch keep you from getting back up and staying in the fight because you might still win! 🥊 (why am I making a boxing reference? idk just go with it 😂)
But of course, at the time I sent those new queries and additional follow-up nudges to agents who have had TBOAD in their inboxes 6+ months…I had no clue if it would work out! But I had no more fear anymore! I had nothing to lose by querying new agents or nudging those other agents and possibly getting one of them to take a look at TBOAD and request a partial or full MS and that possibly working out…and guess what? It did work for one! 🌸
So I guess I should thank the agent who gave me that full request rejection for refueling my fire for querying… although, that’s maybe not the best choice of words… because while I was still digesting that full request rejection, about a week before I would receive that new partial request, all hell literally broke loose in LA 💔
Well, not Hell, exactly…but fire did.
The most devastating wildfires to ever hit Los Angeles in history were sparked on January 9th—and LA is where I was born, it’s the county where most of my family lives, it’s the city I will always consider home, and I still spend a lot of time in LA these days. So I’ve had a bit of anxiety about the ongoing wildfires because I have family members who live close to the fires (thankfully, no one has been directly in the line of fire yet), and while I don’t live in Pasadena, it’s probably the one city in LA I visit the most frequently to hang out, eat, go to bookstores, or just walk around—and so many people and businesses in Pasadena have been greatly impacted by the Altadena/Eaton fire, including some of my favorite independent bookstores.
Thankfully, the LA community has been coming together to help those in need, and I would appreciate if you could support Octavia’s Bookshelf, an independent BIPOC-owned bookstore that has been doing amazing work of organizing donations & resources to give to Altadena fire victims who have lost their homes. If you’re somewhere across the country or the world and would like to help by donating, LAFD is a good place to start and I’m sure you can find a bunch of mutual aid accounts on any social media platform.
I also of course had thoughts about all of this as someone who literally just finished drafting and is currently editing a book set in historical Los Angeles—and Pasadena is even an important location in this book:
[pasted from Instagram]: Thinking of everyone affected by the LA fires, including my own family ♥️ but as a writer who just spent over a year writing and researching about historic LA, my hometown, the cities I grew up in, and places I still love to frequent often today…I’m also thinking a lot about preserving the history of LA and how important it is to write about the history of where you live to keep it alive—because one day it could all be gone overnight.
I have many more unrefined thoughts because I’ve had so much of my mind on my own relationship with the history of LA as I’ve written this book, and throughout the process I realized how much I never actually knew about the history of my birthplace and hometowns until I started writing 🕷️💋 wip—and how even then, Mexican Americans aka people like me, had their history erased almost entirely from mainstream documentation of the era I wrote about in favor of the white anglo American narrative that they were the ones who made LA—and that there was nothing before they arrived at the end of the Mexico-US war (which is why the research for 🕷️💋 book was so much more difficult than the research I did to write about 1899 Europe in TBOAD)
anyway, it’s all sad and devastating and I’m hoping the fires don’t get much worse. Even my favorite independent bookstores had to be evacuated and I have family members who can see the fires from their bedrooms at night 😢
keep us in your prayers & consider helping out/donating if you can to those most severely affected ♥️
And for some uplifting news besides just reporting on the devastation, here’s a positive article about what’s been going on lately:
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/01/los-angeles-fire-mutual-aid/
So yeah….it’s been a chaotic January so far…but hopefully that just means it’ll balance out with a bit of peace and positivity for a bit 🙏
Speaking of positivity, I just participated in #BluePit over on Bluesky the other day, and got a TON of notes for both of my books. Only one agent liked my pitch for 🕷💋 WIP but it’s always cool to find people excited about my books!
So… I should probably get to the regular part of these monthly updates at some point? lol here are my fresh-out-the-oven querying stats:
Queries sent: 83
Rejections/No-response: 75
Full & Partial Requests: 3
Withdrawn query + Agent left industry: 2
Pending queries: 8
I never planned on going into 2025 thinking this was going to be *my year* because 2025 is not going to be an easy year for anyone in the U.S. who didn’t want to vote for a fascist-leaning criminal to become our head of government and I’m preparing for things to get worse before they get better. But despite all the fire and chaos of 2025 so far, maybe there is still hope of getting through the other side of all that and feeling even stronger. It’s not like there’s any choice but to keep going, anyway. Not for me, at least.
So I’m gonna keep chasing after my dreams and see what this year holds for the fate of both of my books and my career as a writer…and I think once I’m finally done editing 🕷💋 WIP, I’d like to take a small break from writing any sort of book just to give myself some rest and then start a new book project this year not thinking about being marketable or writing a perfect book—but working on something that will fill my spirit and make me happy…because I’m gonna need it.
Take care, everyone 🖤
Jazmin