"Is the book published yet?"

And other questions I don’t want to answer. A brief history of my 13 year journey to get one manuscript to "not quite published yet."

As soon as people know you’ve written a book, or are writing a book, they start asking you questions you don’t want to answer. “How’s the book going?” “When is it going to be published?” And more innocuous, yet cold sweat-inducing questions. That’s why for years I didn’t tell people I was working on a book. But eventually I wanted to talk about it… I was proud! And it was taking up a lot of my time, so when people say “what have you been up to lately?” I could either lie, or just talk about the book.

But once the book (cat) is out of the bag, you get a lot of questions from people about when it will be published. First of all, who said publishing is the end goal anyways? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t…. Ok, it totally is. But maybe it isn’t for you! I know people who have written books and never intend to publish them, either because they are scared to let other people read it (IT IS TRULY TERRIFYING) or because that’s not why they wrote it in the first place. I understand this deeply on both fronts. I have a collection of essays that I wrote that I likely will never publish. Because that’s not why I wrote them. They aren’t for anyone else, they are for me. However, I have a completed Middle Grade manuscript and another in the works that I absolutely intend to publish – that is what I will talk about here.

I’m not going to give any tips on how to get published or find an agent because honestly, I have no idea! If that’s what you’re looking for, there are lots and lots of great newsletters out there for aspiring published authors from industry insiders, for example Kate McKean, and many others that you can see on MY reading list. I’m not an insider, in fact, I’m an outsider and it’s taken me over a decade to get here and I’m still sitting on an unpublished manuscript. So that’s the disclaimer done: I’m not an expert.

Creating the character

Here’s a brief history of how I came to write this book. About 13 years ago I started developing a character. I won’t tell you her name because that is actually a spoiler for my manuscript! But here is a snippet of how I described her in an early story about her that I wrote in 2012:

She was an exceptionally ordinary girl. She had short brown hair and brown eyes. She was of average height. She lived in the suburbs with her mother and father and younger brother. She was 11 years old and her favorite color was blue.

She went to school, and was exceptionally average there too. She wasn’t the best or worst at anything, not the most popular or the most teased. She didn’t stand out, she didn’t talk much, most people didn’t notice her. In fact, if you had asked many of her classmates what she looked like, most of them would have shrugged and said “she’s about average” if they remembered her at all.

One of the only extraordinary things about her was that she dreamt of being extraordinary. Not just dreamt, really wished for it, ached for it, constantly worried that one day she would die and no one would remember her at all. And she was only 11.

Is she me? A little bit. She has aspects of me, or maybe me in an alternate universe. But she is very much her own person, borrowing bits from myself and people I’ve known.

A data center on the moon

I knew this girl inside and out. She walked around in my head, had conversations with her best friend, and went through petty dramas. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do with this character until I came up with the premise for a science fiction story in 2016. What if, I wondered, an Amazon-like entity started operating a data center on the moon? Back in my days working at Forrester, one of the areas I researched was data center facilities and locations. I wrote about the risks and benefits of locating your data center in various regions. Soon I was invited to tour new data center facilities all around the world, including in Iceland where power is effectively free and climates ideal for cooling servers (yes, I am quoted in this NYT article, just flexing a little here). That reminds me about the strongly worded letter from the government of Luxembourg telling me I was making a big mistake for not recommending it as a location for European data centers! But I digress….

What got my imagination going, however, was the underwater data centers that were starting to pop-up. It was both madness and brilliance – the most expensive and complex thing in a data center facility (not counting the servers, just the infrastructure that houses it) is the cooling. Data center efficiency is measured in PUE – power usage effectiveness – the closer you can get to an equal amount of power going to compute (the reason you are running a data center) and to cooling and facilities (the overhead) the better. At the time, the companies I advised were measuring a PUE of over 2.0 – meaning that 2x the amount of power went to overhead when compared to compute. These days Google is bragging a PUE of under 1.1, and I found a source suggesting that the average PUE in 2024 was 1.56. But what if you could get to a PUE of under 1? The equipment would need to be self-cooling. In an underwater data center, you could use a never ending supply of seawater to cool your equipment. But in outer space, you could use the never ending vacuum of space to cool your infrastructure.

Is it far-fetched? Sure. But technically possible? Also yes. In 2016 I started sketching out a world where an Amazon-like entity had a cloud region on the moon. From my premise document:

Quantum computers function with 37% greater efficiency in low-gravity/no-oxygen environments. Amazon has built massive data centers on the moon housing millions of quantum server blades. Because the latency from the earth to the moon makes it basically impossible to run anything other than batch jobs, processes that require quantum computing also require local developers. The cost of space travel has come down significantly, and it’s not very expensive to maintain life on the moon with hydroponic gardens, solar power, and oxygen converters.

This was before large language models (LLMs) were a thing, but now they fit perfectly into the world I’ve built. The Lunar Complex Region has two Availability Zones (lc1-north and lc1-south) that primarily runs batch process AI analysis on large data sets that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive to analyze on Earth. Latency doesn’t matter because it’s batch analysis, not real-time analysis. There are all sorts of applications for this type of analysis from medical to financial.

Just write it

I had a character, I had a setting. From there I developed a plot outline using the eight point story arc: stasis, trigger, quest, surprise, critical choice, climax, reversal, resolution. Turns out, there are only so many narrative structures in the world, and once you recognize them, you see them everywhere. If you haven’t seen this chart of narrative structures, it’s amazing. My favorite row is Kurt Vonnegut, who is one of my all-time favorite authors

Vonnegut actually has a theory of 8 shapes of stories, even if he himself only uses three of them. He plots them out on an X/Y axis like this:

It’s brilliant.

I’d like to say I spent a lot of time thinking about which narrative structure to use, but I came across the eight point story structure and it immediately clicked for me. Coming up with the plot was one of the easiest parts for me, maybe because I had a solid setting and solid characters to play with. By 2020 I had a plot outline I was happy with. A mere 8 years after coming up with the character. Now I just needed to find time to write the novel. Ha.

In a bout of mild insanity, I decided that I would participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November 2021. I was working as an executive at an early stage startup. I had a three year old child. There was a global pandemic raging. What could go wrong? Thirty days later, I had a 45,000 word first draft. Let’s sweep under the rug the sleep deprivation, stress, and unnecessary pressure that I put on my spouse and our marriage that he may never forgive me for. Look over there! A shiny manuscript!

I spent a year revising the manuscript, another 6 months getting feedback from beta readers and revising. And then I was ready to find an agent and a publisher!

126 queries and counting

Turns out, you can’t just email your manuscript to a publisher and have them read it. Well, at least the big five publishers who take up 80% of the US book market don’t allow that. You have to have an agent submit your work to the publisher. Great, how do you get an agent? You find agents who represent your genre and have capacity to take on new clients. You send them a query letter, essentially pitching your book to them and why they would want to represent it. Agents only get paid when and if they get your book picked up by a publisher, so they only want to represent books they can actually sell.

Over the past two years, I have sent out 126 query letters to potential agents. Sixty agents simply never replied. Sixty-three agents declined. Three agents replied to the query requesting the full manuscript! But all three eventually declined. Sadly, these stats are actually not bad. I’m proud of the three full requests, all from highly reputable agents, which makes me think there is something sellable here.

I know that this is a crazy competitive space, and getting an agent to represent your book is based just as much on good luck and timing as it is on the quality of the book. I’m not disillusioned or discouraged, if anything, I’m energized.

Don’t quit your day job

“Don’t quit your day job,” is advice I’ve seen pretty frequently for aspiring authors. Oops, too late. Since I left the full-time workforce, I actually have time to spend on my novel again, hooray! Before I jump with both feet into self-publishing, I’m doing to do a bit more querying — I’ve identified another handful of agents who seem like a good fit and I’ll likely send out another dozen queries or so. But I’m not overly optimistic. At this point, I’m pretty excited about self-publishing. I’m researching the process and making a plan. I’m also taking a beat to do more revisions on the manuscript and have it out with another batch of beta readers. I’m grateful that self-publishing is a viable option these days (if you have the time and the energy) and I’m excited to dive in.

So the next time someone asks me “how’s the book going?” or “When's the book coming out?” instead of flying into a fit of angsty explanations, I’ll just send them here. Crisis averted.