In 2018, the Loft Literary Center in downtown Minneapolis held its annual writers’ conference. For anyone unfamiliar, a writers’ conference is where literary agents from across the country gather to give lectures and take pitches from aspiring authors. It’s not cheap. I paid $500 to attend.
I arrived confident and prepared. I was no longer a nobody—I was the founder of Manic-Expression.com. The year before, I had expanded my short story collection into a six-volume series, an interconnected universe of tales spanning a full millennium. I wasn’t just bringing a book to this conference; I was bringing an entire cosmology. Surely these agents would be clamoring for something so original.
…Right?
Not quite. My first pitch on day one was a disaster. Before I could even finish, the agent cut me off: “No one reads short story collections.” I’ve told that story many times since, and I’m always met with stunned looks from people who insist they love short story collections.
Worse, she repeated something I had already heard twice that day in lectures from two other agents: “I’m looking for The Hunger Games.” She didn’t mean the actual book, of course. She meant the next Maze Runner or Divergent—a slick imitation. As the other agents had been quick to note in their sessions, they wanted their Katniss to be a girl of color, or trans, or a lesbian. I got the distinct impression they didn’t want me writing those books.
That night, I rewrote my pitch. The next day, I no longer led with a six-volume collection. Instead, I pitched just the first book and compared it to the fractured, layered world of Cloud Atlas. The agent liked that. She asked for sample pages.
The third agent was indifferent, but I didn’t care. I had a “maybe” from a real literary agent. This was it. The beginning!
Again… not quite. After reading the pages, she passed. It wasn’t enough like Cloud Atlas for her taste. Rather than feeling crushed, I felt something click: if I wanted an agent, I needed to give them what they actually wanted—a novel.
That winter, I sat down to write Hurt. I had never attempted a full novel before, and the prospect was intimidating. But once I started, the pages came easily. I crossed 300 pages without much trouble. Despite how it may come off as I attempt to sell my stories, I’m brutally critical of my own writing. I can edit something for thirty years—literally—and still feel it’s not quite right. So when I say Hurt is the best thing I’ve ever written, you can trust that I mean it.
I went all in. I did deep research, conducted extensive interviews with people in the fields I was writing about, and paid for two professional edits before querying. I polished my query letter with help from critically acclaimed author William Kent Krueger, who generously responded to a cold email. A full year after that writers’ conference, I felt as prepared as any writer could be.
What followed was more than 100 rejections.
Then, in May 2020, in the middle of a global lockdown, an agent—we’ll call her Kathy—reached out. While sheltering at her summer home, her daughter had read Hurt. She came to her mother in tears and said, “This is the one. You must represent this book.”
I was floored. It was finally happening!
Well… not quite.
Kathy sent Hurt to all the major publishers—Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and the rest. They all passed. But she forwarded their rejection letters and urged me to “focus on the positive.” There was a lot of positive. The emails dripped with praise:
“Hurt is an amazing piece of work. The writer’s voice is so original. The characters jump off the page. The setting is unlike anything we’ve seen. It’s wonderful… magnificent… No, thank you.”
While Kathy tried to keep my spirits up, the effect was the opposite. I kept hearing those agents from the conference: “We want The Hunger Games.” They had been more serious than I realized.
Undaunted, I wrote my second novel—an adaptation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni transplanted to 1970s Los Angeles. Where Hurt was grounded and gritty, this one was big, splashy, and operatic. If they didn’t know how to market Hurt, surely a neon-drenched gothic story with built-in name recognition would click.
I never got the chance to find out. Kathy rejected Don Giovanni. She seemed almost insulted by it. She told me I was free to submit it elsewhere, but if I did, she would drop me as a client. By then, I suspect she had already made up her mind. The emails stopped. That was five years ago. I never heard from her again—no “this isn’t working out,” no goodbye. The agent I had signed a contract with simply ghosted me.
My confidence shattered. I had planned to dive straight into my third novel, Backstabber, but suddenly saw no point. I spent a few months sending both my novels to other agents, but after another wave of rejections, my heart wasn’t in it. There’s a reason they call your query a “submission.” You grovel in carefully crafted letters to strangers, pretending to be awed by them, all while knowing your odds are worse than winning the lottery.
I didn’t write anything for three years. I tried repeatedly to start Backstabber, but I was paralyzed. I no longer knew how to write what they wanted. Backstabber wasn’t The Hunger Games. I was terrified of saying the wrong thing—of offending people who seemed more interested in virtue signaling than in a compelling story. So I gave up.
Then, in 2024, out of sheer boredom, I returned to my Manic Expression universe. I re-ordered the stories chronologically and wrote nine new ones I had been carrying in my head for years. I knew no agent would touch them. If these stories were ever going to reach an audience, it would be because I released them myself.
That realization was incredibly freeing. I was writing for me, not for a gatekeeper. This work was mine. I owned it. I decided its fate.
It took me a full year to edit the new, massive chronological version of Manic Expression. A year of reading my life’s work from beginning to end. A year of sharing the stories with others and hearing how much they moved them. I learned something important in that year: I had created something truly impressive. A vast interconnected collection of short stories, two highly original novels, and many other pieces I could be proud of—even if they never landed me a traditional deal.
And so, free from the pressure of impressing an agent, I turned my full attention to Backstabber and to launching my life’s work on my own terms. But we’ll talk about that next week…
We’re just two weeks away from the first release in this rollout. Thank you for joining me on this journey.
James Daniel Walsh
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