Savannah Brooks (on medical leave)
@SBLitAgent
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Literary agent at @ktliterary (opinions my own) // MFA '19 // I believe books make people better people // COVID long-hauler & disabled✌🏼
Minneapolis, MN
Joined July 2015
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Pinned Tweet
Want to know my perennial (and yet also new! and improved!)
#MSWL
? Check it out here:
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As of today I ~officially~ have long COVID (as recognized by the CDC), so I wanna take a second to explain what’s happening. To set the stage: I’m 30, I’ve been an athlete my entire life, and I used to be extremely healthy, minus some pesky seasonal allergies. My resting heart 1/
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recovered. Getting vaxxed and boosted is critical—but so is masking. Please make safe choices. Anyway, here’s a cute little pic of my new wheelchair life and the best–wheelchair pusher (and occasional personal carrier) I could ask for.
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$20 at a thrift store. So while I appreciate well wishes, I’m not sharing for that. I’m sharing because at one point in my life I literally RAN THE MILE UP THE SWITCHBACK WALL OF THE GRAND CANYON, and now I can’t risk standing in the jetway to board a plane. If my heart can be 7/
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30 percent of cases across the country, they’re seeing patients who have a hyper-functioning central nervous system, which is why long COVID folks are exhausted all the time. It’s also why we feel more pain more intensely—all of those receptors are at 100, always. For whatever 4/
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this affected by COVID, anyone else’s can be. I know it’s been so long, and so many people’s breakthrough COVID cases are mild. But a lot of people’s aren’t. And even if it is mild, a lot of people are seeing issues—cardiac issues being a big one—weeks after they thought they 8/
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Wow! Thank you all so much for your love and support. Unfortunately, since I’m supposed to be cutting out stimulus (screen time included), I can’t respond to everyone. But I’m so moved by y’all 🖤 Here’s hoping everyone struggling with long COVID finds healing.
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rate used to be ~67, and my blood pressure used to be 120/80. I have no underlying conditions. Right now, I can maybe walk a handful of blocks before passing out. I had a really intense week of COVID with all your classic symptoms. Then they got better, and I thought I was 2/
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getting better too. A week later, I tried to go for a walk with my boyfriend, ended up passing out, and he had to carry me home. It took 45 minutes for me to be able to stand without my knees buckling. And now this is my norm. My post-COVID clinic doctor told me that in about 3/
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reason, my CNS ramps up my HR whenever I exert myself at all. My new RHR is between 85–95. (My new blood pressure is a whole other issue.) Walking up a flight of stairs can jack my HR up to 140, easily. I’ll hopefully know more about the why when I see a cardiologist—in a 5/
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month because that’s how far out they’re booked in the Twin Cities right now. I am, truly, okay, besides being very tired all the time and not being able to do anything active. I’ve got a great support network, decent health insurance, and a sweet little wheelchair I found for 6/
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Ah yes! As a few people have pointed out, I didn’t mention my vax status (that’s COVID brain for you). I was vaccinated twice and got the booster in January, so I was a four-month-ish breakthrough case.
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Normalize buying books for your white kids that don’t have white characters. It’s not just books about race that should have POC MCs. Sharing books, unicorn books, princess books, family books, joy books—if your kid sees equal rep there, they’ll expect to see equal rep in life.
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It's official! Today is my first day as an agent with
@ktliterary
! I'm so thrilled to be joining this incredible team and can't wait to send more projects your way, editors 📚
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I got turned into a comic!
All exclamation points aside, this is a conversation I wish more outlets would engage in, so a million thank yous to
@GuardianJessica
for putting together this series. Long COVID alters your life in unimaginable ways. Stay safe out there, folks.
A devastating comic explaining the toll of long Covid - based on
@sblitagent
's lived experience
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If you have to deploy the National Guard before you announce your verdict because you know the verdict will make so many people angry that your city could be torn apart—don't you think you might have come to the wrong verdict?
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Thoughts on why the
@hcpunion
strike is so critical 🧵 When we talk bias in publishing, we need to address the bias of disconnect. As an agent, the majority of the passes I get from editors are along the lines of “just didn’t fully connect / fall in love / see a vision for it.”
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Peek behind the veil at: # of clients an agent has. This depends on a whole swath of things, but here’s a few that probably aren’t obvious (because publishing is about the most opaque business to ever exist): 🧵
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Authors: there's room in your career for every book you want to write. That's the art. The business: deciding what to publish when. If you write a story you love that doesn't make it right away, maybe it needs to be shelved for a bit. That's not failure. It's future opportunity.
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Just a regularly scheduled reminder for all you querying authors that agenting is super subjective and it takes a while to find the right person for your beautiful book baby. Keep at it.
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That feeling when you're reading a full manuscript you requested, and suddenly you're on page 100 and it's three hours later and you have officially become a tertiary character.
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Despite being vaxxed and boosted and having no underlying conditions, I’m on day five of COVID, and it’s still really bad. Like, can barely walk to the bathroom without fainting bad. I’m not in the hospital, no, but believe me when I say that not all vaxxed cases are mild.
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I 🖤 agenting, but here’s the thing: every task is going to set another task behind. Need to work on a contract? Can’t edit a manuscript. Need to read a new submission? Can’t read queries. Need to meet with editors? Can’t write pitch letters. There is no system. It’s just us.
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I read through a whole chunk of queries today, and of the requests for fulls I made, about half came back with something like "I've gotten really good edits lately, can I send in a bit?" 100x YES. I love that. Never be afraid to ask. Always vouch for your best work. I'll wait.
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Putting a project on sub today. Genre? Historical fiction. Year it takes place? 1998 🥴
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I’ll be stopping in and out of
#PBPitch
today! If I 🖤 your tweet, sub at and be sure to include “PBPitch” in the query as well as the tweet/link. I can’t wait to dig into all of these manuscripts!
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It's my turn for a ~vague publishing tweet~
I spent the past five years at
@JDLitAgency
, and while I learned so much and met incredible people, it's time for the ~vague~ next step! I'll be back when my move is officially announced, just know I can't wait to join my new team 🖤
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I closed to queries for a while, but I'm baaaack! A quick
#MSWL
note to celebrate While kidlit will always have my heart, I'm actively trying to build up the adult side of my list—so if you've got thrillers, romcoms, horror, spec and contemp fiction, I wanna see!
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I'll be popping in and out of
#PBPitch
today. If I 🖤 your tweet and you're interested in submitting, visit . I can't wait to read these incredible pitches in full!
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As I read through so many incredible manuscripts that I’m still passing on, I just want to reiterate just how much has to go right for an agent to bite. I need to 1) love it, 2) be confident I can sell it, and 3) not have super similar works already on my list. It’s all odds.
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One of the hardest parts of workin in publishing—be it as writer/editor/agent—is constantly feeling we’re waiting but also not doing enough. It’s hard to remind myself that accomplishing one thing per day is still an accomplishment. So this goes out to me and you. We’re doing it.
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professionals do not identify with marginalized groups, we have an issue. There is no overt -ism in acquiring books you connect with, but as humans we connect with characters who resemble us, and as agents and editors, we decide which books go out into the world. Our bias of
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Honestly just impressed anyone is on top of their queries enough to pay attention to a time stamp. I love y’all, but I’m not getting to your query for like three months. Send it whenever your heart desires.
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Writers, I know you want the holiday miracle of an offer of rep, but my brain is actually just the soggy tea dregs in that mug left on your counter for 3 days that fills you with endless anxiety even though washing it would take 3 seconds, so now is not the time to follow up.
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Closed up pub shop for the holidays today. The number one thing I learned in 2021? My life is more important than my job. I love my authors and my books, but I don’t owe this industry my every moment. My happiness is a priority. And no one can/will make it one but me.
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disconnect affects readers across the world. So how does this relate to the strike? We cannot attract a diverse pool of talent unless we compensate them. This is a rule of business, and publishing is a for-profit business. There is so much burnout, but it’s exponential for
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My takeaway from very recently developing a disability: being disabled is simultaneously trying to prove you still have worth in the workforce and desperately hoping people understand that you can’t always be productive in the workforce.
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And if an agent is established, they may have just hit a query jackpot. So that’s A LOT of information, but hopefully it helps all y’all querying writers who are trying to gauge what client
#s
mean. Above all, your agent should be transparent! If they’re not, that’s 🚩🚩🚩
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As someone who works with both kids and adults in the exercise realm, I think the most important part of body awareness is switching the mindset of “this is what I want my body to look like” to “this is what I want my body to do.” That way, the body you end up with is one 1/?
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Another day of
#pitmad
! If I 🖤 your tweet, head to to see my sub guidelines. Be sure to include it’s a pitmad request somewhere in the query + the link. Cheers to SO MUCH READING 🥂
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@captainsteph
It was supposed to be the reintegration of “beauty” into literary fiction. But I don’t rep literary fiction 🤷🏻♀️ and I think my YA and MG angels are as beautiful as they come, thanks.
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Braving a patio for some celebratory birthday champagne. Cheers to 29.
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And these are all very valid—in fact, they’re all reasons I give when I pass on queries. But when a gatekeeper makes a subjective feeling (“I didn’t connect with it”) an objective guideline (“I don’t sign/acquire books I don’t connect with”), and when the majority of publishing
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entry- and associate-level publishing professionals, and screw the “sacrifice for the love of the art” bullshit—we all know money does, in fact, solve problems, and it’s a great start to publishing’s majorly inexcusable lack of diversity, which drastically affects the largest
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employees who face demographic barriers as well. They don’t stay in the industry—why would they?—and our literary voice suffers for it. Being a human is hard right now; no one is going to volunteer to be a financial martyr, nor should they be expected to. We need to support our
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This is a dark, dark time for America. So let me say: if you write stories about empowerment and advocacy and people fighting for what they believe in and caring about ALL of their neighbors—the world needs your words. We need stories of hope and love and light. Keep writing.
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In the spirit of good news: Just a week until y'all can officially call me Professor Brooks. I'm teaching a course at the University of Minnesota, The Business of Publishing. I haven't taught undergrad since my MFA days, and I'm very excited to be back in the classroom.
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Because we’re all starry-eyed idealists at heart? What a hell of a way to start 2023—making an entire industry better. Right? We can. So let’s.
/🧵
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Please clap for my hair, which is finally long enough for space buns. This day has been nine months in the making.
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What should I major in if I want to be the girl from The Ring when I grow up?
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Some people have assistants, but most of us don’t. I work four jobs. Most people get query responses from me between 5–8 p.m. during the week. I JUST started not working on weekends (minus conferences), and I felt incredibly guilty. Please remember we’re all just trying our best.
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I’ve been pretty absent on Twitter lately, because of things. So just a reminder for anyone who needs to hear it: you are not obligated to be on social media, and you are not obligated to explain why you might not be available. Your offline existence takes precedence.
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Publishing is brutal, and America is toxic, and if you’re looking for a sign that leaving Twitter for a while is okay, here it is. This is the sign.
Take care of your mental health. Your online presence is not the most important part of you.
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media industry in the world. Yes, things feels uncomfortable and uneasy, but I believe both the payoff of holding out and the loss of caving are too critical to be neutral about. We can make this industry better, and the world will be better for it. Isn’t that why we’re here?
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At the risk of sounding overly sentimental: Every day, my authors choose to share part of their history, knowledge, culture, insight, trauma, etc. with me. And honestly? What a gift. Every manuscript of theirs I read makes me a smarter, more empathetic person.
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I have a pretty long COVID recovery in front of me—minimum of three months of a stark lifestyle change—and the main purpose is for me to remove as much stimulus from my life as posssible. So I won’t be hanging out with y’all quite as much, but I’ll be sure to check in ✌🏼
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This isn’t a new take by any means, but as someone who is officially underweight because a shit disease makes me nauseous basically every second I’m awake, we’ve really got to retire the old “Have you lost weight? You look good!” shtick.
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I see a lot of querying writers using their query letters to explain why their project is important. Use that space to get me excited about the content of the book instead. A well written query letter will show why a project is important and make an agent want to read more.
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Ran into one of my previous students at the university library while I was checking out a new haul of reading. She was like, “Man, I can’t believe you get to just read YA for your job. That’s so cool.” And you know what? She’s not wrong.
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*sneaks in*
It's possible we're all taking the rage-inducing helplessness we feel out in the only way that feels acceptable—antagonizing strangers online—when the truth is we're all doing our best (and would do a whole lot better if we had a little more kindness).
*sneaks out*
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To begin to understand the epidemics of police violence in Minneapolis, we have to start with statistics. In 2020, only 8% of the MPD lived in Minneapolis. The news hyper-focuses on Minneapolis as an inherently dangerous place, which means those same suburbanite officers come 1/
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I’ve seen a hundred posts about how terribly the side effects of the second shot are, so here’s a new one: I didn’t have a single side effect. My arm is a tiny bit sore, and that’s it.
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Yesterday, I requested a full manuscript for a query that had been sitting in my maybe pile since June. In case you’re wondering how caught up I am going into the holidays.
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She’s still Very Nervous, but please meet Toast. She loves blankets and my bathrobe and pushing her bed against the toilet. She can look 100 percent goof or 100 percent royal—no in between. She stalks around the apartment at night, meowing at ghosts. She’s perfect.
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Why do I put so much pressure on myself to have everything figured out at 29 when I spent the first 22 years of my life in structured education and partying? Like, what did I expect seven years to provide? The secret to all success?? I’m getting there. That’s enough.
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Querying via email and taking a whole paragraph to explain that, while you know I don’t accept queries via email, you find putting the effort into filling out the QueryManager form to be too much work and think I probably won’t even read your query anyway—that just ain’t it.
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This is funny because this person is a dipshit, but it also so clearly highlights the second largest root of why the policing system is so broken (the first is racism). In our society, policing has been so glorified that we expect police can and will do anything. Eight weeks. . .
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I’m a queer literary agent with the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, and I will always stand for trans people.
I’m a queer literary agent & foreign rights manager at the Laura Dail Literary Agency and I will always stand for trans people.
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Please appreciate my boyfriend putting on an entire photo shoot for my cat.
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A
#MSWL
reminder that I DO rep adult work as well—contemporary fiction, romcoms, thriller/mystery, and horror—and am actively trying to build up that side of my list! 🧵
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#QueryTip
re: comp titles: when I see “none” or “can’t think of any” or “totally original!” it doesn’t intrigue me; it worries me. Worries me that you aren’t well read in your genre or don’t want to put in the work to research. I get what you’re trying to say: (1/)
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It’s one whole degree in Minneapolis, so I’m compensating with an outfit I’ve endearingly titled Somebody’s Grandma.
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Agents may seem all cool and collected on the Call, but trust me, inside we’re all
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#MSWL
Would really love to see a thriller where the person being pursued is just as ruthless as the pursuant. A real "oh you messed with the wrong woman." Has been trained in combat, is a recreational fighter, HOME ALONE style traps—give me all of it. In both YA and adult.
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Bring that July energy to December and buy gift books written by BIPOC authors and featuring BIPOC character from BIPOC-owned bookstores. It’s so easy for gatekeepers to use “there’s no demand” as an excuse to not bring a book on board. They’re wrong. Let’s prove it.
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Ah, that feeling when you jump into a new set of edits on a manuscript and get to fall in love with it all over again.
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Every year at the end of winter I leave myself a little treat in my below-zero-only winter coat, every year I forget I’ve done so, and every year it’s an excellent surprise.
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Also read the acknowledgement and take note of who the agents are and sub to those agents if your book has similar themes/voice/plotting. The agent may not sign you, but it’s an excellent way to show that you know your genre and are serious about publishing as a business.
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As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more attuned to how important it is to be kind for the sake of being kind. Giving a compliment. Recognizing someone’s talent aloud. Letting people know you love and care about them. It’s such a bright spot, giving and receiving kindness.
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Honestly this would be a pretty embarrassing time for an alien invasion. They don’t need to see us at our worst.
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Update: I’ve responded to all queries through January. I have about 500 sitting in my QueryManager queue, so my usual three-month response time is prooobably not happening. For a while. But I promise I will respond to each and every one.
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It’s looking like MN will legalize recreational marijuana, and I want to throw on an anecdote about why this is so important. Medical marijuana is legal in MN, but only for certain conditions. I’ve had long COVID for a year, and one of my most nefarious symptoms is constant 1/
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Sometimes working in publishing is so tough—the weeks of rejections, how slowly everything moves—but then other times you meet with other pub folks and talk about the books you're obsessed with and projects you're excited about, and it's like, "oh yeah, I really love this."
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Twitter can be the worst, yes, but you won’t believe how much I just learned about how domesticated versus wild sheep lose wool, just from a bunch of fascinated people, kind experts, and polite questions. No trying to be the smartest; no tearing people down. Just sheep facts.
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Another tip for querying authors: slamming other agents, editors, writers, readers, and/or the general public for not understanding your work is not making the point you want it to. It also doesn't make me think I'd enjoy working with you. Positivity is your friend.
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In case anyone needs another cautionary tale, I too am in a wheelchair a lot of the time, and I’ve lost almost 20 pounds. My first bout of COVID—a breakthrough case, no preexisting conditions—came and stayed. We’re going on month six.
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@rkwashburn
Before making a judgement call, it’s worth asking if you were the primary target for this. If it’s not new information, instead of assuming I’m being patronizing, consider whether this will be helpful information for someone else.
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One of my students asked for an extension on her final draft because she was working a big event, and I said yeah, of course. The big event was Cheryl Strayed coming to speak, and my student got me a signed copy of her book, just because 😭
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I can’t wait for the world to meet sweet, caring, brave Zia and her mouthwatering lunches. This is the perfect book to show how people can connect, learn, and show love through food, and I’m so thrilled to be a part of its pub journey.
Screaming into my pillow in excitement because THIS CHINESE AMERICAN GIRL WROTE A BOOK AND THIS BOOK WILL BE ON SHELVES IN 2023!💥
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“Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well. Just tell them stories.”
This quote from my favorite book series (His Dark Materials) has stuck with me from the time I was a kid, and it’s a huge reason I do what I do. 1/
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I wish I could stop in for
#DVPit
today, but I'm just too swamped right now with the agency transition 😩 But please feel free to check out , and if it looks like we're a good fit, submit anyway!
It's official! Today is my first day as an agent with
@ktliterary
! I'm so thrilled to be joining this incredible team and can't wait to send more projects your way, editors 📚
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The wildest thing about long COVID is the WTF symptoms. Sometimes my legs just . . . stop working. And doctors are like “yeah man, we have no clue,” because no one knows anything concrete about this disease yet. Just me and my occasionally unresponsive legs doing our best 🤷🏻♀️
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My only contribution to the whole YA ratings thing.
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