Tyler Hayes Guest Post–"Rescued From the Trunk"

The week before I got an offer on my debut novel, I made the decision to give up on it.

The Imaginary Corpse was a labor of love: a noir-flavored fantasy cobbled together from childhood memories, my experiences in therapy, and a million literary and ludological ancestors. Writing it felt right in a way that no other manuscript had before. I built this world in a matter of hours, the outline in a matter of days. Rarely did I have to stop and think during the drafting process (editing, of course, was another story). It’s the book of my heart. Writing it required years of working on myself, finding my real voice under all the received wisdom about writing, and trying very, very hard not to be afraid.

I also couldn’t seem to sell it for the longest time.

Out of all the books I’ve written, the queries and pitches for The Imaginary Corpse were by far the best-received, but all that means is that I finally got partial manuscript requests. I also got partial manuscript rejections, and all of them said essentially the same thing as the rejections of my initial query packet, just in more detail: This is good. But I, a literary agent, have no idea where I’d sell it.

To read the full article on locusmag.com, click here