Querying is a queer little purgatory, especially when the very thing being queried is an incredibly personal memoir about your dead daddy.

Lately, my fears and self-doubt have been using the quiet against me. That long silence (which, granted, is standard) starts to feel like a verdict on everything that makes you who you are; your very youness.

It feels like standing in a cramped waiting room with tinny lights bright on your face, with no magazines or books to distract you, and a receptionist who may or may not even be there. It’s enough to drive a person bonkers.

You send the thing out. (That thing being years of your life.) Your grief, your family, your daddy’s lifeblood inked out on the page. The sentences you built out of shame, memory, old text messages, half-lit rooms, and whatever part of the human brain that’s uniquely known for poking a bruise just to make sure it still hurts.

Then nothing happens. Or almost nothing, which is much worse because at least a clean rejection has the decency to shut the door. Silence leaves it open just a crack. Silence leaves you peeking through the peephole like a dirty peeping-Tom with a sickness that can’t be cured, no matter how many times you refresh your Gmail inbox.

I knew that querying would be hard, I knew it. Everyone tells you that.

Publishing is slow. Agents are overwhelmed. Memoir is especially difficult, they say. The market is impossible right now. Platform matters. Follower count matters. Timing matters.

Your hook matters. Your first five pages matter. Your bio most definitely matters—and your dead daddy, apparently, isn’t enough of a credential, which is annoying but not inaccurate.

Even knowing all that, I wasn’t prepared for how quickly silence would become self-diagnosis. That’s the trick of self-doubt: it takes missing information and calls it evidence. Maybe my book is plain bad. Maybe it’s too much (because I’m too much). Maybe my very Voice is wrong.

Maybe the structure is too braided, too tracked, too patterned. Maybe the thing I thought was my strength, the way I follow emotional threads across years and scenes and versions of myself, reads as “overbuilt.” Maybe the crossover from my fantasy writing, the part of me that loves mapping symbols, motifs, arcs, and echoes, looks less like craft and more like evidence of a suspiciously organized woman.

Which feels unfair. I’ve been suspiciously organized long before software could ever claim credit.

The braided-thread thing didn’t come from a machine. It came from years of writing fantasy, where I learned the difference between soft and hard magic systems, how to track spells by their cost, making up prophecies, building family bloodlines, emotional debts, using symbolic objects, and so on.

Fantasy taught me to respect pattern. Memoir taught me that real life has them too, only messier and without the courtesy of a fire drake showing up to clarify the metaphor.

When I started writing about my daddy, I didn’t sit down and think, How can I make grief more complicated? Grief did that all on its own. My job was mostly transcribing my thoughts and feelings, figuring out the best way to get the inside of my brain down on paper in a way that might make sense to someone who isn’t me.

I tracked all these threads because I needed to understand what I’d lived through.

I wanted to see how a child learns to confuse love with vigilance. How silence starts as protection and turns into a survival strategy. How responsibility can be inherited without anyone ever formally handing it over. I wanted to know why I still cared so much. I wanted to know what was truly mine to carry versus what I was just told to carry.

So I made the maps. I didn’t lack feeling (as I sometimes thought), but because I had too much to understand it clean on my own. That structure became a way to hold the book without drowning in it. A trellis for the vine. A deeply normal hobby, if there’s no follow-up. That’s how I handle fear, mostly: I give it a shape, and then I decide whether the shape is truthful.

But now, standing at the edge of publication, I keep worrying the very things that helped me finish the book might make people distrust it.

That fear sharpened this week when I read about an older man who won a short story award and was then accused, by strangers online, of using generative AI. What startled me wasn’t just the accusation. We live in the age of instant suspicion. Everyone has a torch and a pitchfork these days. What startled me was how familiar the argument sounded.

His work was too polished, and he didn’t have the expected professional writing background, mostly. So, people automatically wondered if the work was really his.

That scares me, deeply, because I also don’t have the right kind of background, depending on who’s asking. Is that why I keep getting ghosted by agents?

I didn’t spend the last decade collecting literary publications or awards or institutional gold stars. I spent it working a day job because my rent required it. I wrote when I could. At night, mostly. On weekends. In fragments. In bursts. In the scraps of energy left after my “real job” had taken its pound of flesh and then circled back for another.

I didn’t fail to write because I lacked passion. I failed to write consistently because survival is a time thief. After my daddy died, my life changed in a way that still feels impossible to explain without sounding both lucky and wrecked. For the first time, I had real money. I had space. I had time. Not because something beautiful had happened, but because something irreversibly tragic did.

That’s an ugly inheritance to admit, and it’s one I never expected to get so young. Or really, one I expected to get at all. I got the chance to write because my daddy was gone. So I wrote.

I wrote the book I’d been circling for years. I wrote through childhood, alcoholism, family silence, guilt, anger, longing, and the specific hell of loving someone you couldn’t save but kept trying to anyway. I wrote until the braided threads stopped looking decorative and started looking like proof of consciousness. Not proof I was right. Not proof I was innocent. Just proof I’d stayed awake inside the story long enough to tell it honestly.

And now that I’ve finished it, I’m terrified to release it.

I know where this book came from: little ole Me. From my memory. My questions. My old shame. My dead daddy’s orbit. My obsessive need to understand why love can feel like a job you never applied for and still somehow failed. But can agents actually see that?

That’s the part I wish querying could show. Not just the premise or the pages. Not just the bio line where I try to summarize myself without sounding like a haunted LinkedIn profile.

I want agents to see the years behind the sentences. The ugly apprenticeship of having lived it first. The fact that a person can come late to the public version of writing and still have been writing privately the whole time. The fact that not every polished sentence is artificial. Sometimes it’s just old pain with enough revisions to finally stand upright.

Maybe that’s what scares me most about this new suspicion around AI. People are right to ask questions; asking the right questions matters. It’s how I was able to write this book. Authorship matters. Labor matters. The line between assistance and replacement matters. I’m not pretending otherwise.

But that suspicion has a blast radius, and us writers without the “right” résumé are standing awful close to it.

There’s cruelty in finally finding your Voice, only to worry that it sounds too composed to be believed. As if amateur has to mean messy. (You should see my fanfiction—now, that is some true blue amateur writing.)

I don’t know what agents see when they read my query. I don’t know if the silence means my book isn’t ready, or the pitch is wrong, or the market’s tired, or the pages are missing something I’m still too close to see.

That’s the maddening part. Silence gives you zero data.

I’m trying not to turn the absence of response into a verdict. I keep reminding myself that a quiet inbox doesn’t mean anything concrete. I keep reminding myself that writing the book was the impossible part, even if publishing is doing its best to make me think otherwise.

But I can’t help it: I’m sad. I’m confused.

I’m scared that the thing I made from the truest, bluest parts of my life will be dismissed before it’s understood, or worse, misunderstood because it looks too intentional. Too braided. Too polished. Too much like someone who learned to survive by tracking patterns and then had the audacity to turn that habit into art.

But that’s what I did. I tracked the threads. I followed them backward through the rooms I used to live in. Through old versions of myself. Through the places where love got tangled up with responsibility. Through the silence I once mistook for kindness, for love.

And at the end of all that, I found a book. My book. Now I’m trying to be brave enough to let it be read. That’s the only honest way I know to handle my fear and self-doubt: not by waiting until they leave, but by refusing to let them be the final editors.

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inspo: the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize controversy around Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” // the ghost town that is my inbox // the terror of finally finding my Voice & fearing readers will reject it // fear, self-doubt, authorship // mostly, my utter lack of a professional writing résumé and what that will mean for my memoir

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A/N: I’m late posting again this month, apologies. I’ve been focused on getting the memoir ready for publication. I’ve also been somewhat in denial about the possibility of self-publishing, though it’s starting to look like that may be the path I need to take. I know this post retreads old ground, and not even ground from very long ago. But this has been eating up my focus, so it’s the only thing I could think to write about. Reading that article about the short story winner, then clicking through to the story itself out of curiosity, really disheartened me. I’m no expert, of course, but I couldn’t see any obvious “tells” beyond proper grammar and common writing techniques, some of which I use too. I feel like I’m beating a dead horse, but I also don’t know how to stop worrying about it yet. So, for now, I’m doing the only thing I know how to do: writing my way through the fear and hoping it eventually tells me something useful. Thanks for reading, as always!

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