Success Story Interview - Ab Saif

An Interview with Ab Saif (AbSaif on QT) upon receiving an offer of representation from agent Melanie Figueroa of Root Literary.

10/28/2025

QT: Can you tell us a little bit about the book for which you've found representation? What inspired you to write it?

Ab Saif:
MARA is ‘weird lit’ sci-fi horror about a grieving archeologist forced to join an expedition to study the sudden appearance of a massive island in the Atlantic Ocean, dubbed MARA, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge Anomaly—only to find the island itself is ancient, sentient, and grieving too. I’ve been on a sentient super organism kick lately (think Krakoa from the Johnathan Hickman’s recent X-Men run, or the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park), and also really into making maps and alt-history what-ifs. MARA started out as a map-making one-off graphic around the idea "what if Atlantis suddenly resurfaced?”— and very quickly spiralled into a cosmic horror story about a sentient island, depression clashing with duty and how grief manifests, corrodes, and corrupts both the human and the unfathomably cosmic.

QT: How long have you been writing?

Ab Saif:
I started writing when I was 12, on Harry Potter roleplaying message boards (if you know, you know) and kept at it until I was 19. My 20s were a blackhole for writing. I started again in my early 30s, trying to crack writing novel-level prose.

QT: How long have you been working on this book?

Ab Saif:
The idea came in December last year, and I was outlining, plotting and planning for most of December and January. I wrote my first page in April. Wrote the last page in August. September was for edits and passes. And in October, six months to the day of first opening the Google Doc, I got my agent offer.

QT: Was there ever a time you felt like giving up, and what helped you to stay on course?

Ab Saif:
Nope. Honestly it’s all gone by so fast there wasn’t any time for cold feet. Showing up every day made the difference. I told myself I only needed to hit 800 words a day, and then I’d push for “just another 200” to hit that satisfying 1000-word mark. It helped TREMENDOUSLY that I’m at a point in my life where there’s not much going on besides my very hands-off day job, so it was easy to devote mornings and evenings to writing.

QT: Is this your first book?

Ab Saif:
It is!

QT: Do you have any formal writing training?

Ab Saif:
I do not. I was skilled by the internet and the kind advice and fellowship of message board nerds in the 2000s.

QT: Do you follow a writing routine or schedule?

Ab Saif:
800 words a day (to get me on the keyboard, and then I push it to 1000), every day if I could. If I skip a day, I try and make up for it by doing 1600 words the next time I write. Sometime’s I’ll break it up to 400 words in the morning, and 400 in the evening, which makes the writing task seem much less daunting if I’m being tempted by procrastination.

QT: How many times did you re-write/edit your book?

Ab Saif:
I planned out every major scene and chapter, so not very much really. One chapter got removed and reworked halfway through writing it, but that’s about it. I did two rounds of line edits in September.

QT: Did you have beta readers for your book?

Ab Saif:
Not really. I had my best friend (fan of the genres) read the first 30ish pages, and he gave encouraging feedback, but that was about it.

QT: Did you outline your book, or do you write from the hip?

Ab Saif:
I outlined everything. 38 pages worth of scribbles on my iPad Mini!

QT: How long have you been querying for this book? Other books?

Ab Saif:
Just a little over 3 weeks. This is my first time in the querying trenches.

QT: About how many query letters did you send out for this book?

Ab Saif:
66 overall. I’m UK based, and I had a tally of 22 UK agents and 44 US agents. The US market seemed a lot more receptive to my genres, and a lot speedier in replying.

QT: On what criteria did you select the agents you queried?

Ab Saif:
Genre interest, weird lit lean, and if they had a personable presence on their manuscript wishlist, agency profile or social media. I wanted someone that was ideally personable, collaborative and editorial, because I am very green to this and generally an anxious person and wanted the guidance and assurance that would come with a collaborative industry pro.

QT: What advice would you give other writers seeking agents?

Ab Saif:
Don’t sleep on pitch events. For all my hours of pouring over agency websites and manuscript wishlists, searching by genres and refining my query letter, I ended up getting representation thanks (in part) to a 300-character pitch I tossed on Bluesky with the expectation it would get lost in the void. It got 10 agents interested, and eventually led to the offer!

Query Letter:

Dear Melanie,
Thank you for your interest through #DVPit on BlueSky!

I'm writing to seek representation for my 76,000-word work of upmarket near future sci-fi horror, MARA. It will appeal to readers of Ray Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea, Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series, and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay.

Giti Sharma just wants to be left alone. Drafted onto a NATO expedition to a mysterious island that appeared in the Atlantic with reports of impossible ruins, the archaeologist arrives at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge Anomaly (MARA) unwilling, grieving her husband's suicide, and convinced she has nothing to offer.

Discovery turns to disaster as the island's strange ecosystem unravels the team one by one. Giti pushes on—realising that survival doesn't care if you're depressed. Even at rock bottom, she keeps moving, if only for a way to crawl back to her flat in Camberwell and resume drowning in grief. That is, until the island leaves her with a choice she cannot run from.

MARA, it transpires, is no island but a sentient superorganism, stolen from Earth eons ago, uplifted with parasitic spores, and abandoned in torment. The insects that crawled on her surface became her salvation: steered into a civilisation advanced enough to tear open a wormhole back to Earth, then exterminated as pests. Returning home to yet more pests, she turns her trauma, and her spores, toward humanity. To MARA, humans are just another infestation to erase. To Giti, an island devoured by grief is a mirror, and the jolt she needs to pull herself together and save humanity.

MARA is a novel about trauma both human and cosmic, depression colliding with duty, and a woman forced to face her grief against a god driven mad by theirs.

Yours,

Ab Saif