Success Story Interview - Jennie A. Fernandez

An Interview with Jennie A. Fernandez (jennieafernandez on QT) upon receiving an offer of representation from agent Mariah Stovall of Trellis Literary Management.

04/08/2026

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

Jennie A. Fernandez:
It's a dual POV work of literary fiction with a romantic spine. It deals with issues of migration, language, and denial. I was inspired to write it on the ten year anniversary of my renal cancer diagnosis. One main character spends the whole book ignoring symptoms, the other puts off difficult conversations. I wanted to write something about cancer that mimicked my own experience, which I don't see reflected often in literature. Wherein a diagnosis, while not a positive, forces a stillness and reshuffle of the character's priorities that they'd otherwise delay or never undertake.

QT: How long have you been writing?

Jennie A. Fernandez:
I've been journaling on and off since I was a little girl, but I'd never written fiction before starting this novel, outside of a short story I wrote over a decade ago.

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

Jennie A. Fernandez:
I started working on it in November of 2025. I finished the "fever draft" as I called the rough draft, December 18. From then forward it was a matter of revising, revising, revising. A lot of things have changed from that first draft. The tense wasn't working, the male POV was completely reconfigured, I cooled the tone, etc. I didn't feel it was ready to start querying until late February.

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

Jennie A. Fernandez:
There were a few moments I really felt like it was a bad book. Like I was writing something awful. But that's what started to excite me about revision. I email myself drafts periodically so I can save them. When I read the draft I sent myself December 18, it's kind of horrific--but the seeds of what I have now are there. And it excites me to know that now it will get even BETTER because I'll have Mariah's help, and then (hopefully) eventually an editor. So I would say that revisions themselves--problem solving--kept me on course.

QT: Is this your first book?

Jennie A. Fernandez:
Yes, I've never written before.

QT: Do you have any formal writing training?

Jennie A. Fernandez:
No.

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

Jennie A. Fernandez:
My day job is in tech, so I definitely see drafts the same way others view software. Which means I consider there to be 4 main drafts of this novel, but within those drafts there are sub-drafts (2.5, 2.75, etc). I basically never, ever stopped revising. Any time I re-read it I would make a small change or line edit, but I made four major changes, so I consider there to be four drafts.
Draft 1-The completed draft, with a beginning, middle and end that I wasn't happy with.
Draft 2-I changed a lot of the end.
Draft 3-Changed the tenses from third person present to past
Draft 4-Cooled tone, added humor, changed more of the end, changed labeling of chronology. I really feel like this is when the book became the book. In drafts 1-3, I was still sort of learning how to write fiction and also finding my voice. My voice is quite wry/funny, it turns out. The early drafts of this book didn't feel right. This one, while still not where it needs to be, feels like my voice.
I would say I'm currently in draft 4.75. Once I get my agent's notes back and start to make those changes, I'll finally be working in draft 5.

QT: Did you have beta readers for your book?

Jennie A. Fernandez:
Yes, I hired a beta reader to help bridge Draft 3 to Draft 4. She really helped me understand where the points of confusion were (this is a chronologically ambitious novel).

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

Jennie A. Fernandez:
What I've learned about myself is that I am what is called a "plantser." In both my first novel, and the one I'm working on right now, I have an outline or structure in my head. For my first novel, I started with the idea of thirteen dates. These characters would get to know each other over these thirteen dates, and that was the structure. I didn't write the structure down at first, I just kept it in my head and started writing. As I wrote, I did start jotting things down. Chronology, making sure I was hitting certain beats with my male POV, etc. But any organizing/outlining came second, not first. For my current novel, it's turned out to be quite similar. I think eventually I'll start to approach with more of a plan, but for these two novels it just hasn't worked out that way.

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

Jennie A. Fernandez:
I sent my first query early in February. However, the early queries I sent were "feet wet" queries, if that makes sense. I chose a very small group of agents that were medium fits rather than strong fits. I wanted to get used to rejection and generally familiarize myself with the process. I would actually consider the query I sent to Mariah to be my first "true" query--I really, really wanted to work with her or someone like her. She was in my list of top ten "dream agents." I sent that query on February 27 and she offered me representation a month later.

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

Jennie A. Fernandez:
I sent 23 queries for this book. Most of them were sent in mid to late March.

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

Jennie A. Fernandez:
The main thing I looked at is their manuscript wish lists and also their favorites. The sweet spot of this book is very specific--the agents have to be comfortable with a book where romance is prominent but doesn't fall into the genre of romance (though I do love that genre!). The agents have to be comfortable with books that have two balanced POVs, one of which is male. Migration, language, cancer and other heady topics are handled but there's also a lot of humor. It's not a sad or serious book per se, I would say it's a mix of humor and melancholy. So the main thing I looked for is agents who liked books by writers that play in the same sandbox: Lily King, Gabrielle Zevin, Sally Rooney, Elif Batuman, David Nicholls.

QT: Did you tailor each query to the specific agent, and if so, how?

Jennie A. Fernandez:
Yes, I tried to include a sentence to let them know that I'd researched them and chosen them for a very specific reason. For example, I told Mariah that I thought she might be interested in my book because she mentioned being interested in the intersection between art and STEM. The two characters are an erstwhile art historian and a computer engineer.

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

Jennie A. Fernandez:
The three main things I really helped make this a very short and relatively painless process for me:
1) Have your query reviewed by agents. Not just other writers and editors but agents who have no skin in the game with your book. I had five separate agents review my query and iterated on it after each review. One thing I learned is that agents love a query they can sink their teeth into. I used to think your query had to be concise--and it does, it has to pack a punch--but the first iteration of my query letter was only 250 words and the final one was almost 500. Every agent I showed each iteration to kept saying "I need more."
2) The title of your novel is really important. Think about your title--run it by beta readers. Run it by everyone. Every single agent I showed my query to for review said they loved the title. Eventually I ended up including what the title means as the very first sentence of the query because two agents specifically said I should expand on it. An eye catching title coupled with the right word count and positioning will grab an agent's attention when they're scrolling.
3) Research the agents you're going to query. Not just their MSWL but what books they've loved and read a lot. What's the agent's vibe? Do they seem like they'd like your book? Most of the queries I sent out just went unresponded, I only got three form rejections, but the three manuscript requests I DID receive all came from the agent most likely to ask for it, if that makes sense. Like if there were a lineup of agents, I would be able to tell you exactly who I'd think was most likely to request and who was more of a longshot. I reached out to the longshots as well, I wanted to reach out to a diverse group, but I ended up predicting exactly who would be the most interested.

Query Letter:

In Icelandic, window weather describes a day that looks mild from indoors but turns harsh the moment you step outside. WINDOW WEATHER is a dual-POV debut novel of upmarket literary fiction, complete at 71,000 words. In the vein of The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş and Rental House by Weike Wang — novels about the space between what people feel and what they can bring themselves to say — it follows two twenty-nine-year-olds, a Cuban-American and an Icelandic expat, who fall in love in 2014 San Francisco.
Mille survives by instinct and humor — and a near-photographic memory she uses mostly to catalogue other people's secrets while carefully withholding her own. She immigrated from Cuba as a child, lost her father young, and has been improvising ever since. She treats most destabilizing truths as problems she can solve later. The latest entry: a pain in her left side she has named The Spear, and promised herself to address if it occurs just one more time.

Magnus is an Icelandic engineer who plans everything, approaches English like a technical problem, and reaches for words the way other people reach for tools: carefully, one at a time. He arrives in San Francisco having already lost the woman he loved by waiting for the perfect moment to speak until there were no moments left.

What begins as flirtation — an argument about cocktails, a shared earbud on a stone wall overlooking the ocean — deepens into something built on word games and conversations that stretch past midnight. The novel alternates perspectives and timelines, the present-tense summer threading through backstory chapters showing how each of them arrived at this particular kind of stuck.

When Magnus tells her he loves her, Mille does what she always does: she disappears before he can. When she is diagnosed with renal cancer — treatable, but requiring the removal of a kidney — surgery and stillness force what she's been postponing: decisions about her body, her future, and the man she pushed away. Magnus, meanwhile, must choose between returning to Europe and the pull of his old habits, or showing up fully — for the first time — in the present.

On the eve of her operation, Mille reconstructs Magnus's phone number from memory — every digit retrieved slowly and exactly — and calls him. When they meet, they play their old game: stories told in languages the other can't understand, guessing at the shape of what they heard. Magnus speaks first. In imperfect English, without a plan.

I am a Cuban-American tech worker and former San Francisco resident. WINDOW WEATHER grew out of my interest in language, migration, and the specific loneliness of people fluent in every language except the one that would actually help them.