Success Story Interview - Wallis Pink

An Interview with Wallis Pink (wallis_pink on QT) upon receiving an offer of representation from agent Aram Fox of Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents.

02/27/2024

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

Wallis Pink:
The book, MY SOMETIME DAUGHTER, is historical fiction set in 1947 in the Rocky Mountain Foothills of Southern Alberta. The story, I feel, chose me. My family has its roots in that area. Around the time my sister and I were in college, we were riding in the backseat, behind our parents, when we drove down a secondary road past an old, disused ranch. My parents told us it was called the Tiki Ranch; it had raised and sold horses and only women lived on it. Neither of our parents had never been there or known anyone who had lived there, but they knew someone, a friend of my father, who had gone out there one night. They shared that story and a couple of others (just rumours, really) that they had heard in their youth. With the place in our rearview mirror my sister or I, I don't recall which, turned to the other and said, "That sounds like a novel." The memory of that drive in the Foothill countryside, down the years, never left me. Neither did the story.

QT: How long have you been writing?

Wallis Pink:
For a good while. I have an academic background and did a lot of writing while on that path, but my creative writing life is relatively brief, beginning in about 2016, when I decided to start writing screenplays. Writing screenplays on spec is - many others who've tried it might back me on this - a game rigged to ensure that the player loses every time. It's good training, though, in many respects, for writing a novel. I had four feature-length scripts in the drawer when I realized I would almost certainly never sell one, and, more to the point, didn't care all that much if I did. So I turned my hand to writing a novel. Prior to that, I had never written creative prose.

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

Wallis Pink:
It started as a pandemic project. It took about four years.

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

Wallis Pink:
Not really. Yes, writing a novel is hard work, but plenty of people - Navy Seal trainees, cancer survivors, single mothers - do much harder things without giving up. I would think about people like that and just get on with it.

QT: Is this your first book?

Wallis Pink:
It's my first novel, but not my first book. I published an academic monograph with the University of Toronto Press.

QT: Do you have any formal writing training?

Wallis Pink:
No.

QT: Do you follow a writing routine or schedule?

Wallis Pink:
While writing the novel, I liked to be at my desk by 5:00AM, if not earlier (this schedule allows time to work out at 6:15 before getting ready for my day job, which thankfully was, and remains, remote). Then I got in as much writing as I could between quitting time and going to bed. Friday night was a night off, at my wife's (entirely justified) insistence. In project mode I prefer to write every day.

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

Wallis Pink:
I overhauled it completely about half way through, once I found my voice and what felt like the right way "in" to the story, Then I gave it as thorough a revision on my own as I could, with special attention to cutting, gave it to my wife to read, and cut and revised it again, making some significant changes, before sending it to my editor. I revised it again after she read and critiqued it, shedding another 17,000 words or so. Now I'll rework it again in consultation with my agent, though the editorial lifting at this stage, prior to submitting to prospective publishers, appears to be pretty light. I lost count of how many times that was.

QT: Did you have beta readers for your book?

Wallis Pink:
My wife and my editor. Hiring a good editor was the smartest thing I did during the whole process. Check that - a gifted editor. Her name is Leslie Wells. She is incredibly talented, thorough, and perceptive, and an absolute joy to work with.

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

Wallis Pink:
A little of both. A basic outline helped me hit my points on time and round out my arcs, and I refined it once I found a five-act structure I was happy with, but I really enjoy laying all that aside for stretches and getting into a groove and just seeing where it goes. Sometimes it went to some unexpected and satisfying places.

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

Wallis Pink:
Academic publishing is different and doesn't involve agents, so this is my first experience with querying. I spent much less time in the active phase of it than I was expecting. The time elapsed from sending out my first batch of letters to receiving an offer of representation was a little less than three weeks.

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

Wallis Pink:
Five. I followed Jane Friedman's advice - in this, as in all things - and worked up an initial list of 25 agents to query. I emailed a first batch of five letters. The enthusiastic response I received two days later led quickly to the offer representation, so that was the end of querying.

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

Wallis Pink:
I queried only agents who were looking for, and genuinely interested in, the kind of novel I had written. It's the only thing a writer needs to consider with respect to selection, I think, but very important. Querying scattershot, or to any agent not specializing in the genre you have chosen, is a waste of your time and theirs.

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

Wallis Pink:
No. I just made absolutely sure to spell their name correctly and verify their preferred salutation, if any, in their QueryTracker profile.

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

Wallis Pink:
Read Jane Friedman's blog. Do exactly as she says.

Query Letter:

Dear ___:

What if a lesbian owned a horse ranch on the Canadian prairie in 1947? Add one part pride, one part stubbornness, and a penchant for misreading human character, and you have a woman named Mother, a place called the Tiki Ranch, and a catastrophic error of judgement that threatens to pull down a lifetime’s work and destroy a family.

Dying of cancer, Mother relinquishes the Tiki Ranch to her favorite hands—Rory Miner, a mean-tempered alcoholic, and Anne (Gal) Galloway, who strives for a life more like the moneyed one she grew up in. Enter Rory’s lover, Cookie, a local knockabout who arrives on the scene with minimal ranching skills and a wild heart that won’t be reined in. Mother soon regrets having trusted Rory and Gal, thanks to whose mismanagement the Tiki starts running quickly downhill. Cookie tries to be as indifferent to Mother’s plight as the reckless new overseers she’s fallen in with, but gradually comes to love and look out for the dying woman suffering the horrendous consequences of her foolishly bestowed legacy.

Rory and Gal, however, look out for no one’s interests but their own. When Cookie gets wind of their plan to sell the ranch out from under the Tiki family, her bond with Mother is stretched to the breaking point as the rapidly escalating price of remaining true and loyal becomes her own life. An old secret eventually comes to light, and Cookie discovers that Mother has a past that she couldn’t have imagined—and so does she.

MY SOMETIME DAUGHTER (86,690 words) retells King Lear by grounding it in the Rocky Mountain Foothills of post-World War II southern Alberta. It will appeal to readers of queer historical fiction in the style of Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests, with its similarly dark psychological undercurrents, and also to readers who enjoy novelized adaptations of classic myths and stories, such as the Hogarth Shakespeare series.

MY SOMETIME DAUGHTER is my first novel. The bare outline of the story is true. The Tiki Ranch, a horse ranch run entirely by women, once existed near where my family has its roots. I was inspired to flesh out the story because certain people I asked about it clearly knew more than they were letting on. The unspoken subtext—that queer lives were being lived on that ranch, in that religious, deeply conservative area—was considered shameful. Those lives deserve their story to be told not only unashamedly but proudly. That is why I wrote this book.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,