06/21/2015
Kristen Bonardi Rapp (tipper_snark on QT) has signed with agent Kevan Lyon of Marsal Lyon Literary Agency, LLC.
After getting that R&R (and crying about it for like, 24 hours straight), I read an interview the Humans of New York blog did with President Obama. In it, he discusses the time he lost a Congressional race and he says the thing that got him through was to keep thinking about the work more than yourself. He says, "if you can keep it about the work, you’ll always have a path." Reading that really changed the way I looked at what I was doing, After that, when I would get discouraged, I'd start telling myself, just keep it about the work.
Sure thing! Here's the query I sent specifically to Kevan Lyon:
Dear Ms. Lyon,
Because you represent historical women's fiction like AFTER THE WAR IS OVER by Jennifer Robson, I hope you will be interested in representing my novel. THIS IS ALWAYS is set in the late 1950s and is complete at about 100,000 words. Told from the perspectives of the three main characters, the novel is a love story, as well as a love letter to New York.
Here’s a brief synopsis:
New York City, 1958.
Alice Woodward is young, beautiful, and about to graduate from Columbia University. She's married to a handsome, confident man who loves her, and she lives in the greatest city in the world. But, for reasons she can't understand, she feels lost, unsure what to do with her life.
Father Walter Donovan is still adjusting to his new life in the city. More than anything, the priest wants to help people, but like Alice, he feels adrift, like something's missing. When he and Alice meet, they find themselves confronting feelings, and longings that could tear their both lives apart. At the same time, Alice's husband, Jim, struggles with his own secret desires—ones that he won't even admit to himself.
THIS IS ALWAYS takes them from the campus of Columbia to the bohemian Greenwich Village, from the sanctity of St. Patrick's Cathedral to the seedy underbelly of Times Square. It's a story of making a home in the world, of desperation and despair, of passion and betrayal, of heartbreaking loss and, finally, love.
As for me, I live in Brooklyn with my husband and daughter. I’m a freelance writer whose non-fiction work has appeared in the New York Press and the Manhattan Times.
Thanks so much for your time!