Breaking In: March/April 2025

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Guatemalan Rhapsody

(Literary fiction/short stories, March, Ecco Press)

“Guatemalan Rhapsody tells the stories of saints and sinners, holy men and vagabonds, and holds the country of Guatemala up to the light so that it may shine to the point of synesthesia—a place so real you can taste and hear the music.”

Writes from: Most of the collection was written in Pittsburgh, where I did my MFA. Currently writing from North Carolina, where I am teaching a 1/1 as the 2024-2025 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill, as well as applying for tenure track positions. I have no idea where I will be writing from next year.

Pre-Rhapsody: Leading up to this, I was writing stories that appeared in Joyland, Story, Cleaver, Kweli, The Porter House Review, The Pinch, and other literary journals, with the “biggest” publication being a non-fiction piece in The Kenyon Review Online. I also wrote a novel for my MFA thesis, which I shopped around a bit. As far as first attempts go, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t publishable either, so it was left to rot in the sun and is now being picked apart by my fingers—the talons of a vulture—searching for scraps and remains of meat to be used in my current project.

Time frame: It took me five years to write this book. I am a very slow writer and I edit as I go; I write one sentence, then I rewrite it, then I do it again, and one final time for good measure (maybe even a few more, because why not?). Afterward, I move on to the next sentence and do the same thing, but I also have to make sure the rhythm of the sentence that came before works with the new one. It’s tedious, but I’d like to think my editors appreciate it.

Enter the agent: I found my agent, Eric Simonoff—heavyweight champion of the publishing world (at least I think so; quote me!)—using the 100^th-anniversary edition of the Writer’s Market. It lists agents and agencies and the type of work each is looking for. It also teaches you how to write a good query letter.

Biggest surprise: My biggest surprise was finding out just how long it takes for a book to go from being sold to a publishing house to being sold on bookshelves. Eric Simonoff sold Guatemalan Rhapsody to Sarah Birmingham and Gabriella Doob at Ecco in the Spring of 2023, and it’s being published in the Spring of 2025. Talk about anticipation. I think another thing that surprised me was how many people it takes to make a book happen. It’s like raising a child—it takes a village.

What I did right: I think the one thing I did right was failing and learning how to fail better. I know that sounds weird, but I wrote failed stories, failed novels, failed poems, failed articles, even failed grocery lists. The thing is, with each of those failures, I learned something new—pieces of craft, like, how to write a believable character, what good setting can do, how to manipulate points of view, etc. But, the thing I failed into the best was finding my voice. I think that if I hadn’t failed time after time, I would have never found that unteachable thing—my voice. Each time I wrote something, I got closer and closer to finding it—this ephemeral thing all writers talk about. With each word, sentence, paragraph, I was training my ear to listen for that cadence and rhythm that makes writers stand out to those in the industry and readers alike.

What I would have done differently: I have been fortunate enough to be accepted or invited to writing conferences, including The Tin House Summer Workshop, where I was a scholar, the Colgate Writers Conference, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and multiple AWPs. How many invaluable and famous contacts did I make along the way, you ask? Zero. Up until a year ago, I suffered from debilitating anxiety that I quelled with imbibements. So, I was either sober and too anxious or too inebriated to interact and make meaningful connections with anyone. I met people like Melissa Febos, Tim O’Brien, Omar El Akkad, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, to name a few, who have no idea who I am because I said or slurred “Hello,” and ran away. So, if I could do it all again, I would apologize to them from here and introduce myself anew.

Platform: The only platform I’ve had for a while now is Instagram, with, like, 60 followers. But, as I published, I would find people in the same issue or on the masthead of previous issues of that journal and add them. A lot of them added me back. Of course, I also followed big names in the publishing and movie industry, but they typically don’t accept your friend request or reciprocate (still waiting for that follow-back, Oscar Isaac—fellow Guatemalan! Just kidding. He doesn’t have an IG. I checked). I also built a website the year before I graduated from my MFA after seeing that others in my cohort had them. I didn’t blog or anything, but it was there, and I’m glad I did it when I did because, well, once you make a website and show your friends, you’d better fake it ‘til you make it or they’ll disown you.

Advice for writers: Everyone says read and write a lot, which is true; even I said it under the “things you [did] right” section of this interview. If I could expand on that, I would say read craft books; just like actors, painters, musicians, and any other artist needs to understand method acting, color theory, music theory, and other fundamentals, so do we as writers need to understand the building blocks of scenes, pacing, and, well, writing. I would also encourage people to read things they don’t like. I know: why? Well, sometimes you learn even more valuable lessons from things you don’t like. Why? Because you pick apart what’s “wrong” or “not working” for you as a reader. From that, you learn what you would do differently or how you would change things; in essence, you’re learning your craft by other’s “mistakes.” For instance, after I read Moby Dick, I learned I would never write about whales. I also learned how to bore my readers to death—write 300 pages about whale blubber, ambergris, and the whaling industry. Thank you, Melville!

Next up: I am currently working on my first novel. Here’s the working tagline: When the fictional town of Huecotenango, Guatemala, a location you don’t end up in by choice, is threatened by two brothers with a new vision for the place the residents reluctantly call home, they divide into two groups: those who want to take the chance on something that might improve their lives and those who know that it’s better to have a little than it is to have nothing. Along with this, I really want to work on a book that takes place in Central America; by which I mean a work ranging from Panama to Guatemala. I read The Motorcycle Diaries in high school and again not long ago, and I still feel the pull to do something—a fictionalized version—along the lines of what Che Guevera did for South America in Central America. I still don’t know what shape this would take—a classic or episodic novel; short or connected short stories; diary entries or a non-fictional account, but I do hope that with some funding or advance, I’ll be able to make something like this happen.

Website: JaredLemus.com

Make Believe: Poems for Hoping Again

(Poetry, March, Convergent Books) 

"The poems in Make Believe are an invitation to return to childlike joy, wielding nostalgia and memory as lenses to explore reconnection to our bodies, our past, our desires, and our wonder."

Writes from: Houston! When I’m writing casually, I write at home. But I wrote a lot of Make Believe at this coffee shop in Houston, Agora. It’s open until 2 A.M., which is nice when you’re on a deadline. I also travel often and love to write on planes and at airports. I do my best thinking in the most inopportune moments—like at the airport gate when my laptop has 3 percent battery, and my flight is boarding.

Pre-Believe: I wrote very few poems and drafted lots of contracts. I was a corporate attorney who did not consider myself a creative person, let alone a writer. I’ve always loved writing, but lost that part of myself in my twenties in a fog of burnout. It’s been very tender to watch creativity take root in my life again. I feel like a little kid again.

Time frame: It felt like 30 years, but also 30 seconds. The deal for Make Believe closed in September 2023 and the manuscript has been (mostly) finished since October 2024. Make Believe was announced the day after I left my job as an attorney. I wrote the proposal during the summer of 2023 while still practicing law full-time. All summer, I drafted contracts by day and frantically wrote poems late into the night.

Enter the agent: My friend Brianna Pastor introduced me to my wonderful agent Steven Harris. At that time, I was starting to hear from publishers who had seen my social media. I did not know up from down in the publishing world. I reached out to Brianna—who is an incredible poet and had just announced the forthcoming publication of an expanded edition of her poetry collection Good Grief with HarperOne—and she helped me find my way. I’m forever grateful.

Biggest surprise: I did not realize how deeply a book changes during the editing process. I’m so glad it did. Without my editor, Leita Williams, Make Believe would be a shell of itself.

What I did right: Putting myself out there. It can feel so embarrassing to shout into the void of the Internet. Especially before anyone is talking back. My biggest fear was people from work finding my social media. But embarrassment is par for the course of changing your life. And people will surprise you! On the last day of my job as an attorney, my boss gave me a crystal butterfly. The subtext was, Go spread your wings. I wept.

What I would have done differently: I waited too long to ask for help. When I first started hearing from publishers, I did not have an agent and knew nothing about publishing. I was so far out of my depth. I knew almost no writers at that time, and none well. I wanted advice. I wanted writer friends. But I was afraid that if I reached out to the few writers I did vaguely know, they would be annoyed by me or think I just wanted to extract information from them. As a rule, people are far more generous than anxiety tells you they are.

Platform: Make Believe would not exist without my social media community. In 2022, I started sharing on TikTok. I have been a yoga practitioner for years and a registered yoga teacher since 2018. So, at first, I mostly used social media to share about my yoga practice. At some point, I bought a wireless microphone, intending to use it to teach online yoga classes. Instead, I used it to talk. I talked about love, hope, friendship, childhood, purpose—whatever was on my mind. People watching those posts started calling them poetry long before I did. Most of the poems in Make Believe are completely new, but it also has expanded versions of previously shared community favorites.

Advice for writers: Unfortunately, I think consistency is huge. There’s no secret sauce. I love how Mary Oliver describes the creative spark as a cautious lover that waits to see if you will prove your devotion to it by showing up when you say you will. If you do, it starts to show up frequently too. If you don’t, it rarely appears either. In A Poetry Handbook, she says, “Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime.” As someone who kept her creativity locked up in a dusty corner of her soul for a decade, that remark gave me chills.

Next up: I am currently working up the courage to admit to myself that I want to write another book.

Instagram: @thedailyvictorian

The Serpent Called Mercy

(Fantasy, March, Daw Books)

“A sentimental book thief and a religious ex-brawler join an illegal monster-fighting arena for some fast coin to pay off debt but quickly discover the most dangerous beasts are outside the ring as they get embroiled in a game of politics orchestrated by a cunning match-master.”

Writes from: Malaysia.

Pre-Mercy: I’ve been writing for fun since I was a kid, drafting some deeply embarrassing things that will never see the light of day. I also started building a paracosm back then, a fictional world for my stories to be set in. I’d toy with various plotlines set in it, exploring different characters and ideas. The Serpent Called Mercy was the first story in this world that I actually finished though.

Time frame: I started my first draft all the way back in 2015—a decade ago (always terrifying realising how much time has flown!). I drafted it fairly quickly, whacking out the words in about two months—but even I could tell they were pretty rubbish words. So over the years, I rewrote it countless times, fleshing out different aspects of the book, refining my prose, tightening my character arcs, homing in on what exactly was the story I wanted to tell and the themes I wanted to explore.

Enter the agent: I did attempt querying the traditional way a few times over the years, usually firing off a few queries and getting a couple of full requests that would ultimately end in an “I enjoyed this but I don’t think I’m the right agent for this” rejection. I’d then hit the pause button on querying to try to figure out what exactly was the X factor I was missing, launching yet another rewrite of the book to experiment with another angle.

Then in 2021, the Pitch Wars mentorship program opened for applications, and I decided to toss my hat into the ring. The brilliant Saara El-Arifi, author of The Ending Fire Trilogy, plucked me out of her slush pile and chose me as her mentee, helping me polish my book up in time for the agent showcase at the end of the program. Thankfully, I did wind up signing with an agent through the showcase! Alas, just a few months later, she wound up leaving the agenting world before we could even begin actually working on the manuscript together, but I then moved over to another agent, who’s been brilliant to work with since.

Biggest surprise: How non-linear the journey can be. From the outside, it always seemed fairly straightforward: write a book, get an agent, get a book deal, book gets published, rinse and repeat. But now that I’m going through my first bout of publishing, there’ve been a lot more bumps in the road than I expected: getting an agent, then losing the agent, getting a book deal, then losing the editor who offered the book deal—various unexpected hiccups and setbacks along the way. But all those lows are balanced out by the highs—getting the news from my second agent that my book was going to auction, getting my first glowing review from Publishers Weekly, getting my first DM from a reader saying my book had restored her love for fantasy novels, etc. The rollercoaster ride never ends!

Another surprise? How chaotic my email inbox would become, with emails from my agent, editors, publicists, interviewers, and more flying in willy-nilly, new deadlines appearing left, right, and centre. Still struggling to stay on top of it and not let things slip through!

What I did right: Letting myself take breaks whenever I needed it, but never fully giving up on my book. Throughout the years, I hit several periods of frustration and resignation as I racked up rejection after rejection, thinking that traditional publication might not be in the cards for me. But whenever I came close to burnout, I’d put my book aside, and either swap to another project or just take a break from writing entirely. I think that was integral for me to maintain the motivation to keep trying. Because eventually, once I was rested and my creative well had been refilled, I’d be drawn back to The Serpent Called Mercy, ready to tackle it from another angle and see if I could crack the code this time. So to anyone who’s getting tired of their book and starting to lose hope in it: chill for a moment, put your book aside, and do whatever makes you happy. When the time's right, you'll come back to your book

What I would have done differently: I don't regret anything, to be honest. I imagine everything I've done so far—the good, the bad, and the ugly—has led me to this point. Even my mistakes were necessary lessons for me to learn from via first-hand experience. If I really had to give an answer, then I suppose I'll say I would've prioritised protecting my joy throughout the years, rather than letting it be occasionally extinguished by anxiety or frustration at the publishing process. But hey, I've always managed to find my way back to joy, so no (permanent) harm done!

Platform: Nada. When I got my book deal, all I had was my Twitter account with barely 100 followers (90 percent friends made through Pitch Wars, 10 percent spam bots with suspiciously attractive profile pictures), and an Instagram account with a grand total of 1 follower (that being my agent, hah!). During contract negotiations, my agent fought on my behalf to get social media expectations for me whittled down to the bare minimum. At one point, she said to them something like, "You can't expect her to have any impact with social media, she doesn't even have any followers!" which I found hilariously blunt.

I am trying to be a little more active on social media now because I do think it can be a fun way to engage with readers. But honestly, trying to learn all the newfangled features and idiosyncrasies of each app makes me feel like a cavewoman discovering modern society for the first time.

Advice for writers: Follow your heart and write what is authentic to you, regardless of how it'll be received. There were periods where I'd try to understand the publishing industry better by reading all the recently published books in my genre, studying market trends, absorbing books on the craft of writing, imitating the techniques of others, and trying to figure out how to make my book palatable to a wider audience.

It was good and necessary for me to do all this to improve my craft in the early stages—but trying to forecast trends and obey every publishing rule out there just led to me feeling deeply unhappy with my book and writing itself, cheapening an act of creativity and authentic expression into an act of conformity. It felt like I was squeezing my brain into the confines of someone else's skull.

So at a certain point, I decided to just trust my instincts as a writer and lean harder into my idiosyncrasies to write a book that would truly hew to what I liked to write—a story that maps the patterns of my brain and what I've always wanted to read but couldn’t find out there.

I imagine following this advice runs the risk of writing a largely alienating book—but the readers who'll love your weird book will absolutely love it, because there's nothing else like it out there. Authenticity seems a better thing to strive for than acceptance.

Next up: I'm working on the second book in my contract, which is also in the fantasy genre. I'm not allowed to say anything about it. Top secret. My publisher will send hitmen after me if I leak too much information. There's a red laser dot appearing on my forehead as I type this. Send help!

Website: RoanneLau.com

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