Jackson Bliss

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Lucy Carson Requests Full Manuscript of Ninjas

After a month, I thought Lucy Carson had erased my query letter.  Because I have my shit together (I'm OCD), I keep a linear log of all my submissions (both to agents, literary journals + CW jobs), with color coding based on the final results of each submission.  Black = manuscript still in play.  Orange = manuscript being reviewed (useful only for submishmash/journals with online submission manager).  Light grey = rejection (because it's the easiest on the eyes).  Green = acceptance.  Blue = withdrawn.  Red = who who the fuck knows what happened?  The point being, after a week, I'd already changed my query status for Lucy Carson from black to red because I hadn't heard a thing.  Usually, when agents don't respond within a week, they don't respond at all.  That's been my experience 99.999% of the time.  But today:  Jackson, meet exception.  Exception, Jackson.

Today I got a very gracious response today from Lucy Carson requesting the entire novel.  She also thanked me for my kind words for one of her clients, Ruth Ozeki, who I read at USC + mentioned in my query letter.  Some of the clients at The Friedrich Agency include:  The Pulitzer prize-winning Jane Smiley, Esmeralda Santiago, Ruth Ozeki, Carol Muske-Dukes (a USC poet, no less) + Elena Gorokhova.  Not bad at all.  But to put things in perspective, statistically speaking, the number of literary fiction writers + male writers at this agency is slim.  So, I'm not going to delude myself into expecting miracles here.  But, I def appreciate the full manuscript request.  Now let's see if it's a good fit for her.  If not, I'm certainly flattered nevertheless that a tech-savvy agent like LC showed interest in my novel.