Canwen Xu

So I was like, well, I've done a lot of editing and I feel like it's good now.

You know, I sent it to 20 agents.

I got two full manuscript requests and both of them were rejections.

But one of the rejections actually came with a lot of feedback.

And this agent who I'm so grateful to for her feedback, she also kind of gave me a solution to what she saw as a problem in the book, which was kind of the lack of momentum, especially in the first two thirds of it.

So I kind of went back to the drawing board and I was like, you know what?

I her feedback bothers me a lot.

And the reason it bothers me is because she's right.

So I was like, you know what?

This wasn't this wasn't ready.

This wasn't ready.

I'm going to go back and I'm going to edit it until I feel it's ready.

And I took another year just just editing it.

And then I edited it to the point where I just felt intuitively I was like, this is ready.

This is as good as it's going to get.

I mean, obviously, you know, I've edited it further, but I really felt intuitively like, you know, someone's someone's going to like this.

And if they don't, that's their problem.

That's not mine, because I really I really like that.

So that's kind of going back to the internal validation part.

So and then that was that was when I found my agent, Rachel.