✨Agent Alert!✨Katie Reed is opening to queries this Friday!

Let me tell you, it’s been a comedy of errors in my house lately. The events of the past few days have served as a reminder to me of the importance of the domino effect (aka causality) in storytelling.

So here’s what happened: a…. how can I put this so I don’t get sued… a Person Who Shall Remain Nameless bought one of my children Thai food, and that child fed said Thai food to this little guy 👇

And because of that Benji needed emergency treatment in a vet hospital on the other side of the city.

It was bedtime for my kids, so I asked the Person Who Shall Remain Nameless if they could take him. Benji was treated successfully (phew!) and came home with a little red bandage on his leg, presumably to stop him licking the sore area where they’d put in a drip.

Unfortunately I was not given the essential instructions to remove the bandage 😑. And because of that Benji’s paw swelled up and the poor little mite stopped eating/drinking and I had to rush him to our vet on Monday.

And because of that we were late for swim camp and missed the private lesson. Two hours of driving there and back with no air-con (my car is slowly dying) in the heatwave. For nothing. Also: there’s a massive waiting list for swimming classes in Dublin and it had taken months to arrange the lessons.

And because of all the dashing to vets and ultimately pointless driving I got no work done, ground down most of my teeth in an effort not to release expletives in front of my kids, and ultimately lost a good chunk of my will to go on. (So a pretty normal day then 🤣)

And on and on and on it went.

One central plot problem (a single mother having no time to work in the THREE MONTH LONG school holidays) growing, escalating and complicating.

Can you see the snowball effect that all started with Thai food? (Or, if we’re going big picture with this, the foundation of the patriarchy?)

Now if this story was fiction, the MC (moi) would try to deal with this comedy of errors in her old maladjusted way (e.g. stumble from one drama to the next with gritted teeth), until things got worse and worse and finally she had to face up to her blind spot and change her ways.

In other words, the events would force a positive internal transformation. (In reality, they did not. They just aged me horribly.)

So here’s a little storytelling challenge for you: what should the moral of this story be?

Hint: it’s the last option. That’s the correct answer.

Katie Reed was previously an agent at Andrea Hurst and Associates for several years before founding Katie Reed Literary in 2025.

Yesterday Katie announced on Instagram that her query inbox is opening on July 31st, and she has posted a super-specific wishlist here!

You can find more details on what she’s looking for, and how to query her, here.

Three years ago I still had no idea if the decade+ of my life I’d dedicated to writing novels would ever pay off. And then I stumbled across a quote from the Great Thinker of Our Age Ryan Gosling 👇 that really resonated with me.

Ryan has spoken about what it was like to be an aspiring actor in LA trying to break into Hollywood:

''Everyone's left their family, their homes, their friends [and] their jobs, to pursue a dream, where they know that the percentage of them achieving that dream is never and they do it anyway. Everyone has shared the same dream and no one knows whether it's a premonition or a delusion. And there’s only one way to find out.”

I often felt that way about my writing group friends over the years. We were united by the same dream and none of us knew whether it was a premonition or a delusion.

I can’t tell you whether to quit or persevere, but I can tell you that many writers came and went in our group, but the three core members, the die-hard few who didn’t quit, who kept trying and failing and learning… we all got traditionally published in the end. (I was the slowest of the group, but I got there!)

But in the year leading up to my first book deal in early 2024, I’d started to think I was delusional, and I pretty much gave up on getting published.

I wrote not one single word of fiction in that year.

I pretty much stopped querying the book that is now my debut THE MARRIAGE VENDETTA. A friend from my writing group urged me to query a new US agent, so I did. And forgot about it. I hadn’t a chance.

I told myself I was too busy to keep trying to get published. And it’s true that I was busy: I’m a single mother to two children, one with a lot of health issues, and a dog with no discernible self-preservation instinct. And I was still doing my journalism work back then. (This Substack and my contracted books have now replaced that work.)

But I was also out living during that year. I carved out time for fun each week. Difficult as it was to get out of the house by myself, I did it. Even if it was just for a few hours. Even if it was just to a small literary talk. Or for a drink with a writer. And I had Proper Fun for the first time in about a decade.

I felt alive again.

It was amazing. For a while.

The trouble with trying to combine fun with single parenting is that it’s exhausting. And it leaves no time for fiction. Cannot be done. Or at least not by me. By the end of the summer of 2023, I was shattered. At breaking point from trying to combine parenting and work through the long, looooooong school holidays, and then trying to squeeze in fun. Only one of those things was non-essential. Adios, personal life.

And I swear, the moment I bit the bullet, like the exact moment I admitted defeat and accepted that the Fun Era had to end… an email landed in my inbox from that US agent asking if we could have The Call.

✨Book karma, baby!✨

That (amazing) agent signed me, we went out on submission and THE MARRIAGE VENDETTA sold at auction to a Big Five publisher.

Was that Year of Fun a mistake? Should I have kept pushing ahead with another novel instead of having a writing-adjacent social life for a year? Would I be a year ahead with my author career now? I don’t think so.

I’d done enough writing. I needed to get out there and live. Experience the world.

And guess what? That Year of Fun has inspired Book 3 that I’m working on now. If I’d hadn’t gone out there and made mistakes and learned more about the world and other people and myself, I’d have less to write about now.

WRITING BREAK PERMISSION SLIP!

It’s okay to take a break. It’s okay to stop exhausting yourself in pursuit of the dream. If writing is not adding to your life, you are allowed to stop. For now. For a month. For a year. Forever. It’s okay. It’s allowed.

Your internal worth as a person is not linked to your success as a writer.

Sometimes you need to give yourself a long break to find out if the urge to write is still there.

To get curious about life again.

To fill up the creative well.

To go out and LIVE without feeling guilty.

And if you’re a writer? The urge to write will come back.

In case you’re still really struggling to decide whether or not to persevere, here’s a flow chart I’ve put together based on my experiences. I wish I’d had this a decade ago. It would have helped me to move from delusional to achieving my dreams much faster:

Note: apparently there are people happily walking around out there in the world with zero urge to sacrifice their social lives and general mental well-being in order to lock themselves away and write stories. Bizarre, I know!

Okay I’m off to revive my poor neglected Book 3 - wish me luck!

Happy writing,

Caroline x

P.S. You HAVE to read this post by Karin Gillespie on what bestselling books all have in common. Fascinating doesn’t even cover it.

P.P.S. Benji has made a full recovery, thanks for asking, and regrets his poor noodle-related choices

If you like my writing, you might also enjoy my novel THE MARRIAGE VENDETTA which one Goodreads reader described as: “if Gone Girl had a baby with Fleabag – and that baby grew up in Dublin with a really questionable therapist.”