I sold my debut novel 🎊 LOCAL HEAVENS (coming Fall 2025)

being on submission, how I got my book deal & reflections on my writing journey this year.

Dear readers,

I’m excited to officially announce that my debut novel, LOCAL HEAVENS, a queer cyberpunk reimagining of The Great Gatsby, will be coming to a bookstore near you Fall 2025 with Bindery Books/Inky Phoenix Press. See the announcement here. (The Publisher’s Marketplace deal will probably be up later today or tomorrow.)

Embarking on this project back in 2020, I never thought, four years later, I’d have the immense privilege to be announcing a book deal for it. I wanted to share a little bit about my reflections being on sub for the first time and also to thank everyone who made this possible.

✨ Stay tuned for more news on the cover reveal, and when you can request ARCs + preorder the book. In the meantime, you can follow my other socials. All my links can be found at kmfajardo.com.

☕️ If you’d like to further support my work, consider donating to my ko-fi or signing up for my monthly memberships!

On marketability and genre lines.

In my late high school/uni days, my aim was to write contemporary literary fiction. I dedicated a lot of time to this but eventually I couldn’t help but feel that contemporary litfic just wasn’t my calling as a writer. I could never make those stories work because I always felt they were missing something. It took some time for me to realize that I didn’t want to write about our world as it is, but our world as it might be. I was a speculative fiction writer, first and foremost. I wanted to build different worlds, strange worlds.

I switched gears to focus on SFF about 4-5 years ago and unconsciously fell into the idea that ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ are two different things. And while there’s certainly a lot of elitist snobbery and resentment when it comes to the literary vs. genre fiction discussion (and I understand that categories need to exist for consumers), as a writer, I don’t like how separated the two can feel.

For LOCAL HEAVENS, I had no delusions about how tough submission might be for a queer, genre-bendy sci-fi project, centering a cyberpunk protagonist whose goal isn’t anything besides staying in his lane and getting through life. He is dishonest, uncertain and conflict averse. This isn’t how I would ordinarily approach an SFF protagonist, and when I was first brainstorming, it presented an interesting craft challenge for me: I was drawn to writing a cyberpunk setting, but conceptually, the story I wanted to tell felt more literary leaning rather than high-action commercial. This made me hesitant but in the end, I was too tempted by the idea not to pursue it.

It’s a little tough, when you’re pursuing traditional publishing, because you have to constantly balance marketability with passion. You have to think intentionally about where you want your work to be categorized and which crowds you want to appeal to. As a debut author, it was something I was thinking about constantly: how to strike the right balance between literary and commercial for this book, and what would be the best way to pitch it.

Somehow, through a mix of delusion, luck and persistence, I queried this book successfully and signed with an agent who was willing to revise this book with me for five months prior to pitching.

I had to write quite a few drafts of this book to figure out what the identity of the work should be. I knew a more literary editor is going to have different expectations than an SFF editor. I kept asking myself: is the anachronistic voice okay, is the cyberpunk too off-putting for a literary crowd, is the tone too quiet for a genre crowd? These are valuable questions, but they can spiral into so much self-doubt that you get lost as a writer.

In the process, there were moments where I’d forget to ask myself the most important question: am I still having fun writing this?

I truly believe that writing indulgently, audaciously and obsessively is the only way to survive in this industry. The target audience is me—because if it wasn’t, I would have thrown the manuscript in the trash. With the amount of times that you’re going to be reading your book, you need to be obsessed with it or else you’ll burn out.

Of course you can’t completely disregard “the market,” but understanding publishing as a business is part of what protects your relationship with your craft because you start to realize just how much of rejection usually has nothing to do with you.

Am I having fun? This is a daily question, every single time I sit down at my computer.

I tried to keep this front of mind when revising and talked myself down from many ledges. I decided to focus on putting elements into the book that I wanted. From fictional sports, to dreamscapes, to cyberpunk jazz clubs, I wanted to write with no regrets.

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Rejection.

LOCAL HEAVENS went out to editors at the end of January 2024. From February onwards, I don’t remember much.

I allowed myself a few weeks of being anxious, then I went to work on brainstorming a couple new books. LOCAL HEAVENS is a cyberpunk project and I had another idea I wanted to write in this genre. My agent had approved the concept and thought it was strong but by March/April, I’d decided I needed to write something totally different than LH for my own sanity.

This was the best thing I could have done during this time, if only to remind myself that I had so many more stories in me besides this one. I wanted to prove to myself that I could write across genres, inhabit different worlds and vastly different characters. I wanted to fall back in love with writing and to stop thinking about publishing trends.

Everyone (publishers and authors) are always trying to figure out where the trends are going next—how they will evolve, who will get to it first. Science fiction has never been the easiest thing to sell as a debut writer. I expected a long submission experience, and the fact that it didn’t end up being over a year (or dying on sub entirely) still kind of shocks me.

The right tastes have to align at the right time, and for about five months, the alignments weren’t happening. In this industry, fuelled by passion, editors (like agents), really have to love a project in order to take it on. We received complementary passes, near misses, and I felt like a failure.

In May, my agent and I chatted a bit and she reassured me that the market ebbs and flows. One rejection got me down for a while. My thoughts spiralled.

My agent still believed in the version of the book that we’d sent out, but privately, I wasn’t sure if anyone would want to take a chance on this project. I was deep into a new book, which was keeping me afloat creatively, but I was beginning to grieve LH.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

[Content warning for panic attacks, anxiety and depression. Please scroll past the paragraphs indented with the line if you’d like to skip that portion.]

June came and my mental health had deteriorated—not exclusively because of submission, but also from work stress and other personal things—so I took a writing break in order to recuperate. I was constantly on edge. My chest felt tight for days at a time. One week, I went almost two days straight without sleeping.

I’d never felt anything like it before. This cold, hazy darkness had taken root inside of me. I couldn’t speak to anyone about it for a while because it was such a new, sudden feeling. I was convinced that to speak about it would not only bother people, but would be an acknowledgement that those feelings were real.

It was like sharing my body with a stranger who was holding my real self captive somewhere else, somewhere far away. I was scared and resentful that I was losing all sense of normalcy. I couldn’t remember the last time I wasn’t tired, anxious or both. Life did not feel real anymore. This went on for a solid few weeks. I left my apartment and spent most of the summer at my parents’ house.

I am still learning to coexist with this stranger, bartering with it for pieces of my old self, just long enough for me to get through the day. But overall, I’m doing better; at least now, I know that the stranger is there and can’t creep up on me.

Many doctors appointments later, at the start of July, I was feeling more refreshed, and truly starting to make my peace with the idea of LH having to be shelved.

I wish there was more “advice” I could give about this part of the journey but all I can say is that I endured it. Despite my own dwindling belief in myself and the worst mental health spiral I’d ever had in my life, the time passed, as time does. I got through each day gradually. I endured it. And if you’re a writer on sub right now, you will too.

I reminded myself that this one book was not my worth or my identity. Whether or not LH would get published, I was going to write more stories anyway. I reminded myself that my best books are still ahead of me. After my health hiccups, I realized I simply couldn’t let publishing kill me. Not even a dream is worth that.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. I threw myself back into my new book. I trauma dumped into the group chat (sorry Lynn and Kelley). If LH doesn’t sell right now, I thought, then it wasn’t meant to.

But on the afternoon of July 6th, a surprise resurrection. An email from my agent.

LOCAL HEAVENS had received an offer.

Publishing is a wild industry because you’ll go half a year not hearing anything, sitting in a doctor’s office for the third time in four weeks, on the brink of quitting. And then. Everything changes in a single email:

I stared at my phone for five minutes. I was confused. I read and reread the email. Then I composed myself.

I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop so while I was ecstatic to have such an incredible response, I was also very on edge. And for good reason.

In the whirlwind days that followed—as my agent went to work setting up calls—I was trying to go about my life as normal, continuing to work on my other book while balancing my day job.

But mid-July, just a week after all of this exciting news with LH was happening, I got laid off.

I remember laughing because it felt like balance was being restored in the world. One amazing, lifelong-dream-come-true thing had happened to me but of course, it couldn’t last too long, and so predictably, a terrible thing had to come in from left-field and clock me in the jaw.

That was a Monday. And it wasn’t even the worst thing to happen to me that week. If you missed the “flooded basement” saga, I won’t recap it, but here is the newsletter I wrote around that time.

That very same week, I got on a call with the offering publisher and my agent. It was exciting, informative, and surreal. I don’t think the reality of having an offer had really sunk in before this call. That was the first time since signing with my agent that I realized someone had actually read LOCAL HEAVENS, loved it, and believed that it should be put out into the world.

This story, which I’d torn out so many chunks of myself to create, which I’d been so close to abandoning, jumping off the train to let it crash and burn—in this single call, it was set on-track again. Not only that, but it was finally headed for a place I didn’t think was possible anymore: publication.

After contract negotiations, I officially signed the deal in October 2024—about four years after I first conceptualized the novel, two years since starting the first draft, and one year after signing with my agent. Most of that time, I was entirely alone with this work and this world. When it all comes down to it, writing is a solitary, fearless act of digging out your guts and putting them onto a page.

But when I got on my first call with the rest of my publishing team, one of the first things I was told was: “You’re not alone anymore.”

I didn’t realize how much it would mean to me to hear that. Writing a book is years of loneliness, alone with your thoughts and your heart—but publishing a book takes a village.

After a lot of waiting around, everything is moving very quickly now and while I’m slightly overwhelmed, I’m trying to take it in and enjoy it as best as I can, despite the debut nerves settling in. From meetings with my art director, to my editor, to every single person on the LH team helping me bring this book to life, I know the year ahead is going to be insane.

I hope you join the ride. 🪐

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Thank you.

As I spoke about in this newsletter earlier in the year shortly before I went on sub, there is something about Gatsby that feels more relevant today than ever before. It’s a true dream to be given the chance to remix my own version of this story I’ve cherished since my youth and to spend time with the voice of a writer who has continuously reignited my passion for writing.

LOCAL HEAVENS is my love letter to cyberpunk, to our own generation’s “Roaring Twenties”, to Fitzgerald’s magical world, and to the hopes and illusions of the American Dream, revisited through the lens of late-stage capitalism and technology. I never imagined this crazy little plot bunny that I turned over in my head years ago (“gay cyberpunk Gatsby” lol) would travel as far as it has, but I am endlessly grateful to be here. Never ever give up.

I hope LOCAL HEAVENS finds the readers for whom it’ll resonate, who see the same parallels between the past and the future, and who may find some meaning in it in the present.

Thank you to the people who emotionally and editorially supported me while I wrote this book—especially Lynn, Kelley and Rachel. Thank you to my agent, Laura, and to Kathryn at Inky Phoenix Press for believing in this book and giving LOCAL HEAVENS a loving home.

Thank you as well to the team at Bindery Books, who are truly carving out a unique space for authors, bridging gaps between publishing and community. Finally, thank you to my ko-fi community (who heard the news first!) and to everyone who’s cheered on this project over the years.

In 2025, on the centennial anniversary year of the original Gatsby (!!), it’ll finally be in your hands.

Much love,

-Kris