🌊Yoo-Hoo! I’m Caroline. 🌊
Six years ago, I quit my cushy tech job at LinkedIn to revise the YA underwater dystopian sci-fi novel I’d written late at night at the office, called MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA. After two years of revising, I signed with the agency behind The Hunger Games. Heck yeah! 🙌 Proof that my big risk had paid off!! We revised together for another year, and then…..she dropped me. Oof.
I rewrote even more. A second agent offered representation. The agency behind Ender’s Game (another heck yeah! 🙌). I said yes, we started editing together, and it was fantastic. I liked her, she GOT it!
Then, the contract came. It was problematic. The agency wouldn’t fix what was wrong with it, so I walked.
That was 2024. I was too hurt with my first book to even look at it, so I focused all of 2025 on writing a second book, MOONSHOT. I started sending it out to literary agents, and then, I realized something….
💁🏼♀️ The Pattern in My Life (aka About Me)
This is what I realized. But first, a quick resume:
I studied Economics, Computer Science, and Mandarin at Harvard, then moved to Hong Kong, where I worked in finance and earned a CFA (the finance equivalent of business school). My dad died unexpectedly from a heart attack, so I moved back to the US to be closer to family. That led me to San Francisco, where I worked at LinkedIn doing operations and data analytics.
Not so authory yet, eh?
Well, when I was stuck in this waiting period for my 2nd book in 2024, refreshing my email to see if a literary agent wanted it, I realized something.
When I wanted to work in China after college, I was told to get a job in NYC Finance first, THEN transfer. “That’s how it’s done.”
Instead, I traveled to Hong Kong for a month during my winter break and set up interviews with alumni, arranged a 1-month junior summer internship (in addition to my upcoming NY finance internship at Blackrock), then landed a full-time job in Hong Kong straight out of college.
When my dad died and I was considering switching into Tech in the US, I was told to go to business school to help me pivot.
I tried to write the “Why Business School?” essay and thought, this is silly, why don’t I at least try first? I moved to San Francisco without a job, interviewed, and got hired at LinkedIn. (To note: I ONLY got the one job. Only one person was willing to take a risk on me. LOL, “Asia Finance” was the “risk.”)
When I wanted to write a book, I was told to keep the job and do it on the side.
Well, I did listen to this…for the first draft. But once I’d written it, I was hooked. I quit the job, gave myself one year to go all-in, and I got literary representation by an epic agency for the very first novel I had ever written. How amazing!! (Minus the getting-dropped part).
Have you recognized the pattern yet?
Every time I was told to take the “proper step”, I skipped it and went straight to the thing.
And that worked.
But somewhere in the last two years, I lost my momentum. I stopped writing and started waiting…for permission, for approval, for something beyond my control.
I quit my job in 2020. It’s been six years, I have two books, and I’m ready to take some exciting next steps.
You ready?
Something starts here on September 15th.
I’ll tell you what it is on Sept. 8th. 🤫
