September 2024: Q&A with Cosmic Writer, Rowana Miller 💫

Debut author Rowana Miller, who is also founder and executive director of Cosmic Writers, discusses her writing process and road to getting published.

Dear Writers,

The end of summer is always bittersweet. To sweeten it, we have a great Q&A with Rowana Miller, founder and executive director of Cosmic Writers, whose debut novel, Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls, is out fall 2025 from SourcebooksFire. Watch Rowana’s discussion of her writing process and road to getting published here and read her answers to our Q&A below.

We’ll also have Zoom Q&A’s in October and November, which will go out to all subscribers.

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Starting in December, our exclusive video Q&A’s will be available to paid subscribers. Consider buying a subscription to our Substack and supporting our business today ✨.

What is your writing process?

I often learn that I’m excited about a project after writing its first scene. In the case of my debut novel, Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls, my first page has been almost the same since my first draft: a high school junior hides inside a school supply closet and uses ballpoint pen ink to dye her hand blue.

Then, after I determine that I’m going to pursue a project in its entirety, I write a brief outline, usually using the three-act structure. I treat my outlines like car headlights: they illuminate just enough to see what’s directly in front of me. My outlines get less detailed as they progress — at the beginning of a project, I usually figure out the major plot points in Act I, the general arc of Act II, and some miscellaneous thoughts about Act III. As I draft, I fill in my outlines so that, by the end of my first draft, Acts II and III are as detailed as Act I.

When I started writing, I thought I would have to decide between being a plotter and a pantser, and didn’t like the restrictiveness of an outline, so I wrote my first drafts without any kind of planning. But while that allowed my characters to develop naturally, it also meant that I struggled to understand the goals of my scenes as I was writing them. I often ended up needing to do complete rewrites for my second drafts because it was only after completing a full draft that I understood the full arc of my work. Now that I’ve experimented more with what works best for me, I’ve found a strategy that gives me a bigger-picture view of the plot while still providing flexibility for my characters to inform the narrative.

As I write, I also keep a list of references for the overall tone of the project. This functions similarly to a Pinterest board, but the references span different media: songs, movies, books, television, etc. These references keep me grounded in the world that I’m trying to create.

After I complete my first draft, I shelve it for a few weeks and then reread it. As I reread, I make a revision checklist. Usually, I have a “big-picture changes” section — cutting or significantly altering a character, improving pacing, changing a key setting — and then a chronological list of smaller changes, which range from rewriting a scene in its entirety to dropping a one-sentence hint about a plot point in a later chapter. Then I repeat this process over the course of several drafts, until I’m satisfied that the plot is working properly; conduct a sentence-by-sentence revision; and send the book to my agent.

Where do you write? (Bed, desk, kitchen table, coffee shop, etc.) Standing up? Sitting down?

Recently, I’ve formed a writing group with two dear friends. We have very different writing focuses — I write YA novels, one of my friends writes literary short stories, and another writes literary analysis — so the purpose of the group is less about craft and more about creating a space where writing is our sole focus. We meet on Thursdays, rotating hosting duties between our apartments. Outside of our writing group, I usually write on my couch or in a coffee shop.

Do you read actual books, read on Kindle, read on Audible, borrow from library?

I read my fiction in actual books and I audiobook my nonfiction. I live in New York City and love walking around new neighborhoods, so if I have an afternoon free, I like to take a long walk and listen to an audiobook. I’m the founder and Executive Director of Cosmic Writers, a nonprofit that provides creative writing education for kids, and while my personal background is in teaching and writing, my day-to-day involves more traditional business skills. So I tend to choose audiobooks that hone my skills in the business side of my job. Most recently, I enjoyed The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. I’m also very interested in sociology and psychology, and really enjoyed Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari.

Which writers do you turn to for inspiration?

I am very lucky to have a writing mentor in the extraordinary YA author Nova Ren Suma. I wrote the first scene of Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls in her YA fiction class, and finished the first draft of the book in an independent study with her. Nova’s feedback articulated the challenges that I was having — something that I’ve always found very difficult to do within my own writing — and provided me with scaffolding to address them.

Nova’s own writing is deeply inspiring to me. Her fiction hovers at the border of realism and speculative, and at the border of commercial and literary. She creates intriguing, multilayered narratives that encourage her reader to think but also allow her reader to escape into the pleasure of reading. I hope that I can one day fulfill so many types of readers within a single piece.

If you have an agent, how did you find this person? Or how did this person find you?

I cold-queried for years. Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls was the third novel I queried, and I spent years querying each of the first two before deciding to shelve them. Right away, it was clear that Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls was a substantially stronger book than the ones I’d written previously; I had never received a partial or full request before, and this novel had an approximately 50% request rate. At that point, it was a matter of hoping that the right agent would fall in love once they read the manuscript, and luckily for me, that agent was Amelia Appel at TriadaUS.

If you have had a story, essay or book published recently, how many drafts did you revise before you finally submitted it? How many hours/months/years (roughly) did you spend on it?

As far as numbers go, there will be 6 years between the time when I wrote my first draft and the time when the book will be published, and I anticipate that I’ll go through 10 drafts total. Right now I’m on Draft #8.

What are you working on now?

After receiving an edit letter that got me energized to return to the world of Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls, I’m in the process of revising. And after this book is sent to press, I’ll return to an urban fantasy novel-in-progress that I started drafting during the time that Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls was on submission. It’s clear to me that my work on the urban fantasy book has been incredibly helpful for revisiting Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls — I’ve been able to apply a lot of the worldbuilding takeaways in order to make Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls feel much more atmospheric, for example — and I hope that the revision process will provide me with equally helpful takeaways for when I pick up the urban fantasy project again. I suspect that it will.

• October Q&A with Julie Fingersh, whose memoir, Stay: A Story of Family, Love & Other Traumas, is out October 15 from Rowman & Littlefield/Bloomsbury.

• November Q&A with Zelly Ruskin, whose novel, Not Yours to Keep, is out October 8 from SheWrites/Simon & Schuster.

Janet Wolkoff, Playing the Piano in Padua (Manchester Journal)

Family Affair: Netflix movie that is better than you think it’s going to be. Zac Efron is terrific as a spoiled movie star, Joey King is fabulous as his “assistant.” Nicole Kidman, as King’s mother, looks like a hologram, but is supported by Kathy Bates, who, as King’s grandmother, says, “Your Mom? She might also be a woman.”

We’ve launched a bimonthly, online book club. We discuss how a book is structured and why it works. We’ll discuss Percival Everett’s novel, James, October 10. A new 3-discussion session starts up again in December when we’ll read Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel, Long Island Compromise. If there are books you want to read with us in 2025, let us know!