Hey, do you have a 1,000 page manuscript based on "Wagnerian opera, Lou Reedian post-punk, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Jungian psychology, the life and death of cities, French aestheticism, the magic of memory, gay identity and—most importantly?—cats"? Hah, good luck selling that. But wait... what if a blind query to a big-deal William Morris agent resulted in the book getting sold? That's what happened to editor and commenter Matthew Gallaway, also known as the Gay Recluse.

Eight or nine years ago, we decided to write a novel... when it was done, it was literally 1000 pages long. We sent out some queries and a few people expressed interest. But everyone was like: “Hey, what century do you think you’re living in? Good luck selling a 1000-page novel about opera and philosophy and French aestheticism!” Whatevs... someone (somewhat tersely) suggested we send a blind query to a “big-concept” agent, which we did.

That would be Bill Clegg at William Morris, who's also working on a memoir, about drug addiction and crack!

He wrote back! And not only that, he helped us streamline the story... these revisions took the better part of a year, but the resulting novel was at least one million times better than the original version. And then — just like that — he sold it! Given the choice between a few smaller “literary” houses and a gigantic, multinational conglomerate, we went for the latter. Ha—we sold out! We read about it this morning in Publisher’s Marketplace, as if we were reading about someone else. "FICTION: DEBUT Oxford University Press editor Matthew Gallaway’s THE METROPOLIS CASE, the sweeping tale of an unlikely quartet, bound together by the strange, spectacular history of Richard Wagner’s masterpiece opera, Tristan and Isolde, to Suzanne O’Neill at Crown, by Bill Clegg at William Morris Agency (NA)."

Whoa, congrats! Read the full blog post.