Rainy Season, Red Flags, and One Terrifying Query Letter

Rainy season is crawling back into Korea again. The air already feels damp in advance, which somehow matches my current emotional state and also my coffee.

I finally queried an agent this week.

One.

Singular.

And before anyone starts imagining some glamorous writer montage with jazz music and confidence, no. It took me four days to press send. Four. Entire. Days. I stared at the email the way people stare at suspicious basement doors in horror movies. Open it. Close it. Edit one comma. Re-read the query. Walk away dramatically. Come back. Change one word. Suffer. Repeat.

Thriller author behavior.

Still counts though. I did it terrified anyway, which unfortunately seems to be my entire career strategy lately.

The strange thing is that while querying made me feel mildly hunted for sport, sending physical letters and unseen chapters to my subscribers did the opposite. That part made me feel awake again. Properly awake. Tiny bookmarks, folded pages, envelopes spread across the table, wax seals, my printer threatening suicide halfway through the process. Beautiful chaos.

There is something deeply unwell and deeply wonderful about mailing fragments of your brain across the world to strangers who somehow understand exactly what you meant.

And yesterday I went live for the first time in a while and read one of my chapters out loud. Honestly? The reactions stayed with me more than anything else this week.

The “oh my God.”

The nervous laughter.

One person typed: “we need holy water.”

Which, frankly, is the highest compliment a thriller writer can receive.

Those reactions sit in my chest longer than numbers do. Longer than algorithms. Longer than analytics and follower counts and all the exhausting internet machinery that occasionally makes creativity feel tax-related.

Someone gasping at the exact sentence you hoped would ruin their evening a little? Different thing entirely.

That keeps me going.

I’m deep in line edits now, which feels less “writing a novel” and more performing surgery on a creature that occasionally bites me back. Some scenes still work immediately. Others stare at me from the document with the energy of a raccoon holding a knife.

And I do wonder sometimes if thriller writers get too attached to their red flags.

I genuinely think I’ve crossed into emotional-support-psychopath territory with some of these characters. Which feels concerning. But maybe normal? I don’t know. Maybe every thriller author eventually reaches a point where they stop asking “would he do this?” and start defending him in private conversations with themselves.

“He only buried three bodies your honor, and technically two were teamwork.”

The rain is coming back. The edits are getting cleaner. The book feels heavier now in a good way. Less draft. More real. More dangerous somehow.

Anyway. If you hear distant thunder over Korea, it might just be me opening my manuscript again.