Lunching at a monastery in Tuscany. As you do.

Seven years ago I was invited to a dream trip for writers in Italy. It had only been six months since I made the leap to fight imposter syndrome and changed my instagram bio to include the word “writer.” I still knew very little about the industry.

I didn’t know the facilitator of the trip was a literary agent at the top of her game. (I had to ask what a “literary agent” even was when I first met her a month before at my first writers’ conference....