At just 26 years old, author and Marin native Ciel Pierlot’s second book, The Hunter’s Gambit has already hit the market — two years after the debut of her first novel Bluebird in 2022.
Despite Pierlot’s recent career ascent, the science fiction author’s journey started over a decade earlier during middle school, when Pierlot spent hours writing what she affectionately dubbed “bad anime fanfiction.”
Pierlot put her fanfiction efforts on pause during high school, but her passion for writing reignited during a gap year she took before college. She wrote daily — sometimes a sentence, sometimes a few hundred words, other times over 3,000 words. Somewhere along the way, her fanfiction turned into unique works, and by the end of 2018, Pierlot thought, “Maybe I can make some money off of this.”
From there, Pierlot’s writing trajectory began a steady upward climb. With guidance from her mother, a technical writer with connections in traditional publishing, Pierlot started to navigate the industry. She secured an agent at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic (“A heck of a time to start anything,” says Pierlot), and published her first book a year later.
While navigating the complexities of selling her first book to a publishing house, Pierlot was already working on The Hunter’s Gambit. Now, Pierlot is back at school pursuing the degree that she put on pause when she decided to pursue a writing career (“C’s get degrees, and I need a 9-to-5,” Pierlot says). It’s not in her nature to slow down.
Below is an edited Q&A with Pierlot, who shared her experience navigating the publishing industry at a young age, divulged details of her writing process, offered advice to young writers on how to get started and unveiled some of the less glamorous parts of being a writer.
How does it feel now that your second book is out in the world?
There’s always that sense of wanting to celebrate. But at the end of the day, you’ve got your next book coming up. So you have a little celebration and then you’re like, ‘Okay time to get back to work.’
How was the process different for you this time around, given that you’ve done it before?
It’s always very chaotic the first time around because in traditional publishing there’s so many hoops you have to jump through. You write your first book and you think, ‘This is a great book. I’m done. I get to send it to publishers.’ Well no, first you have to query a literary agent, which can take a long time. Sometimes it can take years. I was lucky that it took maybe one year for me. Everytime you think, ‘Aha, now I’m done,’ there’s another step. With my second book, it was great to have that familiarity and to be able to already know everybody at my publisher. I kind of had a general sense of who I needed to go to for what.
How did you get started in the publishing world so early?
I don’t want to be falsely modest or anything like that. I am a skilled writer, and I work hard. But a lot of the unfortunate truth of publishing is that there is so much luck involved. I got lucky when I found an agent who really liked my work, and my agent and I got lucky when we found an editor who really liked my work. So much of it is timing. There’s a lot that depends on whether you happen to send an email to the right person at the right time.
I’d also been doing so much writing casually for years. And that’s not to say that my middle school fanfiction was in any way shape or form good writing… because it was not. But the way you become a good writer is by writing a lot of really bad words. You have to write all the really stupid [expletive] and learn from it. And because I started writing the really dumb stuff very young in life, it gave me a baseline in which to learn how to actually write ‘good.’
A lot of people decide, ‘Oh I really want to go into publishing, I really want to go into writing.’ Oftentimes they decide that in college. And then they think, ‘Oh, well I should wait until I have my degree.’ You don’t have to. You don’t need a degree to go into traditional publishing. I don’t have a degree. So because there’s the expectation that you should get a degree, a lot of people don’t start writing all of the really terrible words you have to write first until they’re finished with college.
How do you think fanfiction has influenced your writing style over the years, as you’ve discovered what “good” writing looks like for you?
I think fanfiction is really amazing. It provides a lot of community where you’re able to engage in a very close friendly way with other authors. The community of fanfiction is deeply helpful, from a ‘you get to make friends’ standpoint and being able to engage with other writers who are in the same field as you. The medium of fanfiction, where you’re working with pre-existing ideas, characters, settings and narratives is a lot like the difference between creating the picture that is used as the base of a puzzle and playing with the puzzle pieces. In original writing there are a lot of debates about white authors writing the stories of people of color, or debates about authors writing a narrative about parental abuse but they have a great relationship with their parents. And the answer to those debates can greatly affect your livelihood. In fanfiction, you are in a sandbox and you get to play around. It’s very valuable for gaining skills as an author because it lets you play around without any stakes.
What does the writing process look like for you when you are writing original works?
My routine does change because I’m still in university, so during the semester, when I have classes, obviously I have to work around classes. A lot of authors will block out specific time to write. That does not work for me. I need to be doing multiple things at once. I’ll work on the writing I need to get done, but in another tab I’ll have a fanfiction or whatever other no-stress thing I’m working on. In another tab, I’ll have a YouTube video I’m interested in. And I’ll keep constantly switching between these things. That lets me sustain momentum.
What are your long term goals as a writer, having already achieved so much at such a young age?
Where I am currently and where I see myself going forward, I would love to be the type of author that puts out a book a year. For me, that is currently very sustainable. I’m a very visual person. One of my jobs is that I am a professional digital artist. So I actually did the painting for The Hunter’s Gambit cover. When I write scenes, I visualize them in the way that you would a keyframe art for a movie or a TV show. I would love to turn any of my books into film or TV because that’s a visual medium that I really enjoy.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
I’d give all the boring advice of ‘Keep at it, I know it’s hard’ and ‘Make sure you keep writing often.’ But, at the end of the day, the biggest piece of advice I would give is don’t let it stop being enjoyable. The moment you become so committed to the goal of nebulously being published, and you’re not focusing on what you enjoy about the craft and the process, you’re inevitably going to lose motivation. Make sure it stays enjoyable. And if it’s not enjoyable, rethink what you’re doing.
