Biography
Zoe Hana Mikuta is a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Washington-Seattle, where she intends to major in English/Creative Writing. She loves Marvel movies and comic books, and inhales any YA book with a hard-to-love, kickass protagonist that can feed her hunger for action.
When she is not feeding into every cliché she so shamelessly loves by sitting in a coffee shop writing her own YA projects, she is out doing Muay Thai kickboxing, mentally noting the combos she can later jot down into her fight scenes.
Her debut novel, GEARBREAKERS, will be out with Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan in the Spring of 2021, with an untitled novel to follow in Spring 2022.
Recent Posts
Editor Letter for GEARBREAKERS
Originally posted on Lightning & Lightning Bugs:
Zoe just broke her query letter versions for her debut, GEARBREAKERS (Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan, 2021). See the three versions of her query letter in the post linked to above, including the version that she sent me, back in the fall. The query prompted a request for the manuscript…
The Query Letter That Got Me My Agent
In any scenario, but perhaps especially in the literary sphere, it is important to be adaptable. By the end of my querying phase, I had gone through two rewrites of my original query letter, three versions total. These rewrites were not necessarily due to a lack of agent responses—even the first version received three partials […]
How I Got My Agent ( + My Experience in the Query Trenches )
It’s jarring to me that I get to write one of these posts. When I was querying, I would spend hours upon hours pouring over these stories, and successfully heeded every single piece of their advice—I waited patiently, worried little, with a heart constantly brimming with the hope and knowledge that soon, the little ping […]
On Worldbuilding 1/?
Something completely unique in humans is this gravitation to create alternate worlds. In our childhoods, all of us were able to fabricate (complexly, at that) entirely separate realms that existed vividly—a way of constructing that came effortlessly. We created entire storylines and characters, fleshed out intricate scenes, and fought through the created conflict in a […]
Some News…
I cannot believe I am finally able to say this, but The Secret™ is Out: I’m going to be a published author!!! It’s been a long, nerve-racking, heart-wrenching journey, not yet over, but another step closer. My science fiction debut, GEARBREAKERS, my absolute heart, will be out 2021 with Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan. Get ready for […]
When Writing Isn’t Your Life
This week started off the spring quarter at UW, and my schedule consists of all English classes, which makes me both excited and exhausted. Mostly because last quarter, I wrote around 60k words, which would normally be cause for celebration—if ~49k of those words weren’t attributed to my schoolwork. And this was only with a […]
Writers Don’t Eat Cake
It’s been around two months since I signed with my wonderful literary agent, Weronika Janczuk of D4EO Literary Agency. In that time, I: 1. Moved away from home 2. Entered my first year at UW 3. Gutted and edited a significant chunk of my manuscript 4. Wrote the full synopses for the following two books […]
Editing Anecdote 1/?
A University of Washington ‘claim-to-fame’ is that no matter where someone is on campus, they are always two minutes away from a coffee shop. As such, a caffeine habit is slowly trickling into place. My dining account is emptying. I get whipped cream on every order and it’s the equivalent of eating sugar by the […]
