Crystal Duffy Success Story Interview – Author of Twin to Twin

Crystal Duffy Success Story Interview with Mark Malatesta – During this insider interview on our literary agent blog, Crystal Duffy, author of the memoir Twin to Twin shares advice for authors of all genres about how to write, publish, and/or promote their books. Crystal also talks about how she worked with former literary agent Mark Malatesta to improve her pitch materials, resulting in representation with Donald Maass Literary Agency, a top literary agency in NYC.

Scroll below to: 1) Get instant access to the audio interview and text transcript, 2) See Crystal’s success story about how she got a top literary agency, and 3) Read an excerpt of Crystal’s book. You can click here to visit Crystal’s website and here to buy a copy of Twin to Twin.

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Audio Interview with Crystal Duffy
Author of Twin to Twin

Press the play button below now to listen or click here to download the file (left-click or right-click the link, then select “Save Link As”). This recording is 57 minutes.

Click here to view and/or download a free PDF transcript
of this audio interview!

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Crystal Duffy’s Success Story

Mark, I just signed with the Donald Maass Agency!

I would not be where I am today if it wasn’t for your support, guidance, and faith in me. I was so surprised and shocked when my agent called me on the phone and told me the news. I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I had to process it. It was such an amazing feeling. She’s a great agent, a top agent, and I’m very lucky. She’s successful but also very friendly, very approachable.

Before I met you, Mark, I had never even heard of a query letter. I was just beginning my search on what literary agents were. Then I found you. All our work together paid off. I remember how excited I would get when we first started working together. I would think, ‘I have a call with Mark, and I’m going to learn so much and it’s going to bring me one step closer to my end goal!’

When my agent first asked for more information on my book, I sent it to her and, later that night, she emailed back saying, ‘I’m already reading this and loving what I’m seeing so far.’ Then, later, she told me that she loved the proposal. She said it was a fresh breath of air to get a proposal and not have it be a mess. She made it seem like sometimes she loves an author’s ideas, but it would be overwhelming for her to put it all together.

My agent loved the commitments for testimonials that you helped me secure also – the potential blurbs for the book. There were about a dozen, a few from well-known people. My agent never said to me anything about my platform being weak, even though I didn’t really have a platform when you and I started working together.

I spent a long time going through the list of agents that you gave me, narrowing it down – and I really read the comments that you provided about them. It was so helpful to have that, because then I didn’t have to go back to the agent’s website. It was also important that you showed me how to follow up with agents. My agent didn’t remember getting my original submission. If I hadn’t followed up, I might have missed out.

Mark, I really appreciate that you made the process of getting an agent such a wonderful and positive experience. You made me feel like it was totally fine that I knew nothing about the process. You also helped me come up with a great title, improve the opening of my manuscript (I always knew that was Achilles Heel), and tighten everything up a bit.

When I was considering signing up for the introductory call with you, what distinguished you from other people I could have worked with was the number of testimonials you had. Not everybody was like, ‘Oh my God, I got a #1 book deal’, but everybody said really positive things about the experience of working with you. I knew I would benefit, like them, having you as a coach to take me through everything.

I like your newsletter, too – I remember when I’d get those emails and I would see a new testimonial from one of your clients… it was uplifting. Like, when you’re in the middle of, ‘Who should I reach out to now?’ and you get those emails, and see another success story and you’re like, ‘This is what I’m working toward. This will happen and I’m going to keep doing what Mark is telling me to do, even though I might not always want to!’

Everything came together so beautifully.

Thank you so much!!!

Crystal Duffy
Author of Twin to Twin (published by Mango,
one of the fastest-growing independent
publishers in the United States)

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Twin to Twin by Crystal Duffy (Preview)

Chapter One

The Ultrasound

  Certificates and degrees crowded the wall above a large wooden desk full of patient charts and scattered papers. The perinatologist seemed well-accredited, but not particularly neat. A trickle of natural light illuminated the mostly darkened room, let in by a folded-back corner of the blackout curtains over the room‘s sole window. The doctor specialized in high-risk pregnancies, and the ultrasound he was about to give me could forever change the course of mine. Or, it could be just another routine scan and all would be the same as it was before. 

  My mom, dad, and two-year-old daughter, Abby, were in the exam room with me. They were seated on a black upholstered couch angled in such a way that they could view the large ultrasound screen on the opposite wall. My dad‘s sneakers tapped on the linoleum floor. Abby lay on her stomach, her elbows pressed up against my mom. She kicked her legs gently back and forth. She giggled as she held up the screen to her iPad while she watched Curious George. 

  There was a brisk knock on the door and a nurse, a petite brunette in her mid-twenties, entered. She asked me to lie back on the exam table. The paper crinkled loudly beneath me as I struggled to find a comfortable position—a nearly impossible task for a twenty-three week pregnant woman with twins. A few days before, the everyday discomfort of gestating two babies had taken a sharp, dangerous turn. I was suddenly in agony, an intense pain that I had not been able to fully articulate to Dr. Cooper, my OB. Painful spasms were shooting down my spinal cord, and I’d started to feel a continuous sensation of a hard, tightened abdomen. I was suddenly expanding rapidly—and it wasn’t just in my mind. I recalled the previous week‘s conversation with Dr. Cooper during a routine visit; as I stood on his scale, it showed me I’d gained eight pounds in a mere week. “Are you kidding me?” I said to him. “How is this possible?” I felt like Violet, the rude girl in Charlie in the Chocolate Factory who inflates hugely after she chews the forbidden Wonka gum—like I would burst at any moment. 

  The nurse wrapped the cuff around my arm and took my blood pressure, scribbled the numbers in my chart. “This might be a little cold,” she said as she pulled up my blouse. She grabbed a small white tube of ultrasound gel and began to rub it all over my belly. Her touch was soothing. It reminded me how I missed having massages at the spa. After I have the babies, I’ll have to book myself an appointment, I thought.

  My massage was interrupted by a knock on the door. I sat up instinctively, dripping some of the gel onto the top of my shorts. “All right, Crystal,” said the perinatologist, as he walked into the exam room. A soft-spoken man with warm brown eyes, salt and pepper hair, and a red polka dot bow tie under his starched white lab coat; he bore a strong resemblance to Bill Nye the Science Guy. “Let‘s have a look at these babies,” he said.

  I nodded my head fiercely and leaned slowly back on the examining table. “Okay,” I croaked as I adjusted my shorts. My heart was pounding so fast I wondered if anyone could hear it. No doubt my babies could as they were kicking up a storm, probably telling me to chill out. 

  Dr. Bill Nye sat down on his medical stool, grabbed the wand and began sliding it across my belly. He scanned silently for a few seconds. Then he leaned in close to the monitor and glided the wand back to the other side. He bit his bottom lip, steadied his shoulders and looked directly at me. Then, without preface, conveyed the devastating information.

  “Mrs. Duffy, as I suspected, you have Twin to Twin disease. There is a lot of fluid here. There is also a clear size difference—it appears that one of the babies has stopped growing.” He scanned the instrument around my belly more fiercely, his eyes never leaving the screen.

  I stared at the screen. I saw two little teddy grahams floating around the excess amniotic fluid. My heart thudded painfully, and my face felt hot. I closed my eyes to prevent the salty, fresh tears from streaming. I didn’t know what the heck all of his words meant. My brain was on overload. The only information I could really process was the fact that one baby had stopped growing, and they were both in grave danger.    

  The pregnancy had started in a normal enough way. My husband Ed and I were both ecstatic that our family would be growing. The day after we found out we were having girls, we painted the spare bedroom a pale pink and purchased two matching cribs. Two years prior, we had been blessed as parents for the first time, and I’d been given the greatest title of all: mother to our daughter Abigail. But, though the positive pregnancy test made me feel like I was on cloud nine, my anticipatory excitement and happiness was tinged with fear. We’d suffered the traumatic and abrupt end to two previous pregnancies we thought had been healthy—one before Abigail and one after—and they had left us heartbroken. With our joy came unanswerable questions: What if something goes wrong? What if this pregnancy results in another miscarriage? What if the problem is me?

  When I hit the seven weeks pregnant mark a couple of weeks later, the fear had finally started to dissipate. And then, abruptly, I started bleeding heavily, soaking through my clothes and onto the furniture. It was déjà vu; I’d done this all before. I thought I was having yet another miscarriage. Ed drove me to the ER and we waited what felt like hours to see a resident who of course couldn’t tell us anything—until the Obstetrics attending arrived. When he arrived, he called for an emergency ultrasound. Since I was still so early in the pregnancy, I was subjected to the early ultrasound torture—the kind where the ultrasound wand—a long and narrow device—is inserted deep inside you. I laid back and placed my feet in the stirrups, and closed my eyes, dreading the words that were about to come out of this doctor‘s mouth. Our baby is gone, I thought to myself. Raising his eyebrows, the doctor turned to me. 

  “Wait a second, was this a spontaneous pregnancy?”

  “Excuse me?” I wrinkled my forehead in confusion. What the heck was a spontaneous pregnancy? Was that like the Immaculate Conception?

  “Err sorry, I mean, did you use fertility drugs?” he clarified. 

  “No. Why? We conceived our first child naturally—and fairly quickly might I add—we didn’t need to.” 

  “I see two heartbeats,” he said and pointed to the screen. “Look, there‘s one flicker and there‘s the other.” He turned from Ed, who stood silent and shocked, to me. “Right here is one amniotic sac, and up here, there‘s the other.”

  “Holy shit,” Ed said as his expression changed to a smug smile. No doubt proud of what his super sperm had accomplished. 

  “Are you serious? Are you trying to tell me I have two babies in there?” I asked stupidly. Confusion and disbelief washed over me. 

  “Yes! You are having twins. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Duffy!” he said as if he was awarding me a million bucks. 

  What I said next must have made me look and sound like a complete idiot. 

  “How is that possible?” Clearly my egg split somewhere along the way (or were there two eggs?). I tried to remember from biology class back in high school. Trying to recover from my stupidity, I quickly asked, “Are they identical or fraternal?” 

  “Too early for us to tell,” he said continuing to study the ultrasound screen. 

  My feeling of shock was soon overcome by joy and excitement. Ed and I would be welcoming two little additions to our family. 

  “Ed, our prayers have been answered, God has given us two babies.” 

  “I do see something else,” he interrupted pausing to stare intently at the screen. Oh gosh, I thought. Is there another baby in there? 

  “There‘s your uterus, and the lining,” he said mapping out my reproductive organs on the screen. “There‘s a blood clot in the uterus. That‘s the source of your bleeding and cramping.” And there we had it. 

  “What does that mean, exactly?” I sat up on the table like a springboard, lowering my feet from the stirrups and pulling down the bottom of my gown. He sat down on his stool and scooted closer. 

  “We need to be very cautious,” he said. “Sometimes these clots can pull the pregnancy and terminate it. In other cases, the clots will reabsorb themselves into your body and your pregnancy will continue as normal.”

  My brain was trying to catch up to my heart. I felt my joy swirl into fear. “Pull the pregnancy” and “terminate it.” His words were blunt and graphic. This dangerous and potentially fatal condition was after my babies. 

  “Okay,” I said pushing back a tear with my finger. “So what do we do?” I looked back at him for the answer. He got up from his stool and handed me a tissue. 

  “Mrs. Duffy, I suggest you follow up with your OB, but I would strongly recommend you stay on bed rest until the clot resolves.” He grabbed his notepad from the counter and scribbled down the names of vitamins—ones I had never heard of. “You should double the dose of your prenatal vitamins and folic acid since there are two in there.” 

  “Oh right, of course. That makes sense.” I nodded in agreement. 

  I turned and looked back at the now blank ultrasound screen, and I thought: There are two little babies in there, no bigger than a lentil, they have each other and are surrounded by amniotic fluid and a flipping blood clot. 

  “All right Mrs. Duffy, you are all set,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Remember to follow up with your doctor as soon as possible,” he said, and walked out the door. 

  Pregnant with twins AND bed rest. That was a lot to digest all at once. Then, add to that a dangerous blood clot in my uterus that could make me lose them. I felt a sense of fury at this clot that had interjected itself into my healthy pregnancy. My own body was turning on me and trying to take away my babies. Well, I refused to succumb to this worst-case-scenario. I decided that losing this pregnancy and these babies was not an option. 

  Ed couldn’t make it to the perinatologist appointment—he was taking a deposition. I wished he was sitting in the exam chair right beside me. Ed would know what to do. Ed would understand what was happening and what we needed to do to fix it. I had so many questions for Dr. Bill—the most important being: how are we going to save my babies? Nothing came out of my mouth except for anxious breathing. 

  After a few seconds, I calmed enough to ask Dr. Bill for clarification. I was hoping he might admit that he had made a mistake. He might take back his fateful words. He might say I was actually having a normal pregnancy and that my babies looked healthy. The room fell silent as I waited for his answer. I could hear Abby snacking on her Goldfish, but the iPad had been muted, and she stared at the screen silently. It seemed like this was happening to someone else in a parallel universe, not to me, like this was Back to the Future—Marty McFly‘s alternate version of 1985. Maybe if I walked outside there would be a DeLorean waiting to take me back to the real version of my life. 

  But it actually wasn’t the first time I’d heard the term “Twin to Twin Disease.” The possibility of this happening had been mentioned to me in the early doctor visits, but I’d discarded it because I had thought it would never apply to us. I thought it was just another example of the all-knowing and ever-hovering doctors laying out rare negative outcomes. I never imagined things would go wrong, this wrong. And then, in an instant, all the warnings I’d brushed aside came rushing back to me. 

  Dr. Cooper had told us when I was around twelve weeks pregnant that I was carrying Monochorionic-Diamniotic twins—Mono-Di. 

  “I see the membrane separating the two,” he said studying the ultrasound screen. 

  “Oh okay, and what does that mean?” 

  “That tells us that your twins are in their own amniotic sac but share the same placenta.” 

  The membrane is a big deal in twins. It‘s how they are able to distinguish the type of twins you are carrying. The sharing of the placenta—a monochorionic placenta—is a special characteristic of identical twins. 

  “Crystal, these types of twins can carry their own host of problems because they are at potential risk for twin to twin transfusion.” 

  I didn’t really understand what he meant by that, but I nodded because I wanted to move on and discuss other things I thought were more important and relevant. Just as with any pregnancy warning, I always thought: It‘s not going to be me, not my babies. No, that‘s the type of thing that only happens to 0.1 percent of people having twins, and they probably smoked and drank during their entire pregnancy. But I was wrong. Painfully wrong. 

  I sat there astounded as Dr. Bill unraveled more details of the horrific disease. 

  “Twin to twin transfusion syndrome—referred to as (TTTS) or Stuck Twin Syndrome—is a disease that affects the placenta, and it only occurs in identical twin pregnancies, because they share a placenta.” 

  His delivery was nice enough, but this diagnosis still slapped me across the face. I should have been taking notes. But I couldn’t move let alone write anything down. Didn’t the doctor know how devastating this news was to me? I needed a moment to begin to wrap my mind around this and I needed some kind of hope before I dived into the dirty details. 

  But Dr. Bill was still talking. “The shared placenta contains abnormal blood vessels which connect the umbilical cord and the circulation of the twins.”

  “What in the world?” I heard all of the words he was saying, but I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t decipher the secret code. What exactly is the problem? I asked myself. The shock of the news was inhibiting me from processing information in any coherent way. He kept repeating “monochorionic placenta,” “monochorionic-diamniotic,” “donor,” “recipient.” I was getting lost in the medical jargon. I felt like Marty again, “English, Doc Brown.” Then I immediately shifted into self-blame. Had I done something to cause this? 

  When I was five or six, I broke a Waterford crystal vase in our formal living room. My little sister Melissa was a toddler; we were playing tag and I was chasing after her. I ran into the side table knocking over the vase and spilling the hydrangeas that were arranged in it. There were shards of glass everywhere. 

  “It was all my fault,” I burst into tears when I told my mom what had happened. 

  “That‘s okay, it was an accident,” she reassured me. “You didn’t do it on purpose.” 

  I hadn’t done it on purpose but I was old enough to know I should not have been running around in the formal living room—a room that millennials such as myself deemed unnecessary. I also knew how special that vase was to her, and well, I needed to assign blame to ease the guilt; it was no different with the TTTS diagnosis. 

  I feared I was somehow to blame. “So…” I cleared my throat. “How exactly did this happen?” “Did I do something to cause this?” 

  I was too active; I should have rested more. In fact, I never should have gone off bedrest. After the blood clot dissipated, I thought we were in the clear and nothing else could go wrong. I thought I could resume normal pregnant activities, including a family trip to Sea World. I had clearly pushed myself too far. 

  He shook his head. “No, it was nothing you did or didn’t do. We aren’t certain what causes TTTS. It is not genetic or caused by a specific thing. It just happens.” 

  Why wasn’t there an explanation? I wondered. Not even a medical theory based on facts? I did everything right. Why did this have to happen to us? I wanted answers no doctor could give me. 

  I felts the hot tears come and I stopped listening. I knew what this diagnosis meant: my twins were in the balance, hanging on for dear life. Voices were muddling, and then I heard Dr. Bill say something that caused me to stop breathing: “If not dealt with immediately, the mortality rate is 95 percent for both babies. In other words, there‘s a slim chance of survival.” 

  “No.” I gasped. I kept saying. “No, no, no, no, no.” Hysteria gripped me. 

  “No, oh God, no!” my mom screamed, and my poor heartbroken dad put his face in his hands. Suddenly, I couldn’t take any more. I sat up, and fiercely grabbed some tissues to wipe off the gunky gel from my stomach. I pulled my blouse down, stepped off of the exam chair and snatched my Tory Burch purse. I bent down and scooped up Abby into my arms. “Mommy, Mommy!” Abby kissed my cheek, a few Goldfish crumbs still on her little lips. I’m outta here, I thought. I hugged her and five seconds later walked out of the exam room. 

Click here to get a copy of Twin to Twin.

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