#244

Dear QueryShark


Winston Smith has been a foolish man, and on Christmas Day of 2012, it's going to cost him his life.  

This is a great opening line. Do I want to find out what happened? You bet.

On top of a faltering marriage - and there’s been no sex for eight months - not only has he neglected to tell wife, Julia, their heavily indebted dairy farm is up for an income tax audit, but he’s corresponded with the auditor that "the thought of having to hand over my life in letters and source documents for examination by you, a total stranger, on pain of punishment, makes me physically ill," and he will not be cooperating with the Inland Revenue Department.

And then you take veer so completely off the path of taut, lean prose that it's almost like you've morphed into Prolix Man.

For starters, don't quote the novel in the query. Also, we don't need to know why the marriage is faltering, just that it is. And the only thing we really need to know is the audit is going to be a big surprise to Julia.

Tom Parsons life previously could have been summed up in a word: inertia. Married to mousy Sally, the one girl he dated at high school, their marriage has become routine since the birth of their son, Syme.

What? Wait. Who? What happened to Winston and Julia?  This abrupt segue is confusing. Remember, I'm not sitting on my sofa with a cup of tea, savoring your query. I'm not reading this like I read a novel. I'm sitting at my desk, I've got ten minutes before a scheduled phone call and I’m trying to find the queries that entice me to read on. In other words, I'm reading fast and mostly skimming. Whether you think this is a good idea, or fair is immaterial. It's reality and  a smart query writer will write to his/her audience.

What that means: You make sure I know who a new character is by telling me "Inland Revenue agent Tom Parsons"

And you don't have FIVE NAMED CHARACTERS in the first two paragraphs. At the most you have two.

Only planning on a four year stint when taking his first job at IRD, he’s still there after over quarter of a century(1). Now his teenage son has announced over saveloys and tomato sauce he’s got his school girlfriend pregnant, and the physical relief Tom has sought in the flesh of his mistress, Jill, IRD Customer Services, working the floor above his stalled career, is treading a complicated path: he doesn't get her jokes, he doesn't get her kink, his libido is all but destroyed by the stress of work, his audit of Winston and Julia Smith - culminating in a combined police / IRD raid of their house during a twentieth anniversary tea where a naked Julia had been trying to revive their love life - has entered the Kafkaesque with Winston now stalking Tom and his family and posting their movements to his public blog – ('if Winston and his wife have no right to be left alone, or privacy, neither will Tom Parsons.')(2) And were that not enough, Tom has a sore back giving him hell, and Sally has become an emotional wreck, pushed beyond her limits by Smith in his spotlessly clean overalls and shiny gumboots watching their house from the street, while trying to cope with life in a city caught in a civil defence emergency.(3)

This paragraph has 221 words and three sentences. This is an disaster of epic proportion in a query letter.  Remember, I'm reading fast, skimming even.  Even if your novel has Faulknerian sentence structure, YOUR QUERY CAN NOT.

So the lives of Winston Smith and Tom Parsons cross tragically in the streets of Christchurch, New Zealand, as its inhabitants survive hardship through the series of over ten thousand aftershocks following an initial  7.1 magnitude earthquake on September, 2010, and the subsequent fatal earthquake of 22 February, 2011, one hundred and eighty six people killed; the only constant being the unpredictability of the next shake, and the "sound of the demolition crews removing the jig-saw of the city from the Canterbury Plains a piece at a time."

You don't need all this detail.

The two men's modern day parable will change and devastate the lives of all involved:

Here's where I stop reading. Parable is an almost instant rejection.  Show me a good story, and if I can see the connections or the lessons implicit within, you'll have done a good job. Let me reach those conclusions on my own.

Winston Smith will go under the wheel of Parson’s car, but only after first seeing his marriage destroyed, and loss of the farm he has worked his life for, as the bureaucratic machine of IRD begins the serpentine process of liquidation and bankruptcy.

 Don't reveal the outcome of novel in the query. You destroy any desire to read the book to find out what happens.

Tom Parsons life devolves to failure and absurdity: his mistress's book club is reading Fifty Shades of Grey, and sex has become a gauntlet of humiliation, which he gets enough of at work; the Marxist feminist co-op running the corner fish and chipy won’t serve him because he’s a bloke; due to Smith's stalking, Sally has found out about his affair, confronted him in his y-fronts in his mistress’s kitchen, and thrown him out to live in their condemned, roofless Red Zone home; finally he can’t communicate with Syme in his son's first time of needing fatherly guidance, and then on Christmas Day of 2012, his nemesis stalker appears before the bonnet of his car, walking across an intersection - all witness reports agree to his initial acceleration, but did he then try to brake before impact?

One sentence. 138 words.

For Sally Parsons, ‘the sleep walk of her life was ended, an itinerary ... reporting her husband’s unfaithfulness shaking her awake, as the city had been, buildings and lives uprooted from the known and the safe;’ finding a strength to live alone with her anxiety. Her first task is to sort out the mother of the girl her son has made pregnant, ensuring access to the child when born.



Syme Parsons travels from boyhood to a nascent, ill-formed manhood with limitations already on his future. Albeit he's lucky to have made it out of youth, thanks to Winston Smith saving him from the violence of an out of control Facebook street party.

        .

And Julia Smith will be left with the biggest decisions of her life. Leaving her husband in the hospital after he was tasered in the IRD raid trying to punch Parsons boss, O'Brien, she moves to the Mahau Sound to decide if she loves Winston, if she can trust him again, and if she will ever move back. She begins a journal on their lives in the hopes of figuring a path through the startling and frightening mess her life has become - the press are using scary words like fraud and evasion with her name after them, which she knows are lies. Then when Winston is killed she is faced with two choices:



Watching helplessly while the bureaucracy slowly pulls her life apart: “Looking at the correspondence, all these suited, vicious men and women pushing and poking me, I can’t breathe. I can be sitting with a cup of coffee on the deck here in the Mahau, listening to cicadas in the manukas below, watching a seagull gliding freely in the wind, while on my lap is a letter that has politely separated my skin, leaving a tear from which my blood is filing out in an orderly fashion, commanded by statutory threats and court arraignments, to puddle around my feet, a sticky mass, until it slowly trickles through the gaps between the stained, splintered boards, and into the hard, dry ground beneath the house."



Or she can take the personal fortune offered to her in Bitcoin crypto-currency from an illegal sale of their dairy herd, and escape to the mysterious movement blossoming in the USA called Western Spring: a fishing boat can take her from the beach at Kaikoura to a sea-steading oil rig. Although to do so means losing everything she has known: leaving her life, not telling her parents or friends, nor seeing them again, in an act more selfish to them than what Winston has done to her, in order she can disappear into the silences where government spooks can’t hear. Although first there are two questions troubling her. What part in all that unravelled on the farm audit has been played by her new friend, diminutive, tattooed Beth Charrington, with her hacker past? More ominously, who is the pot smoking Philip K. Galt who has been installed to manage their farm, and who appointed him?

oh boy. MORE named characters.  At this point, frankly, I'm pretty lost about what the actual story is and who the protagonist is.

INCOME TAX AUDIT REFERENCE 19:84 - A MEMOIR BY JULIA SMITH is a 66,000 word literary fiction first novel, in which  the major characters of George Orwell’s 1984 are transported to the twenty first century

oh. It's Julia's story. Ok. You'll want to start with her then, and write this query about what choices she has to make.

and the age of Big Data where the taxing state has become the surveillance state, the taxing authorities unleashed in their police state powers by the aftershocks reverberating from the global financial crisis, tasked with extorting the money necessary to keep the crony zombie economies of the West on life support atop the  Keynesian hubris of debt built up over eighty years of profligate politicians bribing their electorates with the illusory promise of the free lunch offered by the welfare state. Depressingly, this is not a work of magical realism, fantasy or sci-fi;  no tax law, or privacy busting power of tax administration, have had to be changed or added to, for this novel to exist, which is written as the possible first part of a series set in the present day milieu of a coming economic collapse built on and dwarfing that from August 2008.

 You're writing a novel to make a point. This is always a huge red flag to me. I don't read novels to find out about the coming economic collapse. I read novels because I like good stories.

You're MUCH better off leaving out all the references to why you wrote the novel and just let the story entice me to read on. I'm a smart shark. I'll get what you're on about if you spin a good story.

Thank you for considering this work for representation.



[I have written to the literary agent of George Orwell's estate, A.M. Heath, for permission to use the characters of 1984 in this manner. Copyright for that work ends in six years. To date I've received no reply.]

Leave this out of the query


Summary of Submission:

Title: INCOME TAX AUDIT REFERENCE 19:84 - A MEMOIR BY JULIA SMITH

Genre: Literary Fiction

Word Count: 66,000 words.

Status: Sixth edit, and I'm putting in words I've previously taken out, so document now final. Considering professional edit.

Leave this out. I really really don't want to know how many edits you've done or if you lack confidence the novel is ready to show anyone. That's what "I'm considering a professional edit" means to me.

My Website: [redacted]

 Contact Details: Per signature below.

You have 1334 words in this query. A good taut query is 250.

You have too many characters, and too much of the book.

Go back and read the damn archives and find the many many places I've listed how to set up a query template to get plot on the page.

Limit your sentences to 10 words on the revision. Then figure out which sentences need to be longer. No sentence should be so long you can't say it aloud without taking a breath.

Queries are not novels. The style you employ for your novel may not work in your query.  Write your query to be read by someone reading at a brisk pace.

Start over.

#243

a. Word Count: 43,000
b. Title: Patrick – The Younger [Children's Historical Fiction]
c. Contact Info: (author name)

You know not to start with this because you read the archives. Don't start with this. Don't start with ANYTHING except Dear (name)

email: (author email)
phone: (phone number plus international dialing code)
web: (website)

You put this at the bottom of the query. It's housekeeping. Don't waste the most valuable real estate in a query on this stuff.

Because you include the international dialing code, I know you're not in the US.  It will help if you tell me where you are.  


And because you included your website I  took a look: You have a page labelled Publishers/Editors/Agents.  You can bet I clicked on that. An error 404 message popped up. Then you include instructions on how to click on a link--information that pretty much everyone knows by now.  And you have spelling errors.  And then the kicker: turns out you've got a book being published this year. A book you don't mention in your query.

The reason I mention all this is because when you send a query with a link to your website, you want to make sure the website is spruced up first.  No 404 error messages.  No missing pages.

And it's clear that your page is intended for your readers, younger kids.  You might want to rethink including the site in your query.  Because the tone is for young readers it sounds odd to me.






Query:

I know this is a query. You don't need to label it. 





Dear Editor [N.B. I searched then phoned but the publisher would not give me a name to send to... just 'Editor'.]

If you're submitting directly to a publisher, follow the directions on the publisher's website. Do not telephone to get a name if it says to submit to Submissions, or Editorial or Department XYZ. You'd be surprised how often people outsmart themselves by simply not following basic directions.


The most important reason to do that is that if you follow the directions, you're more likely to look competent.

The second reason to do that is that when the mail comes in, the person who sorts and delivers it is following a list. Mail for Editorial goes to the person whose job it is to sort incoming queries.  Mail to Editor Amazing goes to Editor Amazing, who puts it in a corner and there it sits. A publisher is not trying to trick you with submission guidelines. They're trying to give you information to get your query to the right person.  Trust them.


Patrik’s father has a plan for his son’s future, but the plan fits with Patrik’s heritage and not with Patrik’s desires or his personality.



 I"m sure there's a reason you're spelling Patrick without the C, but if you read as many queries as I do, this says dystopian or science fiction fantasy to me.  Since that's NOT what you're writing, you're sending the wrong signal. Even if his name is spelled without the C in the first part of the book, you don't have enough room here to explain that.

Also, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a LESS compelling hook for a book: a son doesn't want to do what his father has planned for him. 


Patrik will turn sixteen soon and then must follow his father’s footsteps. But on a sunny afternoon, raiders plunder their estate, murder family and workers, burn buildings, steal family treasures and snatch those people suitable for slavery.

What footsteps?
Is it important that we know the raid took place on a sunny afternoon rather than in the gloom of night, or the mist of dawn?  And frankly I'd be shocked if the raiders didn't do those things you mention.  They are, after all, raiders.

The core of the problem here is that you haven't started with anything unusual let alone enticing.  We're two paragraphs in and my Interest O'Meter is flat. Your language is flat, your word choices are flat, and you're telling us about murder and mayhem like it's a weather report.


Patrik is kidnapped with three others. He frees his mother’s maid, Finola, but in the process loses his only weapon. The raiders take Patrik and workers, Ardon and Nia, by cart then ship, and carry them far away. The three are separated and auctioned as slaves.

This is dull.  I'm sorry, but it's just plain dull.  It's like a police blotter report rather than an adventure novel.  I'm not going to read pages here because you are not showing me good writing.


One will never see the other two again.

This is the high point? We don't even know who you're talking about.

This is the true story of a real boy. A boy whose life is still spoken of and celebrated around the world over 1500 years after his death – for this boy grew to be the man who is now the Patron Saint of Ireland. Today he is known as Saint Patrick.



Oh good, he found his C.  At this point, you have failed to do the one thing you must do in a query letter: entice me to read on.  If there is interesting material in the book, you haven't gotten it on the page here.

Patrik – The Younger, at 43,000 words, is historical fiction for 10- to 14-year-old readers. This book could stand alone or be followed by one or two sequels, some of which has been drafted.


I believe Patrik – The Younger will fit well in the (name) catalogue and I thank you for this opportunity to submit my writing.

Kind regards


e: (author email)
p: (phone plus international code)
w: (website)







One thing you have to be is interesting and exciting if you want to write for kids. This isn't. Start over. Sprinkle some cayenne pepper into your word hoard and try again.

#242

Dear QueryShark:

His code name: Kangaroo. His special ability: The Pocket--a unique portal into an empty "pocket universe," which Kangaroo can use to smuggle contraband throughout the Solar System for his intelligence agency employers.

The bad news: Kangaroo sucks at being a spy.


Even equipped with state-of-the-art, 22nd-century biotechnology implants, Kangaroo keeps screwing up. Now his whole department is under internal investigation, and Kangaroo's handler sends him away: mandatory leave aboard an Earth-to-Mars pleasure cruise, where the agency's auditors can't reach him.


But even on vacation, Kangaroo can't seem to stay out of trouble.

First, there's an unexplained murder on the cruise ship, and security thinks Kangaroo is the prime suspect. Then a hijacker seizes control of the vessel, threatening to crash it into Mars Capital City, and Kangaroo risks exposing his true identity to help the crew take back their ship.


When he discovers another spy on board, conspiring with the hijacker and intimately familiar with agency tradecraft, Kangaroo must face the possibility that this act of terror is an inside job. Cut off from his support team and unsure whom to trust, can Kangaroo prevent an interplanetary war--and prove he has what it takes to be a real secret agent?


WAYPOINT KANGAROO is a 115,000-word science fiction spy thriller. This is my first novel.


Thank you for your time and consideration.





Let's do something a little different today. This query is a Win on the First Try.

Tell me why. Use the comment column below.

Introducing the Sharkives--revised

The amazing Michale Lewis has uploaded all the QueryShark archives to my DropBox account in pdf format.

The Sharkives are the QueryShark Archives in ten separate documents. Rather than clicking back and forth to each new entry, you can just scroll.

I think it's a great new tool for reading the archives.

If you'd like to receive these archives, send me a link to your dropbox account and I'll upload them to you. send me your email address and I'll add you to the Dropbox folder so you can share it.

Please list the email address you want me to use in the body of the email.

Your message should read: Please send an invitation to the Sharkives to: (email)

If you don't know what DropBox is, here's their site. 

If you have questions/problems, post them in the comments column. We'll get an FAQ started.

In the meantime, three cheers for Michael!

#241

Dear QueryShark:

Vani is an avid reader whose favourite author is Jane Austen. She dreams of becoming a teacher and marrying a man like Mr. Darcy. Instead, she becomes a live-in servant for a British family at Jacaranda, a magnificent colonial bungalow in Singapore, after she is forcibly married to her abominable uncle according to an ancient South Indian tradition.

This is a nice set up. I wonder who forced her to marry her uncle: her parents or the social norms of her community. It seems odd to have a tradition to marry a close blood relative, but I'm willing to suspend my skepticism and read on.

For any blog readers tempted to jump on the juxtaposition of "magnificent" and "bungalow" remember the Brits use bungalow to mean something quite different than we do. 


Vani is only fourteen. In between cleaning, she finds solace every afternoon in the countless books which line the shelves of every room while her husband tends the tropical garden. Within months, she is widowed. Soon after, her employer’s nephew, John, arrives from England. Before long, he is summoned home to attend to family matters.

There's no connection between John and Vani. There's no followup to her being widowed. A lot happens but it's not the plot.


When the coffee-coloured Vani bears a coffee-with-lots-of-milk-coloured Eurasian girl, Vani’s employer is suspicious and secretly plots to keep her unknowing nephew away from Singapore. While waiting for John to return, Vani juggles work, motherhood and night classes in the hope of being a teacher.

Ok, well, that is one way not to do plot: off the page. You've just skipped over the most important part of the story: John and Vani. Are they in love? He's part of her employer's family. I do NOT assume that she is in love with him at all.


It is the late fifties; anti-colonial sentiment is strong and Britain is losing her grip on Singapore. On the cusp of independence, with chronic unemployment and a dire housing shortage, the live-in servants, cocooned in comfort and security at Jacaranda, are not ready for an unpredictable future without their British employers. The impending reality is especially harrowing for Vani, who has a young child and does not know when, if ever, she will see John again.

That last sentence makes it sound like you're introducing Vani, when in fact the first two paragraphs are about her.  Suddenly introducing the wider world in paragraph three is jarring.  So far this has been a story about two people. Now it's about the end of colonial rule in Singapore.  You've got to blend these two aspects of the story.

Here's the description for UNDER THE BANYAN TREE which is about the changes wrought with the arrival of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia: 

For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours, bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Soon the family’s world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as the Khmer Rouge attempts to strip the population of every shred of individual identity, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of her childhood— the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival.

Spanning two decades, from British rule to a young Singapore going through a sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll phase, JACARANDA weaves a story of friendship, loyalty and hope, drawing parallels with the tide of uncertainty in a fledgling nation struggling against all odds to become self-sufficient.

This is all tell and no show. Because there's no plot I'm afraid the first couple of chapters will be only a series of events.  This is where I'd stop reading and send a form rejection.

JACARANDA is women’s fiction, complete at 69,000 words.

There is NO way in the world you can write a fully developed novel that spans two decades and is set in colonial Singapore in 69,000 words. This is the kind of book that needs to clock in close to  120K.  Detail takes time, and if you've got twenty years of events, those too take time.  If I hadn't already said no after the paragraph above, I would here.

Most of the time word count is a problem on the other end: too many. But historical novels (like this), fantasy, family sagas, novels with a BIG story---those need more words than a thriller, or a romance.


This is my first novel. My memoir, (title redacted) was published late last year.

It's crucial you include the publisher if you've had a book published before. 

Thank you for your time and consideration.


Kind regards


There's not enough here to pique my interest, and what is here isn't plot. The characters are almost two dimensional.   We have no sense of what they think or feel, let alone the choices they have to make.

#240

Dear Query Shark,

Sophie Anderson has finally accepted her fairly large butt and somehow managed to snag the coolest, hottest guy in school.  Are the two related?  Who knows and who cares.  Sophie’s sophomore year of high school is guaranteed to be totally awesome.

This does what it needs to do: I want to find out what happens next.

Then Anthony (who?)  cheats on her with his ex-girlfriend, Chelsea.  The same one he dumped so he could be with Sophie in the first place.  Ugh.  Seriously.  The irony would probably be hilarious if it wasn’t busy ruining Sophie’s life.  Probably.

When you introduce characters in a query, you can't label them and then name them. We don't know who Anthony is. We know she's with the coolest, hottest guy in school, but we didn't learn his name.

Is a sophomore in high school going to think this is ironic? And ironic while it's ruining her life?

This feels distant, like you're observing Sophie not actually showing us what she's feeling.

Now Sophie not only has to deal with her first heartbreak, which is like, the hardest thing ever, but she also has to see that homewrecker at school every freaking day, flaunting her non-boobs, raccoon makeup, and oompa loompa tan.  Once again, ugh.

I LOVE oompa loompa tan. I love it so much I can forgive almost everything else.

Then there’s that cute new guy.  Too bad he’s full of himself and has that way of getting under Sophie’s skin… but he has the softest, nicest looking hair and all she wants to do is run her fingers through it…

Remember the oompa loompa tan? I loved it cause it was fresh and funny.  Running her fingers through his hair isn't either of those.

 At least she has her friends to get her though it all.  Sure, they’re completely insane, but they’re all she has, and for some reason they put up with her insanity, too. With them around, Sophie may just get out of this unscathed.

Ok, you've avoided character soup here, that's good. But again, this feels distant "Insane" is how I describe my friends in a throw away comment. If I was REALLY describing them, I'd be more specific: they're slithery for starters, fierce, don't suffer fools gladly (or even at all), and funny.

Then again, this is high school, so probably not.

And that's funny too, but it's ironic and distant and I'm not sure it's the right tone BUT oompa loompa tan still keeps you on the plus side of things.

 BECAUSE I’M AWESOME is a 60,000 word Young Adult novel. 

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Wait, that's all? This is only half the story.  You have things that happen but NO PLOT! 

"Wait, wait," I hear you gasp, clutching your gold ticket to the QueryShark tank. "There's plot, look at all the stuff going on!"

Plot is not what happens. Plot is how the characters react to what happen. [I know this is true cause I read it in a comment on one of my blog posts!] We need a sense of the choices Sophie has to make, and the consequences.

And right now, this feels very thin to me in terms of what does happen.  I'm not well-read in the YA category but what I have read of contemporary YA seems to always involve MORE than just a romance. Something more is at stake. You need a subplot here, or a plot with the romance element is the subplot.

This is also what editors will call "too small" a book: there's not enough story there to carry a full book.

Go back and read your 20 favorite YA novels published in the last five years. (Yes, they MUST be published within the last five years)

When you read them, map the book's plot and subplot. See how they intertwine and relate. 

It's not enough to have one great phrase, you've got to also have one great plot. And you need to have a more immediate sense of Sophie and her friends in the query. We're can't be ironic observers, we need to be right there with her.

Research. Rewrite. Revise. Resend.

Revision takes time. Not just time to write, but time to think (and in this case research.)  More good writers shoot their career in the foot with impatience than anything else.

#239-Revised 2x

Second Revision

Dear QueryShark,

Kris Kennedy is living a nightmare.

A mental health counselor at Bison Mental Hospital in San Jose, California, one fateful day Kris is assigned a schizophrenic named Lorelei Cooper who turns up out of the blue at Bison. Within days of working with Lorelei, who acts extremely erratic around Kris, she quickly realizes that Lorelei has a disturbing fascination for her.

This is awkward nonrhythmic writing. I'd stop reading and send a form rejection after this first paragraph. Awkward writing in a query means awkward writing in the novel.


How to fix this: put the sentence in the right order first. Subject. Verb. Clause. Every sentence. Then, when you have the form right, you can revise it to be more artful. Right now this is a mess because you're not using this sentence structure on purpose to make a point. It's just raw.

One night Lorelei escapes the hospital, clearly having been let out. Kris's master set of keys are found near the crime scene. The janitor saw her come in late the night of Lorelei's escape. Offices were searched; Lorelei's shredded documents are found in Kris's office. Quickly everyone turns on her.

But Kris is innocent.

Her close friend and administrator at Bison, Mac, regretfully gives her an ultimatum, restrained by his primary obligation to the hospital: figure out who let Lorelei out soon, or risk being thrown in jail by the police for the crime you didn't commit, by the people who hate you: everyone. I'll send out search teams to find Lorelei, but you will still seem guilty unless you defend yourself, he advises. Kris knows that Lorelei, who is mentally unstable, could be a danger to the public, and especially to herself, since Lorelei has such a fixation with her.



The grammar here makes me weep. Even some quotation marks would help. If you don't know what's off here, it's time to do a refresher course. Honestly, I'm not a grammar Nazi, and which/that confounds me to this day, but this paragraph should sound wrong to you.  If it doesn't you need to recalibrate your ear.


Kris must figure out who the culprit is before it's too late, all the while battling her personal problems. And in the end, when all is said and done, she learns of a secret that changes her life forever.

"Learning a secret that changes her life forever" isn't the resolution of the book. If it changes her life forever, it's the start of the book. Also, I strongly urge you NOT to include the resolution of the book in the query.  The purpose of a query is to entice me to read the book. If I know how it ends why would I read it?




I grew up in San Jose, which is the reason why I set my novel, PUZZLES, there. I also write for a local newspaper, and have been published in many magazines.

PUZZLES is my debut suspense novel, and is complete at nearly 61,500 words.Thank you for your time and consideration.


 I'm not sure if you're revising too quickly, or in getting the query down to a manageable number of words the awkward writing is just more prominent.  Whatever the reason, it's the writing that's going to be the problem here now.

One of the ways to tune your ear to awkward writing is to read things aloud.  Read  books you love aloud. Or listen to them on tape.  Hearing things rather than just seeing them will help a lot.

Sentences have to flow. They have to have rhythm.  And you've got to be able to create sentences with flow and rhythm for the query to work.

-------

First Revision

Dear QueryShark,

    Kris Kennedy is living a nightmare.

    A mental health counselor at Bison Mental Hospital in San Jose, California, one fateful day Kris is assigned a schizophrenic in her fifties named Lorelei Cooper who turns up out of the blue at Bison as her patient. Within days of working with Lorelei, Kris quickly realizes that Lorelei seems to have an intense fascination for her, bordering on the disturbing. Lorelei acts very erratically around Kris. One day she'll be a sweet old woman, the next she'll try to bite Kris's hand off. Kris soon develops a fear for Lorelei, which is abnormal for a calm, stoic professional like Kris.

You're drowning in words here. All of this is backstory and set up. All we need to know Kris has a disturbing patient; one who is erratic and fixated on her.

   One night soon after Lorelei's arrival at Bison, she escapes the hospital, clearly having been let out by someone. And looking at the crime scene (Lorelei's room), it's not hard to see who did it: Kris's possessions are strewn round the crime scene. Plus, people saw her come in late during the night of Lorelei's escape, unusual for Kris. Quickly, everyone turns on Kris.

And again, too much information that we don't need. Lorelei escapes. Kris's possessions are strewn about her room. Kris gets blamed.

    But Kris is innocent. In fact, she only came in late that one night to grab her coat.

    So whodunit really?

One of the commenters to the original version (Raquel) pointed out that "whodunit" is both abrupt and too comical for the  rest of the query and I agree with that.

    Her close friend, and administrator at Bison, Mac, gives her an ultimatum: figure out who let Lorelei out soon, or risk being thrown in jail for the crime you didn't commit. Kris knows that Lorelei, who is extremely mentally unstable, could be a danger to the public, or especially to herself, since Lorelei has such a fixation with her. Kris realizes she must figured out who let Lorelei out before its too late.

Wow, Kris REALLY needs better friends. If any of my friends threatened to throw me in jail for a crime I didn't commit, I'd quit my job and move to Texas where they let you buy guns at the drive through window.

But what this really does is illuminate a key problem with the novel.  This isn't plausible.  Unless  the rule of law has ceased to apply in this novel, ordinary people can't just get their friends thrown in jail. Trust me, I've asked.

There has to be a plausible reason Kris is both accused/suspected of helping Lorelei escape, and why Kris has to find Lorelei on her own.

    Unfortunately, there's a billion other problems going on in Kris's life. She is suffering from intense depression, having killed her mother in a freak fireworks accident. Soon after she becomes involved in the mystery behind Lorelei's escape, an unknown stalker begins to terrorize her at night. Her best friend, and only source of support, Julia, begins to slowly drift away from Kris, tiring of Kris's misery. A new friend she makes, Eli, has ulterior motives, and after pretending to be friends with Kris and helping her to figure out whodunit, he uses the information they found together to try to solve the mystery himself, for the cash prize involved. In the end, when she finds out who the culprit is, she learns a secret about her mother that changes everything, including her life.

This is a list without any purpose to the plot.

    I grew up in San Jose, which is the reason why I set my novel, PUZZLES, there. I also write for a local newspaper, and have been published in many magazines, like (redacted). I have also won several writing contests.

Writing contests really don't count unless they're well known.

PUZZLES is my debut suspense novel, and is complete at nearly 61,500 words.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

You're well over the desirable word count here: 460 is  200 words too  many. The reason you want to adhere to word count is it forces you to write sparely, and focus on what matters.

You've got a lot of stuff that doesn't matter.  Take that out.  Focus on getting the plot on the page.

I'm glad you paid attention to the very astute commenters on the original post particularly those like Lauren H.T. who pointed out the problems with mental health nomenclature and description.

I think you're trying to revise too quickly here. This feels like you read all the comments and my critique and rushed to fix it.  That's good. What you're missing is the revision process.

You need to let your work sit for at least a day, maybe two. Then go back and figure out what you can take out.  Revising is almost always taking stuff out. 

All first drafts are dreadful. Novelist Bill Cameron once said "give yourself permission to suck" and that's really good advice.  Revision is where you get out of suck and into "this works." 

You've got some awkward constructions and some sentences in the wrong order.  It's easier to see that with fresh eyes.  

Revise. Wait. Revise. Wait. Revise. Resend.

----------------------
Dear QueryShark,

Life is out to get Kris Kennedy. Not to mention a crazy old woman, a stalker, etc.

etc? Et cetera is used at the end of a list to indicate that further, similar items are included. It's only useful if the reader already knows what that list would be. I have no idea what the next item on the list of things out to get Kris Kennedy is. Her girdle?  Her cat? A posse of clowns?

If I'd gotten this query for real, I would have stopped reading here.  (Scary isn't it)  Your first sentence should grab me, but if it doesn't it should at least not make me think Huh?

As a grieving young woman who burned her mother alive in a horrible accident, Kris, usually sharp, crisp, and at the top of her game, is drowning in depression.

And right here, my response is whaaat?  For starters, you'll want to reverse the order of these phrases--

 Kris, usually sharp, crisp, and at the top of her game, is drowning in depression. A grieving young woman who burned her mother alive in a horrible accident,

-- to get the description in logical order.

And really, you just can't leave us with nothing else about what happened to Kris' mom. It's too awful to leave hanging.  Either leave it out (you don't need to explain the cause of her depression) or elaborate.

One day, Kris, a mental counselor at Bison Mental Hospital in San Jose, California, is assigned a new patient, a brooding old woman named Lorelei Cooper who is sort of...creepy. Kris quickly realizes how pathologically insane Lorelei is. Soon, Lorelei escapes from Bison, let out by someone, and with some incriminating evidence, Kris is quickly under everyone's suspicions.

A mental counselor? I think you mean mental health counselor.  I'm not sure "pathologically insane" is something a mental (health or otherwise) counselor would say. It sounds awkward to me.  Also "sort of creepy" would seem to be a lay-person's description of someone, not a professional.

Also this doesn't make sense. If Kris is the counselor and Lorelei is her patient, there's paperwork attached to the case. Kris isn't going to "realize" how pathologically insane Lorelei is, cause it's going to be on the admittance form.  

And why is Kris under suspicion? She's a counselor not a guard. Or a nurse. Unless Lorelei escapes while Kris is meeting with her, why would she be the target of the investigation?

But whodunit really?

Kris, deep in peril, must battle her misery and investigate who let Lorelei out and framed her, before Lorelei, one of the most insane patients Bison has ever housed, does something dangerous to the public. She must solve the perfect crime before the police get involved and throw her in jail for the sin she didn't commit. With powerful enemies and fickle friends lurking, high stakes, little time, and a mystery maniacal stalker terrorizing her, Kris confronts truths, makes foes, and learns of the greatest deception of her life, an epiphany which rocks her to the core. Her journey is one fraught with danger, destiny, and above all, discovery, about life and all its own puzzles.

The stakes here are pretty abstract: something dangerous to the public. It's always better to have something specific. Lorelei has a long standing enmity toward someone and now she's out, she's going after him/her/them/it.

And the rest of this paragraph is too generalized to be useful.

Go in to the archives and read the posts. Look for the ones that show you how to get plot on the page. You don't have that here yet, and that's a fatal weakness in a query.

I grew up in San Jose, which is the reason why I set my novel, PUZZLES, there. I also write for a local newspaper, and have been published in many magazines (names mentioned.)  I have also won several writing contests. I have an interest in psychology and penning stories, and this book is the crossing point of those interests.

I have a personal aversion to the phrase "penning stories" because it evokes a sense of Victorian ladies at their escritoires with a damn feather.   It makes writing sound bloodless and I've seen the carnage y'all inflict on yourself and others.

PUZZLES is my debut mystery novel, and is complete at nearly 61,000 words.Thank you for taking the time to read my query. Thank you for your time and consideration.

61K is pretty short for a suspense novel, which is what this is.

Sincerely,

This isn't doing what a query needs to do: entice me to read on. Lorelei is a cardboard villain, the other villains (powerful enemies, fickle friends,  a mystery maniacal stalker) are one dimensional. 

The protagonist is a depressed woman who burned her mom alive. 

When you see the setup rephrased like this, you can understand why I'm not all that keen to spend the next three hours reading your novel.

Characters have to be enticing and interesting. They don't have to be paragons of virtue, in fact it's better if they aren't but they have to be interesting, and these aren't yet.

Here's one way to learn how to describe characters well in a query. 

1. Make a list of 20 books you've read that had characters you liked.  Books where you hope there's a sequel soon cause you want to go back to that world.

2. Look at the flap copy for those books and see how the characters are introduced. What words describe the character?  Make a list of the words. What does the character DO that reveals what they're like.  Dick Francis was a master of this. All of his heroes were essentially the same guy albeit with different names, circumstances and professions.

3. Look inside the book to see what the characters DO that reveal what they're like.

Analyze those lists and see how to do the same kind of thing in your book.

This is one of the reasons you keep a list of books you've read, and a notebook of observations, comments and tricks and tips you picked up from reading. 

#238-revised once

Dear Query Shark:

When the senior partner at his law firm directs Reed Sutcliff to bury a damning memo implicating his client in covering up defective heating units, he knows it’s wrong—continue down this path and he will lose his soul. Deciding he needs to put as much time and distance between himself and his current situation, Reed takes a sabbatical from his firm. Of course, he will miss his fiancée, Suzanne, but he has to sort this mess out.



You're writing like a lawyer and that is not a compliment.  Law school beats the "trust your reader" stuffing  right out of you.  Here at Fiction Central, trusting your reader to fill in the gaps will be an enormous asset not a liability. I know, it's a world gone mad.


By trusting your reader I mean you can leave out things. Consider: Asked to bury a damning memo, Reed Sutcliff knows he'll lose his soul if he continues working at his law firm.

There are two advantages to this: you cut the number of words spent on set up, and it's zippier.  I'll even spare my usual rant about starting with a clause rather than my preferred subject/verb/clause structure.




With the help of Suzanne’s father, a powerful member of Congress, he heads to a refugee camp on the Thai and Cambodian border and finds himself in the middle of a world of dire suffering. There he meets Claire, a remarkably caring, gifted, and enigmatic woman—who is also a Catholic nun. Although she initially gives Reed the cold shoulder, his tenacious attempts to befriend her pays dividends.

And here's just more set up. It's not that big a deal that he meets someone in his travels. I'd be shocked if he didn't. It's not a big deal she gives him the cold shoulder, he's probably utterly useless at refugee work, and certainly if he's trying to hustle her in to the sack she's not going to just fall all over him.

What's the story here? Why does he persist? What is it about her/the situation that calls to him. For that matter why the hell is he in Cambodia in the first place.  Unless it's listed under Places to Save Your Soul in Lonely Planet, there must be something there.

But all that matters not a whit cause what you don't have here is PLOT.



After they have several harrowing scrapes with corrupt border operatives, most notably a murdering wretch named Dith, and amid the daily chaos, Reed eventually finds himself falling for Claire. He’s certain nothing can come of it; still, he can’t shake these feelings. He’s bewitched.


"Murdering wretch" is such an unequal pairing that it made me laugh. It's like nefarious unicorn or wily sloth.  


And still, despite those murderous wretches and their nefarious ways, There Is No Plot here.

And the irony of a Catholic nun being "bewitching" is not only not lost on me, it makes me wonder if you don't realize how funny it is.  Witches not being something nuns aspire to and all.

When Claire winds up in the hands of Dith, Reed takes a risky course of action to rescue her that results in his expulsion from Thailand and lands him back in the States. Now what? Should he return to the life he had—Suzanne, money, power, and prestige—the good life, or should he leave it all and return to Thailand for seemingly unrequited love? No doubt, it’s messy, but life and love often are.



Winds up in the hands of? She hailed a cab and he was driving? He hijacked her mule? She took a wrong turn at the footbridge?

And sadly, this reveals the problem with the novel: Reed is kind of lame. Why is he dithering if the woman he loves is in the hands of a murdering wretch? He's going to leave her there and return to the vapid Suzanne and her porkbarrel paterfamilias?

I understand this is not a romance, but the idea that he just leaves her there makes me wonder why I ever got in book with this guy.




THE UPPER AIR is a 96,000 word romantic novel set in 1980. It is my first novel.

 Oh wait, it is a romantic novel.

Ok, I take it all back. Reed better get his asterisk back over there and rescue her.


This is still not working. There's no plot, there's too much dithering and Reed is a damp rag of a hero. 

This whole query needs a good stiff dose of starch. There's not enough substance here to entice me to read on. Come to think of it, that's what I said on the first version of this too.


---------------
Dear QueryShark:

I see from your Publishers Marketplace listing that you have represented Book/Author XYZ.

This makes me crazy. It's akin to saying "hi, I see you are breathing."  What you need here is WHY you're mentioning Book/Author XYZ.

Yes, I represent Jeff Somers. So? Unless you are writing top notch commercial urban fantasy like TRICKSTER, it doesn't matter that I rep him.

Also, you want to be VERY careful about Publisher's Marketplace.  Unless you've actually read the book that's listed, it's very easy to think it's a comp title when it isn't. Remember, Publishers Marketplace lists books before they have been published.

And the ten-twenty word buzz phrase that's listed in Pub Mkt is NOT a reliable indicator of whether the book is a good comp for your book. Trust me on this please.

Comp titles should be published books. If you want to use a comp, you say I see you represent Jeff Somers, author of Trickster. Readers who like Trickster (like me!) are the audience for this book.


Reed Sutcliff sits on a bench looking out over a frozen Lake Michigan wondering, Where in the heel did it all go wrong?  As a successful attorney, he had it all complete with a beautiful fiancée, Suzanne Warner, and her well-connected father, a powerful member of Congress.  Reed's charmed life crashes down on him when the head partner in his firm asks him to engage in some questionable ethics and tactics.

Where in the heel?
This is a textbook illustration of the value of reading your query out loud. You'd have heard heel and known in wasn't the word you meant to use. Your spell czech does not recognize homonyms as errors.

Also, this setup doesn't make Reed Sutcliff sound enticing or interesting. He had a charmed life? I'm kinda glad life has taken a turn for the worse for him then. 

Also, "asks him to engage in questionable ethics and tactic" makes Reed's charmed life crash around his head? Unless Reed is facing jail time, this doesn't seem all that serious. It makes Reed sound naive and wet behind the ears. Those qualities are not the qualities of a romantic novel hero. 

To try and sort out his life, with the help of Suzanne's father, he goes to a refugee camp along the Thailand and Cambodian border.  There he meets Nicki, a remarkably caring and gifted woman—who is also a Catholic nun.  At the camp, he witnesses the terrible condition and treatment of the refugees.  During several excursions outside the camp, he encounters a nasty border operative named Dith.

This is actually where your story starts. I'll eat my rosary if a Catholic nun is named Sister Nicki though.

And you'll notice that your main character is very passive here. He's witnessing and encountering. He's not involved. He doesn't really seem to have anything at stake. He's a cardboard cutout of a character. This bodes ill for my interest in spending several hundred pages with him.

Reed's growing attraction to Nicki adds to his confusion regarding his life.  Besides his uncertainty concerning his career, he must now sort out his feelings for Nicki and then reconcile them with his relationship with Suzanne.  Of course, it won't be easy.  Love never is.

This is tepid. You've got to insert some vim and vinegar in this narrative or it will be too flat to hold anyone's interest.

THE UPPER AIR is a 96,000 word romantic novel set in 1980.  It is my first novel.

Sincerely,



Contrast what you wrote with the jacket copy of another male protagonist romantic novel THE CHOICE by Nicholas Sparks:

Travis Parker has everything a man could want: a good job, loyal friends, even a waterfront home in small-town North Carolina. In full pursuit of the good life-- boating, swimming, and regular barbecues with his good-natured buddies--he holds the vague conviction that a serious relationship with a woman would only cramp his style. 

That is, until Gabby Holland moves in next door. Despite his attempts to be neighborly, the appealing redhead seems to have a chip on her shoulder about him . . . and the presence of her longtime boyfriend doesn't help. Despite himself, Travis can't stop trying to ingratiate himself with his new neighbor, and his persistent efforts lead them both to the doorstep of a journey that neither could have foreseen. 

Spanning the eventful years of young love, marriage and family, THE CHOICE ultimately confronts us with the most heartwrenching question of all: how far would you go to keep the hope of love alive?

Can you see the difference? For starters the language is more vibrant. Second, we see the tension and understand the plot, and what's at stake.

Romance novels aren't plot driven, so everything depends on writing characters we want to spend time with, that we care about.

I'd suggest reading more of them to really see this. Read as a writer does: watching how the author turns a phrase, introduces a character, keeps you reading on. It's helpful to keep a writer's journal where you write this stuff down. The act of writing helps you understand things more fully, and helps you remember stuff. Just READING isn't enough if you're analyzing books.

Thanks

The overwhelming response to my frustration Sunday night was both helpful and heartwarming. Thank you.

It's clear QueryShark archives have value and should continue.

It's clear that most writers understand the value of having their work in the archives, and the revision process available for other writers to benefit from.

With that in mind there is a change in the QueryShark submission process:

1. Every submission must include a phrase agreeing to be posted and archived.

2. The option to have your work removed is gone.


Because this is a major change in the submission agreement, ALL queries are being discarded as of this morning.

IF your query was not posted, and you wish to be considered you MUST SEND AGAIN.

You MUST use the new submission policy.

It's spelled out here.

My patience is at zero

There have been several writers who've submitted queries to QueryShark recently, had the query posted and critiqued, only to ask to take it down shortly thereafter with NO revising.

The value of QueryShark is in the archives, everyone learning from the work of other writers.

It's also a complete waste of my time to critique a query and then have it taken down. Given I spend more than an hour, frequently several, on each entry, you can understand my patience is wearing thing for this kind of thing.

So, help me out.

Do I:

1. Remove the provision that allows writers to remove their work at will?

2. Require that the query be posed for a minimum length of time?

3. Turn off comments for the first week the query is posted?

4. Throw in the towel and let the archives serve their purpose, with no new entries?

5. Something else?

Input needed. Input received. It was VERY helpful, thank you.

#236-revised twice FTW

Dear QueryShark:

Ariel Cordova's soon to be dead husband calls to say he loves her, he's sorry, and he doesn't think they know about her. He directs her to leave Texas, go into hiding and find the clue he tucked away in her books explaining his perilous predicament.

oh yes! yes! Yes!!!! MUCH better!

An assassin's bullet keeps him from warning her of the rogue C.I.A. operative demanding the return of four million dollars. Or the blackmailer who has stolen the digital plans for Jester, part of a missile launching system he was unwittingly designing for the spook.

Across the country in Granite Pointe, New Hampshire, when Ariel escapes a kidnapping she's forced to hire Marco Romano, security and protection specialist and notorious playboy. Rebuffing his advances will be as challenging as avoiding kidnappers and killers. In the end, she teaches Romano to be a better man while he helps her to find personal strength she wasn't aware she possessed.

The only chance of survival will be to identify and capture the blackmailer, destroy the plans for Jester, keep it from being used against American targets, and stop a murderer from adding them to his growing list of dead bodies.

At 82,300 words, KEEP AWAY is a Romance.

I left a few strings untied to allow for a sequel which I'm currently working on.

Thank you for your time and attention. 


You've got all the pieces in the right place now and I think this is pretty spiffy. Let it sit a week, then pare and prune as needed but don't fuss yourself in to not sending.

Good luck!


-------------------
Dear QueryShark:

Ariel Cordova's soon to be dead husband calls to say he's sorry, he doesn't think they know about her and she should leave Texas and go into hiding.

An assassin's bullet stops him from warning her of the rogue C.I.A. operative who wants his client's four million dollars back.

Those troublesome double subjects. When you have the CIA guy acting for someone else, you end up with sentences flailing from too many people.

How about this:  CIA operative who wants a four million dollar refund.

In a query, you don't have to spell out every connection. The CIA guy wants the money back for someone else it's true, but in this form, you don't have to explain that. It's enough for our purposes here to know he wants it.


Or the blackmailer who has stolen the digital plans for Jester, a navigation system for a missile launcher he was unwittingly designing for the spook and his buyers, some not so nice people with a grudge against the United States.

and you've got the same convoluted problem here too.

Across the country in Granite Pointe, New Hampshire, Ariel wants to settle in to an anonymous life, stay off the radar of her husband's killer, and avoid the charms of Marco Romano, security specialist and notorious playboy.

Can you say that sentence in one breath? If NOT then it's too long.

After a run-in with a bungling F.B.I. poser, a nervous man who knows all about jester,Jester she's forced to hire Romano for protection and investigation.  Not willing to join Romano's fan club of bimbos, she attempts to train the dog in the ways of monogamy while he digs to find the truth.

You need to be careful here. If Romano's fans are "bimbos" and he's the romantic lead...that makes OUR girl one of the bimbos.  You don't need to characterize his "fan club" as more than that. We get it.

Also why is she training him for monogamy if she doesn't want to join his fan club. You're revealing too much here. "Forced to hire" gives us the sense she doesn't want to be around him. What's missing is what changed her mind.


In her book collection hides a clue, an explanation and the location of the money.  The only chance they have at making a life together, or living at all, will be to identify and capture the blackmailer, recover and destroy the plans for Jester, and stop a killer from adding them to his growing list of dead bodies.

In her book collection hides a clue.  In this sentence awkward rhythm prevails.  I've jumped up and down endlessly about the value of putting sentences in the "right" order: subject verb object.  If you need to gussy it up after you see it in that form, do so. START with the simple. Then gild.

At 82,300 words, Keep Away is crime romance.
Ah, MUCH better title.

I'm not sure what a crime romance is. At some point we'll need to figure out if this is going to crime editors or romance editors.  I think it's romance.

I left a few strings untied to allow for a sequel which I'm currently working on.

Thank you for your time and attention.






One of the things about revising is when you do one round, it often reveals things you didn't see on the first round. Thus this is better but still not there.



----------------
Dear QueryShark:

Arial Cordova's soon to be dead husband calls to say he's sorry, he doesn't think they know about her and she should leave Texas and go into hiding.

This is a great opening. I particularly like "soon to be dead."  It puts us in the moment and creates instant tension.

Contrast that to what I see a lot of--backstory: "Arial's husband was killed in the middle of a phone call warning her..."

See the difference? 

An assassin's bullet ends his life before he can tell her of the ex-C.I.A. operative who wants his four million dollars back, or the blackmailer who has stolen the digital plans for Jester, a treasonous weapon her husband was unwittingly designing for the former spook.

Ok, here we get a little muddled.  "Treasonous weapon" isn't very clear. Because of that wonderful first line, I have confidence in the writer though, so I'd keep going.

The good thing though is that we instantly see the problem, and what's at stake.



Across the country in Granite Pointe, New Hampshire, Arial would like nothing more than to blend with the community and avoid the charms of Marco Romano, local security specialist and notorious playboy. However, a bungling F.B.I. impostor, and a kidnapper hired by an elusive stranger in the neighborhood are keeping her from settling into a new life.

Now this is interesting because the tone changes.  It's not a high stakes thriller, it's more of a down home cozy. Can you have both? Well, not really. This isn't a deal-breaker though. I'll keep reading because there's nothing here that goes splat. It's just going in a direction other than what I thought--not always a bad thing.



If Arial can't find the clue her husband said he left in her book collection and stop his killer from adding her to his growing list of dead bodies, she won't get the chance to live happily ever after.

Err...living happily ever after is NOT what can be at stake for a mystery or thriller.  There has to be a real problem that has an impact on other people.  Happily ever after is what's at stake in a romance novel.

So, I'm confused, but I like the writing.  Not a deal breaker yet.



At 82,300 words, The Jester Project is crime fiction with some laughs and a little romance.

TERRIBLE title because it sounds like a thesis for an undergraduate degree at Clown College (a college I always wanted to attend in fact...it was run by Ringling Bros.--but I digress)

So, here's the rub. This isn't really crime fiction since what's at stake is romance. And there's not enough here about the romance to make me think it's a solid romance.






I left a few strings untied to allow for a sequel which I'm currently working on.


I love this line. It's funny and fresh. It makes me think I'd like the writer, that s/he'd be fun to work with.


Thank you for your time and attention.

And the writer hasn't made an crazy claims of self-importance or included pictures of his/her cat, rat or alpaca--all good things to avoid.

This is good, but not really good enough. To work it needs better stakes, a better description of the weapon (and what would happen if it got in the wrong hands) and a new title won't hurt.

 Revise, resend.

#235-revised 3x

Dear Query Shark:

For 26-year-old Promised Savior, John, life changes forever when he grows fond of a bar girl, Tanya, and struggles to decide between human bondage and a divine duty.


Are you getting tired of listening to me yammer about putting things in the right order in sentences? I'm getting tired of repeating it but it doesn't seem to be getting through.

This opening sentence starts with a clause, not the subject. 
Start with the subject. John. 
Then the verb. John's life changes forever. 
Then the clause. John's life changes forever when he must choose between human bondage and divine duty.

Can you see the difference? 

The reason this is important is twofold: it's stronger writing, and it's easier to understand.

Once you get the sentence in the right order, smaller problems are easier to see. Smaller problems like what the hell is human bondage?

On a quest to find a middle path of reconciliation, John lands into a part of India simmering with the six-month-old communal conflicts that started in December 1992.  The all-round suffering and violence push him into a spiritual cul-de-sac, where priests, pujaris and maulvis bay for every Tanya’s blood.

Put the sentence in the right order: India simmers with communal conflicts in December 1992. 
Smaller problems: everything else.

On John’s lookout is a fugitive Roman priest, who carries the gift of a two millennium old secret. Generations of the dying priest have scouted for a virgin-born Savior like John, who can convince the world about the reality of the Last Gospel of Jesus.

This paragraph makes no sense.  Phrases I don't understand: "on John's lookout" "fugitive Roman priest"  "generations of the dying priest." 

The heartrending gospel of worldly bliss removes John’s blinkers. As he  accepts Tanya’s hands and prepares to preach a new message of salvation,  a revenge-seeking journalist reveals the shocking conspiracy behind the tale of his sacred birth. Now, John must prove to his betrayed followers even a disgraced mortal can be a true messenger of God. If he fails, the world will never hear the redeeming songs of the Last Gospel..

At 100,000 words, The LAST GOSPEL is a literary fiction based on the theme of the Second Coming.

I’ve extensively reported on religious and political issues as a professional journalist for 20 years. .

Thanking you for your time and consideration.


This isn't getting better. You're not doing what's been suggested in the previous critiques.  You don't have to implement my suggestions if you don't want to, but you do have to improve.  Right now, I don't see that.

Start with simple sentences. Be clear about what John wants. Be clear about what is keeping him from getting what he wants.  Make every sentence less than 10 words. That will force you to take out all the adjectives, adverbs and clauses.

That will become your skeleton. From there you can add things, but you have to START with that basic form.

Revise. Resend.


--------------------------------------------------------

Dear Query Shark:

When a faith healer and promised Savior of the Second Coming, John can’t revive a dying child, he senses the urgency to tackle its possible cause: A raging conflict between his prophesied duty and fondness for a bar girl, Tanya. At stake is his evangelical mission, the faith of his virgin mother, his mentor priest and thousands of followers.

This is very awkward writing. One of the reasons is because you're starting with two clauses rather than the main sentence.  I have GREAT fondness for subject/verb/object structure in query letter sentences. It establishes a base rhythm for your query and you can alter the cadence when it makes sense to do so.  This is what you agents call "being in control of your writing."  You're not being awkard on purpose to make a point. You're awkward here cause you are writing as if you're talking.

And you're trying to stuff too much in to one paragraph: faith healer, promised Savior, dying child, raging conflict, prophesied duty, bar girl, evangelical mission, virgin mothe, mentor priests, thousands of followers.

Any ONE of those would be the subject of an entire paragraph. 

By way of comparison here's the blurb for Dan Brown's DaVinci Code:

A murder in the silent after-hour halls of the Louvre museum reveals a sinister plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ. 


The victim is a high-ranking agent of this ancient society who, in the moments before his death, manages to leave gruesome clues at the scene that only his granddaughter, noted cryptographer Sophie Neveu, and Robert Langdon, a famed symbologist, can untangle. 

The duo become both suspects and detectives searching for not only Neveu's grandfather's murderer but also the stunning secret of the ages he was charged to protect. Mere steps ahead of the authorities and the deadly competition, the mystery leads Neveu and Langdon on a breathless flight through France, England, and history itself. 

After months of prayers and penance in a distant region, when John can’t regain his peace and healing touch, he prepares to live a life in obscurity. That’s when a dying Roman priest provides him refuge and a two millennium old secret. Generations of the fugitive priest had guarded the last gospel of Jesus and awaited a Savior like John, who could convince the world Christ passionately loved Mary Magdalene and sang the virtue of earthly bliss before his Ascension.

You're trying to tell too much of the story here.

The gospel opens John’s eyes: If Jesus doesn’t see human bondage as sin, why can’t he embrace Tanya and carry on with his Divine duty?

And here again, too much.


Hand-in-hand with Tanya, when John prepares to resume his mission and preach The Last Gospel, a revenge-seeking journalist unearths the scandalous conspiracy behind his sanctified birth. Now, John faces another challenge: To prove to his betrayed followers that with the power of love and compassion each of us – whether the Chosen son of God or a mere mortal – can be a true healer of body and soul.

And this is the ending of the book. A query is NOT a synopsis or a description of the whole book. A query has ONE goal: entice the agent to read more. If you tell me how the book ends, you've removed any reason to read it.

At 100,000 words, The LAST GOSPEL is a literary fiction.



I’ve extensively reported on religious and political issues as a professional journalist for 20 years. .



Thanking you for your time and consideration.

Simplify this. Get down to basics. What does John want. What's keeping him from it? Give us a sense of the time and place the story takes place in.

Right now this is an overstuffed sofa on skates. 

 
--------------
Dear Query Shark:

Tall, dreamy-eyed, and three months short of thirty, Master John falters on his divine mission when a mystique bar girl, Tanya trespasses into his evangelical life. If he lets her tarry there, he’ll betray his virgin mother and millions of Christians who see him as the Promised Savior of the Second Coming.

Some of this word choice may simply be cultural (the writer is not American): "dreamy-eyed" is not something an American reader would associate with a handsome man.  He might be called "dreamy" if he were  60's heartthrob of some kind (ex. what Doris Day calls Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk) but it's not a word a contemporary reader would resonate with.


And "mystique" is an aura, not a state of being.  Someone has mystique (Thomas Pynchon! Greta Garbo!) but they are not called mystique writer or mystique actor.


When I see this in the opening paragraph of a query, I know I'll see it in the novel.  Sometimes this can work to your advantage if you use words in a fresh, new way.  This isn't that.  This is confusing.  That's NOT what you want.

Here's where the value of an American English beta reader comes in handy.  Even Brit writers need an American reader if they are querying here. There are some words that simply do NOT mean the same thing here as they do there.


And if he shuts the door on her, he dies of a broken heart!

This is a tad melodramatic isn't it?  And as consequences go, I gotta say...so what?  I haven't come to know or care about the characters yet. They can defenestrate themselves with impunity at this point.

In a theater of religious fanaticism, violence and death, John receives a rare gift: The Last Gospel, preserved by a fugitive Catholic sect through generations. Only a Savior like John could convince the world Jesus sang such a sweet sermon of earthly bliss in between the Resurrection and his Ascension. The gospel opens John’s eyes: God wouldn’t have created this Eden if he wanted his children to practice renunciation.

Theatre? You're using this like theatre in "theatre of war" but this isn't taking place across a wide swath of Europe or the South Seas as far as I can tell.  Thus, it's the wrong word.



Practice renunciation?  I actually called on a friend, a former monk to see what this meant, and he didn't know.  Thus again, confusing.


Hand-in-hand with Tanya when John prepares to unveil the supreme message of The Last Gospel, the Serpent coils up. A revenge-seeking journalist unearths the explosive truth behind John’s sanctified birth. Now, he can strip the Savior of divinity and leave him to the mercy of his betrayed followers.



At stake is not only a life, but a gospel that can reconcile Tanya and God in every troubled soul.

oh dear, this sounds like some sort of parable.

The LAST GOSPEL is a 100,000 word literary fiction based on the theme of the Second Coming.

It's not "a fiction" which is what you're saying here if you strip out the word count and the adjectives.  You're writing a novel.  Thus: The LAST GOSPEL is literary fiction, 100,000 words, and based on the theme of the Second Coming.


And if I can talk you out of including any talk about theme/purpose/intent when querying about a novel, I will count this a good day's work.  Leave it OUT. Let the story lead the reader to conclude what the book is about.


I’ve extensively reported on religious and political issues as a professional journalist for 20 years. .

Thanking you for your time and consideration.



This is a LOT better than the first iteration, but it's still a form rejection.




Focus on the elements of the story. Leave out all the folderol which is Sharkspeak for fancyschmancy. Just tell the story as PLAINLY as you can.







------------------
Dear Query Shark,

What if you grow up believing you are the Chosen Son of God born of a virgin mother? What if the Church has forecast your birth as the fulfillment of the Second Coming prophecy? What if a revenge-seeking journalist is out to prove you are an impostor? Will you lead a reclusive life as the promised Savior, or marry a Hindu bar girl and enjoy the bounties of creation? Will you choose your own life over salvation of the world?


This is the classic example of why you should not ever start your query with a rhetorical question, let alone a series of them. You're writing a letter to me, and I am not marrying a Hindu bar girl no matter how well she cooks.

Also, there's no context of any kind here. "You" ie me is not the protagonist of the story. What choice I would make is utterly irrelevant. What choice your main character makes---that's what we want to know about. That's where the story lies.

The rule of "don't start with a rhetorical question" is a rule for a reason. You can break it ONLY if you improve your query. This doesn't. This isn't enticing.



These are the questions Master John must resolve in The Last Gospel, a 1000,000 words literary fiction.

I'm really REALLY hoping you don't mean 1,000,000 words cause one million words is about ten times too many. It's really ok to abbreviate word count as 100K, or however many thousands of words your novel is. It might help you avoid this kind of glaring error that, if I had kept reading, would make me stop now.




Unable to any more preach the gospel of morality during the day while thirsting for love in the loneliness of night, John flees Goa and takes refuge in Kerala. In that war zone of Christianity, Hinduism and Islam, suffering, fanaticism, violence, death and a series of events open his eyes: A loving Father would never deprive his sons and daughters of the fruits of His own creation and set them against one another.


This is so general as to be meaningless. I had to look up Goa and Kerala. They're both places in India, but I didn't know that for sure. I have no idea what any of the rest of that means because I don't know what the story is here.



John now wants to embrace Tanya and spread the supreme message of Love and Joy, but he may be risking his life. His followers disown the Savior who does not preach abstinence, and the journalist zeroes in on the scandalous story of his birth. Will there be any taker for the preacher of The Last Gospel?

Who's Tanya? Right here your reader is adrift in information but there's nothing enticing. For all intents and purposes this is Stranger in A Strange Land without Mars, set in India.


Set in the former Portuguese colony of Goa, The Last Gospel is based on extensive research and may well trigger a major controversy across the Christian world.

This last phrase is the kind of hyperbolic over-statement that even if you had written a magnificent query would make me reach for the rejection form. It demonstrates unrealistic expectations about the  reality of publishing: you'll be lucky if people read it, let alone care enough to protest about it.



I am (job) of India’s (newspaper). I was also associated with the country’s (other newspaper) for eight years.



I look forward to hearing from you.



Sincerely,




Once you get rid of the rhetorical questions and the absurd estimates of the novel's impact, you're still left with generalities and little to entice me to read pages.

Start over.

Use the formula in the archives to get your plot on the page. There's a lot to be said for just plain straightforward writing. And it's a whole helluva lot harder than it looks.