#65-Revisions

SECOND REVISION



Title: Doorways and Mirrors
Genre: Women's fiction

Liz is a happy go lucky girl with a problem. She is having panic attacks, and she wants to know why. The merry go round of doctors she visits are of no help at all. Liz is a patient adrift in the wonderful world of western medicine, experiencing a frightening and embarrassing health crisis that culminates in a complete loss of self esteem, getting fired from her job and losing her health care coverage. She is determined to find a cure and goes on a desperate search for sanity in an insane, drug obsessed country where insurance companies rule, television offers treatments and physicians are demoted to “prescribers.”

After a frustrating three year search for answers through the labyrinth of conventional and alternative medicine, she finds the root of the problem while watching an HBO special on drug issues facing the elderly: an over the counter drug interaction.

In Doorways and Mirrors, Liz goes on a journey of healing and self discovery similar to Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love. She draws on spiritual strength, philosophy and a whole lot of humor to find answers, and reclaim her health:


I'm sorry but I don't want to read novels about health care. I want to read novels about people. Jodi Picoult writes very compellingly about a health care issue in My Sister's Keeper. Here's the first paragraph of the jacket copy:

Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate--a life and a role that she has never challenged...until now.
Now you tell me if you can stand not knowing what happens. Yes, it's about health issues, but mostly it's about Anna and how we now have an instant sense of her, and what the stakes are.


Liz Riser walked out of the tri county community-health clinic in a complete huff, frustrated with the commercialized pill pushing industry of modern medicine only to get in the car and hear her trusty radio ask if “Viagra is right for me.” As she drove down the street, her heart raced. Her face flushed. She felt that ol' dreaded wave adrenaline surge upward, overpowering her for the millionth time. She panicked. She clutched her chest. She was dying, over and over again, and none of the doctors could tell her why. Even worse, she was convinced that for the most part, they did not even care.

She pulled over and dialed 911, for the third time that week.

Don't put your first paragraph in your query letter. Particularly without mentioning that's what you're doing. It's jarring in the extreme.

This is a story of white coats and co-pays, shamanic healers and scammers, all mixed up in the day to day life of a working mother with bills to shuffle, laundry to ignore, and the frightening thought that Richard Simmons might really be her friend for three easy payments of $19.95.


The author is a congressional policy liaison with a wide base of knowledge on women’s health, alternative medicine, and the structure problems of our conventional medical/insurance systems. She has co-authored two privately published works of non-fiction for corporate clients, and this is her first novel.


Pages are available on request.



You're getting lost in all this description. You can distill this all down to: Liz is a happy go lucky girl who suddenly finds herself having panic attacks and can't understand why. She's got the same problems everyone else does, so why is she suddenly dialing 911 every day thinking she's dying?

And then you can get into why we should care about her.

This still has the feeling of a novel that's written to rally people to a cause, and that never goes over very well. The story has to come first. Much like Jodi Picoult's novel is not couched as an exploration of right and wrong, but as a novel about people facing choices, your novel needs to be about Liz first and foremost.

Form rejection
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FIRST REVISION:

Dear Query Shark:


Title: Doorways and Mirrors
Genre: Women's fiction


Liz is a happy go lucky girl with a problem. She is having panic attacks, and she wants to know why. The merry go round of doctors she visits are of no help at all. Liz is a patient adrift in the wonderful world of western medicine, experiencing a frightening and embarrassing health crisis that culminates in a complete loss of self esteem, getting fired from her job and losing her health care coverage. She is determined to find a cure and goes on a desperate search for sanity in an insane, drug obsessed country where insurance companies rule, television offers treatments and physicians are demoted to “prescribers.”


After a frustrating three year search for answers through the labyrinth of conventional and alternative medicine, she finds the root of the problem while watching an HBO special on prescription drugs issues for the elderly: an over the counter drug interaction.

In Doorways and Mirrors, Liz goes on a healing journey of self discovery similar to Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love. She draws on spiritual strength, philosophy and a whole lot of humor to find answers, and reclaim her health.

You've already said this is a novel. Eat, Pray, Love is a memoir, not a novel.



Liz Riser walked out of the tri county community-health clinic in a complete huff, frustrated with the commercialized pill pushing industry of modern medicine only to get in the car and hear her trusty radio ask if “Viagra is right for me.” As she drove down the street, her heart raced. Her face flushed. She felt that ol' dreaded wave adrenaline surge upward, overpowering her for the millionth time. She panicked. She clutched her chest. She was dying, over and over again, and none of the doctors could tell her why. Even worse, she was convinced that for the most part, they did not even listen.

She pulled over and dialed 911, for the third time that week.

This is an abrupt shift from the query letter to the first page of the book, with no warning.

This is a story of white coats and co-pays, shamanic healers and scammers, all mixed up in the day to day life of a working mother with bills to shuffle, laundry to ignore, and the frightening thought that Richard Simmons might really be her friend for three easy payments of $19.95.

You've just got too much going on here. The tone alternates between funny, and sort of pathetic. I don't know what to think about Liz, and I don't have much sympathy for her. And Richard Simmons is a weight loss guru, not anyone associated with therapy. (I had to look up Richard Simmons website just to make sure he hadn't become a therapist since I'd last heard of him and was fortunate enough to find this youtube of his appearance on Whose Line Is It Anyway-this is NOT for anyone who finds sexually nuanced jokes in bad taste. I laughed for ten minutes)

The author is a congressional policy liaison with a wide base of knowledge on women’s health, alternative medicine, and the structure problems of our conventional medical/insurance systems. She has co-authored two privately published works of non-fiction for corporate clients, and this is her first novel.

You don't need qualifications to write a novel. From this though I get the idea that you want to use this novel to illuminate problems in the structure our conventional medical/insurance systems. I'm always leery of books that start from a prescriptive premise. Start with the story. The prescriptive flows from the story not the other way around.

Don't talk about yourself in the third person in a query letter.

Pages are available on request.

This is a form rejection.







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ORIGINAL

Dear Query Shark,

I am dipping my toes in the water to give you something to chew on. Enjoy the feast:

Title: Doorways and Mirrors
Genre: Women's fiction


“I think I’m allergic to Pop Tarts. Or maybe it was the Advil, or the Pepsid. I also ate my kids Flintstones vitamin that day, so maybe that’s what put me in the hospital on deaths door in a full blown tachycardia. I'm not sure, but I’m not taking any chances Doc. I’m not taking any more pills.”

“Panic attacks and anxiety disorders are common Liz. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We just need to look at the root cause…together.”

At that moment laser beams shot from my eyes and melted that creepy councilor's sappy face to the floor. Anxiety disorder? Give me an ever lovin break. I’m trying to find the source of a life threatening allergy here, and this bitch is going all Sigmund Freud on me.

“I am NOT paying for this. I'm NOT a psycho.”

I walked out of the tri county community counseling center in a complete huff, only to get in the car and hear my trusty radio ask if “Viagra is right for me.” My heart raced. My face flushed. I felt that ol' dreaded wave adrenaline surge upward and overpower me for the millionth time. I felt like an abused child at the moment when the bedroom door creeks open at two am. I panicked. I clutched my chest. I was dying.

I dialed 911.

Again.

Thus began my three years of hell as a patient adrift in the wonderful world of western medicine, the complete the loss of my Self, the shrinking of my world and a desperate search for sanity in an insane, drug obsessed world where insurance companies rule, television offers treatments and Physicians are demoted to “prescribers.” It is the story of white coats and co-pays, shamanic healers and yoga, all mixed up in the day to day life of a working mother with bills to shuffle, laundry to ignore, and the frightening thought that Richard Simmons might really be my friend for three easy payments of $19.95.

This is a story of courage that has nothing to do with war.

Feel free to request pages if you run out of Ambien.


Sincerley,


I can overlook misspelling "sincerely"; that's not a problem. The problem here is that you are talking in a sort of jokey, off the cuff, don't-take-me-seriously voice about a topic that's pretty serious. And of course you use the analogy of an abused kid at 2am. That's as jarring a pairing with jokey voice as I can think of.

This reads like the query for a memoir. Only cause you told me it was women's fiction did I know I was supposed to be thinking novel. The problem with that of course is that your query letter is in the first person. That makes me think it's you.

When I finish reading I'm utterly confused about what you're trying to write about, and thinking, honestly, "you" ie the narrator DO sound psycho so this one is a form rejection.