The Maid's Here & She's Biting Her Nails

She looks just like me!

So normally you wouldn’t be hearing from me until Monday, but I have a few items I need to take care of, and I won’t be posting again until Wednesday, December 7^th, which, as the first Wednesday of the month, is reserved for Alex Cavanaugh’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group. 

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So I’ve done something crazy:  I gave my new query to Matthew MacNish at the Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment.  He posted it yesterday, December 1^st, and critiqued it today.  You might be wondering why I would put myself through that.  Well, I participated in a query blogfest last July, but the query that blogfest produced garnered not a single request, so obviously I needed to revise it.  I came up with a formula for a new one and sent the new query to literary agent Suzie Townsend last month.  She offered a critique as a form of celebration for her recent move to Nancy Coffey’s agency.  For one hour on November 1^st, she accepted all queries via email with a specific subject line.  Then she spent a couple of weeks critiquing those lucky few.  I was one of them, and she gave me some great feedback.  That revised query is now up for  critique on Matthew’s blog.  I have further revised my query after reading Matthew's comments and those of his followers.  You can find that version here on my blog under the tab marked The Query.  And feel free to comment.  I can only improve with feedback.

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On December 16^th, Nicole Ducleroir,  Lydia Kang, D L Hammons, and Katie Mills are hosting the Déjà Vu Blogfest, which gives participants the chance to resubmit their best posts for the benefit of all those who might have missed it the first time around.  After all, it’s easy to miss some awesome posts when you’re away or simply unable to keep up.  Joining this bloghop will instantly connect you to many others who are interested in your writing.  So go to Nicole’s site and sign up using the convenient Mr. Linky’s Magical Widget.  104 bloggers have signed up so far.  Don’t miss out on meeting some fantastic new bloggers and the chance to gain a few new followers of your own. 

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And lastly, Murees Dupe at Daily Drama of an Aspiring Writer has bestowed the Liebster Award on me.  And while I have received this award a few times, I never miss the opportunity to spread the word and introduce a few bloggers with less than 200 followers.  So go visit these wonderful folks and follow:

1.                    The hilariously cheeky Al Penwasser

2.                    My best friend and talented cohort Lisa L. Regan

3.                    The brilliant and insightful, Lora Rivera

4.                    The always fun and kind Carrie Butler

5.                    The brave and compassionate Julius Cicero

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That’s it for now.  I’ll be back on Wednesday for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

Gearin' Up to Get an Agent BlogFest: Query Critique Contest

Okay Friends, Followers and Readers extraordinaire,

I am participating in week 3 of

Deana Barnhart’s

Gearin Up to Get an Agent Blogfest.

Query Critique Contest

In this week’s installment, participants will be putting their query up on their blog so that they may receive feedback from other participants and anyone else who might want to share their two cents.  I’m not sure that I’m ready yet, but here it goes.     

Dear Ms. Agent-of-my-Dreams:

I am seeking representation for THE MISTAKEN, a psychological thriller of 91,000 words. Told from alternating perspectives, it is the story of a vengeful man struggling to save an innocent woman from the ruthless men he’s mistakenly set upon her.   

Skylar Karras is no longer an honorable man.  Gone is the doting husband, the sibling who never failed to bail his brother, Nick, out of trouble.  In his place is a different man, one broken by grief, blinded by rage and consumed with vengeance.  His target is a stranger, the woman responsible for the death of his pregnant wife.  He doesn’t know her, but he’ll find her, and when he does, he will make her pay.  But to do so, Sky must get into bed with Nick’s thug associates in San Francisco’s Russian mafia.  They’re experts in human trafficking and Nick’s plan offers Sky the perfect solution: his fill of sweet revenge and the chance to free his brother from the Russian’s control.  But as he stumbles forward in a numbing haze of alcohol, Sky mistakes the wrong woman for his intended victim, sending all his plans straight to hell.

With his eyes made clear by the stark reality of his mistake, Sky is driven, compelled by remorse and a relentless sense of guilt to make amends and protect Hannah Maguire, the innocent woman whose life he has derailed.  He vows to keep her safe and out of the hands of the Russians, but they’re holding Nick as leverage to force Sky to complete their deal and turn over the girl.  It’s a race against the clock as Sky strives to be the man he used to be, risking all to defend Hannah’s life and secure Nick’s freedom.  But desperation leads him to a place darker than he ever imagined and he simply can’t do it all: save the girl, his brother, and his own soul.  One of them must make the ultimate sacrifice. 

Charged with the raw emotions of human loss and regret, I believe my novel would appeal to fans of Greg Iles’s Turning Angel, James Scott Bell’s Try Dying, Neil Cross’s Burial and even Alexandre Dumas’ classic, The Count of Monte Cristo.

I am an interior designer living in Sammamish, Washington with my husband, teenaged son and two singing sled dogs.  Though I no longer have ties with anyone in San Francisco’s Russian underworld, I have loosely based my novel on villains and events from my past.

My research has unveiled your interest in thrillers.  I have included the first five pages within the body of this email.  I would be happy to provide a full synopsis, additional chapters, or the complete manuscript.  Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best Regards,

Nancy S. Thompson

(Personal info redacted)

So what do you think?  (This is me biting my finger nails!)

Stories Don't Happen in a Vacuum

            I knew I would have to come up with something to post about today, but when I woke up, I still hadn’t thought of anything new, that is until I read today’s post at BookEnds Lit Agency.  Today is Workshop Wednesday at BookEnds, the day agent Jessica Faust posts one of the queries she’s received for critiquing, kind of like Janet Reid does at Query Shark.

I love query critiques.  I think it is the single most effective way to know what does and doesn’t work in a query.  Now, I don’t always agree with Ms. Faust’s opinion.  Case in point, a few weeks ago, she critiqued this query and loved it.  I thought the query was vague, at best, and had many of the qualities that agents advise writers not to include.  But she loved the “southern rhythm” of the voice.  Yeah, I didn’t get that at all and I lived in the south for awhile, but whatever, just like books, it’s subjective and if she liked it then kudos to the author.  Well done!

But this week’s critique struck a nerve with me because Ms. Faust alluded to something I hear over and over again when agents are critiquing queries.  After reading the first two paragraphs of the query, she more or less said, this is all backstory; the real story starts here.  In other words, cut all this crap out and get to the meat of the story.  While I agree the query needs a lot of work, I find issue with the fact that the agent automatically thinks the first two-thirds of the query, and therefore the book, is all backstory. 

In my opinion, this is the story, at least part of it.  It is how the author wrote it to give it structure and body, a reference point from which to contrast the conflict.  It bothers me that the agent thinks that everything that came before what she considers the core of the story is somehow irrelevant or that the story goes off track.  Yes, the author should have written the query differently to show the progression of the story and the importance of that progression. 

She implied subtly that the story might be about something else, or perhaps that was just the agent inferring that idea, but even still, that doesn’t mean all those points the writer thought important enough to include in her query are not crucial to the story.  Some of the commenters, in fact, seemed very interested in the writer’s story, calling out the fact that those first two paragraphs were simply acts one and two.

My point is that agents toss aside stories based on assumptions that the reader doesn’t want to know all that happened before, that they simply want to get to the meat of the story.  Well, okay, I don’t need to know everything that happened to the nineteen-year-old MC during her first seventeen or eighteen years unless it’s relevant to the story, but from age nineteen on, all the things that happen to her forge her into the woman she becomes and adds dimension to her reasoning, to how she handles the conflict.  Stories don’t happen in a vacuum.  We need to care about the protagonist and their journey and we do this through knowing and understanding their history. 

I often wonder why everyone is always in such a hurry to get to the end.  It’s all about instant gratification so we can move on to the next thing.  Why not savor the time spent with a story and let yourself get immersed in the simmering heat of the layers as they buildup?  I’m not saying that everything that the query writer put in her query is essential.  Personally, it comes off more like historical romance, not historical fiction, and so definitely not my thing, but I get that those details are important to understanding why there even is a conflict. 

Could you imagine if Winston Groom had to query Forrest Gump in today’s market?  Some agents would likely say to cut all that backstory about Forrest as a small child or in high school, but it is those details in the early chapters that show how Forrest changes later in life, how he manages to deal with all the drama that’s thrown his way.  How can we know if we weren’t privy to the backstory?

All this relates to me personally because last week I rewrote my query, for what must be the fifteenth time, based on advice from Stephanie DeVita in her post last week titled Slow Summer, where she says, “In most of the queries that I read, the writer isn’t giving me the most thrilling aspect of their book, the crucial element that should make me desperate to ask for more pages. In other cases, it’s unclear if that pivotal element is even there.” 

So I cut all the “backstory” out of my query and just alluded to it in the second line, then got right into the major point of the conflict.  But now I worry that any agent who requests pages will think the first third of my novel is all backstory when, in fact, it is the story, or part of it anyway.  Since the story is all about a man who changes, who becomes a different man due to some pretty terrible things that happen to him, that first third of the book is the setup.  It determines what he was like at first and how those events twisted him into a different man, made him act a certain way and do that one awful thing that drives the story.  The rest of the book is how he deals with the repercussions of those decisions.  Why would any reader care about how he changed and what he did if they didn’t know his “backstory?”

And by the way, I hate that word, backstory.  It makes it feel like all those early words are somehow illegitimate, a bastard to be cast aside.  Yes, it matters how that information is presented, that we feel it is part of the actual story and not simply dumped there in a lazy attempt to give context, but I like to think of it as the ice cream in my sundae.  It’s all those yummy bits on top that make it special, but you can’t just eat the yummy bits.  You have to savor it properly with the ice cream set below.  Otherwise, it’s not a sundae.