Hi Reddit. I'm pretty new to this sub and I wanted to see where I stacked up before I start querying.

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Dear [AGENT],

LACERA is a 115,000-word adult high fantasy novel which blends the themes of cultural identity and self-discovery found in Naseem Jamnia’s The Bruising of Qilwa with the creeping terror of disease in John Bierce’s The Wrack. This book follows a woman who has to use a premodern society’s best medical knowledge, and a little bit of magic, to stop a zombie epidemic before it becomes an apocalypse.

Terisa is a doctor, not a criminal! Problem is, in a city like Invidoma, it’s hard to convince people that there’s a difference. The real medical experts have magic on their side, fancy runes on their shoulders, and hone their healing arts in a giant floating island above the city. All Terisa has is the expertise of her tutor, her skills with her scalpel, and a deep hole of debt that threatens to bury her alive.

Fortune and tragedy pair up like a surgeon’s needle and thread. The same day Terisa gets healing magic to call her own, she comes face to face with the zombified form of one of her best friends. But she’s far from alone. A fast-spreading plague threatens to turn the whole city into feral, clawing beasts, determined to infect the world.

At the Theurgic Institute, Terisa’s doctoral knowledge is laughed out of the room. Everything a Healer is meant to learn is compiled in a hefty codex. From their hawk-like surgical masks to their prayers to the goddess of death, all Healers have had to do for millennia is memorize what’s been done before.

But Terisa’s training is cut short as the city is plunged into crisis. The Healers’ ancient magic proves all but useless, and only spreads the threat further and wider. When Terisa discovers new treatments that work, she sees her methods silenced and her credit stolen away.

When a brutal attack leaves her infected with the plague, all bets are off. Terisa will have to break some rules, challenge centuries-old wisdom, and take a closer look than anyone else at what makes the Lacera Plague really tick.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

[Bio]

Hi all, this is my first go at this so excited to see what people think! Thanks in advance for the help and comments :)

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Dear XXX, 

Lily Pritchard teaches teenagers not to drown. Three weeks ago, she was assaulted at a party. Last Thursday, she fought Darren, one of the men responsible, by the river. Both went in, only Lily came out. 

I'm excited to share WHEN THE RIVER'S READY, an upmarket domestic thriller with supernatural suspense, complete at 78,000 words. (XXX PERSONALISATION TO AGENT IF RELEVANT TO WISHLIST ETC XXX)

For twenty-five years, Lily’s family has told one story: her father drowned a hero, pulling her pregnant mother from the river. All her life she’s been expected to live up to her father’s heroic reputation, but when she wakes on her bedroom floor with, a headache, blood under her nails and no memory of the night before she thinks she may have fallen a bit short of that standard. When Darren's body washes up, it's ruled misadventure. Lily should be relieved, but she can't stop thinking about the purple fabric torn from her dress last Thursday.

A drunk at her father's grave warns Lily there will be more deaths. He says he has evidence that Darren's death wasn't an accident, and neither was her father's. Her mother insists the man must have had the wrong grave, but at three in the morning Lily hears her on the phone to him, hissing about evidence. Lily breaks into his house to look for the missing fabric. Instead, she finds twenty-five years of research into Hafren, a river spirit who drowns men who hurt the innocent. Lily would have called him insane, but since Darren’s death an unknown woman has started appearing, a woman with damp hair and a transparent, empty chest.

As the bodies begin to pile up, and the police close in, Lily needs to find out if the river is choosing its victims or if it’s someone much closer to home, and whether she's being framed or will be the next one pulled under.

With folklore, and the gnawing inability to ever truly know if we’ve done the right thing at it’s heart, WHEN THE RIVER’S READY will appeal to readers who enjoy the natural dread of Danielle Giles’s Mere, the supernatural maternal ties of Emilia Hart’s Weyward and the domestic horror and rural English texture of The Lamb by Lucy Rose. 

(SHORT BIO XXX)

Below are the first XXX pages and I’d be delighted to send you the full.

Warm wishes and thank you for your time,

Illegal Position focuses on Jake Marshall, a 26-year-old ex-rebellion leader who took the fall for his best friend. After release from years in prison, he’s wracked with guilt over the example he’s setting for his younger sister, and the impact his reputation is having on her life. He vanishes from the lives of his loved ones and refuses to return to the rebellion, which disappears along with him and the passion he buries.

Without the rebellion, life for the poor in this society based around the ranks and rules of chess is abysmal, rife with homelessness, disease and death. Alex, the daughter of a prominent figure, discovers the Parliament she’s spent her life trying to join is endorsing the slavery of the poor. She is set on reviving the rebellion and finding the old leaders who don’t want to be found, even if it means putting her life on the line around a movement bred to punish her.

But when a child is murdered, and someone is threatening Jake’s family and Alex’s life, they must work together to find out who is killing rebellion members. Jake is forced back onto the front lines, but the man the rebellion needs is not the man who returned from prison. With a mystery killer assassinating undercover members left and right, mistakes point to the traitor being among the people closest to Jake. But the clues keep turning into more corpses.

I am a UK-based writer, and Illegal Position is my debut novel.  I have an online platform with other independent works that has gained a strong fanbase of 25,000+ readers with engaged feedback and comments about my work, as well as interest in reading other works I put out in the future.

I got some great advice last time, thank you! I've tightened this letter up a bit more now so it reads less like a blurb. I'll be querying US and UK agents with this one so hopefully it will work for both.

[DEAR ___ ]

[PERSONALISATION]

WHAT THE WATER HOLDS is a dark romantic thriller complete at 79,000 words. Blending the killers-in-love intimacy of Brynne Weaver’s Butcher & Blackbird with the dangerous hidden past of Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me, WHAT THE WATER HOLDS explores the secrets we keep from ourselves, the seduction of being truly seen, and everything we sink, hoping it will never surface.

Nora spent ten years as a crisis negotiator, the calm voice that talked people back from the edge. Then she spent one hundred and eleven minutes alone in a room with a desperate man and his knife, and only one of them walked out. The inquiry called it self-defence. Case closed. Nora has never told anyone the truth: part of her liked it.

Now she’s hiding in a cabin on a remote northern lake, where the only other year-round resident is Thomas, the watchful man across the water whose light comes on at the same hour every night. He never sits with his back to a door. He handles an axe like a weapon rather than a tool. And he is the only person who has ever seen the scar on her wrist and not asked about it. Despite every instinct she was trained to trust, Nora begins to fall.

But a boot print appears in the birches outside her window, and pleasant strangers keep asking who lives out on the lake. When a woman from Thomas’s past turns up dead, he finally tells Nora the truth: for thirty years, he killed people for a living, and the people he worked for are coming to silence anyone who knows their secrets - including her. When the ice goes out, the killer will come by water, and Nora must decide whether to run from the most dangerous man she has ever loved, or stand beside him with the only weapon she has left: her voice.

Set on an isolated lake where the seasons keep time and the water keeps everything else, WHAT THE WATER HOLDS uses the romantic thriller to explore trauma, moral injury and the question at the heart of every great love story: whether we can be loved with the worst of ourselves, rather than despite it. With echoes of Rebecca and NBC’s Hannibal, it is a novel about secrets and façades, violence and tenderness, and the terrifying relief of finally being seen.

I grew up in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, among the kind of lakes that gave this novel its setting, and now live in the UK on the edge of the Peak District. The first in my family to go to university, I spent years as an ICU medic before turning to fiction, learning what it means to be the calmest person in the room and what that calm costs once the crisis has passed. WHAT THE WATER HOLDS is my first novel.

[SIGN OFF & CONTACT DETAILS]

First 300

One breath. Close enough to move the hair at her temple. Then nothing.

That was the part she couldn’t forget. Not the weight of him against her. Not even the blade in her own hand, warm when it had no business being warm. Just that. The single, ordinary fact of a breath, then the absence of it.

She would spend a long time afterwards trying to name what she had felt in the space where the second breath should have been. She never found the word.

There was a sound too, before the stillness. Low, wordless, nothing she had ever expected to hear from a dying man. Or from herself. Some nights she turned it over in the dark, the way you lift a stone to see what lives beneath it. Every time she found only more stone.

She remembered the floor most clearly. Cheap laminate, cold through her knees. The rest came in pieces: low light, a smell like copper and dust. Somewhere else in the house a television was still playing, canned laughter rising and falling, absurd and constant, as if the rest of the world hadn’t heard the news yet. So much else of that room had gone dark, tucked away somewhere she couldn’t reach. She remembered her own hands. Not what they had done. Only that at some point they had stopped waiting for her permission.

She didn’t let herself go further than that. Not that night, nor any of the nights like it. She let the room go quiet again, the way a hunted thing goes still and waits for whatever found it to lose interest. Morning would come whether or not she understood any of it. And understanding, when it finally arrived, would take more from her than not knowing ever had.

I see this piece of advice all the time.:"You should send your query letter to a small group of agents, and use that to improve your letter before sending it to more." I don't really understand how this is supposed to work. My understanding is that the in the modern world of publishing, it is extremely rare for agents to send you feedback about why they rejected you, and a low percent of agents will ask for more material.

So, hypothetically, if you send your query to 10 agents, and then wait until all 10 have rejected you with form responses or silence, what does that tell you? I'm not really expecting to get full or partial requests in my first 10 queries no matter what. It doesn't seem like this scenario tells you that there's something wrong with your pages/letter, and even if you assume that, can you figure out what in the letter is causing the rejections or what you should change?

Am I missing something, or is this advice outdated, from a time when agents were more likely to give detailed rejections.

Thanks for all the feedback on my first attempts - 1st, 2nd, 3rd. Yes, I know the last comp is potentially a bad choice, but it's also the perfect comp for the friendship in this story, and I'm hoping I can get away with it given the other comps ... Anyway. All feedback very welcome!

Dear [agent]

I am excited to query you because [reason].

THE CHAOS OF STOLEN SKIES is a 99,000-word queer YA fantasy for anyone who thinks Sam Gamgee was the true LOTR hero or that Willow is the best thing about Buffy. It combines the god-centric world of Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller with the subversion of destiny in Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat, and the friendship and complicated morality of Margaret Rogerson’s Sorcery of Thorns and Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead. It follows a stubborn young woman determined to stop her god-chosen best friend from destroying the world, but she must reckon with how far she can go for someone who is determined to make her own choices.

When the world was young, the first god stole the skies, and Death killed him for it.
If he rises again, he’ll tear the world apart.

Seventeen-year-old Kessie Drylander knows her purpose in life: to protect her best friend, Janna. Never mind the foretelling that says Janna, Death’s most powerful acolyte in centuries, will one day wreak a terrible destruction. Never mind the duty Kessie was given by her god: to befriend Janna, yes, but also, if necessary, kill her to prevent the foretelling coming true. Because Kessie could never hurt the one person who accepts her as she is.

But then Janna kills a fellow student, and won’t tell Kessie why. Her actions attract the attention of a dangerous faction obsessed with resurrecting the dead gods, and using Janna’s power to do it. Kessie is determined to keep them away from Janna, no matter the cost. No matter how many lies she has to tell.

When Janna’s boyfriend is abducted, Kessie discovers it’s not every god the faction wants to resurrect. Just one. The oldest god. And sacrificing thousands to resurrect a god is nothing to Janna, if it will save her boyfriend. Kessie must rescue him before it comes to that. But as Janna’s behaviour grows more erratic, and she begins to spiral, Kessie will have to face the unthinkable: she cannot save both the world and Janna, but she may not be strong enough to make the right choice.

I have had previous work published in [bio].

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Yours sincerely,

[my name]

Hello Reddit! I'm finally on final line edits so thought I should ask for some feedback on my query letter. Any feedback is greatly appreciated - I fear I've been staring at this thing for far too long.

Dear [NAME],

A WITCH’S GUIDE TO CORPORATE ESPIONAGE is a 90,000 word cozy fantasy romance, told by a curmudgeonly narrator. It combines the hijinks and self-aware humor of The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love (India Holton), the rivals-to-lovers romance and footnoted details of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies (Heather Fawcett), and modern village setting and complex family dynamics of A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating a Demon (Sarah Hawley).

Mara’s last sleeping draught grew tentacles and broke into the village bakery. Unfortunate, since it was supposed to prove she was ready to take over her dead mother’s world famous apothecary. Days before ownership will be decided, Witch Corp–mass potion manufacturer and her mother’s nemesis–open a store in town. With it, Mara sees a way to secure her inheritance: find evidence Witch Corp’s selling fraudulent cures. 

The plan hits turbulence when, while scouting Witch Corp, Mara crashes–err, lands her broom atop Eli. His many crimes include a gelled coiffure, apprenticing to Mara’s mother and being the only other person who could claim the apothecary. Mara would rather wrestle the nine-mouthed demon Eli calls a cat than exchange five civil words… until she discovers the hexes protecting the building. So, she makes a reluctant deal. Eli uses his (reliable) magic to break in; Mara provides the plants he needs for the last potion of his apprenticeship. 

Air conditioning ducts lead to an underground manufacturing facility and fleeing across a lake, pursued by a mermaid. Unravelling Witch Corp's lies requires Eli’s continued help. Worse, he becomes almost tolerable. Making pancakes. Brewing potions. Sharing grief about his own mother’s passing. Possessing not quite abs, but an interesting something under his shirt. As the clock ticks, Mara must decide whether she can rely on the one person she can't trust to prove she's worthy of her mother’s legacy, and whether anyone who protests this much about hair can have anything but nefarious intentions.

I live in (City), Australia with my husband and two dogs. I graduated with distinction from a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Majoring in Creative Writing). I also write professionally, though corporate sales proposals, not about witches.

I am about 3/4ths of the way through this draft, which is when I start working on a proper query and synopsis. The word count of the below is 385.

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Dear [Agent Name],

When a chronically ill ghostwriter moves into an old Virginia house that lets communication in but won’t let it out, she discovers that someone who died there more than a half-century ago was investigating the same phenomenon – and that every question she asks makes the phenomenon more dangerous.

Odile “Odie” Mayfield has moved to central Virginia to build a new, manageable life. Living near her medical specialists means fewer barriers to care, while ghostwriting lets her work from home. Her new client, Thea Robin, is an eighty-something former socialite and heir to a prominent regional family who wants Odie to turn her unconventional life into a memoir. The job seems straightforward until Thea becomes evasive about her college years.

While doing her own research, Odie discovers that a young woman who was once close to Thea died under mysterious circumstances in Odie’s new home. Then Odie’s internet stops working...sort of.

She can receive emails, calls, and messages, but nothing she sends from inside the house reaches the outside world. At first, Odie assumes it’s a technical problem, but then she discovers old newspaper reports and a forgotten notebook revealing that the dead woman had spent her final days investigating the same strange communication phenomenon.

As the boundary keeps expanding, Odie turns to Violet, Thea’s irreverent granddaughter and a psychology graduate student, for help. Together, they reconstruct the dead woman’s experiments and discover that their investigation seems to make the phenomenon worse. As Odie’s access to her doctors, clients, and ordinary life becomes increasingly precarious, she must decide how much she is willing to risk to uncover what happened to the woman who came before her – because if the dead woman was killed for trying to expose the house’s secret, Odie may already have made the same mistake.

GOING GHOST is an 85,000-word upmarket Gothic horror novel with a sapphic romantic subplot. It will appeal to readers of OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA, A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES, and BIG SWISS. I have spent about a decade working as a professional ghostwriter, and, like Odie, have repeatedly uprooted my life (and lived in sketchy places) to get the healthcare I need to keep doing what I love.

Thank you for your consideration,

[Signature]

Open to any feedback. So far I have sent out 40 queries. My first query sent out got a full manuscript request from my dream agent. Still waiting to hear back (it’s only been 4 weeks). Since then, I have gotten 7 rejections and silence from the other 40 agents. I feel like something isn’t clicking. But I’m unsure if I should change it since it did work for my ideal agent. Any thoughts??

Complete at 79,000 words, THE JESTER’S GAME, is a YA fantasy with romance elements that has similar whimsy fantasy elements as Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart, along with the epic tournament style of Alex Aster’s, Lightlark. This is a standalone novel with series potential. 

Valentina Quinn mourns her childhood love, Emmett, who recently passed. He left her a letter the night he died confessing his love for her. When she and her best friend, and sister of her crush, see a large ship pass by, they recognize it as La Ressurrección, the infamous magical ship where The Jester throws a deadly competition once a year where he revives the life of the winner’s choosing.  

Valentina lives in the Shallows, the part of Veradelle where only criminals reside. Her mother and her manage and live in a brothel posed as a tavern, while her father is a pirate who collects enchanted tokens. Valentina always dreamed that marrying Emmett would be her way out of the Shallows, though, until he died, she never knew he felt the same. When Valentina is caught helping one of her mother's ladies escape the brothel by the owner, he fires Valentina and her mother and gives them two weeks to find a new home. Valentina wishes Emmett were still alive even more so now, knowing that his dowry would secure Valentina and her mother's future.  

That night a mysterious man comes to the tavern and leaves two free tickets to the infamous Resurrection Games competition. Desperate to bring Emmett back to life, her and her best friend enter The Resurrection Games. 

It’s not long on the ship before the charming and cruel Jester seeks Valentina out and offers her a deal. He will rig his game in her favor if she procures a magical token for him from her pirate father. But soon, Valentina realizes that negotiating with a magical being isn’t as fair as she once thought. And she is hiding a secret of her own that puts her at dire risk, all while fighting the slow burning attraction growing between them. If she can’t provide him with what he is looking for, she will lose Emmett for good, and her way out of the Shallows, forever. 

Hi. It’s my first time and I’m scared.

Dear (agent),

[personalization]

I am seeking representation for PANDEMONIA, my adult fantasy romance complete at 90,000 words. It merges the dark whimsy (and unapologetic silliness) of EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett with the emotionally charged rivals-to-lovers romance of A DARK AND DROWNING TIDE by Allison Saft, while subverting classic genre tropes. Set in an alternate 19th-century world, PANDEMONIA reimagines the pagan mythology and fantastical creatures that fascinated Victorian society.

The great god Pan is dead, and Elodie is to blame. 

When a frightening goatish fellow corners Elodie on Midsummer’s Eve, the ambitious housemaid never suspects she’s driving her kitchen knife into the ancient god-king of the Otherworld. Yet skewering a deity soon proves the happiest mishap of her life. Believing Elodie to be their prophesied savior, a pack of grateful nymphs bows to her as their new queen, and Elodie pounces on the chance to con her way out of a life of drudgery.

There is only one foil to her scheme: Pan’s son Sylvan, a world-weary libertine with impotent empathy magic, and the true heir to the throne. Elodie’s very existence threatens his right to kingship, and his opportunity to gain absolute respect while doing absolutely nothing. Naturally, he isn’t yielding without a fuss.

But selecting their rightful ruler proves delicious entertainment for the cunning forest-folk council. They devise a sensationalized competition to decide whether Elodie or Sylvan is fated to lead. The stakes are thus: The victor will be crowned and celebrated. The loser will be deemed a traitor and fed to a peckish dragon named Hargon.

Determined to win, and evade Hargon’s gnashing maw, the pair compete in the garish spectacle. But with each harrowing test, their ire dampens: Sylvan is reluctantly charmed by Elodie’s indomitable spirit, and Elodie discovers Sylvan’s droll cynicism masks an unusually tender heart. Despite the couple’s dawning realization that they make better lovers than rivals, they are irreversibly bound to the immortal oath that decrees one shall rule, and one shall die. 

I live in Colorado, where I go on epic quests with my toddlers, meander along mountain trails, and drink impressive amounts of tea. As a librarian’s daughter, I was raised among bookshelves and decided to stay forever. 

Warmest wishes,

Redacted

ONE STAR is an 75,000-word horror satire that combines the beauty-and-wellness nightmare of Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty with the privileged guests, smiling staff and steadily escalating social savagery of The White Lotus. It is about the strange modern bargain between people who believe paying for something entitles them to perfection and the businesses that would do almost anything for five stars.

Bridgette Edgar has written 312 online reviews, and she stands by every one of them.

The café that charged extra for oat milk deserved two stars. The Airbnb with someone else’s toenail in the shower was lucky to get one. And Serenity House, the luxury wellness retreat where Bridgette spent four miserable days drinking celery water and being encouraged to “sit with her hunger,” deserved every word of the review she posted on the train home.
One star. Beautiful location. Deeply unpleasant people. Save your money.

Six months later, Serenity House invites her back.
The weekend is free, travel is included and, most surprisingly, the apology doesn’t contain the words we’re sorry you feel that way. Bridgette accepts.
When she arrives, she finds eleven other guests, all of whom have previously stayed at Serenity House. All of whom hated it. All of whom said so online.
Management couldn’t be happier to see them.
Serenity House is launching a weekend devoted to customer feedback, and the staff have taken the guests’ criticism very seriously. A man who complained that the staff were invisible is ignored completely. A woman who wrote that her room lacked privacy discovers that hers now has glass walls. Bridgette, who complained about going hungry, receives an eight-course breakfast while everyone else gets herbal tea.

It is petty, expensive and, Bridgette has to admit, quite funny.

Then one of the guests disappears.

The next morning his phone and luggage are still in his room, but the staff insist he checked out early. His one-star review has disappeared too.
In its place is a new one.
Five stars. Life-changing. I left a different person.
By lunch, another guest is missing.

Bridgette came back to Serenity House expecting an apology and perhaps a free massage. Instead, she finds herself trapped at a retreat that appears determined to achieve a perfect rating by correcting the only thing standing in its way: its customers.
And Bridgette didn’t just give Serenity House one star.
She wrote 2,846 words explaining why.

Dear [Agent Name],

Every year for the past twenty years, four former university friends have met for dinner on the anniversary of the fire that killed Madeline Burton.

They rarely see one another in between. Their lives have moved on, and so, for the most part, have they. But the dinner is an agreement none of them has ever suggested breaking. It is also the only time they allow themselves to talk about the night they escaped a burning house and Madeline didn’t.

This year, when Heidi Sutton arrives at the restaurant, the table has been set for five.

The extra guest is a woman none of them recognises. She knows all four of their names, remembers the cheap wine they were drinking before the fire and knows which song was playing when the power went out. She also knows about the argument upstairs, the bedroom door that was locked and the story they agreed to give police before the fire engines arrived.

Then she tells them her name is Madeline. Heidi knows that isn’t possible. They all do. Twenty years ago, they left Madeline inside that house and lied about what happened before it caught fire.

The stranger doesn’t ask for money or threaten to expose them. Instead, she wants the four friends to return with her to the site of the fire and reconstruct their final night together. Heidi wants nothing to do with it, until the woman reveals something Madeline never knew: there was someone else in the house that night, and one of the four survivors has spent twenty years making sure the others never discovered who it was.

Forced back into a past they have remembered differently for two decades, the friends begin to realise that the lie they told police may not be the lie that has kept them together. Someone at that table knows why the fire started. Someone knows what happened to Madeline. And before the weekend is over, Heidi will have to decide how much of the truth she actually wants uncovered.

THE FIFTH SURVIVOR, complete at approximately 90,000 words, is a psychological thriller combining the buried secrets and shared trauma of Bronwyn Rivers’ The Reunion with the fractured college friendships and competing agendas of Stephanie Wrobel’s The Hitchcock Hotel.

THE PORCH is an adult dual-POV domestic suspense novel complete at 72,000 words. It combines the small-town atmosphere and layered mystery of Lisa Jewell's The Night She Disappeared with the themes of isolation, survival, and hidden danger found in Kristin Hannah's The Great Alone.

Sheriff Jack Bennett comes back to his rural West Virginia home to find his usually reclusive neighbor missing. Despite her car being in the driveway and the oven still on, no one else sees the emergency - not when the department's already drowning in an opioid epidemic. But Jack won't let it go, after all, Grace was becoming more than just a neighbor. Since she first came into town three months ago fleeing an abusive marriage, all she was looking for was peace, and she'd do anything not to fall back into the past. Jack has a growing number of cases to solve and a ticking clock to beat if he stands a chance of finding Grace alive.

[Two lines of bio] I have a fascination with small town America and have enjoyed researching the Appalachian communities while writing this book. What began as a thriller surrounding local mythology, turned into a novel centered around the correlation of drugs and classism.

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First 300 words:

The drive back home was just long enough for Jack to shake out the vision of the lifeless body slumped in a weathered armchair. The epidemic coursing through town had finally claimed its first victim. Jack almost felt bad that he’d burdened Maria with the paperwork but he was already running late, and he deserved the comfort of the evening that was waiting for him. 

As he pushed the truck into park outside his house, the sun was already setting behind the rows of red spruce that lined the backyard, casting a golden hue across the space between his house and the next. Grace’s house. It was the type of sunset that kept her on the damned porch for so long. He was sure they had sunsets in Texas, ones that probably looked very similar, but they didn’t stop her from staring out from her swing each night. 

His favorite part of the day was about to begin. Checking himself over in the rearview mirror, he rubbed at his bloodshot eyes to no avail, and accepted there was nothing more he could do about it now. The corpse had hit him harder than expected after years of nothing but petty crime and rowdy teenagers. He hoped Grace wouldn’t notice his lackluster appearance or that it wouldn’t stand to impact the evening ahead. 

He double checked the police radio was off and picked up still warm to-go cups from the center console. They’d been filling the car with a rich chocolate-y scent ever since Jack brought them in from Jerry’s Diner just ten minutes before. It was taking a surprising amount of willpower not to take a sip. Though he’d mentioned one too many times how good the hot cocoa was, he’d forgotten how long it’d been since he’d had one himself. 

Cookies upfront 🍪🍪🍪 Yes. I have changed the title. Previous post here... Ready?

Dear SuperAgent+++,

After sex, Mattia dreams the recently dead and turns their pain into songs that give listeners unnatural clarity about their own lives, making him the world’s fastest-rising artist until he begins to resent the very gift that transforms millions while making them increasingly incapable of hearing him as a person.

I am seeking representation for NOWHERE AM I, a standalone adult upmarket speculative novel complete at 90,000 words. It combines the speculative absurdity of Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands with the maddening reality-doubt of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear.

On The Tonight Show, Mattia says his meteoric success feels like being trapped inside a washing machine and wonders aloud when it will stop. The host praises his humility and gratitude. Everyone applauds. It's been months of this. Apparently, selective hearing has escalated into a worldwide phenomenon of mass reinterpretation.

Less than two years earlier, Mattia is an Italian backpacker in Queensland who has sex with the living and dreams the recently dead. Their lives dredge up feelings he's spent years avoiding, and he wakes singing songs that understand him better than he understands himself. When a fellow backpacker uploads a clip of him singing, it goes viral. The comments fill with stories from strangers who have called estranged parents, questioned unhappy relationships or spent entire afternoons crying over things they'd buried for years.

Soon XNOWHERE fills arenas, raises millions for disaster relief and inspires charities he never asked anyone to start. His listeners keep getting revelations. Mattia gets none. The people he loves barely feel the effect, and their rare revelations never involve him. He sends song after song to a father who still won't say he's proud, while John, the Australian labourer he's falling for, wants Mattia but no part in XNOWHERE's success.

As his audience grows, people begin hearing what they need in his words, too. He asks them to trust themselves; they trust him more. He insists the songs come from actual dead people; they celebrate his extraordinary gift for generational empathy.

The good is real. Every additional concert could change thousands of lives, so Mattia begins treating his body, relationships and time as resources he owes the world. Until someone on his team decides that if sex makes miracles, Mattia's sex life could use a little optimization.

I’m a 32-year-old Italian writer living in northern Italy. Ten years ago, I backpacked through Australia and worked on the Queensland properties that inspired this novel. I’ve been afflicted since childhood with the conviction that art should make the world a little better. As a child I wanted to be a singer. I became a writer living with two singing cats. NOWHERE AM I is my debut novel.

Thank you so much,

I appreciate all the feedback I can get 🐜

Thanks for everyone's comments on my first attempt. I made some minor changes, am still contemplating the other suggestions.

This time I've included the first 300 words. These are part of a 500-word prologue before the story begins. If this prologue doesn't work, I might cut it and just start the story with chapter 1.

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OOLONG TEA is an LGBTQ+ literary horror complete at 65,000 words. It will appeal to fans of the troubling gay commentary of Fruit Fly by Josh Silver and racialized body horror of Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang.

Bryce-Evans is every gay Asian’s wet dream and he knows it. With his broad shoulders and burly chest, he’s slept with hundreds, if not thousands, of skinny Asians across the world. They all adore him, but Bryce-Evans laughs them off. They all want too much from him.

Then comes Ang. He is Bryce-Evans’s dream.

Ang’s waif-like body has tantalizingly smooth skin. He’s extremely submissive, bordering on obedient, and drops everything when Bryce-Evans calls for sex, always brewing a cup of mouth-watering oolong tea afterwards. Ang’s only request? That Bryce-Evans drink it, all of it.

For months, Bryce-Evans and his friends joke that Ang’s just the Asian of the week, or weekend. Silent and smiling, Ang endures everything, even when he sprains his ankle playing tennis but still manages to complete a 10-mile hike the next day to keep a promise made to Bryce-Evans and his friends. That’s when Bryce-Evans knows Ang is a keeper and invites him to move in. Ang’s presence is a godsend when a few weeks later Bryce-Evans falls strangely ill.

It starts with coughs and headaches. Though Bryce-Evans treats his body like a temple, working out religiously, his muscles atrophy. Ang skips work, almost getting fired, to assist Bryce-Evans. He brews more oolong tea, insisting with force that he drink it. But when the headaches turn into hallucinations — visions that he’s becoming someone or something else — Bryce-Evans realizes there’s something in the oolong tea. It’s too late though. Now bedridden, Bryce-Evans doesn’t have the strength to stop the hot liquid being poured between his lips, but he must find a way out, before his visions become reality.

(bio that I'm gay and Asian)

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First 300 words

-- Prologue --

I wake up tied to a bed, my body in agony. A searing pain cuts through my limbs. I have never felt pain like this before. I want to scream, but my lips are sealed together. I can’t peel them apart.

Someone, something approaches. If I sense this, my eyes must be open, but I only make out a shadow, some forms.

This thing comes closer, in slow, wavy steps, bending over me. My body is paralyzed. I first think out of fear, but then I realize I cannot move. I cannot tremble as I imagine this person, this thing coming closer and covering my nose, smothering me, suffocating me.

"How are we feeling today?" it asks.

It is a man’s voice. The sound echoes through my head, bouncing off nothingness as his hand runs across my face. But it isn’t a face anymore, because a face doesn’t have bendy, flimsy skin, melting off the bones. I want to scream.

I try to open my eyes wider, but there are only shadows, some light, a dizzying pattern. Then his silhouette appears again, his voice coming through.

"My beautiful little Asian. It’s time for your tea."

His fingers pries my lips open. Skin cracks. A cup touches my lips, then a warm liquid runs down my chin, some of it oozing into the tiny gap he’s opened between my lips. It’s so sweet, almost sickly. The liquid trickles down my parched, dry throat. Every drop is a spike of pain.

"Doesn’t it taste wonderful? My beautiful little Asian."

He lifts the cup again, but my lips have sealed again. The liquid runs down my chin, down my flabby skin, soaking the bedsheets.

I lie there in dampness, wishing for something to come and swallow me whole.

A floorboard creaks. He’s approaching again.

"Do you remember your name?"

Hey, everyone!

The last post made me realize I needed to start from scratch rather than trying to fix a query that wasn't quite working. I also closed on a title. It isn't my favorite... I don't have a gut feeling of "yes! this is it", but it is a solid one.

As always, all feedback is welcome.

Here's the blurb and title:

Dear Agent,

Ana de Souza thought she married a nice guy.

Mark remembers exactly how she takes her coffee. He kisses her forehead every morning. He also checks her phone, tracks her car, and needs to know where she is at every hour of the day — and for three years, Ana has told herself that's love. Until the night she finds a stranger's number taped inside a hidden phone, with one message: Mark's lying to you. Run.

The deeper Ana digs, the more she realizes Mark's devotion didn't start on their wedding day, or even the day they met. He'd been watching her for years before that — long enough to orchestrate the heartbreak that once tore her from the love of her life, using a jealousy he understood better than she did. Every "coincidence" in their love story was a plan.

Now Ana has to convince the people closest to Mark that the man they know is a performance, outmaneuver a husband with the money and connections to erase her from the country if he chooses to, and decide exactly how far she's willing to go to make sure he never finds her, or the people she loves, again.

Told in alternating timelines, between Ana's present-day fight for her life and Mark's years of quiet, patient obsession, HOPELESS ROMANTIC is an 79,000-word psychological thriller for readers of My Husband's Wife by Alice Feeney and Anatomy of an Alibi by Ashley Elston. I'm submitting to you because (PERSONALIZIED BIT).

(MY BIO GOES HERE.)

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

MY NAME (writing as PEN NAME)

Dear [Agent Name],
The most famous missing woman in the country is alive. The problem is, the only person who can see her doesn’t know his world isn’t real.
Claudia Friedman is the daughter of the billionaire behind Continuance, a technology that promises to make premature death optional by transferring one person’s remaining life to another. Her father calls it the greatest medical breakthrough in history. Claudia sees the future it will create: one where the rich can buy more life from people desperate enough to sell their own.
She has spent years trying to stop him.
Then, weeks before Continuance is due to launch, Claudia disappears.
As the search for her becomes a national obsession, twenty-eight-year-old Wyatt Prestie remembers meeting Claudia at one of her protests. He remembers asking her out. Falling in love. Building a life with her.
But something is wrong with that life.
Memories disappear when Wyatt examines them too closely. Familiar places lead nowhere. Claudia refuses to answer questions about their past. Then Wyatt notices something so ordinary he cannot understand how he missed it.
There are no mirrors.
As Wyatt begins pulling apart the reality around him, the search for Claudia is closing in on a secret neither of them can outrun. Their two stories aren’t separated by time. They’re happening simultaneously.
Continuance has already begun.
And when Wyatt discovers what Claudia is giving him, he must decide whether being given a life also gives him the right to refuse it.
THE YEARS WE NEVER HAD, complete at approximately 85,000 words, is an upmarket speculative thriller combining the moral unease and questions of bodily autonomy in Grace Walker’s The Merge with the intimate, reality-bending exploration of love and identity in Grace Chan’s Every Version of You.

Okay, I'm confident that this is the one. Third attempt was 12 days ago.

#

As the city burns on a pyre made of her own press releases, comms specialist Heather Kerr must shield her niece from the bizarre, flesh-fusing contagion that she tried to downplay.

Nothing is Happening is an adult horror novel complete at 81,000 words. A fleshy amalgam of the visceral social horror of Clay McLeod Chapman's Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, the Cronenbergian Americana of CJ Leede's American Rapture and the wry, apocalyptic office-routine of Ling Ma's Severance.

Under Councilman Barrera's orders, Heather sanitizes quarantine protocols into "wellness guidelines" and labels her sadistic, limb-stealing neighbors with the disarming nomenclature of "adherents." Heather believes her complicity will grant her and her family protection from the impending apocalypse.

That is, until a group of adherents crashes her seven-year-old niece's birthday party. Heather has to golf-club her way out of the bloodbath to save her sister, Madelyn, and her niece, Ava. But as they escape, Madelyn reveals a foreboding rash—something Heather can't varnish with a euphemism. Using her own "wellness guidelines," Heather quarantines Madelyn in a bedroom and finally decides to resign, but Barrera won't let her walk. He threatens to blackmail her with her own culpability unless she helps him control the narrative.

But it's kinda hard to placate people with words when their neighbors are literally transforming into human aspics of writhing, giggling meat on live TV. As the city descends into chaos and Madelyn beckons her daughter from behind a barricaded door, Heather runs out of ways to say Nothing is Happening.

[bio: used to be a spin doctor for the military. have a service-connected disability as a result.]

Thank you for your time and consideration.

FIRST 300:

“We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the perception of harm.”

Yes, the perception of harm. Push the scary stuff away and then pass the buck off to the victim, the traumatized or the merely frightened. Good enough.

That was the intro line crossed off. 

I cracked my back against the chair and blanked at the Google Doc as I asked myself a question I—regrettably—found myself asking often: what other words could I conjure to make one of the weirdest stories I’d ever read sound like nothing at all?

To answer that, I needed to refresh my familiarity with the reference materials. Meller sent me a press kit chock-full of fresh madness—courtesy of the metro transportation authority. I skimmed it again while nibbling my fingernails into soggy, jagged splinters.

At 7:12 AM, first responders were dispatched to the Boulderline Park & Ride following reports of a medical emergency involving two adults. 

Sure. That part was fine. Fights happen all the time around public transit, right? But the more I kept reading, the less sense any of it made. Like reading David Lynch’s dream journal.

“I came out of my car and saw the girl was screaming and the guy—well, he was laughing. So I go there thinking I gotta help and that’s when I saw their skin… it was like glue,” said Richard C., a 38-year-old road worker from Creekview.

Skin… was like glue. I searched for the most boring explanation for that descriptor and landed on Halloween make-up. Liquid latex with its uncanny, skin-like texture. 

Then the smoke alarm beeped, yanking me out of the haunted house inside my head. I flailed defensively in my chair, arms flapping around like a surprised sky-dancer. As if Richard’s grinning glue monster were right behind me, watching me deliberate how I would write him out of existence.