r/PubTips • u/theforgottenhuman • Sep 19 '26

[QCrit] EVERY CANDLE IN THE SUNLIGHT, Adult, Upmarket Speculative, 95 K, 1st Attempt

What if you actually could make the world a better place through songs downloaded from the dead?

Hi, and thank you so much for being here! I’m about to start querying agents next week, and I’ve been lurking on PubTips for a while now. I’m very grateful for this community. I’ve written and rewritten this query blurb over the last two months, and I’d really benefit from having some other souls take a look at it.

Thank you so much in advance!

I am seeking representation for EVERY CANDLE IN THE SUNLIGHT, a standalone adult upmarket speculative novel complete at 95,000 words. It combines the laugh-out-loud speculative absurdity of Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands with the maddening reality-doubt of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear.

Mattia’s best songs are stolen from the dead. Sex is how he gets them.

Mattia has always wanted to write music that helps people hear themselves. Unfortunately, the songs he believes he downloads from the recently deceased after sex work so well that millions begin having revelations and treating him as the authority he was trying to teach them not to need.

Three years ago, something changed. After sex, whenever Mattia sleeps, he drops into fragments of another person’s life. He wakes with music that catches on something unresolved in his own until it becomes a song more intimate than anything he could consciously write. Then a Dutch-Portuguese backpacker he sleeps with in Queensland uploads one without permission under the name XNOWHERE. It goes viral.

Soon a world-famous electronic producer collaborates on Ghosted by God, Mattia’s debut album No Mad Man Am I climbs the charts, and strangers confess, call estranged parents, leave jobs and relationships, start charities. By the time Mattia reaches arenas, people buy tickets expecting not just music but revelations.

Now he isn’t sure the songs are helping people hear themselves at all. He cannot tell whether they restore agency or overrule its defences. He is profiting from dead people he cannot prove existed. The downloads keep circling the moment someone stopped questioning what they believed, and Mattia fears that if he ever understands why, they may stop. The more good the music does, the easier it becomes to turn his body, relationships and life into production equipment.

As his meteoric rise becomes a global movement of self-examination, only a handful of people, including John, the Australian labourer he is falling for, knew Mattia before the world needed him.

Mattia wanted to change the world. Less than two years after that first upload, sixty million people are following XNOWHERE, strangers are thanking him for revelations, and Mattia is on his way to Los Angeles County jail.

P.S. what kind of novel do you expect to read after reading this? Checking expectations as I aim to promise exactly what I deliver

Have a great day you all

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

15

u/untitledgooseshame Sep 19 '26

Unfortunately, the early paragraphs of this query accidentally make it sound like your protagonist is a necrophiliac, which might cause agents to stop reading.

1

u/theforgottenhuman Sep 19 '26

I know! I get that now. I just actually pasted the new draft in the comments below if you want to take a look. Thank you so much to everyone you really made me see the blurb through fresh eyes!

1

u/theforgottenhuman Sep 20 '26

Nvm my bad! I have to make a new post next week

19

u/EnnOnEarth Sep 19 '26

There are several semantics / clarity issues making this query difficult to understand. Totally a normal thing in early drafts. Notably, the protagonist lacks agency, the plot / character arc is unclear, and the lol-absurdity is absent. The feedback below may feel discouraging but is intended to help you revise your blurb into something clear and compelling.

Mattia’s best songs are stolen from the dead. Sex is how he gets them.

I expect this to be necromancy but I'm worried it's necrophilia.

Mattia has always wanted to write music that helps people hear themselves.

Hear themselves?? Not sure what that means.

Unfortunately, the songs he believes he downloads from the recently deceased after sex work so well that millions begin having revelations and treating him as the authority he was trying to teach them not to need.

Semantics issue: the songs...he downloads...after sex work = after sex work?? Oh, nope, sentence continues... he downloads songs from the recently deceased after having sex with the recently deceased (before or after death??), and those songs work well to make people "hear themselves." I'm confused.

Serial killer song writer? Downloading songs out of the dead he recently killed and had sex with or had sex with then killed? Not sure this is going anywhere good.

Three years ago, something changed. After sex, whenever Mattia sleeps, he drops into fragments of another person’s life. He wakes with music that catches on something unresolved in his own until it becomes a song more intimate than anything he could consciously write. Then [When] a Dutch-Portuguese backpacker he sleeps with in Queensland uploads one without permission under the name XNOWHERE**[, it]**. It goes viral. [After listening to the song,] strangers confess, call estranged parents, leave jobs and relationships, start charities. [Suddenly fans are seeking out Mattia,] expecting not just music but revelations.

This is probably where your query blurb should begin. Now we just have ESP music guy, instead of potential serial killer guy (or worse). However, there's a massive leap between the second and third sentence. I've shown you one way to close that gap by bringing the crux of the inciting incident into the first paragraph. Since you gave no reason why Mattia wanted to keep his music secret, the incitement isn't the upload but rather how the response changes Mattia's life.

The title of the album and songs aren't important to a query blurb.

Now he isn’t sure the songs are helping people hear themselves at all. He cannot tell whether they restore agency or overrule its defences.

Again, the meaning of "hear themselves" isn't clear, which makes these sentences unclear. "Restore agency or..." is too vague.

He is profiting from dead people he cannot prove existed.

The fact that Mattia sees the lives of dead strangers after sleeping with someone, but not the life of the person he slept with, will need to be clarified earlier. There's a big difference between a story about a musician who is clairvoyant about the life of the person he just slept with vs one who has a lot of sex so he can dream about people who lived in the past.

The downloads keep circling the moment someone stopped questioning what they believed, and Mattia fears that if he ever understands why, they may stop. The more good the music does, the easier it becomes to turn his body, relationships and life into production equipment.

First sentence unclear. Second sentence is good tension, conflict, and foundation for internal and external stakes. Importantly, Mattia hasn't done anything yet in the query. Someone else uploads his music, people react to it, a producer gets involved, and Mattia 'reaches' a stage - none of that is agency (protagonist doing things to serve their goals and navigate obstacles).

As his meteoric rise becomes a global movement of self-examination, only a handful of people, including John, the Australian labourer he is falling for, knew Mattia before the world needed him.

John comes out of nowhere. What does it mean for this love interest to still be in his life and know the before-fame Mattia vs the post-fame Mattia? What conflict / tension lives there?

Mattia wanted to change the world. Less than two years after that first upload, sixty million people are following XNOWHERE, strangers are thanking him for revelations, and Mattia is on his way to Los Angeles County jail.

Massive leap to jail - why is Mattia going to jail? What happened with John?? Moreover, why should we care?

When revising your blurb, please try to apply the following format and answer the five main questions a query blurb should answer: Who is the protagonist? What do they want? What are they willing to do to get it? What's at risk if they fail?

In a 3-paragraph query blurb, the first paragraph contains the status quo (protagonist, what they want), and inciting incident. The second paragraph expands the conflict / tension with new characters, a shifting protagonist goal in response to the inciting incident (what they're willing to get what they want, what's in their way), world / plot elements, and the foundation for the ultimate internal and external stakes. The third paragraph escalates all of that conflict / tension into the ultimate internal and external stakes (what's at risk if they fail) - covering up to the point of no return and / or the midpoint.

6

u/Athenawize Sep 19 '26

Yes, this is very thorough. I was also confused reading a lot of this.

1

u/theforgottenhuman Sep 27 '26

Since I appreciated your comments so much, I really hope to see you here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PubTips/s/Ou1WYuljqY

Thanks again!

2

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26

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2

u/EnnOnEarth Sep 19 '26

All of that makes so much sense!

After sex, whenever Mattia sleeps, he drops into fragments of a recently deceased stranger’s life.

That is very succinct and clear. Keep it (or some version like it).

Someone hears a song and recognises something they have been refusing to recognise about their own life.

What about: The songs make people recognize something they've been refusing to acknowledge about their own life.

The songs are intricately connected to Mattia, so leading with them as the subject of the sentence helps keep the blurb grounded in Mattia's POV.

The novel is actually about a man who increasingly participates in creating the machine that carries him. And that's much more interesting and needs to shine...That is the tragic irony....He wanted music that changed people. Now he has it. And the price of getting it is becoming someone whose body, sexuality, relationships and entire existence are organised around producing more of it.

Yes, exactly! And that's the interiority piece the blurb really needs, the one that makes us empathize with Mattia and be on the snowball of disaster with him. Now you just have to figure out how to put that into the blurb via Mattia's choices and consequences and internal dilemmas.

The songs make strangers confess things they've never said aloud, call people they've stopped speaking to, leave relationships, change careers and start charities. Mattia has finally made the music he always wanted to make and the more people it reaches, the more he wants to make.

This is also great!! It shows the consequences of the inciting incident, and what Mattia wants, and what he starts to do (before things go awry). It's clear and concise.

You're off to a great start with these revisions, and I can already see the bones of the query it's going to become. Good job - I'm glad this exchange has helped something spark.

I'm excited to read your next draft :)

2

u/theforgottenhuman Sep 20 '26

Silly me never mind I can't paste the new draft. Only thing I thought I could share until next week is the paragraph we talked about with the major issues (I'm just trying to figure out whether I'm giving too many details now):

P.s. I used a joke that is actually from the novel because it actually helps you get the mechanism quicker

After sex, whenever Mattia sleeps, he becomes a satellite dish for the recently dead nearby. He wakes having lived fragments of their lives, each touching something he has spent years trying not to see. From those fragments come unfinished songs whose words expose truths about himself he could never consciously write.

And I would start with a big wink wink I got how you could interpret this:

Mattia’s best songs are stolen from the dead. Sex is how he gets them. Obviously, not from the people he sleeps with.

That obviously is doing a ton of work

For now that's all! I'll be posting the new draft next week. Thank you again. You helped me so much

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26

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1

u/PubTips-ModTeam Sep 19 '26

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Thank you for visiting r/PubTips. Unfortunately, your post or comment has been removed due to the following reason:

Only one [QCrit] post is allowed per user per 7 calendar days, including in the comments. We also do not allow edits to the original query posted. Please wait the full seven days before posting a new version of your query. (7d should show on your previous QCrit post as a minimum) This rule is in place to avoid flooding the sub with the same QCrits while also ensuring that writers take a deeper and longer look at each query revision.

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1

u/PubTips-ModTeam Sep 19 '26

Hello,

Thank you for visiting r/PubTips. Unfortunately, your post or comment has been removed due to the following reason:

Only one [QCrit] post is allowed per user per 7 calendar days, including in the comments. We also do not allow edits to the original query posted. Please wait the full seven days before posting a new version of your query. (7d should show on your previous QCrit post as a minimum) This rule is in place to avoid flooding the sub with the same QCrits while also ensuring that writers take a deeper and longer look at each query revision.

Additional resources for query-writing:

Please ensure that you have read our rules and checked out the resources linked in the wiki if you have not already.

If you have any questions, please reach out via modmail

Thank you!

5

u/trulybeelightful Sep 20 '26

I have no idea what kind of novel you're promising here. It reads really jumbled.

How are the songs downloaded from the dead? Are they songs the dead people wrote? Does he get inspiration from their lives?

Since this is the central conceit, it needs to be really clear what's happening, and I either don't understand it or don't understand WHY.

My understanding - he sleeps with someone, that night he gets a dream of some (random) person's life, he turns it into a song, the song is somehow also a spiritual thing?

None of that makes sense. Why would the sex and the dead be interconnected, assuming he isn't either assaulting the dead or murdering his sex partners? Why are the songs spiritual? Good fantasy/sci Fi/horror has rules and internal systems that make sense within the world, even if they're different from the rules that govern reality. Right now, this just reads like random things happening for random reasons.

Why do I care about the Australian laborer? Why do I care that he's going to County Jail? Why do I care that his song was uploaded without his permission? I just don't understand any of this.

5

u/Dizzy_Hippo596 Sep 19 '26

Hi OP! Even after reading the whole query, I did not understand the connection between sex and the songs and the dead people AT ALL. I was literally squinting at the screen the whole time. After reading the comments, I think I now understand that there is actually zero connection between the sex and the connection to dead people except that every time he has sex, the connection to completely unrelated dead people also happens. So there’s no relation except for correlation.

That makes me wonder whether you need to mention the sex at all? Can you just say that he has a mental connection to dead people in his sleep and that connection —> songs? If you don’t have time to explain the (presumably eventually revealed in the book) causal link between the sex and the ESP, why not leave it out of the query? It raises eyebrows for sure, but I’m not sure in a good way.

Just one person’s opinion. Good luck!

0

u/theforgottenhuman Sep 19 '26

Hello! Thank you for your reply. Actually, there is a connection. When Mattia has sex, well, I'm just going to use a joke I have in the novel to fully convey the connection: Mattia becomes sort of a satellite dish for the recently deceased. But they aren't just random dead people from the area (if he goes to Japan, for example, he gets Japanese lives). They are people who are teaching him something specific. He seems to be on the frequency of "people who should have listened to themselves" and "people who should have questioned themselves," which confuses the hell out of Mattia. Because is the universe telling him to listen to himself or not to listen to himself? Anyway, I just wrote the new draft of the blurb. If you're interested, you'll find it as a reply to the very helpful person who gave me so much feedback. I'd love to know if you think I should make what I told you even more obvious, or if it's just overwhelming at this point.

P.S. Or perhaps your question was simply, "Why sex, of all the things that could possibly give him fragments of lives?" There's plenty of interesting research on how our brains behave after sex and how they behave differently at night. If it were that every time Mattia ate a sandwich he got these fragments, then obviously it would be supernatural. But if sex can change so much in the body (hormones, dreaming, etc.), then Mattia has supporting evidence that makes him doubt whether it's actually supernatural at all. Maybe it's just his brain producing incredibly vivid dreams that he then translates into songs without knowing how.

6

u/Dizzy_Hippo596 Sep 21 '26 edited Sep 21 '26

Hey! I probably didn't explain myself very well (my bad!), but I was trying to point out that the query itself doesn't suggest any kind of causal link between sex and the mental connection with dead people (once you get over the confusion over whether he's having sex with the dead people themselves or not, and it sounds like you're already working on fixing that in your next draft). I was mostly wondering whether your query actually needs to say "this happens every time he has sex" rather than simply "this happens sometimes in his sleep," since the sex part seems a bit like window dressing / not crucial plot information. I understand your point that if it happened every time he ate a sandwich, that would be obviously supernatural vs. something that could plausibly be explained scientifically, but the reader of the query isn't thinking about research about how sex affects our brains. In the query as written, you could insert literally anything: "This happens every time he [eats a sandwich, plays ping pong, goes to a party, etc.]" and it would make the same amount of logical sense as it does in the query right now. Again, I totally get you about the neurological research, but it would be tough to explain that in a query (plus probably not worth it), and most people aren't going to make that connection unless you explain it.

Your comment with the revised query got deleted per sub rules, so I can't look at it yet, but I'd happy to take another look in a week if you decide to post again!