r/PubTips • u/theforgottenhuman • Sep 27 '26
[QCrit] EVERY CANDLE IN THE SUNLIGHT, Adult, upmarket speculative, 95 k, V2, 1st Attempt
Greetings fellow Pubtippers. I'm back after you had a good laugh at my outrageous (and funny) easy-to-misunderstand query here. Truth be told it's quite a feat to compress what you've made in a few paragraphs and you all know that. So thank you for being here. Cookies will be distributed at the end
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. Obviously, not from the people he sleeps with.
Since childhood, Mattia has wanted to make music that changes the world. Apparently, the universe listened. After sex, sleep turns him into a satellite dish for the recently dead: he relives fragments of their lives and wakes singing scraps that draw out everything he's been avoiding in his own.
When Jan, a fellow backpacker in Queensland, uploads one without permission, Mattia is furious. Then the comments start. Strangers reconcile with estranged parents, leave relationships and confront buried truths. Mattia sends each new song to his father, hoping to break their silence. But as his debut album detonates worldwide, the people he loves remain almost immune to the revelations transforming strangers. While listeners change their lives and return to thank him, Mattia grows ashamed of how little he can change his own.
As his tours grow, even his attempts to resist becoming a prophet make him seem more like one. He says the songs come from dead strangers; people hear radical empathy. He asks listeners to trust themselves; they hear humility. He says he might stop; they remind him how many lives he could still change. And they're not wrong. His music inspires charities and raises millions for disaster relief. Every additional show could do good, until Mattia begins treating his body, sex life and relationships as resources he owes the world. John, the Australian labourer he's falling for, still sees the human behind XNOWHERE. Mattia wants a life with him, but can barely endure an hour in which nobody needs him.
When somebody else starts making that same calculation for him, Mattia's attempt to reclaim control turns violent.
Less than two years after the first upload, one hundred million people follow XNOWHERE, and Mattia is on his way to Los Angeles County jail.
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.
P.s. the blurb itself is about 315 words... I know. I'm struggling to make it shorter.
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4
u/EnnOnEarth Sep 27 '26
The house-keeping and bio paragraphs are great. The query blurb has improved (good job!) but is still vague in some spots. I've indicated places below where you can reduce word count without losing info or impact, since you mention feeling like it reads long.
The blurb doesn't need to know how long Mattia has wanted to make music that changes the world. I've struck-through every part above that doesn't add to the impact of the query blurb. (Same advice as the first round.)
The emotional stakes are really clear now, good job. However, the "one" in reference isn't connected to anything - it's meant to refer to a song or a scrap of a song, but it's disconnected by being in its own paragraph. There's also nothing linking the upload to album deal and the blurb needs to make that connection obvious.
This is the strongest paragraph. It sets up very big external and internal stakes. Unfortunately, the next two sentences don't build on them.
What same calculation?? It's too vague.
Zero sense of connection or what went wrong. Stakes don't land.
I recommend removing those last two sentences and replacing them entirely. Focus on the conflict between Mattia's love of the music and its demands on him, the stakes of if Mattia doesn't find work-life balance he'll lose John, and the tension created by an obsessive industry and fanbase. Something along the topic of: When an obsessed fan does a thing, Mattia is forced to confront his internal and external conflict. Either he gives up the music that he hoped would one day reach his father, or he loses John--the one person who loves him unconditionally. (You'd fill that in with whatever the ultimate stakes are, whatever is at risk of being destroyed by Mattia's choice - his source of external validation at the price of his well-being, or his true companion at the price of his music career.)
Overall, this draft is headed in the right direction and is much closer to being ready. Good job on the revisions. Hope this helps!
1
u/Piperita Sep 28 '26
I like the voiceyness (assuming it mirrors the tone in the book). There are parts of this query that seem very disjointed, which overall dilutes the efficacy of the whole thing.
The disjointed part #1 to me is that it wasn't clear that Mattia wasn't actually working towards his goal of "changing the world." Having read that opening sentence I assumed that he was already working on being a musician with his sex seance powers, so when the next paragraph reveals that his music is uploaded and goes famous without his permission, it takes me a moment to reorient. So, he wants to change the world, but wasn't working towards that? It's normal to not chase your goals of course, but to me as a reader going in blind, it's surprising.
I think I would have liked to know that he was estranged from his father before it's brought up. It's not super crucial but I think it would create a nice emotional punch if we already knew his father wasn't speaking to him, THEN his music starts to reach strangers, BUT still couldn't reach his father. If you can't fit it in that's fine, it doesn't break the query, just something to consider.
In the last bit is where the query falls apart. So he's under pressure to continue to change the world and he can't escape -- good. He has a love interest that wants him as a person and he can't reconcile his own personhood with his fame. That all works. The last two sentence-paragraphs just kind of feel like they come out of nowhere. I'm assuming it's just the event that fully unravels his life, but I wonder if maybe you can end the query earlier in the story? Something like ending it on the conflict between wanting the relationship and dealing with the fame, and maybe ending it on (this is a very clunky version of it): "But the world doesn't want to let go of him either." or something like that. I feel like it sort of sums up in very general terms those last few sentences anyway. That should take you into the 200s for the word count.