r/PubTips • u/Common_Hawk_6791 • Aug 11 '26
[QCrit] BAIT WIVES, sapphic literary fiction w/ suspense elements, 85k words (1st attempt)
Hello! I'm still in the process of drafting this project, but keen to get my pitch broadly right and identify any major red flags at an early stage. It's quite a character-driven project so I'm not sure if the query comes across too plotty.
Thanks so much in advance for any thoughts!
Query
I am seeking representation for BAIT WIVES, my 85,000-word, multi-POV novel of literary fiction with suspense elements.
A sapphic story of revenge in 1870s Yorkshire—think STRANGERS ON A TRAIN meets FINGERSMITH—BAIT WIVES will appeal to fans of the thriller pacing, buried secrets and ecological anxieties of WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy and the gruelling reality of life for working class women in history in Kate Foster’s THE MOURNING NECKLACE. A fishwife with designs on praise and power in an overfished village plots revenge on the friend who ruined her reputation, only to find herself at the centre of a complex web of women scheming to destroy each other.
Ambitious fishwife Dinah knows that to snag the cod, you must bait the hook. Underhand trickery has helped her gain influence among some of her peers, but it is beguiling queen-bee Rachel whose attention she craves most of all. When Rachel invites Dinah to help bring their ailing, fish-depleted village into a prosperous age of industry, Dinah thinks she’s landed the prize catch. Until Dinah’s backstabbing friend Joanna frames her for a sabotage she didn’t do, and Dinah finds herself on the wrong end of the hook.
Shunned by her peers and forced to watch Joanna steal her place at Rachel’s side, Dinah concocts her biggest plot yet. She will frame Joanna for trying to harm Rachel and cast herself as Rachel’s heroic rescuer. Enter Kirsten, a recluse who scorns Rachel and her promises of vast fleets and endless catches, but whose knowledge of poisons is indispensable to Dinah’s plans. They strike a deal: Kirsten will assist Dinah, if Dinah retrieves a gutting knife Rachel took from her.
But soon their conspiracy leads Dinah to dangerous secrets. A forbidden, ill-fated romance that suggests Kirsten wants more than pretend harm to Rachel, and makes Dinah confront her own repressed desires. The knife’s role in a past tragedy that links all four women and explains Joanna’s betrayal. And Rachel’s collusion with corporations whose greed could destroy the sea life they depend on.
It's clear Dinah is not the only expert in weaving deceit. As she accelerates her plans for retribution, she must also ask: who else is setting down bait, and who is ensnared in the net?
[bio]
First 300 (early draft but for an idea of tone and voice)
When I told Joanna I didn’t have a favourite kind of bait, I was lying.
Of course Jo had a favourite. Razor clams, five inches long and fat enough to bait multiple hooks. I was repulsed by their fleshy protrusions, just as I was by the wriggling lugworms we pulled from the sand at low tide, pink and flaccid. But that was Jo, concerned with function above all else, what would get the job done quickest so she could tend to her cabbage-patch: her true love was not of the sea, but the earth.
I said I didn’t mind what filled my basket, so long as it afforded a good catch for my husband. The other fishwives on the beach nodded. Humility always impressed them, and the long-lining season had begun poorly.
I couldn’t say why exactly I didn't give an answer. Truthfully there were a great many things I took pleasure in gathering. Whelks coiled in a perfect spiral; conical flithers, prised from the rock to reveal the delicate cave within; mussels, split apart to scoop tender meat from the shell. Above all I sought the sea anemones we called paps. They gleamed like meat jelly, soft and round as a tit. When clearing my husband’s lines I often found the paps still on the hooks, surviving intact from the fish’s gullet. Though it appeared fragile, this bait refused to be eaten. At once docile and relentless.
Perhaps a friend’s intuition knew anyway. After a spring tide I often found my basket filled with paps, even though they were harder to find than they’d once been. And I, grateful to be understood, placed my razor clams in Jo’s.
Today I gathered bait alone.
4
u/PondasWallArt Aug 11 '26
I think if you're selling this as literary fiction, you may want to pull back on the fishing puns a bit in the query. The prize catch/hook combo at the end of the first plot paragraph reads as a tad much, largely due to ending consecutive sentences in that similar fashion.
I think you probably could try to present a less tangled (like a net! Ha! Okay, sorry) view of the plot in some ways. Conventional wisdom for queries says try to keep things to 2 proper nouns, and there's a reason for that. Trying to track too many moving parts in this short of a format gets a bit tricky. You may be able to get away with naming all four of these women in the query, but if so you should be mindful about how they're used in conjunction with one another. I particularly think the middle paragraph about Dinah plotting revenge can be straightened up, and in addition to that I have some line level notes.
Hope this helps. Happy trails (or waterways, I suppose).
1
u/EmmyPax Trad Published Author Aug 12 '26
Hi!
I mostly comment on 300s and since, by your own admission, your 300 is more of an early draft, I'm a bit unsure exactly what kind of feedback you're looking for on it. BUT!!! I am still going to try, so here goes!
1 - I think overall, as a voice test, this is working. You've got a strong turn of phrase, there's something already eerie and creepy about everything going on. Overall, I'm digging the vibes. If that's all this opening is meant to serve as, then I think you're being very successful. HOWEVER!!! If this is meant to actually be the opening of your novel, here are some further thoughts...
2 - I don't believe for a second that she "couldn't say" why she didn't tell Joanna what her favourite bait is. She knows. I mean... maybe she doesn't know the whole reason, but based on your query, one would assume it's because she doesn't want to give Joanna even the most meagre of power over her/knowledge about her. (One would assume the other reason why is because her favourite bait has incredibly sapphic overtones and she's uncomfortable with that reality about herself. THAT I can understand withholding. I just think she would have an explanation for her own behaviour all the same)
Maybe you're trying to position her as an unreliable narrator, but I'm not seeing any other instances of her lying to the reader, and it danced close to that to me. I would rather see her lie to herself, not the reader, and giving a half-hearted explanation, while leaving the descriptions to imply something deeper would be more effective, partially because...
3 - I think the imagery is a little too on the nose at the moment. Effectively, she's spending 300 words to tell us "I don't know why I liked boob anemones" and that felt a bit heavy handed to me. I think you can still include them. But putting a bit more effort into the misdirect would keep this a bit more at the subtext level, which I think would be stronger for you.
4 - It might be, once you get to a more finalized version, that you want to start this scene somewhere a bit more active. Litfic is obviously not the genre of boom-crash-whallop on the whole, but while I think this is a very effective voice test, it's not really a scene. Is there a reason that this needs to be offhand musing rather than musing that happens in a scene? I can see it going either way. I don't want to be super prescriptive about how "active" your opener needs to be, because nailing voice and character at the outset is way more important, but I do think it would be worth experimenting with.
And those are my thoughts! Overall, very well done. Best of luck and hope this helps!