Misha Gericke's Current Query Critiqued

I have a huge meeting with the head of the European division of our client today, which of course they just old me about yesterday. My company is so messed up. I'm very near the bottom of the organizational ladder, and they don't pay me enough for this stuff.

Anyway, I hope I can get this done in time. So, we have Misha's query again today, this time with my feedback, which will be in red.

Now here's the query:

Dear [Insert Agent Name Here]

Callan Blair is adopted into a wealthy family and thinks it’s just her 23rd game of “Happy Family”, except this time she ends up in a different world, triggering events that will lead to a war generations in coming the making?

You do well to start of with your character, but after that, this falls apart. I don't know if this is a cultural thing, but here in the US, "Happy Family," is a dish you can get at Chinese restaurants for dinner. I have no idea what it's supposed to mean in this context. Also, the fact that what I assume is some kind of family board or card game ends up sending her to another world, a world on the brink of war, sounds pretty cool, but it's also incredibly vague. I'm hoping it will be explained in the next 'graph.

All this happens because her bratty adoptive brother, James, doesn’t know Callan’s dark secrets will get her out of his life soon enough without his help. This is also vague, and doesn't make much sense. I can't conceive of how this brother can make a game send his sister to another world, so if you're going to bring it up, you should probably explain how he has that power. So he does the sensible thing and plots her expulsion from Greyston Academy, but fails and Callan gets permission to skip her first day of school. Huh? Not only is this jumping to a whole other conflict, but it also doesn't make sense how the one leads to the other. He plots her expulsion, but fails, which somehow leads to her being allowed to skip? How and why does the first logically progress to the second? She escapes to a nearby castle where she bumps into a group of oddly non-geeky cosplayers who aren’t what they appear to be. Okay, this is another leap of logic for me, but I don't really care. The mention of cosplayers would make this an automatic request for me if I were an agent. I hope it's intended to be funny, because I find it hilarious, in a good way. Turns out they’re a group of highly trained and ferocious warriors on their way home after war. So she sees a group of warriors, and because she's not familiar with the world she's in, she assumes they're cosplaying? I hope that's how it works, because I can't really tell for sure. If that is how it works, it's an awesome scenario, but you could probably make it much clearer in your query. She finds this out the hard way when a very real battle erupts and she gets kidnapped by a psycho with delusions of love and plans to drag her to the continent of Tardith, a place she never knew existed.

Okay. At this point, I have to say, elements of the content are very cool, in the sense that showing up in a new world because of a game sounds really cool, if shocking, and even the basic mention of cosplayers sounds fun and funny, but the structure of this query isn't working for me.

Right now, it's set up like: Random thing A happens, which sounds cool. It's followed by random thing C, which has no logical progression from A, and then suddenly jumps back to random thing B, all of which sound like interesting things to occur in a story, but are vague, don't make much sense, and seem to have little or no connection to each other. I hope that doesn't sound too harsh, but does it make any sense? Of course you don't want to give everything away in a query, but things need to fit together better than this. I realize it's a fantasy world, and so the world doesn't have to be completely logical, but the way things connect to each other has to make sense, and the way one occurrence progresses into another has to be logical.

The “cosplayers”, at this point, the cosplayer thing starts to feel like a gimmick. After seeing them in a real battle, would she not stop thinking of them that way? Or is she a gamer and cosplayer herself, back in the real world, and is therefore obsessed with the concept? led by the most arrogant bastard Callan ever met and his absolutely stunning best friend, rescue her and take her to Nordaine -- a country in Tardith. There, she discovers two things: Her parents both came from this strange world and her mother was a princess in Alfen Cairn, the land of the elves. She wants nothing more than to discover her mother’s secrets and why she kept them, but to do it; Callan has to contend with politics, the elves themselves, an arranged marriage and her own darkest secret. Now this query is starting to get good. When you re-write this, focus on this section, and consider how all these sentences fit together, and lead from one to another. Try to write the rest of your query, especially the beginning, with this same kind of cohesion. For within her lurks an evil so powerful that she could never fight or expel it, and now it’s trying to destroy her life. Vague. On top of it all, she must decide where her loyalties lie in the boiling cauldron of Tardithian politics. And because all that is too easy, her choice will determine the whole continent’s future.

DOORWAYS is a 110(,)000 words YA epic fantasy about five people: Callan who is searching for her place in Tardith, James, who follows her there in search of his redemption, Darrion, who’s fighting to save his leader and so ensure his place on Nordaine’s throne, Gawain, who’ll stop at nothing to help him, and Ward, who is more than just the quiet guy in James’s shadow. I would skip this whole thing. I'm not saying a bunch of POV characters can't work in fantasy, because it does all the time, but it's place is not in the query. You could maybe say the story is told from multiple POVs, but you can't name them all like this. Consider George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Awesome, crazy story, with tons of POV characters (even in only the first book), right? The query would still be told from Ned Stark's POV. Every story has a main protagonist, and in a query, you should almost always try to stick to one. The book is intended to be the first in a four part series. This is okay, but it might be better worded to just say it has series potential. Agents want a book to stand on its own.

A tiny bit about me: I live in South Africa, using my beautiful view of Table Mountain as inspiration when I write, blog it's okay to put a link here and work as a fresh produce trader/marketer.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Misha Gericke

[contact details here]

All right. Summary. First of all, this sounds like an awesome, epic tale. It's a bit difficult to excavate that information from the way this query currently stands, but I can tell it's there.

As to structure, this query needs some work. The first half in particular. The good news is that it starts to get really good near the end, and the whole final stakes and choice are pretty well executed.

What you need to do is see if you can apply the same methods to your opening hook, and introductory conflict paragraph. Right now, the first five or six things you mention jump from one to another with no sense of being connected, and even though they sound cool, it throws the reader off because he's puzzling over how you got from one to the next, instead of being impressed by how cool the next thing is.

I hope this all makes sense, and helps.

That's it.

What do you all think? Can anyone suggest a better opening hook? Or perhaps think of a way to tie this compelling string of events together better?