Evil Editor's Blog, page 91

Face-Lift 1233

Guess the Plot

The Stage

1. "The curtains tickle." "The lights are blinding." "The lead actress's stilettos stab like hypodermic needles." For the first time, the world of the theater is presented from the perspective of the one who has seen it all... The Stage.

2. The story behind the story of one theatre producer's ambition to do the impossible: Schindler's List- The Musical.

3. Kaylen was assigned months ago to write, produce and direct the senior play. It's almost time for tryouts now, and she hasn't done jack. Maybe if she can convince everyone that the stage is haunted the show won't have to go on.

4. The only thing Joan wants in life is to be an actress on Broadway – she loves the exhilaration of performing live. Then Nancy gets the role Joan lives for, and Joan learns that the exhilaration of watching a rival die before her eyes is much more satisfying.

5. Five years ago, the stage in the Shnooblethwatz Theater was cursed by some stereotypically angry ghosts after the building was constructed on their graves. Now anyone who performs in the theater can only speak the words the ghosts recited on the stage. Can Taniqalla Boom-Boom, most recent addition to the company, break the curse? Or is everyone doomed to say nothing but scripted lines for the rest of their lives?

6. Rocket scientist Jeff Hutchens suspects that the solid fuel in the first stage of the new Mars rocket has problems. But his boss is under pressure to launch this week, not waste time with a burnout. His lover Sam can't wait to fly the bird, the press is screaming for action, and even the President wants the launch. Should Jeff do everything he can to have the mission scrubbed, or should he sit at Mission Control with fingers crossed?


Original Version

Seventeen-year-old Kaylen has the opportunity to do what no one else at Alderpoint High School has done before - write, produce and direct the senior play in their new state of the art theater. [Of course no one's ever done this stuff in the new theater. The theater wasn't there before. It's like bragging that you're the first person in the history of the world to eat a slice of the cake you just baked.] [Also, I find it hard to believe the drama department wouldn't divide these three tasks among three people to give them all valuable experience.] Nailing it will get her out of her small town and into the theater program of her dreams. [Not to mention a possible Tony nomination.] Unfortunately, a summer of writer's block has left her without a script. [Then she has an epiphany: a play about a high school girl with writer's block.


Act I, Scene 1Kaylen's bedroom
Kaylen (Turning off television)Damn, I thought sure watching a Big Brother marathon would give me some ideas for the play I have to write. Maybe I shoulda gone with MTV. Let's see, I need a setting. The mall? Yeah, that's it. I bet no one's done a play set in a mall, with a character shopping for clothes with her BFF. Actually, if I want this to feel real I should go to the mall and immerse myself in the world. I'll call Nicole and see if see wants to help me with research.]

Act I, Scene 2The Gap
NicoleThat top looks great on you.


Kaylen Buying clothes is way more fun than writing a play.


NicoleYou could be writing down everything we say for your play.


KaylenBorrrrring. I'll write the play tomorrow. Let's go to Mrs. Fields.]


With tryouts fast approaching, she looks for inspiration in the prop storage area. Instead she finds an old, fire-singed script of a play she's never heard of. Too proud to admit failure, she passes the script off as her own.

Things start falling apart at the first full-cast read-through. As soon as the actors finish, the stage curtains catch fire. Later that week Kaylen's assistant producer is found unconscious backstage, his face and hands covered with burns. She writes it off as bad luck [for the assistant producer,] until she catches her five main actors rehearsing on stage without her - in the middle of the night, standing in the shape of an inverted pentagram. [Seems like whether a pentagram is inverted or not depends on where you're looking at it from. And if it's just five people standing up at the points of the pentagram, it wouldn't look any different than five people standing in a circle. Now if they were lying down they could form an obvious pentagram.]

Convinced the script holds clues about the strange events, Kaylen examines it more closely and finds ties to Obadiah Baker, the town's founder. As she dives [delves?] deeper into Alderpoint's history she discovers multiple horrific tragedies involving fire - and the dates coincide with her show's opening night. If she hopes to save her friends, Kaylen must learn what happened below her school's stage over two hundred years ago and figure out how to stop it. [How can she stop something that happened over 200 years ago?]

THE STAGE is a ##,###-word YA Horror and a 2014 NaNoWriMo project (I know not to mention the NaNo part in the real query!) Thank you for your time and consideration.


Notes

How does Kaylen know that whatever happened over 200 years ago happened below her stage? Did all the fire-related horrific tragedies that happened in Alderpoint's history happen on the same location as the stage? Is it the stage or the script that ties all these tragedies together?

How come when she delves into Alderpoint's history and finds out about all these other tragedies, she doesn't find out about whatever happened under the stage 200 years ago?

It would be pretty unusual for the senior play to be written by a student. And for that student to be so unmonitored that the teachers involved have no idea she has no script started with tryouts rapidly approaching.

Are the burning curtains etc. related to the fact that Kaylen claims the script as her own? Or would they be happening even if she'd admitted it wasn't hers? If the latter, we don't need to know in the query that she does something dishonest. If the former, does that mean all the other tragedies that occurred on that date involved someone being dishonest?

Face-Lift 1232

Guess the Plot

The Splintered Empire

1. Prince Kischae's plan to marry the daughter of Pixali's king hits a stumbling block when he finds her leading an army against his kingdom. But hey, many a great romance has gotten off to a rocky start.

2. A sweeping, galactic, epic adventure, with three Separatist groups destroying the Federation's hold on the galaxy, with varying degrees of success.

3. Emperor Hiram's biggest mistake was walking barefoot through the woods. He returns to the palace with three enormous, painful splinters in his toes. At first, he's willing to go to any length to have the splinters removed. Then he comes to accept them as parts of himself, going so far as to disown his children and name the splinters heirs to his empire.

4. Big John Holcomb built his fortune by logging the wild redwoods. Now his son and grandsons fight over whether or not to selectively log, plantation farm redwoods, or nail themselves to the big trees to stop humanity's destruction of . . . the splintered empire.

5. The split of the Roman Empire into eastern and western halves is efficient in many ways, but not for twin brothers Antonius and Duilius, whose home is bisected by the border between east and west, and whose arguments over which half of the empire they live in are historic.



Original Version

Dear Evil Editor and Minions,

Prince Kischae spent his childhood as a hostage in the neighboring kingdom of Pixali. Years later, after removing his rivals to his home country’s throne, he invades Pixali intending to conquer the kingdom and wed the bastard daughter of the king. [Pixali reminds me of pixies or Pixy Stix, or Pixar, or the emails I keep getting from women who want me to click on a link to their pics. Come up with a name that a king wouldn't be embarrassed to admit he rules.]

Unfortunately, his assassins attack him next—they were bought off by a very-much-alive rival. [Somewhere on the list of Things I would do if I ever became an Evil Overlord must be: If I order my henchmen to remove my rivals, I will insist that they bring me my rivals' heads, which I will then count to make sure they're all there before having them cremated. Along with my henchmen.] His generals start plotting against him. And, the bastard daughter of the king has the temerity to be leading the resistance army. [When other kingdoms and your own assassins and your own generals and your soulmate all want you dead, it's time to cut bait.]

Can Prince Kischae win the throne, the war, and the girl? Or will he have to choose between [among] them?

The Splintered Empire is a stand alone fantasy adventure query complete at 132 words. I may be working on this book for NaNoWriMo.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

The 5th Serial Killer Guess the Plot Quiz

The fake plots below have all appeared on this blog since the last time we had a Serial Killer Guess the Plot Quiz. But wait! Two of these plots turned out to be the actual plots of minions' novels. Do you remember which two?




1. When a serial killer starts leaving his victims' body parts encased in amber all over the city, Detective Zach Martinez knows two things: the police's geological consultants are also his suspect pool, and he's definitely getting his wife a different semi-precious stone for their anniversary.
2. The "Lipstick Killer" is on the loose, so called because he kisses his beautiful victims and smears their lipstick before strangling them, but efforts to capture him are hindered because the sheriff hates the police chief.
3.In Van Buren Arkansas, they roll up the sidewalks at 7 PM. One morning a crushed corpse falls out when the sidewalk is unraveled. Two mornings later another pancake-flat corpse falls out. Could little Van Buren have the world’s first sidewalk-crush serial killer?
4.When Quinn Masters, firefighter extraordinaire and chef with a flair for flambe, discovers a charred body in her garage, she totally throws up. But as the bodies begin to mount, Quinn secretly investigates the murders. The more she discovers, the more worried she becomes. Could she be the serial killer?
5. Cindy sings blues for brother Fire Robinson’s Blues Band. Their shows are stalked by a sadistic serial killer. Washington Detective Wilson Waters arrests Fire on erroneous evidence. Cindy and singer Earthy Edith find the killer and free Fire from phony charges. Also, a litany of artless alliteration.
6. Seemingly random online strangers find themselves on a serial killer’s potential victim list. Will they discover in time that the  killer is a Grammar Nazi trying to eliminate the biggest online offenders of the English language?
7. After Mercy is kidnapped, raped and tortured and nine other people are murdered, she decides that the killer is the cop investigating the crimes. No one's likely to believe her so she must solve the case herself. But can she survive a rigged death match and bring in her quarry before the Afghan War veteran trying to avenge his slain grandma does? 
8. Ryan Carver analyzes footprint molds for the FBI. He's also a foot fetishist. And Washington DC's latest serial killer has the most heart-stopping size 7s he has ever seen. 

Answers below.


The actual plots are numbers
2 and 7.

Evil Editor Classics

Guess the Plot

Texas Tango

1. Most places in the world it takes two to Tango, but here in Texas -- it takes three.

2. The year: 1870. The city: Death Gulch, Texas, home of the infamous dance duel. Alphonse the Kid has shot 24 men across the Wild West. But is he tough enough to survive the . . . Texas Tango? 

3. Released on parole after five years in a Texas prison, Joe Fane just wants to get on with his life. But first he needs transportation, so he car-jacks an SUV, which happens to contain an Uzi and two dozen gold bars. He probably should fence the gold and live like a king, but instead he uses it to frame his hated father-in-law for theft. It's a "priorities" thing.

4. When sultry Latina dancer Muriel Fuego is accused of murdering her manager, crack homicide detective Zack Martinez knows two things: the Texas Two-Step is for squares, and he’s got to get some of those jazzy dance shoes with the pointy toes and built-up heels. 

5. It's Brokeback Mountain meets Strictly Ballroom when two gunslingers meet their destinies, not to the sound of blazing six-guns on the streets of Laredo, but to the strains of an Argentine tango in the Longbranch Saloon. Also, a transvestite ivory-tickler.

6. There are so many Texans on death row they have to execute them two at a time, which is how the long walk to the execution chamber has come to be called the Texas tango. But when ballroom instructor Melina Kerchenko and her student/lover Bob Lucas are sentenced for murdering Bob's wife, they literally tango to their deaths.



Original Version

Dear E-Squared:

After five years in state prison, Joe Fane returns to Houston to serve a six-month parole. Divorced, broke, and jobless, he moves into a halfway house--hardly the lifestyle he enjoyed as son-in-law to rogue banker Charley Shyler. [Change his name to Charley Shyster.] All Joe wants is to do his time and move on.

Charley himself avoided prison only because Joe took a fall. Now, paranoid that his former protege knows too much, Charley takes Joe on a midnight ride, presenting him with a choice: reaffirm his loyalty by making a contract hit, or else. [Spending five years in prison without talking doesn't show he's loyal, but killing some stranger does?] But Joe is no killer; seizing an unguarded moment, he breaks free, [Breaks free of what?] carjacks an SUV, [Where is this midnight ride, downtown Houston?] and escapes. When he abandons the vehicle, he discovers a loaded Uzi and two dozen gold bars.[The cops are already looking for this car for sure. I better dump it and head for the hills, but first, since I'm broke, I'll check under the seat for spare change and . . . Holy Crap!!]

Joe is elated, then dubious. Is the gold stolen?--probably. Can he fence it?--not quickly. Without certificates of assay, complications would arise. [My admittedly limited research reveals that certificates of assay are rarely provided or expected, especially not with bars big enough to be worth two million dollars per two dozen.] Word would leak out, Charley would hear. And what about the guy Joe car-jacked?[Maybe he was just delivering the gold bars to someone who ordered them online.] [Possible subplot: a guy's boss tells him to hire an armored truck to transport two dozen gold bars across town. But the guy thinks, Hey, I'll drive them over myself, after work, and pocket the armored truck fee. So he's driving across town in his SUV at midnight with the gold bars in a grocery bag, and as he's eating a Taco Bell Volcano Burrito at a red light, suddenly a guy jumps out of the car next to him and pulls him out of his SUV and takes off. So now he's standing there with beans and sauce all over his shirt, wondering how he's gonna explain to his boss that he lost the gold bars.] [It suddenly occurs to me that this guy's story is far more interesting than Joe's story. Can we make Joe the subplot?]

Instead of peddling the gold, Joe plays on Charley's greed. He enlists Molly Teague--an old flame--to pitch a phony land deal, conning Charley into holding the gold as collateral for a two-million-dollar loan. [If you'll lend me two million dollars to buy a plot of land, I'll let you hold onto these gold bars for which I have no proof of ownership and which I inexplicably don't want to use to buy the land.] Once the money is wired to an offshore account, Joe and Molly will go their separate ways--

--and Joe will tip the FBI to the illicit treasure sitting in Charley's bank. [Whether I'm Molly or Joe, I'm not going my separate way unless that was my offshore account the money went to.] So long, Charley. [If Charley accepts the gold as collateral on a loan, wouldn't the FBI be more interested in who borrowed the two million than in Charley?]

It almost works.

TEXAS TANGO is an 82,000-word crime novel. Thank you for your time.

Yours truly,


Notes

Is the person Joe is supposed to kill in the car with him and Charley? If not, why does he need to escape? He could just say, Okay, I'll kill whoever, and then disappear.

Does Joe have a gun when he steals the SUV? Because it seems to me the guy driving around with stolen gold bars is more likely to be armed than the guy out on parole trying to keep clean for six more months.

Many of my annoying questions undoubtedly are easily answered. You don't need to answer them in the query, but if you can answer a couple and eliminate whatever inspired a couple, it will seem less preposterous. 


Selected Comments


Anonymous said...You may want to do some fact checking on the parole part. Six months parole sounds rather . . . .light. I've heard of 3, 5, 10 and even life on parole but six months on parole in a half-way house? i don't think so.


AlaskaRavenclaw said...Here are things I've found in used or rented cars:

A small Darth Vader with one leg missing.

A receipt from a wire service for sending $150 to Senegal.

One platform shoe, beige.

Kenny Rogers' Greatest Hits.

Here are things I have not found:

Loaded Uzis and gold bars.

This doesn't sound believable to me. It's the kind of thing that Donald Westlake used to get away with because he had seniority and no one could stop him, but nowadays, I can't see it flying. If your protag actually did something (other than commit an apparently unrelated crime) to get the gold and the Uzi, it might work.

And if the guy is in a halfway house and just wants to do his time and go free, I'm having a hard time buying a situation in which carjacking seems like a good idea. Why not walk, run, take a bus, crawl through a culvert?

Probably Joe's actions make more sense in the novel than they're making in the query.


Anonymous said...I don't get a feel for the main character, Joe Fane. He stumbles onto the gold, the con job doesn't sound terribly exciting, and the final crushing blow to Charley is an anonymous tip to the FBI?

Other than being elated and then dubious, Joe's emotions are non-existent. Revenge? Greed? Hate? Boredom and ennui?

I'm sure it's more exciting in the book; the query needs to reflect that.


BuffySquirrel said...If he can't sell the gold without these certificates, what makes it possible for him to get Charley to accept them as collateral? If the guy's a banker, he'll know more about gold than Joe does.

The whole phony land deal thing sounds highly contrived as a way to turn the gold into money. Why not ransom it back to the owner? Or turn it into the cops for a reward?


John said..."...the guy driving around with stolen gold bars is more likely to be armed than the guy on parole..."

If this is Texas, even that driver's dog would be armed. And would probably be a decent marksdog.


jcwriter said...Author here:

@Evil Editor. Thank you for your comments. For what it’s worth—

I chose Shyler because it was close to Shyster and Shylock without being either.

Charley will video the killing; he’ll sleep better knowing he’s holding that over Joe’s head.

Before Joe abandons the SUV, he wipes it down to remove his prints; in doing so, he finds the weapon and gold.

In reality, gold bars are marked to show weight, purity, and foundry; the bars Joe finds have no markings and are in fact crudely cast. To introduce that story element into the query--that is, to get into the provenance of the bars--would push me past the 250-word limit I was trying to hold. So I shorthanded it by referencing the lack of documents.

The gold bars don’t just pop up from nowhere; they are the MacGuffin in a subplot that intersects and interweaves with the Joe/Charley story clear to the end, in fact, sharing the same climax.

Same goes for the phony land deal—it’s part of a subplot that develops Molly Teague’s motivation for swindling Charley Shyler, and the reasons (besides his overwhelming greed) he falls for it.

Yes, it is Molly’s offshore account the money goes to.

In a minor subplot, Joe is hounded by an investigator with the Texas Rangers (in the query, I said FBI because it’s shorter; I should maybe quit doing that) who faults him for taking the fall that let Charley Shyler off the hook years before. As Joe leaves the country (to meet up with Molly, who has the cash), he will drop a dime on Charley and tell the ranger that the banker is holding a hoard of unregistered gold. As the query implies, the plan fails, but by story’s end, Joe engineers a different, more gratifying comeuppance for Charley, without employing jail time, gunplay, or deus ex machina.

Thanks again for your comments and suggestions. I tried to follow advice you gave several weeks ago: ten sentences on one page that focus on the main character; who is he, what he wants, what’s stopping him, what he plans to do about it. The question that arises, though, is how far into the weeds do we wander? At some point, motivations, set-ups, etc. must go unsupplied, lest we wind up with a detailed synopsis that will be rejected because it’s too long.


jcwriter said...Addendum to author’s previous post: Here’s my question:

At what point in a query do we stop revealing story beats? It seems to me, the purpose of the query is not to prompt an agent to sign the author on the spot, but to think, “Wow, I can sell this story,” and request the full manuscript.

We are counseled that brevity in a query is paramount. But brevity necessarily gives rise to unanswered questions; if they’re of an inconsequential nature—and not some jaw-dropping logical disconnect—will an agent (some, all, few, none?) let the full manuscript speak for itself?

Or not?


Evil Editor said...If the story sounds good, some agent will request it even if some inconsequential point seems nonsensical. Of course, unless you label each point as either inconsequential or jaw-droppingly important, you must accept that what you consider inconsequential may not seem so to someone who hasn't read the book.

Also, AR, can I have that receipt? My Senegalese emailer is claiming he never got the $150.

Halloween Guess the Plot Quiz

Below are a number of fake plots that appeared here in recent times. But wait! They weren't all fakes. Four of them turned out to be the actual plots of minions' novels. Which ones?


1. A Vermont coven of witches discover how to travel into the past as ghosts. They decide to right the wrongs of New England’s past by building goodwill for witches, but they also break a barrier holding back a clutch of demons. As the witches right wrongs, the demons wreak havoc and frame the witches.
2. I was murdered a century ago, so you'd think I'd be dead, but I'm immortal. Since I never look any older I have to move to a new town every time I graduate from high school. That's why immortality is a curse, at least when you're 16. If I have to read Paradise Lost one more time I think I'll jam a stake through my heart. 
3. Son Son is sick of his obsessive compulsive parents who repeat every action to make sure they got it right, including the time they submitted his birth certificate. He wreaks vengeance on them by murdering them both twice - once as humans and once as zombies.
4. Terrorized by bullies at school and my abusive mother at home, I begged a vampire to bite me and give me power. Instead the vampire bit my mother, then passed out, drunk. So I found a werewolf, who promptly ran off with the vampire.
5. When you live in Skeleton Gorge, the biggest worry is landslides. So when a mage named Landslide shows up with an army of zombie skeletons and starts causing landslides, it's up to the Skeleton to protect the gorge. 
6. Cassandra is a witch, which is against the law, so she lives in isolation. But she'll have to expose herself if she wants to rescue her grandmother from kidnappers. Although her grandmother's also a witch, so maybe she can rescue herself. Also, a talking dog and cat. 
7. In the woods practicing her Wiccan rites, Helen is abducted by aliens. Seems the Grand Chief would like to add a witch to his harem. Although her powers are diminished when away from Earth, she isn't giving up without a fight. Now if she could only get to her wand. 
8. When Henri the pirate captures Kadi and puts the moves on her, she wonders if she should tell him that she's the queen of the vampires? He's pretty handsome, and something like that can be a stumbling block to a relationship.
9. Kelsey, third-year student at Rugglesbottom Witch School, is fed up. The other girls are snotty, the boys are jerks, and Master Snoftrun just gave her alchemy final a C. When she finds a strange wand in the library, she fools with it until she knows what it does. Fourth year is going to be much, much better.
10. A vampire, mummy, zombie, werewolf, and alien walk into a dive bar. No one seems to care. Then the loneliest, most ordinary teen girl on the planet walks in and all hell breaks loose.
11. The day after he was cursed by a witch, Jack lost both legs in a mysterious accident. She cursed him again, and this time he was attacked by a vampire. But in bat form, he didn't need legs and lived happily ever after.
12. It was the forbidden song. Throughout the ages its words were sung surreptitiously wherever there was oppression and hearts longed for revolution and freedom. So the wizard overlord cursed the song so that its lyrics now invoke the dreaded steel vampire.
13. Searching for some missing fellow witches, Marling comes face-to-face with Viktor, the only man in the world she can love (because the unlove spell she cast on herself prevents her from loving all others). But just because she can love him doesn't mean she does. Does she? 
14. Ogzhal is an Awakener, one of a special caste of elite warlocks whose task it is to select new corpses for life among the undead. When his wife leaves him for a vampire, he turns to formaldehyde to drown his sorrows. Can sweet ghoul Loretta help turn his life around before it's too late?
15. Welcome to Underland, where the Vampires are arrogant bastards, the Zombies do all the dirty jobs, and the Skeletons dominate the music and art scene. But when a human teenager enrolls at Underland High, will everything go to Hell?
16. Prydain was once handsome, but now he's a clumsy giant, thanks to a mean witch. Penny thinks Prydain is cute, and leaves flowers on his doorstep. Now she's trapped in his underground lair, and he won't let her go until she kisses him.

17. Archaeologist Ben Hutton is both amused and intrigued by the Medieval 'vampire' burial his team found at a crossroads near Warsaw. Once back in the lab, you know the vampire will come back and start biting everyone while looking for his lost love, so why am I bothering to tell you this?

Answers below.


The actual plots are numbers

2, 5, 6, and 13.

Happy Halloween

Click strips to enlarge.

Face-Lift 1231

Guess the Plot

Forgotten Rage

1. Xandra doesn't remember anything when she wakes up in an unfamiliar hospital, except that the guy at her bedside, who was supposed to marry her best friend, ended up killing her. So why is he calling Xandra "Sweetheart"?

2. Flowers and group hugs, and butterflies and meditation, and aromatherapy and happy places… Also, puppies… Lots and lots of puppies.

3. The new school librarian, Ann Gray, has a dastardly superpower: she telepathically dredges up long-dead emotional wounds. Cutting words, petty slights, unkept promises--her victims get angrier and angrier the longer they dwell, until they go insane! Can our lovable gang of sixth-grade superheroes take Ann down, or will the team break up as they succumb to their...Forgotten Rage?

4. Awaking from a 2-year-long coma, Martin meets his mother, his wife, and his children. He strains for some memory of any of them, but finds none. When his best friend Steve visits him in the hospital, Martin again has no memory, but he does have an inexplicable and uncontrollable rage. It takes two orderlies, a doctor, and a hypodermic needle to keep Martin from choking his friend to death.

5. They’d played me for a sap once too often. Left me out on a limb. If they thought I’d fall for the same old trick, they were barking up the wrong tree. I was gonna fix their wagon, if it was the last thing I ever did. I’ve forgotten more about the revenge business than they’ll ever know. If only I could remember who ‘they’ were…

6. Archaeologist Ben Hutton is both amused and intrigued by the Medieval 'vampire' burial his team found at a crossroads near Warsaw. Once back in the lab, you know the vampire will come back and start biting everyone while looking for his lost love, so why am I bothering to tell you this?


Original Version

Synopsis: Xandra Donato doesn't remember anything when she wakes up in an unfamiliar hospital, especially not the fact that she was born in France over 600 years ago. [If you don't remember anything, I don't see how there can be an "especially."] So when an oddly familiar boy shows up asking for her help to stop the upcoming war she has to rely on what she does have. An ancient locket, a list of rules written in Latin, and an adventurous and haunted past. Might as well throw in a southern soldier and paranormal abilities, right?

Excerpt - " Took me 600 years to find you Xandra Donato and I don't plan on letting you go now. " The guard removes his helmet with a grim smile. Cold chills run down my back, it's a face all too familiar. " Remember me sweetheart? " " I'm not sure, weren't you that guy who never amounted to anything? The guy who was supposed to marry my best friend and ended up killing her? " " Ahh yes, that I remember. " [So, it's a comedy.]


The title is Forgotten Rage because she had forgotten all of her past grudges and experiences when her memory was erased. [I'm assuming this is not a Nanowrimo book, as there's already an excerpt.]


Notes

Don't put a space after opening quotation marks or before closing quotation marks.

P1: Change period after "have" to a colon. P2: Change commas after "back" and "sure" to periods (or semicolons). You can get away with sentence structure errors occasionally, but at this stage of your relationship with the recipient of the query letter, you don't want to give the impression you don't know what a sentence is.

Excerpts are rarely welcome in a query. What information we glean from the excerpt can easily be conveyed in an expository paragraph.

This is supposed to be a business letter in which you provide the title, word count, genre, and a brief summary of what happens in the book, focusing on the main character's situation, goals, plans, obstacles, and what's at stake.  Check out some of the hundreds of other "Face-Lifts" on this blog for samples.

The situation is intriguing, though if it's set in modern times it's hard to see how this girl can help stop an upcoming war. Who is she? Is she immortal? A vampire? Rightful heir to the throne of England? What war are we talking about? We need information.

Face-Lift 1230

Guess the Plot

Footprints

1. There was trouble in the Security checkpoint line at Terminal 1. But then, there was always some kinda trouble. And that was when eccentric inventor Cornelius Crankpot had his epiphany. It was only a matter of time before fingerprints could be circumvented. But since people had their shoes off anyway, why not surreptitiously verify their identity, by their . . . FOOTPRINTS.

2. Leroy has the job of his dreams: dressing up as a Jesus at The Holy Land Experience (he gets to carry people across sand!) When another Jesus shows Leroy how easy it is to get big tips from older women, will Leroy open his robe for them, or resist temptation? 
3. The MO is always the same. Bloody swim-fin footprints led to a victim completely devoid of blood. A deranged, bloodthirsty surfer/killer was on the loose. The local police, the state police, and even the FBI came up empty. Then the 11th bloody trail led down the pier, and two-headed, squid-like creatures with webbed feet emerged on the beach, leaving a trail of bloodless victims in their wake.

4. There are only a few sets of footprints on the Moon, all left over from NASA's glory days. So when 12-year-old Scott Welpern spots a different, new set of prints, he's ready to call NASA--until he realizes that they aren't human.
5. Knowing she is not long for this world, Ella vows to reduce her carbon footprint. But what can she do about the carbon that returns to the Earth when her body decomposes? Also, a bizarre tarot reading.

6. Ryan Carver analyzes footprint molds for the FBI. He's also a foot fetishist. And Washington DC's latest serial killer has the most heart-stopping size 7s he has ever seen. 

7. On every park sign is the signature phrase: Take only pictures and leave only footprints. "Screw That!" says Smokey the Bear. After fifty-plus-years of "Shoot yourself in the Foot" National Park administration, Smokey's going postal. In a tell-all memoir for the ages, he describes riotous bonfires, by-the-ton littering and free sex with rangers. "Only you can stop...Smokey from baring it all.


Original Version
[Just the plot summary from a possible query for a projected NaNoWriMo novel.]

Ella Rosbury's empty nest is almost unbearable, and while comtemplating ending it all, she finds a lump that might do the job for her. 

Upon discovering the lump is cancer, she chooses to fight to live instead, and to live as ethically as possible in the time she has left. She gives most of her possessions away, turns her yard into an organic haven, reduces her carbon footprint and offers her spare rooms free of rent to people in need. 

She chooses three very different women to share her home with her, each of whom is fighting their [her] own internal battles. Clara, a 25 year-old alcoholic, who reminds Ella of her own estranged daughter. [Because her daughter is an alcoholic?] Mickie, whose obsession with cleaning rituals and routines is so overwhelming she has been out of work for 10 years and only left her own home because she was evicted. And Kyra, [a 40-year-old serial killer/heroin addict. Because when you're dying you want to be surrounded by those you care for the most.] a herbalist hippy who occasionally forgets that it's no longer the '60s. [I just realized, it's now closer to the 2060s than the 1960s.]

Kyra's bizarre tarot readings strike a chord with the housemates and act as the catalyst for their own journeys of healing as they face their past traumas. 

Ella in particular realises she has to forgive herself for not seeing the abuse of her own daughter happening under her [own] nose for years at the hands of her [own] late husband. As her illness progresses, time is running out for Ella to find her lost daughter and to heal the fractured relationship. [If you name her daughter in paragraph 2 when you first mention her, you can use the name from then on, instead of calling her her daughter.]

Notes

Seems like the story is mainly set in Ella's house, which has me wondering what she's doing to find her lost daughter. Googling her?

You could throw in a mention of the hopefulness or joy experienced together by these women so that it doesn't sound like a total downer.

Presumably this will be one of those character-driven litfic novels without much of a plot. Otherwise you'd have told us more about what happens. Of course, maybe you don't yet know what happens.

Feedback Request

The author of the query featured in Face-Lift 1161 has posted a new revision in the comments there and requests your feedback

Feedback Request

A revision of the query featured in Face-Lift 1227 is waiting for your reaction in the comments there.