Query critique 2/4/21

Offer up your page (or query) for Nathan's critique on the blog.
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Nathan Bransford
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Joined: December 4th, 2009, 11:17 pm
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Query critique 2/4/21

Post by Nathan Bransford » February 1st, 2021, 12:25 pm

Want to see how your editing approach compares to mine?

Below is the query up for critique on the blog on Thursday. Feel free to chime in with comments, create your own redline (please note the "font colour" button above the posting box, which looks like a drop of ink), and otherwise offer feedback. When offering your feedback, please please remember to be polite and constructive. In order to leave a comment you will need to register an account in the Forums, which should be self-explanatory.

I'll be back with my own post on the blog and we'll literally be able to compare notes.

If you'd like to enter a query for a future Query Critique, please do so here.

Dear Agent,

After reading your #MSWL listing and noting your interest in unique settings, I am submitting sample pages of SUTTON’S CHOICE, a contemporary women’s fiction. Complete at approximately 80,000 words, the story explores the ties binding us to our roots.

When Charlotte Sutton’s estranged father, a retired baseball player and prize-winning author, is thought to have early onset Alzheimer’s disease, the 28-year-old writer returns to her hometown of Lakeside, Ohio, to face her past and the Lake Erie life from which she fled 10 years prior.

Since her hasty departure from the vintage, waterfront community of ivy-covered cottages with unlocked doors, Charlotte has snagged a city job and mostly—barely—stepped out from behind Chuck Sutton’s shadow. Still, she struggles to bury memories of her parents’ pre-divorce brawls, the chatter of small-town gossips, and the “Three strikes, you’re out!” with every bat, ball, and glove the charismatic patriarch of the family thrust into her hands when she was a child. Upon her homecoming for the first time since her high school graduation—one of many life events Chuck did not attend—Charlotte is greeted by a teenage half-sibling she didn’t know she had and a father who has lost all but a glimmer of his former swagger. The family newspaper is failing as quickly as its editor’s health. Charlotte must decide to embrace the Sutton legacy or leave for good, as she comes to understand Chuck’s life choices and her own misconceptions about what it means to plant family roots in small-town Ohio.

I am a past reporter and columnist for Penn Franklin News Publishing Company (a Pittsburgh press). My writing has also appeared in Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Beacon newspapers, in addition to Leisure Living Magazine and My Outer Banks Home magazine. Now living in Lakeside (a real Chautauqua community attracting hundreds of thousands of annual vacationers), I run a writing program at the library, am a member of a critique group, and maintain a writing advocacy website with blog at www.powerofpages.com.

Thank you very much for considering my manuscript, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Brenda Haas

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