Query critique 5/18/23

Offer up your page (or query) for Nathan's critique on the blog.
Post Reply
User avatar
Nathan Bransford
Posts: 1553
Joined: December 4th, 2009, 11:17 pm
Location: Pasadena, CA
Contact:

Query critique 5/18/23

Post by Nathan Bransford » May 15th, 2023, 6:42 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.

Dear...:

I chose to submit to you because...

Twelve-year-old Frederick David Jones is dissatisfied with school and routine and dissatisfaction. He wants to really live, you know. His solution: wander into the woods. When he accidentally dozes off, he finds himself in a realm where the trees have grown about a hundred feet tall and aged about a million years. A spirit lady points to a strange fog hovering over his hometown and tells him that she and the world are fading and that their fate depends on him remembering this place. When he wakes up in his bedroom, though, he must confront normal routine life. As he pretends and gradually believes that it was only a dream, his experience of reality deteriorates. Fragments of time slide from future to past without stopping to be present, and a greyness seeps into the eyes of those around him, whose actions turn ever more algorithmic. When he returns to the woods and falls asleep with his imaginative-and-somewhat-unsocialized new friend, they find again the realm of gargantuan trees, but it has turned monochrome and misty, and the spirit lady has become a monster. Frederick must rediscover and remember the sacredness and magic of the world and of his place in it before the fog of forgetting leaks between worlds and blankets everything and everyone in mindless, colorless, everlasting nothing.

FREDERICK AND THE WOODLANDS is a 51,000-word lower YA novel somewhere between urban fantasy and magical realism. Its primary audience is 12-14, but it will appeal to a wide range of ages. Elements of the story and voice evoke Colin Meloy’s WILDWOOD and Katherine Paterson’s BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA but with a touch of Hayao Miyazaki-esque nature magic and Guillermo Del Toro-esque horror.

I am a young writer and graduate student living in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I study political economy and environment at Colorado State University. I have published short stories in Tulsa’s The Voice and The University of Tulsa’s Stylus, and I have a minor in creative writing. This project—hopefully—will be my first published novel.

I hope you will consider FREDERICK AND THE WOODLANDS for representation. Please find the first ... pages below. Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 8 guests