Query: Novak 105363

[MFink]

Any advice would be appreciated! This is a draft I sent in for a specific contest.


Dear Bryan Furuness and the Pressgang Editors,

Greetings! My 109,600-word novel, Novak 105363, is an experiment in historic fiction. At a young age, my great-uncle, John Novak, opened up a silenced world to me as he handed over an old, cloth-bound journal with the words, “Luft Gangster, Killer of Woman and Children and Terror Flyer,” scratched into the inside flap, next to a pair of POW mug shots. John’s war log contained a history of which he had never spoken, but a history that continued on.

Framed by present-day conflicts with memory, aging, marriage and trauma, Marin, the meta-narrator of Novak, reinterprets 1940’s America in a way that questions war in general, and certain soldiers in particular, soldiers who walked along a 300-mile death march through the Austrian Alps, through Mauthausen concentration camp, and all the way to Braunau, the birthplace of Hitler himself. Novak is split into two parts. The first deals with life after the war, the life Marin comes to be a part of, with characters she knows intimately, like her pin-up doll grandmother and the Danny Boy singing Sidney. Part two, however, stretches Marin’s imagination. The young characters she’s created lead her back in time, and give voice to lives that never had a chance to speak.

Soldiers of World War II are dying at a rate of 1000 men a day, and still, having been forced to sign a testament swearing not to speak of their time abroad, truthful stories of John and his fellow Stalag men have only recently begun to surface. John was a crewman in the first group of B17s to fly over Berlin, but John was also my great-uncle––a happy little man in blue slacks and a herringbone Irish cap, with deep wrinkles around his eyes, wrinkles that arched up in laughter when he kissed my cheeks, holding on to his wife of sixty-five years.

Novak fits in well with the Pressgang mission. It is a blurring of boundaries between time, between wars, and between historical and literary language. I am a graduate of the University of Alabama’s Creative Writing Program, where I served as a fiction editor for Black Warrior Review alongside BJ Hollars, one of your authors. I currently teach at the College of Dupage, edit interviews for The Lit Pub, and am the co-founder of Flying House: An Artist-Writer Collaboration Project (ourflyinghouse.com). I would love for you to consider publishing my book. I have included the first twenty-five pages, and have the rest of the manuscript ready if interested.

Sincerely,

[Bobcgirl8]

Hello!

I am not very experienced critiquing queries, but one of the first things I noticed was that the two large numbers (the word count and the title) are confusing when in the same sentence. Maybe save your word count for the end of the query. I think with the first line I am more interested in finding out about the characters I hope this little tidbit helps! Good luck!

Bobcgirl8

[wilderness]

Hi there,

There may be a great WWII historic fiction book in there, but right now I don't have a good sense of what the plot and conflict actually are. I'm not even sure who the main character is. I don't think it matters that one of the characters is based on your uncle since this is fiction.

Mostly, you're telling us what the novel "deals with" rather than what actually happens. Start with your main character. Focus on your opening chapters. And read lots of Query Shark to get a sense of what types of details you put in a query. http://queryshark.blogspot.com/ .

Also break up really long sentences. For example, this one is really hard to digest with one read:

Framed by present-day conflicts with memory, aging, marriage and trauma, Marin, the meta-narrator of Novak, reinterprets 1940’s America in a way that questions war in general, and certain soldiers in particular, soldiers who walked along a 300-mile death march through the Austrian Alps, through Mauthausen concentration camp, and all the way to Braunau, the birthplace of Hitler himself.

Hope that helps!