Right before my first agent retired, we decided my book would be more likely to find its publishing home if I aged it up from YA to Adult, leaving room for crossover potential. Teenage sci-fi readers tend to read up anyway, and YA sci-fi has been traditionally hard to place. Of course, we planned to do that together, so for the past 11 months I’ve been balancing health issues, local organizing (because of, you know, all the things…), and revising my book without a whole lot of guidance. Thank all that’s warm I have an amazing critique group! It’s been a year full of some hard stuff, but I’m ready to jump back into the query trenches with, what I think, is an accessible adult sci-fi novel that will appeal to new and regular sci-fi readers. However, my log line and query letter also need to be updated to reflect the more adult vibe. And, if I’m being honest, my old log line didn’t fully capture what my novel was really about. It worked well enough when it came to enticing agents, but didn’t exactly roll off the tongue and maybe left out some key elements I should have tried harder to convey. Now that I’m querying again, I get a second chance. That’s good, but pretty much every writer hates having to distill their whole novel into about a 300 character log line and/or a 300-400 word query.
I read some advice once that said before you start writing your novel, if you’re the kind of writer who knows what the story is going to be about from the get go, you should write your log line. Unfortunately, I heard this after I wrote my book, but I can see the benefit and plan to try it for the next one. The log line is the teaser, yes, but I think it’s also trying to convey the heart of the book. If you can do that in simple terms, and keep it in mind while writing, your book is going to be so much tighter in the first draft–and that much easier to edit.
But, alas, I had to work backwards. And my book is a bit of a blend of genres and the inciting incident leads to a very unexpected series of events culminating in “oh, it wasn’t about that at all, not really, but still kinda.” How do I smoosh that into one sentence? Or even a couple paragraphs?
I don’t have a magic formula, but I do have a deadline. Today! I wanted to kick-off my return to querying by entering the #PitchDis Festival. Not only is it a great event for writers with disabilities and stories that involve disability, it’s a great way to see if I got the log line right. That’s the only thing agents will see unless they request pages. To get my log line in at 300 characters (including spaces!), I read a bunch of other log lines, made a list of the parts of the story I thought were the key elements, and probably drove my critique group a little batty by sending them a few too many “how about if I change this one word to this other word” emails.
In the end, I think I nailed it. Only time will tell though. The difference between the original and this one are pretty stark. In the original, I was focused too much on themes and the cool parts of the story I liked while trying to cram in some voicey bits.
ORIGINAL: To save her ableist, arctic moon colony from extinction, 16yo Ice Guard Mye Su risks life & status to use her invisible disabilities to negotiate with sentient fungus—accepting herself and asking for help from people, bots, spores, & giant tardigrades, even if it seriously chaps her ass.
I love the voicey bits! But they don’t flow for me. Whenever I had to say it out loud to someone, it was awkward. And do you need to know the society is ableist in the log line? Working that in felt really necessary at the time, but it was at the expense of other important parts…including the inciting incident! And the inciting incident is at the heart of the story. To me, the original reads almost like a different book to the updated version, and yet I didn’t really change all that much about the book’s fundamentals when I aged it up.
UPDATED: To uncover why she had to mercy-kill her twin, 19yo Ice Guard Mye Su traverses her arctic moon’s tundra and volcanic depths, where she must use her concealed disabilities to communicate with sentient fungi and unite the human coalition, or they’ll all be a hot meal for a reawakened super predator.
I hope this one works better because you get the inciting incident, you understand a dangerous journey is involved, and you get that it leads to exciting discoveries and a huge, unexpected problem. I’m not sure any of that was really conveyed in the original. It isn’t as voicey as the first one, but I did try to give a little taste of my main character/narrator’s voice at the end there. I also had to leave out the ableism reference, but hopefully “concealed disabilities” does some heavy lifting, or at least raises some questions that the agents want answered. Why concealed and not invisible? What’s the reason she has to conceal them?
In the end, that’s what it’s all about–leave them wanting more! Fingers crossed I’ve done just that!
Now, to finish the query letter…