GBRK
22hr ago
I've been writing and re-writing my query ad nauseum for about a month and a half, and in the process developed what feels like a genuinely new skill: the ability to take a sentence, and determine what sentence should logically follow. That might sound like table-stakes literacy, but it genuinely feels like I've turned on my mangekyo sharingan. Before, I would look at my writing-- now I can see it. I can consciously identify what elements of a sentence demand elaboration, put them together with explicit goals for where I want the succeeding sentence to take me, and finally identify possible sentences that satisfy all relevant criteria.
Right now, I'm very slow at applying this skill. It takes me about an hour to edit 100 words, and frankly the cognitive load is so high I don't think I'll ever get more than a 2x or 3x speedup. Whenever I get back to actually writing (as opposed to editing), I'll need to retrain my brain to think in flow-state vibe-coder first-draft mode. But whenever I reach a particularly high-stakes passage, I'll have my dojutsu waiting in my eye sockets.
If anyone wants to copy my technique, I would suggest briefly focusing on a type of art that's hyper-constrained in word count. Flash fiction, light novel titles, slam poetry (but not the irritating kind), song lyrics, elevator pitches, and of course query letters. Write and re-write as many times as it takes to be perfect-- and get iterative feedback.
Props to /u/FtttG for introducing me to qtcritique, I wouldn't have gotten here without that.
I thought your query largely made logical sense, with its main problems being misplaced emphasis-- both spending words on things that didn't really matter, and and not spending words where they'd count the most. I am particularly genre-savvy so it have an easier time extrapolating compared to more naive readers, but I think the same is true of agents so you should weight my advice higher. (Do the opposite if I ever review your actual text, though-- that needs to be intelligible to everyone except the bottom 10% of your target audience.)
In general, pubtips seems to have more variance than qtcritique since more of the qtcritique people are regulars. You'll get some really good advice from veterans, but also some really clueless (though well-intentioned) advice from total noobs. In comparison, the main problem with qtcritique seems to be that the star rating system encourages sycophancy, so there are a few power users that give lots of fairly middling advice while visibly making the same errors over and over again in their submissions.
I would suggest looking at the profiles of the people who gave you feedback to survey the other queries they reviewed. Without reading their reviews, identify what you think are the biggest problems with the 3rd party queries. Then, compare those things to what the reviewers said. If you're largely in agreement with them, then their complaints are probably accurate. If you disagree with their points, it might be a difference in genre preference that you can take into account. If you think their overview is facile, you can safely ignore them. If they surprise you with the depth of their insight, cut out their eyes and transplant their kekkei genkai.
More options
Context Copy link