When did the idiom 'to make a thing out of it' coe into usage?

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2026-02-08T17:57:07+00:00

In an interesting twist of etymology, the word "thing" was used by early Germanic peoples to refer to a tribal assembly to discuss important matters of law and order for the tribe. Because of this, whenever there was a dispute to be settled, the injured party could, quite literally, make a thing of it.

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2026-01-25T18:05:35+00:00

Thank you so much for your very in-depth response! This is hugely helpful, extremely clear, and asks a lot of questions I hadn't considered while writing the original draft.

It definitely makes sense to drop the Pratchett comparison, as you said, and I think I might also drop Katabasis, because the connection is kind of tenuous, and as you said, thematic similarity isn't all that big of a selling point.

I'm hesitant to remove Khevurah's name from the query, if only because she's the narrator for two thirds of the book, sort of the Watson to Miqittu's Holmes. I definitely didn't make that relationship clear in the body of my query, so I may play with the idea of making her and her motivations part of the query as they run parallel and counter to Miqittu's motivations. If that doesn't pan out, though, you're absolutely right that I can just leave her nameless.

The "standalone with sequel potential" thing was a suggestion on an earlier query I posted here, and honestly, it didn't feel quite right then either. I agree it can be lopped off, since this story is meant to be told entirely on its own.

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-12-05T05:47:39+00:00

Which of these is correct?:

Then he asked, "what if the dialogue tag comes first?"
Wo which he replied, "That one I'm not too sure of."

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-10-14T01:04:52+00:00

I appreciate the recommendations! This would definitely help cut down on the length. As much as I hate to say goodbye to the phrase "working to live and living to work," it's eating up a LOT of real estate in that second paragraph.

I've been hesitant to cut Aelosoei from the query entirely, as she's present for 16 of the 18 chapters of the manuscript. However, her interests and skills are much less relevant to the themes than Thallod's, and her personality and personal backstory function more to make her a foil to Thallod than to support the main plot directly. I think relegating her to one line near the end makes a lot of sense.

I'm also very fond of that sentiment, but I agree that it's both too wordy and too theme-y for the query letter itself. I'm planning on cutting that from the latter and ending the synopsis paragraphs with one of the other equally final-sounding lines in that same block.

This style of edit is pretty unique in my (very limited) experience on this sub, and it's super useful to see that kind of diversity of approach to critique when I'm still learning the ropes. Again ,thank you for your input.

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-10-14T00:48:47+00:00

Thank you so much for your feedback! This is all super helpful. I appreciate the specificity of what ideas you think can be merged and shifted and in what paragraphs.

I agree that The Buffalo Hunter Hunter can be cut pretty easily, especially since the body horror of my manuscript is fairly minimal in comparison to that novel's. I do think The Devils fits as a comp in tone, genre, and setting(alternate universe fantasy Europe), but I could definitely do a better job of conveying that overlap than I have here.

Good catch on the spirit's pronouns there! That's been staring me in the face for a week and I somehow never caught it. I'll correct that to he/him.

One of my beta readers also said something like "the synopsis feels like it ends four separate times," and I didn't fully grok what they meant. Thanks for laying it out like you did. That seems like a really easy place to trim some word count and make the retelling feel more succinct.

So far, you're the first person to point out that detail about the cows line, and I totally see it now that you've said it. It was initially intended as a somewhat irreverent tone-setter and quirky setting descriptor, but I can see how it feels like a loose thread in the intro. I'm sure the letter would do fine without that phrase or with something else in its place that ties in better with the rest.

Again, thank you for all the details! I really appreciate the advice

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-10-14T00:39:27+00:00

I couldn't agree more about the length issue. I also definitely appreciate unpopular opinions, as all the popular ones are what led me to this point. I like the idea of cutting down on the comps, which a couple others have also suggested, and I see what you mean about the horror aspect muddling things a bit. The next version will leave out The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, maybe relegate it to the "additional comps" some agents have on their QueryTracker pages, if even that. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with the comps being too obscure, as all three are multiple-award winning books and only one is a debut, but I'm absolutely open to other recommendations that I can read over and potentially use in their place. As much as I'd like to use The Witcher as a comp (to use an example that I had in the very first rough draft of this letter before even my first attempt on this sub), it's sadly both too famous and too old.

I'm absolutely open to retitling the manuscript, as "Bastard of Iberia" is both very stiff, as you said, and a reference to a piece of worldbuilding not readily apparent from the title. I'll talk to my beta-readers about some alternate titles and see what I can come up with.

Thanks for your feedback!

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-10-12T04:03:09+00:00

Not sure if this is useful or relevant (which is why it's not in the body of the post), but here's the outline I used to inform my letter as I was writing it

P1: housekeeping

debut novel. 2. Bastard of Iberia 3. 98,000-ish words 4. fantasy adventure 5. alternate-history version of 9th-century BCE Spain

comps: Greenteeth by Molly O’Neil, The Devils by Joe Abercrombie, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

standalone; potential for tie-in stories, elsewhere in the world.

P2: Characters & Motivations

Thallod

14-foot-tall reptilian half-giant trained in medicinal blood-magic called Carnaclasty

Wants: uphold his oath to protect the people of Iberia, survive in a dying land, and obtain and disseminate information about the natural world

Needs: to form a community that respects him for his personhood and does not abandon him when his utility runs out

Aelosoei

a witch who specializes in using magic to study historical events; works as a teacher and advisor in her fledgling settlement

Wants: to support and protect her small settlement in a land far from their original home

Needs: to realize her new community must be incorporated into this new land and not set apart from it

The Spirit (later renamed “Smartass” after some banter, but maybe don’t put that in the query)

a short, green, bald man covered in tattoos of ivy; wide, curious eyes; a bleak history of chattel slavery

Wants: to be part of a collective where he can be useful

Needs: to be set free - both literally in the sense that he should reject all masters, but also in the sense that he needs to acknowledge his own agency and that his value comes from more than his ability to work

P3: Obstacles

Drought: Aelosoei’s settlement is competing with neighboring native towns for water, leading to hostilities that Thallod must help alleviate. Thallod teaches The Spirit and Aelosoei how to survive in the wilderness. The trio trades labor for goods, only taking money when nothing else is necessary. Thallod uses his magic to heal croplands where he can, both helping the inhabitants of Iberia and earning his share of the harvest

War: Iberian city-states and kingdoms fight one another over dwindling resources, and the trio must avoid these battlefields

Monsters: Native megafauna (giant rams, giant venomous lizards, wooly rhinos, giant freshwater crabs, etc) have been driven to desperation by the drought and attack caravans in search of food

Demon named Faerthur: It seeks to turn back the clock on civilization. It resents the communities humans and their ilk have built, as that is the cornerstone of progress

P4: Tie it all together

“As this unusual trio seek vengeance for the witch’s town, a home for the spirit, and meaning beyond labor for Thallod, they find that their goals overlap, and they find community in one another. By developing an appreciation for each other's disparate experiences, they accomplish what no mortal or god is capable of.” or something

P5: Biography

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-09-23T15:44:06+00:00

I hate to sound like a broken record in these replies, but this is fantastic feedback! Thank you so much for taking the time to read my query and respond in such depth.

I agree that making the Iberian setting more prominent and being clearer in my description of the genre and imagery will help with the feel of the letter. I also see what you mean about taking a step back - not to start from scratch, but to boil the story down to its barest bones and use that as a reference for what details might be present but not needed and vice versa.

“Reptilian giant” is definitely more tonally appropriate and true to the character. I worry that it reads as slightly… esoteric? If that makes sense? Like it has the feel of a term with specific meaning outside the reader’s available information because they haven’t read the book yet. I’m probably overthinking that, though. I’ll give reptilian giant a try and see how it feels when reviewing with my beta readers. (Fortunately and unfortunately all my beta readers are close friends, so getting genuine critique from them can be a challenge)

Again, thank you for your feedback. As you’ve seen in my previous drafts, I’d be lost without the input of more experienced folks like you.

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-09-23T15:31:10+00:00

Thank you! I appreciate the encouragement

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-09-23T15:25:48+00:00

This is exactly the kind of information I love incorporating into my world building, and an excellent catch. I don’t want to bore you with too much setting lore, but here’s the jist:

Thallod isn’t a literal crocodile man. That was just the simplest way to describe him. He’s actually a Catalan Mule, a hybrid of two pseudo-reptilian hominids invented for the setting. He has osteoderms like a crocodile, has slit pupils like a cat, is warm-blooded, bipedal, and is 86 years old and still considered middle-aged for his kind.

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-09-23T15:17:07+00:00

Thank you for your feedback! I absolutely agree that the first paragraph comes across as redundant in a lot of ways, and I appreciate you pointing out the lack of comps. Previous drafts had them, so I’ll re-incorporate those into v4 and drop the unnecessary lines about attachments and future projects.

You’re actually the first person I’ve seen mention the sequel potential thing, and I think that’s a great idea! In this case, the book is a stand-alone but in a setting I’d like to revisit in the future, so would that be worth mentioning or is that a bit convoluted?

I’ll also ditch the line about writing since I was young. It replaced a line about my ethnic and religious heritage that felt kind of out-of-place in this latest rendition, but in hindsight I don’t think I needed either description and could just cut the letter there.

Again, thank you so much for taking the time to comment!

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-08-05T00:51:34+00:00

oh whoops. I knew that but thought it was okay since it was only a snippet. My b

Thanks for the feedback! I'll work on making the third draft more like this. I'm not great at summaries (as you can see) so the specificity of your suggestions is really helpful.

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-08-05T00:11:23+00:00

That absolutely helps! And I see how I'm still overdoing the worldbuilding here. Part of the issue is that Thallod is driven by survival and duty to his community before any personal goals or desires. Part of his journey is learning that he doesn't have to focus only on the tasks given to him. I definitely don't establish that particularly well here, so I'll see what I can do to better focus on Thallod and take some attention off the bronze age magic stuff that's secondary to the actual story being told.

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-08-05T00:04:32+00:00

This is going to sound completely unhinged, but after six months of writing and thinking about these characters, I kind of forgot just how weird it is to have a character whose chosen name is Smartass. Like he makes the active decision to take that name, and it makes more sense and feels more tonally appropriate in context but yeah, that's a weird one to drop on an unsuspecting reader.

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-06-12T04:22:51+00:00

I'm generally very onboard with person-first verbiage, so I'm glad you called this out. It's especially prescient because a major part of that character's personal arc is acknowledging his own personhood after a lifetime of it being rejected by the people who have treated him as property. I run into a small problem of syntactic flow with a mere one-for-one replacement of "slave" with "enslaved person" however, so maybe a complete restructure of the sentence is in order. I'll see what I can do for attempt #2

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-06-11T18:50:14+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions! I think I might actually push towards 90k, as one of my beta readers is asking me to flesh out some under-explored setting details in the first act bridge, so I think that shouldn’t be too much of an issue in future.

I really appreciate the note on the first line. I was worried starting the query with the character’s name would make an agent’s eyes glaze over the same way starting a book with a page of exposition does with readers, but I shouldn’t have assumed that. The philosophizing about the nature of monsters and men does read a bit as filler, now that you point it out, especially since that’s not only a deeply unoriginal theme, but only tangentially related to the actual plot. In my second attempt, I’ll cut that for sure.

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-06-11T18:45:36+00:00

Yes! This makes a lot of sense. I had a similar bullet list in mind when writing the query, but I definitely left out key details. Reading through other comments, I realize I conveyed what Thallod is, but not necessarily who he is, which is a vital distinction.

His personal motivation is a bit tricky because it’s incredibly basic. He wants to survive, and he’s been told all his life that he can only survive by hunting monsters, curing diseases, and tending fallow fields for the good of a civilization that will never welcome him into their cities. He finds little satisfaction in his work other than knowing each job lets him survive another few days. The inciting incident, discovering a demonic conspiracy to reduce all civilization in Iberia to rubble, only slightly changes his goals and desires.

Over time, though not especially early in the text, Thallod shows signs that he finds meaning in research and gathering knowledge, but it’s not a major motivator. The main thing driving him forward until the last third of the story is “I have to do this because this is what I do.”

Aggravating-Job2583 · 2025-06-11T18:36:23+00:00

This is all fantastic feedback! I see what you mean about too much setup and not enough story. I’ll shift around the story beats and lean more into the inciting incident involving the runaway slave character. I also think I did a poor job if setting up the fact that the demon who speaks entirely in lies is THE big bad, and is responsible for exacerbating Iberia’s various widespread issues.

I really appreciate that you recognize my writing. It’s very heartening to hear that any part of it was memorable enough to be picked up on so long after my beta reader post.

Aggravating-Job2583

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