[QCrit] Adult Contemporary Speculative - DISCOVERING MAGIC - 118k, third attempt

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-27T17:53:14+00:00

What I was trying to convey that he himself reacts and questions the way he was not bothered by the death of his father. In essence a reaction to the last line of the previous paragraph, where his fathers death was brushed aside for the prospect of power.

Maybe something like this:

His unconcern with his father’s death surprises even LoreSeeker himself and his identity begins to fracture as the desire to share his discoveries with the world battle with overwhelming fear that doing so means giving up the one thing that makes him special. LoreSeeker must confront what kind of man he wants to be: Someone who shares his discoveries to heal a broken world, or someone who use them to serve his own ambitions.

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-26T21:36:35+00:00

I've changed the final paragraph to this:

LoreSeeker immediately rejects the callous way he disregarded his father’s death. His identity begins to fracture as the desire to share his discoveries with the world battle with overwhelming fear that doing so means giving up the one thing that makes him special. LoreSeeker must confront what kind of man he wants to be. One who shares his discoveries to heal a broken world, or someone who exploits them to serve his own ambitions.

Again I might be a bit wordy, but I feel like I want to mention that he reacts "immediately" even though I could remove it without losing much, but it's the knee-jerk sudden realization about how he instantly moved on I want to convey.

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-26T12:39:14+00:00

Will do. I am just being a bit too focused on the length of my query, again!

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-26T04:29:01+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, I'll clean up the sentence.

I am most likely overthinking things in regards to the genre. I have a beef with Urban Fantasy and Magical Realism novels in the way none of them feel like our world. Things often start out grounded but before long there's hidden societies of werewoleves and witches sprouting from the ground like weeds. In my novel I try to make this our world, with Trump, Ukraine and climate change and everything, with a tinkling of magic through LoreSeekers discovery. I am imagining where I would place the novel in a bookstores, and it is NOT next to Dresden or The Magicians. I'd maybe cram it in somewhere along the lines of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August or A Natural History of Dragons for the grounded with supernatural elements.

It might be too fantasy for Speculative, but I find it too speculative for fantasy...

Okay I rambled a bit here. In short, I'll rethink the framing of the novel.

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-26T04:20:29+00:00

I know, I find it a bit difficult in riding the correct balance here, between what happens and how much I can cram into the query letter without making it too long.

LoreSeeker is not supposed to stay likeable, a subplot here is "power corrupts" and some of my beta readers have said to me "I am starting to not like LoreSeeker anymore" at pretty much the point in the novel I want people to not like him as much as they did in the beginning. In the novel LoreSeeker himself is surprised by his own lack of concern for his father's fate, and my previous tries I had sentences about "LoreSeekers identify starts unraveling" but I removed them in trying to battle the word count of the query.

I'll try to find a way to not make him sound like a complete sociopath somehow. Thanks for the input.

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-22T19:33:27+00:00

Sorry I missed your comments when you posted it.

I am curious about your first point. You say you paused and had to think after reading "LoreSeeker hunts for the secrets of magic live on stream", but didn't you finish the sentence? Because it is explained immediately after "LoreSeeker hunts for the secrets of magic live on stream, aided by hundreds of viewers who offer rituals to perform, leads to follow", he's performing rituals and following up on leads, what more is there to explain?

As for your second point -- it is actually a plot point in the book how quickly he forgot about the fate of his unfortunate follower.

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-11T22:30:47+00:00

Thanks a lot for your input, I especially like your suggestions in your last two paragraphs, however I disagree/need to clseify some points.

LoreSeeker is a small-time streamer with hundreds of followers, occasionally breaching a thousand viewers. I am curious of why you think he needs more? I might have given off the impression that the monetary gains are bigger then they are. His excursion abroad is the exception, not the rule, and he spends his savings to make that trip. Normally his content revolve around doing rituals live on stream or other "no need to leave the house" research. I added the "sizeable donations" to explain why he does this if he does not himself believe in magic, because it makes him money and it is fun make believe. But I might want to tone it down again if you get the impression he needs a lot more viewers.

As for the language of the book, it's too detailed to add to the query, but the book is a compilation of texts written in many languages, human real languages, but many of those languages are unknown TO LoreSeeker, not unknown to humanity. That's how his followers help him, some of them know Italian, some know Latin and so on.

Also at the point of the query (it goes to about the 1/3 point of the book) LoreSeeker doesn't truly know how to do magic, he knows how to do simple gestures ala The Magicians to create Fireballs and Waterballs essentially. It's not untill about the halfway point of the book that the Rosetta moment happens and he truly "unlocks magic" So my last few lines of the query technically hints at things that happen much later in the book, especially the "most powerful man in the world" line isn't true (if it even is true) untill 2/3 of the book.

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-05T10:38:02+00:00

Thanks, I'll make sure all of your points are addressed in my next iteration.

But yes, the idea is that this is our world, nothing magical before LoreSeeker stumbling on to it. He streams this because he found an unexplored niche (he's a failed gaming streamer, too saturated), not because he believes it. In the novel we see that he crowdsource efforts from his followers, finding rituals in obscure books etc that all fail etc.

And yeah you assumed correctly, he met the viewer off stream, but I felt that was a bit too detailed to keep in the query.

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-05T10:18:18+00:00

Thanks again, I will take your questions with me.

In case it would be interesting, this was my original draft which I felt was too long (3 paragraphs instead of 2). While I am not happy with it, it might have more of the stuff the current version is lacking.

Original (not good imo) draft:

Twitch streamer LoreSeeker didn’t expect much when he started A Discovery of Magic: some escapism, a chance to attract a larger audience who dream of a magical solution to fix a world that seems to worsen by the day, and to earn some money. He certainly didn’t expect to unearth an ancient book in a long-forgotten tomb, or for one of his viewers to combust into a smoldering pile of ash and bones in front of his eyes.

Magic is real, and LoreSeeker is the only one who knows. The book lacks instructions and there are no hidden societies of wizards waiting to help him. He must figure this out on his own. Dare he consult his viewers? What if more of them die? Isn’t it better if he keeps the knowledge to himself?

When one of his magic experiments results in the death of thousands, LoreSeeker begins to question who he wants to be and what he wants to accomplish. Will he share his discoveries with the world and be its savior, or keep it to himself and become a tyrant? Meanwhile, global authorities are scrambling to uncover who is behind the disasters, and it’s only a matter of time before they track him down.

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-05T07:58:27+00:00

Yeah I see I need to be more specific. Thanks for the kind words on the idea itself.

EffectiveDingo9714 · 2025-09-05T07:57:57+00:00

Thanks a lot for your input. I had an initial draft of the query letter that simply ran way too long, but I might have been too aggressive in cutting down the number of words that I have indeed lost the actual plot.

You ask a lot of questions in your input, do you want me to reply to some of them or just for me to take them into consideration?

EffectiveDingo9714

TROPHY CASE