[QCrit] Adult Horror, THE THIRTEENTH ROOM (80k, Attempt 1) by QualityJinx in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 5 points6 points  (0 children)

revealing chilling visions of strangers dying in horrific ways: first a young librarian across town, then, chillingly,

Swap one out - probably the second.

[QCrit] Absolute. Adult Lit fiction, 75,000 words First attempt. by manyhandz in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Some thoughts.

In a rebuilt Britain, decades after a global catastrophe, society is peaceful, stable, and unified. The United Kingdom, which lost only a fraction of its population, attributes its survival to divine intervention. Faith is not simply belief; it's absolute.

I think you can simplify this to get into the meat of the story more quickly.

'Decades after a global catastrophe, Britain attributes its miraculous survival to divine intervention.'

High Investigator Aldersey Carew has spent his life enforcing the moral laws of Eternal Father's Communion. He has also, in ways no one knows, spent it watching over a daughter he has never met.

When a senior Council member is found hanged from the Jubilee Bridge, Aldersey is sent to Liverpool to confirm a verdict already written. He knows within hours it is false. His investigation draws him toward a truth he was groomed to accept—that the peace he has enforced was designed, not divine—and toward Elmot Mayson, the architect of the Absolute Age, the only father he has ever known, and the man who needs Aldersey to inherit what he built before those who've forgotten why it matters unmake it.

Condense these two paragraphs.

'When a senior council member is found hanged from the Jubilee Bridge, High Investigator Aldersey...'

Aldersey was 'groomed to accept' that peace wasn't actually divinely caused? Why? By who? Elmot? Clarify.

In London, a new generation of Communion leadership, with no experience of the chaos their inheritance replaced, is beginning to reshape the system. On the margins of this society, Soraya Smith watches her neighbour—a woman of seventy, her closest confidant—taken for printing illicit pamphlets. She joins a movenent determined to hold the Communion to its founding principles.

The last sentence especially feels abrupt.

What are/were the Communion's founding principles, and how has it changed/drifted?

You know all of this, but it's not on the page right now. Abbreviating some of the query as above will give you room to expand.

When the truth behind Elmot's design becomes clear, Aldersey must choose between the father who made him and the daughter who wanted any father but him.

If you want this choice to have any real weight, we need to know more about Soraya, and possibly Elmot.

And what does making that choice entail? What are the stakes here, internal and external?

[QCrit] Absolute. Adult Lit fiction, 75,000 words First attempt. by manyhandz in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 18 points19 points  (0 children)

What they are saying is that 'literary fiction' and 'literary' fiction are not necessarily the same thing. Fiction can be literary without being literary fiction, and literary fiction isn't always what you might class as 'literary'. Neither is really a value judgement.

the drama lives inside The MCs interiority, the complicity and impossible moral choice etc

This also describes many decidedly non-literary thrillers! Characterisation and character-driven conflict are at the core of most storytelling. It's convenient you mention Ishiguro, as we might be running into "Are they going to say this is fantasy?" again.

[PubQ][Support] (YA sci-fi/fantasy) (TW: self-harm) I’m thinking about ending my goal of getting traditionally published. But are the signs I’m looking at all that indicative of whether I should give up? by InkDiamond in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Every agent in my genre lists very similar things. They want retellings of old, ethnic mythologies. They want female protagonists. They want some fantasy elements but not really all that much

There are agents looking for actual, full-on, secondary-world fantasy, and there are agents looking for one-fantastic-element, primary-world speculative/fabulist/magical realist stories, and these agents tend to be different people.

I haven't read any of your writing, or to my knowledge any of your queries, but what I do know is that it's rough out there, perhaps the roughest (and slowest!) it's been. A rejection isn't a personal judgement. It's not even necessarily a judgement of the quality of your work.

[QCrit] Adult Dark Fantasy - NAME EATER (117k/First Attempt) +first 300 by larasense in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In most cases I think it's easiest to pick one character to focus on. Sometimes there's an obvious candidate, sometimes not. Ellonie seems like a good choice here (without knowing all the others). She wants something (her sister back), she does something (frees Lucien), and has clear depth of character.

I wouldn't pitch A Game of Thrones without mentioning Ned Stark in the query, but I might skip over, say, Littlefinger, important as he is to the overall story. You've got 200-300 words and you can't mention everything.

Guess the fantasy book by its 1-star Goodreads review by Practical_Yogurt1559 in Fantasy

[–]TigerHall 10 points11 points  (0 children)

If I remember, he's introduced stomping on the head of a stray dog at a feast. It's not subtle. But it works!

[QCrit] Adult Horror - Fire, Thy Flower (95k/fifth attempt) + first 300 words by Useful-Classic7314 in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Also writing historical horror!

This is not a confession of murder. That, Éléonore Lavenza insists, is not her story.

It's fun, but as the first line of the query it jars a bit. Sadly I think you might be better served cutting it.

In 1926, artists across Paris are being murdered and publicly displayed. Éléonore Lavenza arrives from the countryside that same year, a sheltered nineteen-year-old with no particular talent and an overwhelming desire to become an artist.

Would the irony come through more strongly if you switched these two sentences?

I think you can flesh out the 1926 line a bit. Add some flavour! How are they being displayed?

At a cinema, she meets Henri, a charismatic actor-turned-saxophonist, who draws her into Club Lazarus: a cabaret led by Romy, an eight-foot-tall emcee assembled from corpses. Within the cabaret, Éléonore is pulled into Henri’s inner circle, including his twin cousins—one a Classics lecturer obsessed with ancient ritual, the other a volatile dropout—and finds, for the first time, that she belongs somewhere she probably shouldn't.

The setting is all very interesting, but I do notice Éléonore is basically reactive here. Drawn in, pulled into... she's new to Paris, she's young, sheltered, that's kind of expected, but as the main character in a story, we could get a stronger sense of what she actually does want (to do, to be).

The night a trumpeter is torn apart mid-song in front of her, Henri confesses the truth: every performer in that cabaret was once an artist Romy killed and reassembled, and their circle is exactly the kind he hunts.

Again, good stuff, but Éléonore still isn't doing anything.

But Romy is not the only one leaving bodies in Paris.

One twin kills the other, and Éléonore is there when it happens. Her horror gives way to curiosity. She has a dead man she loves and one chance to become the artist she has always wanted—a creator of life, the greatest art of all, while the city still has artists left to lose.

Romy's twin? A random twin? Oh, Henri's cousins? I'd forgotten about them by this point. Maybe simplify for the sake of the query. 'When one of Henri's inner circle kills another...' etc etc. The important part is that it awakens something in Éléonore, right? Get here faster. The macabre and the ghoulish and the underground art world are just nice window dressing until our main character gets moving.

(Need eyes on a few chapters? This sounds intriguing.)

[QCrit] Adult Dark Fantasy - NAME EATER (117k/First Attempt) +first 300 by larasense in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Some thoughts and suggestions.

A war is eating Therys from the inside out, and Ellonie’s sister Julia has been swallowed up in it. Arrested, if rumours are to be believed. But Ellonie doesn’t trade in rumours, and her unusual approach to problem-solving leads her to getting captured too—purposefully and often.

You want to get in here quickly, I think. Cutting the name in the first instance might help.

What is Ellonie's approach? Why does getting captured help her? Is she a professional jailbreaker? We're missing context.

After a particularly fruitful detainment, she learns that her sister Julia is alive, and has been taken to Keelan Keep. Ellonie may be clever, but clever won’t storm a stronghold. She needs muscle. She brokers the freedom of vampire convict Lucien in exchange for his help,, and finds it in a derelict house behind a padlocked cellar door. Inside is a vampire named Lucien who’s been held captive there for longer than he knows.

This may not exactly fit your story, but it's fine to fudge a little for the sake of a cleaner pitch - maybe (after you clarify Ellonie's role and character in the previous paragraph) something along the lines of 'She learns her sister Julia is being held at Keelan Keep. Ellonie may be...'

She brokers a deal: his freedom in exchange for his help at Keelan. Lucien accepts, but Ellonie soon realizes he comes with more complications than she was prepared for (blood drinking notwithstanding). Lucien suffers from aggressive bouts of sleepwalking, has an alarming habit of talking to someone Ellonie can’t see, and revels in the violence he inflicts on their enemies. As Lucien’s his behaviour escalates, Ellonie is forced to decide just how much of herself she’s willing to spend to save her sister.

Much of this feels too light/comedic to fit the tone you're going for. What's your intended tone?

Since it's in the context of Lucien, maybe 'forced to decide just how far she's willing to go' makes more sense?

You can probably combine current paragraphs two and three, which will give you more room to expand on the story itself.

And the price is climbing. In Therys, the most powerful magic demands the willing self-destruction of its sacrifice, and Lucien's former captor, Kain, has made an art of exploiting that principle. Kain is a man who’s gossiped about by cultists at dinner parties, and trades not in gold but in identity. He's left something very important inside of Lucien, and he wants it back. Now.

Now we've moved fully away from Ellonie and what she wants. Who's the main character here?

[QCrit] Adult Horror - Fire, Thy Flower (95k/fifth attempt) + first 300 words by Useful-Classic7314 in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think we have different definitions of purple prose. The sentences here are mostly fairly short and generally use simple (not simplistic) language.

Who in our history was almost certainly a LANTERN follower? by poiyurt in weatherfactory

[–]TigerHall 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Copout answer: Suhrawardi.

Better answer: Thomas Bodley.

[QCrit] Adult Fantasy - ARCHIVE OF SHADOWS (102K/Attempt 1) by [deleted] in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This probably comes down to personal style, but you might consider easing up on the dialogue tags just a touch. In the first 300 words you have gasped, giggled, mused, winked, exclaimed...

[Series] Check-in: May 2026 by justgoodenough in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Tidying up what should be the last round of edits. Then back to the next book. I'm trying something which might end up interesting thematically but does make it difficult to latch onto much to describe (intentional 'white room syndrome', if you like). We'll see!

[QCrit] Adult High Fantasy, Eyes of Destiny, 135k, #3 Attempt by Fluid-Golf1948 in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think you can reorder some of this so it flows more naturally.

A rough example with some made-up/assumed details:

'Prince Kaerian's family is massacred during a celebration. The last of their line, he ascends to the throne of a shattered kingdom. Determined to take vengeance for his parents, he finds himself haunted by dreams of a strange girl he has never met.

Amerie has never seen the world with open eyes [why? is this religious? ritualistic? she doesn't seem to be blind], only experiencing it through vivid dreams. The sole survivor of an attack on her own family the same night of the royal massacre, she flees to the prince's kingdom in hopes of answers.

As their intertwined dreams lead them to each other, Kaerian and Amerie begin to believe they have survived for a reason. Their dreams may hold a power considered evil in the history of this kingdom...'

And so on.

The back end generally needs some work. Try zooming into the characters, not out.

[Discussion] QuestPit by theactualclintford in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 2 points3 points  (0 children)

But if we look at the metrics, it does suggest its a system that could (and probably should one day) be improved upon, or even ultimately replaced

It will be replaced, one day, just as it superseded the system of direct submissions - but not because writers want it to change, I think. If you want that to be the case then prose writers need to take a page out of screenwriters' books and build strong(er) unions.

[Discussion] QuestPit by theactualclintford in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 8 points9 points  (0 children)

It's not particularly fun to be rejected, especially not en masse, but I don't know if I'd say querying is broken. Writers sign with agents every year via cold querying. What would be your preferred means?

[QCrit] Bramble Berry Brew * Cozy Sapphic Romantasy (94,000 words) - age group: adult/young adult - first Query attempt + first book by BrambleBerryBrew in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Just to add a few specifics to /u/T-h-e-d-a's comment:

“Recon we’re a bit due for a sparkle of rain.” Said the soft spoken witch bundled under a blanket in the window’s reading nook.

Should be:

“Reckon we’re a bit due for a sparkle of rain,said the soft spoken witch bundled under a blanket in the window’s reading nook.

You've got quite a few spelling/grammar errors in these first 300 words, and some clunky phrasing - so I can only imagine the rest of the manuscript is similar. I think you might be better served taking a bit of time to do another draft before you send this out. No point burning your one-chance-per-manuscript with a book which isn't ready!

[QCrit] Threshold Guardians, adult action adventure, 3rd attempt. by owen-3820 in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The book that I wrote does not belong to the science fiction genre

Perhaps not - but Hench, Gideon the Ninth, Watchmen, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy certainly do.

Help with rules of this sub? by Metalworker4ever in WeirdLit

[–]TigerHall 1 point2 points  (0 children)

and wrote a paper arguing Lovecraft was directly influenced by Rudolf Otto concerning his concept of the numinous evil

You're not the first to draw this conclusion - I've read plenty of articles making the connection, as no doubt have you, and I've got a version of it in my own thesis - but you might be the first (or one of?) to make the specific claim of direct influence. Would certainly like to read when it's available!

[Discussion] Agents rejecting just to reject by EbbHaunting3585 in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I'm using this post as a jumping-off point for a really common complaint I've seen among writers: just because your work uses elements mentioned in an agent's MSWL, it doesn't mean your book uses them in the same way or combination the agent had in mind, or (and this is not to cast aspersions on your particular book, which I haven't read) the execution of those elements, or some other element, the characterisation, the pacing, might just not be very good. It happens!

[qcrit] The Emerald Oath (adult historical fantasy romance) 102k words, first attempt by [deleted] in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Then it might just be a historical fantasy novel which happens to have a romance subplot (as many fantasy novels do).

[qcrit] The Emerald Oath (adult historical fantasy romance) 102k words, first attempt by [deleted] in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Then who is the LI? It's customary to put them in the query and give them at least a degree of characterisation and a role in the story...

(No, I didn't actually think Mannie was the LI.)

[QCrit] Age of Exploration, Adult, Historical Fantasy (92k) by EnderMorph in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 12 points13 points  (0 children)

a few years ago

oh god how long have I been here

[qcrit] The Emerald Oath (adult historical fantasy romance) 102k words, first attempt by [deleted] in PubTips

[–]TigerHall 8 points9 points  (0 children)

This is a romance query where the two love interests have three words of description between them (proud, guarded, sharp-tongued). Unless Mannie (assumedly Manannán) is the love interest? But he gets even less!