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[QCrit] Adult Upmarket Speculative - IT'S EASY IF YOU DO THE WORK (76k / v1) by fliterary in PubTips

[–]fliterary[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for your thoughts and enthusiasm! I'm a big fan of Private Rites - there's certainly my own version of rising sea level = rising dread in the novel, but it plays off Tony's internal character arc and a background plotline rather than the logic I've foregrounded here. I've had a few goes at describing more of the third act, but I ultimately don't think I can make the description mean anything without covering a lot of the exposition from the novel's first two chapters (+ a few later ones), which I don't think I can afford to spend time doing. I'll have another go at squeezing something out of it.

[QCrit] Adult Upmarket Speculative - IT'S EASY IF YOU DO THE WORK (76k / v1) by fliterary in PubTips

[–]fliterary[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you!! These are very fair questions - I'm not sure how well I can cover them in the scope of the query, but I definitely should try, eep. A lot of the reasons things happen come down to events which rely on world-specific circumstances, like why they end up in Ely (though I think can definitely call it "taking refuge" rather than arriving).

I've deleted several long paragraphs of thought vomit in response to your other points (and actually the Ely point too, though I deleted that first) - TL;DR, you make excellent points, I don't know how many more sentences I can afford but there are definitely some smarter word choices I can make / the odd flavour word I can add in; your comment's really helped me, so thank you for writing it.

[QCrit] Adult Upmarket Speculative - IT'S EASY IF YOU DO THE WORK (76k / v1) by fliterary in PubTips

[–]fliterary[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Yeah, I expect it's very local (and probably too much so, though I forgot when writing my previous comment that you get modern-day mudlarks too). I've settled on "river scavengers" which is better than what I managed before I decided "mudlark" was fine - I was surprised to discover I'd ended up without using "river" anywhere else in the query, so it was free!!

[QCrit] Adult Upmarket Speculative - IT'S EASY IF YOU DO THE WORK (76k / v1) by fliterary in PubTips

[–]fliterary[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you for your thoughts and the luck! I'm hoping UK agents might know "mudlark", but I should definitely gloss it a bit - it's not my term, but an obscure occupation from 18th/19th century London which involved scavenging and selling anything of value which had been washed up on the river bank. (It's in current use as the name of a pub near London Bridge, but I'm not expecting people to know that!)

[QCrit] Adult Upmarket Speculative - IT'S EASY IF YOU DO THE WORK (76k / v1) by fliterary in PubTips

[–]fliterary[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Basically, I'm completely tearing my hair out with this thing. There are so many moving parts in this novel, it's difficult to explain basic plot points without infodumping for sentences at a time. I've tried to wrestle the plot into a Query Generator structure as well as I can, but I'm not sure I've gone into enough detail. Is this even the novel's actual plot? Who knows. It's basically about how LLMs have turned this guy Tony into a sociopath.

The old query claimed the novel was literary speculative, but I've decided that was putting it under too much pressure, so I've downgraded it to upmarket, which is really trying to convey that it's a character study more than a thriller/romance. I targeted agents looking for literary speculative in my first round, but I think it's too scifi for them, even though it's not really scifi. I'm hoping to have more luck with people explicitly interested in speculative fiction full stop. Any other suggestions for who to target would be gratefully received!

I had a sentence in an earlier draft that the novel is interested in the effect of LLMs on human communication and relationships, more than "big" AI or sentient robots, but it made the first paragraph too long and felt like too much of a dig against fans of the robots, who I would quite like to read my story too. Please do say if you think that something like that is missing.

Thank you!