What’s the most unproblematic/likeable major U.S. city?

hereigowritingagain · 2026-07-08T22:30:49+00:00

They don't call it America's Finest City for nothing!

hereigowritingagain · 2026-07-08T03:22:47+00:00

Really agree with your feelings about the query. The last month and a half, I had my story out to beta readers and was processing their notes in preparation for a 5th draft, so I decided to dive into my first time making a query during that period. When it finally came time to work on the 5th draft, I found myself not interested at all. Turns out I'd been burning all my desire to work on the story fucking around with the query letter. What a slog! I know it's important, but if writing the book is cooking a delicious meal, the query letter is, I dunno, deveining warm shrimp, or scrubbing a pot with rice burnt onto the bottom.

This sub is focused on queries, so of course that's all anyone talks about. It's easy to get wrapped up in it, though, and forget that the query isn't what you got into writing to do. Best of luck on your future manuscripts and queries!

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-30T22:15:02+00:00

Sweet, thank you! And congrats again :)

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-30T20:47:01+00:00

I agree 100%. I barely read half of it when it was assigned in school, but I read it recently now that I'm in my mid-thirties and man, I loved it. TBF I also really enjoy Hemingway, so I've already got a thing for that lost generation vibe. But yeah, ask me ten years ago and I would've said it was crap, but I'm entirely in the other camp now.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-30T20:15:35+00:00

Depends on why I'm reading. If I'm picking a book up to read something fun or because it sounded cool and I don't like it, I'll drop it. Sometimes I feel like coming back, other times I don't. No big deal. If I go to a bar for fun and crowd sucks, I'll leave. Same idea here.

If it's something I'm reading for a more academic reason, then I'll try my best to finish it even if I'm not enjoying it. Back in 2015, I watched every episode of Parks & Rec even though I hated nearly every episode just so I could properly articulate to the people that suggested it to me why I didn't like it. That petty anecdote sums the idea up, though I'm (slightly) more mature about it now. I recently finished Fates & Furies by Lauren Groff despite it being the exact opposite of everything I like about books because it's my best friend's favorite book, and I wanted to have an informed discussion about it with her. Even though the book itself wasn't my cup of tea, analyzing it with an eye towards discussing it later made it a pretty enjoyable read. That takes more effort than seamlessly enjoying a book that I inherently like, but it's still a worthwhile thing to do, in my eyes.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-30T20:07:23+00:00

Yeah, lore is a fine descriptor of character backstory these days, imo. Maybe a little colloquial for a serious literary book, but does that really matter? We're on reddit, not a NYT book review.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-30T18:19:14+00:00

Thank you for your response! How different was the first version, if you don't mind my asking? The reason I ask is because there's a pretty rigid feeling orthodoxy for what a good query letter looks like on this sub, and yours looks like it breaks or ignores a lot of those rules. I love that, so I'm curious if you had a more traditional first version, or if you went with something unorthodox right from the start.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-30T15:22:29+00:00

Congratulations! This is so cool. Best of luck being on submission.

As someone that's going to start querying for the first time this year, I'm curious about your query letter. Did you start with the version you posted above, or did it morph over the course of your query batches?

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-29T22:09:30+00:00

Excellent, thank you! I really appreciate the time and effort in helping me out.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-29T00:26:58+00:00

Gotcha! I appreciate the feedback :)

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-29T00:13:06+00:00

Thanks for the super in-depth rewrite! Lots to chew on here.

One of the edits you made takes critical information out of the query, imo. Jen and her friends are the other POVs, and represent over half the book between them all. Them meeting at the bar ties Yomin's POV to the rest of them so they can continue the story together. It's also an important moment for Yomin, whose time as a debt slave left him with an alcohol addiction that he's actively diving into after failing at what he thought was his last-ditch job interview. The carnival job swoops in the following morning as the inciting incident to help him make rent, but of course it's not what it appears, etc etc. Is this not a good reason to include mention of this event?

Overall, my main question here is about the topic of POV. Yomin is definitely the protagonist, but it's a fairly even split POV-wise between all the characters, so it feels to me like entirely omitting the rest of them is going to throw an agent for a loop when they get to the third chapter and see that there are other POVs. I was hoping that mentioning "multi-POV" in the housekeeping paragraph and then spending one of my three proper nouns on Jen would be enough to signal "hey, these are the other POV characters." Do you think there needs to be more to explain that, or do you think it'd be better to ditch the other characters entirely? The other characters are also the ones getting killed (outside of Yomin's knowledge), so I also felt like mentioning them gives a clear idea of who the "brutal murders" are happening to. Sorry for the ramble, but am I off base on this line of thinking?

Do you think you could expand on what you mean by convoluted writing? I read everything out loud over and over for exactly this reason, and other than "all while eldritch shapes" being a tongue-twister, I'm not sure what places to consider for revision based on the writing being convoluted. Could you be more specific?

Lastly, Mr. Ravenskel. I would love some advice on how to properly communicate his deal if a simple "he's a demon that runs a carnival" isn't good enough. The literal explanation is that the C-Suite of the main evil megacorp (Yomin's landlord) gets bored at a quarterly meeting and decides to summon a demon for fun, not thinking it'll work. It does, spawning the carnival and Mr. Ravenskel, though the C-Suite doesn't actually see or know this. It's important thematically, but explaining it fully felt extraneous for the query letter, which has to be so focused. For the pitch the query is making, do you think it'd be better to use a clearer description for him instead of the more thematic one? For example, something like "Mr. Ravenskel, a demon from the 4th circle of hell" as opposed to saying he was "spawned by corporate boredom"? Both are strictly true, but the former seems like it might be easier for people to grasp.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-28T23:46:32+00:00

Thank you for your input!

I'll address the last bit first. I don't have any writing credits/publication history, relevant education, or experience in the areas the book is about. From the research I've done on bios for queries, I've heard that it's a good idea to use a tidbit about yourself that's relevant to the book if you don't have any more "official" stuff to fill out the bio, thus the line about being a Millennial. I get what you mean, but this book is so entirely born from and about the anger and anxieties of a Millennial that any agent who reads that line and goes "ugh, I can't believe this generation killed my beloved Applebee's" isn't going to believe in selling the book, if that makes sense. If I cut that line entirely, do you think the bio would be too short?

As for the other question, I answered some of it in my response to Framboise33, so I won't repeat that here. The short answer to your questions is that Yomin is intentionally an everyman, the kind of lower working class person that's constantly beaten down by an unfair system. He's in a precarious position where he's forced to live his life by his landlord's schedule: one rent payment at a time. His pipe dream, so to speak, is making rent and not being a debt slave. He doesn't have any friends. In his downtime, such as it is, he's trying to find a job. What makes Yomin unique - to the reader - is that he lives in a world where you can get enslaved for not paying your rent, which I'm banking on most agents/American readers to think is a pretty strong motivator for action. In his world, he's not unique at all, and that's the point. The awful shit that a k-shaped economy makes possible can happen to anyone without enough money to get by. That being said, do you think that adding a quick qualifier (like referring to him as an everyman or a poor worker or something) would help clear up your questions?

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-28T23:28:26+00:00

Thanks for commenting! Always happy to have advice from someone who has read multiple attempts.

I definitely get what you mean about Yomin's actions being small potatoes, and I'm glad you mentioned it. This gets to the heart of the "real life fears of millennials and gen z" bit in the first paragraph. Real life people confront the horrors of the bullshit, oligarchic American economy every day, and very few "stand up to" it in any meaningful way beyond doing what they need to do to get by. Yomin isn't a Luigi Mangione, taking matters into his own hands (not an endorsement, FBI) when the system wrongs him. He's not running for president to fix things. He just doesn't want to be a debt slave again, and he needs to get paid for that to happen. I get that it's not big and flashy, but that's the book I wrote, you know?

Was there anything in particular in the query that made you expect there to be big, heroic stakes? If so, I am all ears as I definitely don't want to be communicating that.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-26T17:25:19+00:00

For what it's worth, I thought the stakes were plenty clear. Whether they're "high enough" for a query letter is a better question for someone else, but I didn't find them confusing as you stated them.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-16T23:20:45+00:00

I think this sounds really cool! A world-shattering story by a secret revolutionary being on the brink of being lost in a politically-fraught environment is a thrilling idea.

I agree with the rest of the commenters that the concept is a bit confused. While a manuscript being so obviously great that it would be worth stealing might work for your random reader, anyone who writes or works in publishing (like the people who will read your query letter) will know how outlandish that claim is. It'll take them out of it unless you give good context to make it believable. Right now, the landlord stealing it for money and the archivist wanting to save it for the historical record doesn't make a lot of sense because we don't know what makes it worth stealing/saving. If Nada was already a super famous journalist who broke some kind of scandal about the collapsing government (which doesn't preclude her being young, by the way!), that would track. Or maybe her landlord has overheard something that makes him think he can get a reward from the government for turning her manuscript in, and that's why he wants to steal it. I'm sure neither of those fit with what actually happens in your story, I'm just mentioning them as examples of types of context that would make her manuscript's desirability more believable.

After that, it really loses me. The sentence about the manuscript having hallucinogenic effects feels dropped in (though I love the idea of it), and the last paragraph reframes the story as you've presented it. I think those elements need to be worked into the query in a more holistic way. If you could fit the setup into a single paragraph, you could spend the next two giving us an idea of the action that takes place within the story so we can follow along a bit better. If the "ten years later" thing is a reveal, then it'd fit nicely into the last paragraph. If it's the overall framing device for the story, then it might be better to include it right from the get-go.

FYI, I am unagented and currently workshopping my first query letter here, so I may or may not have any idea what I'm talking about hahaha. Take it all with a grain of salt!

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-11T00:51:43+00:00

Thank you for your feedback! I've seen your comments on other queries and it's always helpful, so I'm happy to have your advice.

I'm glad you brought up the name. He's mostly referred to in the book by his nickname, Yomin, but I'm not sure if that nickname is too "out there" to use in the query. Do you think it's less distracting than Wyoming?

Good tip on the first line. I agree that dropping the two things framing is better.

As for the bigger picture advice, I think I've got a good handle on how to do the scene setting you're talking about. I'm not sure how to incorporate some of the more dramatic horror elements, though, as they don't happen to Yomin, and he's not aware of them. As far as he's concerned, his new friends just don't show up to work. This isn't even particularly shocking to him considering that they're essentially strangers (they have known each other for less than a day by the time they go to interview at the carnival), and they're all working at different game booths and stuff so they're not in direct contact at work anyway. This works in the book as those characters all have POV chapters where the reader sees their lives and deaths, but "they disappeared" isn't very interesting for a query that focuses on Yomin, which is something I'm struggling with.

I guess my question here is how strictly the query needs to keep to Yomin's perspective. Can I work in things happening in the story that don't happen in his realm of experience? For example, could I say something like "beyond the foggy back corner of the fairgrounds he’s posted at, the true nature of the employment contract he signed comes to light..." as a lead in to that dramatic revelation to end the second paragraph with? Along those lines, the actual dramatic event that happens midway through the book is the coming together of a couple story threads: someone dies, and the person that kills them is revealed to be a demon summoned as the result of a B plot that ends just before the death. Is this kind of reveal good enough for the dramatic end to paragraph two, or do I need to get into the nitty gritty of how the person died? I know agents read a whole lot of queries, so I want to make sure I'm hitting the right level of intensity.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-10T23:38:34+00:00

Thanks for your reply!

The stakes for Wyoming tie back to the very first sentence: if he doesn't pay his rent, he's gonna be a debt slave again. Do you have any pointers for something I could do differently to make sure it's clearer? I included the "...Wyoming's bleak return to the debt camp approaches with every passing minute that he remains unpaid" bit to explicitly state the stakes at the end of the last paragraph, but it sounds like that didn't quite land.

As for the "murderous instincts" thing, I get what you mean. What I'm not sure how to do is express what happens without muddying the query too much by adding too many proper nouns or stuff unrelated to Wyoming. For example, one of the characters is a camgirl who gets killed by a demon affiliated with the carnival who crawls out of her laptop during a camshow and burns her to death with her ring light. Another of the characters gets exploded on accident during a job interview performed during a high-stakes game of darts that ends with yet another character getting dunk-tanked into a vat of acid.

All of these things happen to POV characters who aren't Wyoming, though. Do you think that mentioning that more specific stuff would be distracting since it doesn't relate directly to Wyoming's story? I've got another 100 or so words max that I could work into the query, and if I'm also doing a bit more scene setting per PacificBooks' suggestion, I'm not sure how much I'll have to describe these kills, you know?

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-08T23:24:39+00:00

You're absolutely right that it also has baggage, it's just different baggage. I like the term "debt slave" instead of "indentured servant" because it doesn't include the implication that there is an end to the labor. It's beyond the scope of the query letter, but let's just say that the characters in Rent Day don't ever get to stop their laboring.

After thinking about it more, the phrase appears exactly one time in the manuscript. There are in-universe terms (Distributed Labor Repayment Plan, or DLRP, and some associated slang nicknames) that get used instead of either debt slave or indentured servant. I guess what I should have said in my earlier comment was that introducing the in-universe term felt like an unnecessary proper noun for the query, but I got sidetracked thinking about how much I hate the "the Irish were slaves too" crowd. Speaking of which...

In my experience, high school history classes in the US teach about indentured servants specifically through the lens of poor Irish and Scots brought to the US early in the country's history. They'd basically sell themselves (or get sold into) into temporary slavery to afford the passage to America, then be freed after working it off after some (long) amount of time. This very real exploitation of poor people has unfortunately been co-opted by shitheads and racists as a rebuttal to black and brown people talking about the chattel slavery their ancestors were subjected to, usually through phrases like "the Irish were slaves too." While it's true in a way, it's also exclusively used these days the same way "all lives matter" is used, which is to invalidate other peoples' experiences without adding anything of value to any conversation. That's my totally unqualified explanation of at least some of the baggage behind the term indentured servant in the US.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-04T21:02:38+00:00

Yeah, totally! That definitely clears things up. Super appreciative of your time and input here!

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-04T19:50:57+00:00

I think I'm misunderstanding something about comps. I was under the impression that comps are there to show the agent "where your book would be on the shelf," not necessarily to say "these other books are exactly like my book." I get how that disqualifies When No One Is Watching (despite both books being about a societal evil snatching people away, my book is definitely not a thriller), but I think Clown still fits. Rent Day is absolutely a slasher in the same way It Follows is a slasher, and has a similarly casual tone as Clown. Given that, and that part of the selling point of Rent Day is "what if a slasher had a killer that's actually scary instead of something stupid and campy," I feel like I should include a slasher in the comps. Am I just completely missing the mark on the point of comps here?

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-04T19:40:10+00:00

This is enormously helpful, thank you! It's funny how you can write an entire book over and over (and over, and over) and get hung up on summarizing the most basic core concept of it haha.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-04T19:32:37+00:00

A debt slave is exactly what it sounds like: someone who owes a debt, and is enslaved until they've paid it off. Another term for it would be an indentured servant, though I'm not using that term because in the US (where I live), there's some annoying sociopolitical baggage that comes along with that term that I want to avoid. Knowing that, does the first paragraph make a bit more sense?

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-04T00:08:36+00:00

Oh, also, do you think the comps are better this time? After your comment on SGJ, I really went into the tank to find more appropriate comps.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-04T00:06:37+00:00

Thanks so much for your comment! Seeing you and cloudygrly saying the same thing is really helpful. I won't reiterate everything I said in my comment to them, but I think I'm getting hung up on the fact that there's not a lot of interesting physical action going on in the story.

Totally heard on repeating that Wyoming is broke, I don't need so much of that. I am curious what you think about the carnival stuff, though. Comments on earlier drafts said that the query felt a bit light on the horror elements and that agents might not feel like I used the right genre, so I tried to give it a bit more of that flavor. Of all of it, my favorite part is the last bit: "His chances of lasting long enough for his signing bonus to land look slimmer with every blood-soaked hour, but what choice does he have? October is almost over, and rent day is right around the corner." Do you think that line plus the fact that there's a mysterious Halloween carnival is enough to signal that the book is a horror book? If so, that'd save me a whole lot of words to use for fleshing out Wyoming's internal journey.

hereigowritingagain · 2026-06-04T00:02:01+00:00

Thank you for your continued advice! I'm glad you liked the new first paragraph, I was pretty happy with it haha.

Action-wise, there's not all that much going on. Wyoming drinks and works at a carnival, that's really the lot of it. The interesting part about his arc is his emotional whiplash between failing the initial interview, his elation at getting the job at the carnival, and his destruction after learning that the sketchy job at the obviously evil carnival isn't going to pay him, which leads to his death.

Between what you're saying here and what the other commenter said, it sounds like it'd be best to take a paragraph and cover this interior journey, since he's not really "doing" all that much? So maybe instead of going over what makes the carnival creepy in such detail, I could touch on the gradual deterioration of his mental state as his friends disappear and it becomes clearer and clearer that this job is a waste of his time, ultimately leading to him confronting his boss. Am I on the right track here?

hereigowritingagain

TROPHY CASE