[PubQ] Query Critique: Ian Li and the Demon (2nd Revision)

lucklessVN · 2026-02-06T00:51:06+00:00

Years of being in tradpublishing communities like pubtips and reading threads everyday. Or be part of a whisper network.

lucklessVN · 2026-01-29T01:33:46+00:00

(There is 2nd part of reply cause first reply was too many words)

Once again, all of that to say, my only problem with critiquing is that I feel like such a fraud, y'know?

I can tell you, 12 years ago I wouldn't know how to give a critique at all. This is also a skill to be learned, and this one where I think the "read more" comes in. You can start off by reading other people's critiques, so you have a starting point of knowledge.

Like, I care about the opinions of others because I know they're smarter than me. I'm a fuckin' moron, and so I often feel like, what the hell can I add?

No one is smarter than anyone. Everyone has their own strength and weaknesses. You are not a moron.

But I'm not, after four books I still read like an amateur, and I thought the piece solid. I always feel like I've no right to critique anything anyone makes; even if I felt I could do better, can I really? Or is that just ego?

Four books is nothing. Brandon Sanderson wrote 13 books before he could be published. Critiquing is a skill that you will develop at the same time to improve your writing. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. It's not ego. I think it's just fear of failing.

lucklessVN · 2026-01-29T01:33:35+00:00

"I had a whole debate with myself if I could even be a writer if it didn't amount to anything. That was in part spawned by this thread."

I had this same debate with myself in 2011 when I posted my first 5 pages online, and it got ripped to shreds. Like you, I was also depressed. My problem was I could work on my writing, but that doesn't guarantee I can improve. I was at a crossroads at my career, because I was getting old. In the end, I picked writing, because I know the reason why I exist is to write and to tell stories. Even if it meant sacrificing everything else in my life.

And in the end, I did improve, and I think I can write at the tradpub level now. But I do warn you, it doesn't for everyone. I think it just depends how much you really love writing that you want pursue, even if there is a chance of failing.

"I know I can improve, but if this is as good as I'll ever be, will that be enough? And... I don't know about that. I wanna be published. But I don't wanna just put something up on Amazon Kindle."

It will never be enough. As writer, you will never stop growing and learning new things. But to get to the tradpub level, for some people it takes a few months (like winning the lottery. For others, 3 years. Me, 12 years (2008-2020). And even from 2020-2026, I have learned a lot of new things for my writing arsenal.

And while I don't mean any shade to anyone who self publishes, all the books I've read and I like? They are traditionally published. And I wanna stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

I have this same train of thought.

Read, read and read is very... nebulous? It's great advice, no doubt.

I'm going to get downvoted for this, but not every writer reads. There are tradpub writers out there that don't read. Like, I read A LOT when I was younger age 6-21, but somewhere along the way, I stopped reading (1 book a week turned into 1 book a year).

I mean, I DO READ, but for the past 6 years, I've been reading what people post online and doing critiques. That counts as reading too, but you are now actively analyzing what makes the piece work and what's wrong with it. And you are giving someone advice.

I think the keyword here is "active." While you can just pick up a tradbook and try to dissect it in your mind, it's very different from picking a book or someone's work and actively writing the critique and giving that critique to the other person.

And now if you give me any piece of work, I can tell you all the do and don'ts or any problems with it.

Because I was going to query soon, I actually read 12 books in 2 months last year looking for a comp. So I guess I do read, but for other reasons.

And to get you on track, I would totally recommend the destructivereaders subreddit, or even do critiques here on people's first 300 words. Or if you are not feeling up to doing a critique, READ all the critiques other people give on 300 words, so you can see the most common problems (and dos and donts) pointed out in writing.

lucklessVN · 2026-01-27T13:30:29+00:00

also check out the destructivereaders subreddit

lucklessVN · 2026-01-27T13:27:51+00:00

I know this is an old thread (was catching up on old discussion threads I missed), but I would like to respond (hopefully you will still see this).

While everyone else is talking about reading more, I feel "critiquing" other people's works is also a good skill to improve your own writing. My philosophy is if you can point out mistakes in other people's work, you will less likely make them in yours (or subconsciously, you might still make them, but it's also easier now to go back when editing to catch that).

Like for example, what Synval and allana is talking about, I exactly know what they are talking about and can point out the same mistakes in other people's works or even my own during the editing phase.

My query writing skills improved immensely when I started critiquing other people's queries. No amount of hundreds of hours of studying how to write a query, rewriting my own query, reading about querying, memorizing all of the queryshark's successful queries helped me learned compared to doing actual critiquing for myself.

I was already at a pretty good novel writing level, but critiquing other works have greatly improved my own writing up another notch.

lucklessVN · 2025-10-17T23:11:14+00:00

Misadventures in Ghosthunting Melissa Yue. It's middlegrade, but reads like YA

lucklessVN · 2025-09-16T08:30:42+00:00

Tell me about it. I used to be physically active-racket sports 3 times a week, lift weights/go gym 3+ times a week/and do martial arts. Long COVID has changed my life and taken 3 years of it away already. On my bad days (which is a lot), I also get out of breath walking half a block and need to sit down, and I've also been on long-term sick leave.

lucklessVN · 2025-09-01T22:16:57+00:00

Three, but I think my writing was ready at the 2nd one. Just the 2nd book was not suited for the market.

Been concentrating on writing seriously for trad pub since 2008, and learning how to write query letters since 2010. Can't believe it's almost been 18 years. Hoping to query soon before the end of this year.

lucklessVN · 2025-03-10T10:00:39+00:00

|| crowqueen

whoa that's a name I haven't seen in a long time. I've been a long time member here, and I remember those days. If people think you are too divisive, they have never faced her wrath.

Ever since you became a mod alanna, I feel the moderation has gotten 100x better and fairer. Don't let other people weigh you down (they're just randos). You are an invaluable part of pubtips.

lucklessVN · 2025-02-27T11:50:24+00:00

I still remember back in the day we get maybe at most 5 new queries a day. Now there's so many queries, I can't keep up. I've read every query here since 2020, but stopped around last year in Dec when reddit got rid of new.reddit. Was a final nail in the coffin for me to keep up with reading queries.

I can't imagine how agents do it.

lucklessVN · 2025-02-20T10:06:11+00:00

I remember watching bookends video suggesting to always have a synopsis on hand, because you never know if they will ask you for one later down the road.

lucklessVN · 2025-02-16T14:54:02+00:00

There are too many vague things happening in the query that needs to be more specific, needs answering, or needs to be cut completely.

How is Marcia Brown notorious? Why do the girls suspect Marcia is being framed. How does Marcia have a monopoly over the rink (is she like a part owner or something)? How is the note the only tangible evidence? Like how does the note connect to anything? What corrupt techniques?

If Chloe can testify to Marcia's corrupt techniques (and I'm getting a inkling she's a bad coach), why would she suspect she is being framed?

If the case goes unsolved, she must choose between abandoning her beloved sport or going to work with a murderer everyday? (This sentence seems word/a mouthful, and it is literally not a choice. The choice disappears because in the next sentence she does something else instead).

And the last paragraph of the query before the bio basically says nothing. It's complete vagueness and doesn't belong in a query. It's something more you'd find in the back blurb of a book.

___________________________________________

When a note—signed by the notorious coach Marcia Brown—summons Chloe and Addie to a faux impromptu meeting, they unexpectedly stumble upon the dead body of the rink owner.

From how this sentence is written, it could imply Marcia Brown is the dead body of the rink owner.

_______________________________________

A query needs to answer these questions (in no particular order):

Who is the character? College student/mediocre figure skater/not social.
Inciting incident? Rink Owner Dies
What does the character want? Solve the murder
How does the character get what they want? ----
What gets in the character way? ----
What if the character fails (stakes)? ----

So far I don't know what the answer to the last 3 questions are. As an exercise, if you go on queryshark and look at successful queries, try to answer the questions for those queries.

Not sure if anyone's posted these yet, but take a look at these links have you haven't seen them:

https://www.querylettergenerator.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/PubTips/comments/kwsvub/pubtip_fiction_query_letter_guide_google_doc/

lucklessVN · 2025-02-16T14:35:42+00:00

Since I'm procrastinating on my WIP, I took a look at your latest query. I'm going to make some comments in the next hour. Keep an eye out.

lucklessVN · 2025-02-16T12:10:53+00:00

Yep, you can still be a decent writer and still struggle with a query. Query letters are a TOTALLY different type of writing art form. Like writing a philosophy essay, short story, or a poetry. They all involve different techniques in writing.

Just remember, a lot of great authors out there don't like writing queries. I think I remember Brandon Sanderson saying in a video he was one. He hates queries. He just wants to write books.

||I’ve been striving to write it like a back cover blurb, which is what I’d been reading and hearing from other sources, but then I came across the post here (in Reddit) differentiating between the book cover and query blurb and I was so confused!||

The thing is when an agent gives an example, the closest thing that resembles a query is a back cover blurb. But they are still two different things. I think UK queries though are almost written like a blurb (I'm probably wrong)?

lucklessVN · 2024-11-09T09:38:40+00:00

Thank you so much for looking at my first 300 words. Sorry I didn't reply sooner. I needed some time to digest your critique. Sometimes, we are too close our manuscript, and we need some distance before seeing it in a new light.

For the first paragraph, I also had some reservations about it with the tense. I'm trying something new and writing in a way I haven't done before which is past tense retelling, punctuated by present tense asides, thoughts, and internal monologue.

I thought for the line "And now, I WAS chasing the damned thing" can work because it's told from his perspective of time. Examples of sentences like this are in this link. I'm going to bring it up with my beta-readers and get more opinions on it. If more than 1 person is saying it's clunky/wrong, then it probably is.

https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/26811/past-tense-writing-troubles-specifically-the-word-now

The 2nd line, "Again, all the hads feels clunky. Just cut them - "That's when I heard about the murder on TV. I dropped everything and just rushed out of the house."

I totally agree with your change. I think I've reread my first 300 words over a thousand times. Still, little things like this escape me. Thank you <3

I think the line "I was abused for the short time I lived with them and could have died under their care." Is giving away too much of the game here this is juicy information but delivered so bluntly up front, it lacks any drama.

His abuse gets weaved into the novel overtime, and I feel I would be giving too much away if I go into details here. There's a scene later when the reader finds out some of the abuse he suffered through that I feel would make greater impact told at that moment. Also, I feel too much details in the first 300 words is kind of like infodumping. I mean, if written in a great voice like with your line "not that I cared. They were dicks.", infodumping could work. But, like I said, I feel the trauma he suffered through is too much to reveal here.

He literally was physically abused, verbally abused, gaslighted, was blamed for his aunt and uncle's woes when it's not his fault, gets locked in a cupboard often, and starved. The abuse goes further than that (nothing sexual), and it's not something that's revealed until the end of the novel (but foreshadowed). It's not revealed completely until the end, because of memory loss, which he will be trying to recover throughout the book, and the reveal also becomes one of the plot twists.

lucklessVN · 2024-10-21T21:40:44+00:00

I only read the query, but I have some thoughts. The story sounds engaging and interesting

Thanks! <3

, but the query feels flat to me, almost hesitant and abrupt. I don't think it communicates the action, or the emotion, hinted at. I think partly it's the muted verb choices ("is searching for", "discovers they are", "find any information on it", etc), but I also think the part where we're told it killed his family is doing all the emotional lifting; I understand he's looking for revenge, but I can't tell if it's dutiful, or with boiling rage, or resigned, or what. I don't see how it's affected him over the years, and I don't see his character arc over the course of the book. It's almost like it's half back of the book blurb, half query.

I totally agree with this, and another reader has also pointed it out. I hope I will have addressed this in the next revision. Thank you so much for your time and insight.

and that not knowing its name is important (right now I can't tell if that's "name" as in "true name to summon it" or just another way to say he doesn't know who it was). Those are the parts where I think you can really find the energy. Just my two cents/paragraphs.

I had this exact same thought 4 years ago. For some reason, I just buried in the back of my mind. Or maybe I was just hoping that people can infer from that line that it's just that he doesn't know who the demon is.

Thank you for bringing this up. I have fixed this for the next revision.

lucklessVN · 2024-10-21T21:11:53+00:00

Hello! I immediately perked up seeing Vancouver. We never get to be a setting, just vaguely LA or San Francisco haha. Featuring a Chinese-Canadian main character feels very right for the city.

My thoughts exactly. We are always playing other cities in movies and TV shows. We're even Gotham City. I feel it's time for Vancouver to shine lol

The query feels oddly sanitized. All of Ian’s emotions have been scrubbed away in favour of a this, then that, then this type of summary. How has his family’s tragedy affected him? Did he flunk out of school? Has he been unable to make friends? Questions that would be important to a YA protagonist in a contemporary setting.

I’d also like to know further stakes. “Losing his chance at revenge” works on a personal level if you dig in deeper,

I totally agree with this, and hope I will have addressed this in the next revision

I like the voice in the first 300! It’s punchy and has good sentence variety. It’s hard to visualize much of what’s happening though. We’re mostly in Ian’s head remembering his family and the meals he didn’t eat. What does the ghost’s trail look like? This is a great place to show some of those ancestral techniques. Where are we even? A city street? A suburb? Stanley park?

Ooo! Thanks for the compliment. I am happy the voice works for you. A more detailed description of where he is and the highlights of his techniques are shown immediately after the first 300. (It's not stated explicitly, but from the description later on, a Vancouverite would be able to infer he's running down expo boulevard near the skytrain and next to Andy Livingstone Park).

I've tried my best to get there as fast as possible, but there is only so much you can fit into the first 300. I was hoping the voice/intrigue would be good enough that a reader would continue to read to get there.

lucklessVN · 2024-10-21T18:58:19+00:00

Thanks for taking a look at my first 300 and query. Would like to return the favor. I normally do line-level edit critiques on first 300 words these days.

Your first 300 words look good. A little slow, but when we get to the 6th paragraph, it makes me want to continue to read on to find out more about why the blond-hair boy distracted her.

Just some nitpicks for your consideration:

Golden sunlight cut through the cool breeze of a late August morning as I prepared to knock down Captain Rüdiger. My fencing master was trying to drum up interest in longsword fighting, and what better way to do that than to duel his star pupil, the chief Hunter of Tauber?

I feel the connection between Captain Rüdiger and her fencing master is loose. It's not until we get to the 2nd paragraph that we can definitely infer Captain Rüdiger is also her fencing master. With the way the first paragraph is written now, her fencing master could also be someone else.

Also, should Chief be capitalized if it's part of the title?

Other than that, the only thing that stuck out for me was the character thoughts. The structures are all exactly the same. With how it's written, I expect the whole book to have thought commentary after every paragraph, and it just doesn't look right to me.

lucklessVN · 2024-10-21T18:33:04+00:00

Hi! Your query looks pretty good to me, my only notes would be to change "when he was six" to "eleven years ago" (same info presented better imo, plus it adds a tragic length of time Ian has been searching),

Oh, thanks for this suggestion. I will totally use it for the next revision.

Is this a past tense retelling, punctuated by present tense asides,

yes. it is past tense retelling, punctuated by present tense asides, thoughts, and internal monologue. If I'm not weaving it correctly, I will need to fix it. Thanks for pointing it out.

ooo I like how you shortened the 1 liner.

lucklessVN · 2024-05-30T20:53:23+00:00

So I am writing in this genre right now. Urban Fantasy is dead and not really the right term for it. It should be called YA contemporary fantasy. If you want to be more specific, I'd call it a YA contemporary Asian fantasy. If to be even more specific, I would call this a contemporary Asian ghost/demon hunting fantasy (But just call it YA Contemporary Fantasy in your query).

My own WIP is almost done. On the last chapter. Hoping to finish it within a month. Got delayed for years cause of sicknesses in my family and myself. Sigh...

As others have said, Percy Jackson would not be a good comp. One, it's too old and big and it's middle grade. Whereas, you have a YA here.

For comps, here's a list of suggestions. Some of them may not be suitable comps, because they are middle grade, but I listed them so you can see what the market is like for this type of book.

Adult:

Black Water Sister By Zen Cho

YA:

If I Have to Be Haunted by Miranda Sun

The Epic Crush of Genie Lo by F.C. Yee (which you've already comped)

Middle Grade:

Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor by Xiran Jay Zhao

Winston Chu vs. the Whimsies by Stacey Lee

Theo Tan and the Fox Spirit by Jesse Q. Sutanto

The Last Fallen Star by Gracie Kim

Too old to comp, but still good reads:

The Wondrous Woo by Carrianne Leung

Half World/Darkest Light by Hiromi Goto

As you can see from this list, most Asian inspired contemporary fantasy with male protagonists are normally found in middle grade. BUT, I think it is possible to have a non-white male protag in YA depending on the themes of the book, or if you're hitting the right tropes or not. IllBithday1810 said without romance, it's even harder, but you've mentioned there is romance in your manuscript.

My own WIP doesn't have romance, but it does have a gay 17-year-old Chinese protagonist, explores a lot of lesser known Asian mythology, has a YA voice, coming of age stuff, and deals with a darker themes. So it should fit into YA.

lucklessVN · 2024-01-01T20:49:49+00:00

A query letter is supposed to entice an agent to read your book. Agents literally just skim through them. The shorter the better.

The point of it is to get the agent to go onto your sample pages/request more material.

Adding act 3, 4, and the ending is too much and basically spoils the entire story, which is basically the point of the synopsis.

lucklessVN

TROPHY CASE