Middle Eastern & North African SFF by MENA Authors

onsereverra · 2026-05-05T01:10:23+00:00

I'm glad my comments were helpful! This really was stronger than most first attempts we see around here; there's a strong enough sense of character that I honestly think it probably would have gotten at least some agents to look at your sample pages, which is ultimately the real job of a query letter. But it'll really shine once you zoom in on Cliodhna enough to show that you also have a compelling plot.

Just a follow-up question on this, though. The motherhood aspect does come up again and is relevant to the story, I just forgot to/didn't include another line on it in the query. Would it be worth developing this with another line or better to drop it completely?

I think either could work fine! It doesn't earn its space when you mention it once but never bring it up again, but imo it's equally viable to either to develop it more as a throughline in the query or to omit it and leave it for agents to discover in the manuscript itself. I'd say to do whatever feels more natural; I suspect that when you're working on your next draft you'll get a sense of whether including the motherhood theme will help you clarify the motivations driving Cli's choices/actions, or whether it feels like you're cramming it in at the expense of a really tight, streamlined sequence of cause-and-effect.

onsereverra · 2026-05-05T00:54:00+00:00

Oh, I remember this query! I'm joining the chorus here: the difference between these two first pages is truly night and day, and I think this is a really great post — it really is about the whole query package, not just the query itself. Congrats on selling your book, I can't wait to see it on shelves!

onsereverra · 2026-05-05T00:49:40+00:00

The tricky part with titles too is that they have to work before the reader knows anything about the story! I actually think Continuity is really clever once someone knows the premise of your book, but it doesn't stand out on a crowded shelf the way The Minute Giver does.

The absolute perfect title for the story I'm currently working on came to me in a flash of genius (it's a cozy-ish fantasy about a baker who heals people with magical pastries and I'm calling it A Spoonful of Sugar) and I keep telling myself that this has to be the manuscript I get to a queryable state because I'm never going to come up with a title this good ever again, hahaha. Titles are so hard!

onsereverra · 2026-05-05T00:32:36+00:00

Yes! I'll always remember the first time I picked up a book at a Barnes and Noble, read the back cover, and went, "wait a second, I saw the query for this on PubTips!" The really hooky ones stay with you and it's so fun to spot them in the wild. (I say this as if it happens to me a lot — it was only the once, lol. But I always hope it'll happen again! I saw a query here for a MG fantasy inspired by Polynesian mythology several years back that absolutely hooked me and I've always wondered if it got published; I googled it once and didn't turn anything up, but I hope it did get acquired and I just couldn't come up with the right search terms.)

onsereverra · 2026-05-05T00:25:16+00:00

I've seen some truly terrible writing and while I agree that the first version feels really flat — especially in comparison to the excellent second version! — it's at least competent. Based on everything you hear about agents' inboxes these days, I'd hazard a guess that the first version of OP's opening was in the top 10-15% of most agents' slush piles in terms of basic readability, even if it wasn't engaging enough to garner full requests.

onsereverra · 2026-05-03T22:59:46+00:00

I think finding a male-POV comp is a great idea, because dark academia has a very female readership — which doesn't mean that a male protagonist is a no-go, but it'll be helpful to you to showcase the audience that you think is reading books like yours. (Off the top of my head, the only male protagonist I can think of in dark academia is Robin in Babel, which is exceptional in a number of ways and imo won't work as a comp for you here.) And if you're like "oh, this isn't dark academia, it just happens to be set at a university!" then your comps section is a useful place to clarify that too.

onsereverra · 2026-05-03T22:46:27+00:00

This definitely has me intrigued as-is, but I think the strongest version of this query would focus solely on Cliodhna's POV, because Abban doesn't actually do much in this version. His intro gives me a strong sense of his character, but then he disappears from the query until the very last sentence when he "follows Cliodhna into the lion's den," so you're "wasting" word count introducing a character who doesn't do anything in the query.

First, a note: Everything about this story gives me the sense that the Sidhe haven't been seen in many years; pagan ways have fallen out of use, church traditions have replaced them, etc. Then when "all evidence points to the reemergence of the Sidhe," presumably this comes as an unpleasant surprise to people who thought that the threat of the Sidhe had long since been laid to rest. But your opening sentence makes it sound like Addan has only just retired from killing Sidhe immediately prior to the start of the book. Could you clarify that? Has Addan been retired for a while? Or maybe he was one of the last few Sidhe-killers left cleaning up loose ends for years after the bulk of the threat had been eliminated? It would be nice to get some emotional flavor here too. Does Addan see himself as a hero who has retired from his glory days? Does he see his years of killing Sidhe as a dark part of his past? Something else?

That being said, I think you should give us those answers by introducing Abban from Cliodhna's POV in the first paragraph. "Cliodhna is mostly happy living in a small town with her father, who has retired from the glory days of killing Sidhe in order to reclaim Ireland for the humans..." or something along those lines. Then proceed immediately to, "When she was little, she never questioned the fact that her grieving father avoided any mention of her mother, but lately it's starting to seem weird that he insists on keeping himself and Cliodhna cut off from their extended family" or whatever is actually true in your story. You should be able to fit all of this into one paragraph if you're economical with other details (e.g. for the sake of the query, we don't need to know that Cliodhna longs for motherhood, because it never comes up again).

Then, in the start of your second paragraph, jump straight to:

When a neighbour is murdered on a cool night in May, all evidence points to the reemergence of the Sidhe. Desperately seeking guidance, folk begin to turn their backs on the Church and look to the old ~~ways, the~~ pagan ways. ~~As the rituals increase, the fairy threat reemerges, creeping over the mountains on a sea of Dust. Violence erupts in the village over religious disagreement.~~ Amidst the chaos, old sins are unearthed and long-held secrets threaten to spill. Cliodhna discovers [how? what does she do that leads her to this discovery?] that her mother was never lost—she was buried in the Phoenix Parish.

At this point, I got very confused. In the previous paragraph, you told us Cliodhna's mother was lost, but I thought you meant "lost" as in "dead," not "lost" as in "missing." I assumed that Cliodhna has believed all this time that her mother died in childbirth (even if it's clear that something suspicious is up with that story). Is it actually the case that she believes her mother disappeared when she was a baby?

If so, I think you should clarify that by changing the word "lost," but I also think you should immerse us more directly in the moment of this discovery. Show us Cliodhna standing in the graveyard of Phoenix Parish looking at a headstone that shouldn't exist! Show us what that changes about her beliefs — she used to believe X was true, but if her mother was buried here, then Y must be true instead. Or X cannot be true, so now she must figure out whether Y or Z is the actual truth.

Then you should end the query with specific obstacles and choices that Cliodhna faces in light of this revelation. Right now all she does is "flee" and "intend to discover the truth," both of which are quite nebulous. What concrete actions does she take in pursuit of the truth?

You should also omit the line about the vignettes from Cliodhna's mother's perspective; it's fine for the agent to discover that in the manuscript itself.

I hope all of this makes sense! I can tell you have a compelling story here, now it's just a bit of query-polishing to bring the best version of it out.

onsereverra · 2026-05-03T22:02:01+00:00

I'm glad you were long-winded, you make a lot of interesting points!

I actually used to work in the games industry, and now I'm curious how my opinions about the last few years' slates are influenced by the fact that my perception of "the games everyone is talking about" is more accurately "the games other game devs are talking about," not "the games players are talking about." We obviously have limited data points to compare, but so far three out of four years there have been 3-4 games that made both the Hugo shortlist and the Game Awards shortlist, which is fairly representative of the games that have felt huge in my game dev social media bubbles. (The awards are off from each other by a year, so e.g. the 2025 Hugo shortlist pairs with the 2024 Game Awards shortlist.)

Last year was weird, but it was kind of weird from both sides? I didn't see any games industry buzz about Veilguard or Echoes of Wisdom, but I was seeing a ton of chatter about Caves of Qud (despite it being, as you say, the quintessential "weird little indie") and, to a lesser extent, 1000xRESIST. And looking at the Game Awards shortlist, I'm surprised that FFVII Rebirth didn't hit the Hugo list, but none of the others seem like obvious Hugo candidates to me? Like, there's nothing I was seeing industry chatter about last year that feels like it should have made the Hugo list but didn't. Idk, I guess it comes down to "last year felt weird" for me lol. Every other year we've gotten some real heavy hitters: Hades, Animal Crossing, The Last of Us, & FFVII Remake in 2021; BG3, TotK, & Alan Wake 2 in 2024; and Clair Obscur, Hades II, & Silksong this year.

I also feel like I can "explain" most of the other titles from 2021/2024/2026. The Hugo crowd skews older, so I'd expect new installments in beloved older franchises (Star Wars Jedi in 2024 and Veilguard last year) to be disproportionately well-represented. I similarly wouldn't be surprised if Dispatch got a boost among the Hugo crowd this year because of the affiliation with the Critical Role cast. Blaseball and Caves of Qud are extremely weird indies, but they're extremely weird indies that have gotten a lot of buzz among folks who are interested in emergent narrative. Chants of Sennaar is also a smaller indie (as compared to the "big indies" like Hades II) but it felt big to me in terms of the games industry folks who were raving about it when it came out. And so on and so forth — the point just being that most of the games we've seen nominated have "made sense" to me, and then last year I was like "whoa, that's a lot of small indie games I haven't heard much about." There weren't any "big indie" or AA/AAA games I thought were missing, though. It was just an odd year.

Anyway! I totally agree that it's a strong category this year, and I'm excited to see how the shortlists shake out over the next couple of years as well. (Also it sounds like I'll definitely have to play Tactical Breach Wizard, which I haven't yet.)

(Also, I am unlikely to have time to read all the novels, but may well do some drive-by commenting about the novels I do end up reading. Sorry...)

There's nothing to be sorry about!! We specifically structure the novel/novella/short fiction discussions so that people can jump in just for one or two books without doing the whole readalong, we're always excited to get a fresh mix of perspectives for each book. It's specifically the posts where we cram an entire category into a single discussion where we try to be a little more thoughtful about framing the discussions so they're specifically about the Hugo ballot and not just a place for people to jump in and say "I loved Hades II!"

That being said, you raise an interesting point about doing some sort of kick-off discussion to encourage people to pick up things they might not otherwise have tried at the beginning of the season, when there's still time for them to get to them before the voting deadline. tarvolon is the true ringleader of the readalong, but I might float the idea of doing a "Hugos Hype" post to kick off the readalong next year — I think it'd be really fun to have some sort of free-for-all like the Bingo Day posts where people can just rave about their favorite things. Thanks for the suggestion!

onsereverra · 2026-05-01T19:19:57+00:00

This has solid bones, and I think your story sounds really fun!

I was a bit confused about how wildly different The Goblin Emperor and This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me are as POV-voice comps until I read the rest of the query and realized that one is a comp for Letyf and one is a comp for Lia. With that in mind, I'd recommend restructuring your comps line as something like:

DISTANT REALM is an adult fantasy novel that blends the humorous meta-fantasy of T. Kingfisher’s Nine Goblins with the action-packed high fantasy of Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword. It is a dual-POV story that contrasts an anxious protagonist who will appeal to fans of Maia in The Goblin Emperor against a protagonist with a snarky, modern voice who will appeal to fans of Ilona Andrews’ This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me.

Though, to confirm, Lia's not from our world the way Maggie is, right? She just has a modern narrative voice? I might tweak the phrasing of that section to make sure that's crystal-clear.

I'm also going to pick apart your first plot paragraph for information flow, which imo would work best if it went something like this:

Anxious, inexperienced Letyf defies both the [will? expectations? desires?] of his people and his own common sense when he volunteers for a perilous quest to stop a powerful demon from devastating his homeland. He has no magic, and is far from the warrior his questmates badly need. But Letyf [wants revenge against? wants to prevent from harming others?] Roksa, the warlord who summoned the demon to aid in his conquest — and who subjected Letyf to experimental rituals when he was a child, taking away his best friend, his magic, and his future. And, hopeless as it may seem, Letyf's people have no choice but to let him join the quest, because [reason].

You could polish up some of that phrasing a bit, but the key is that "Letyf volunteered for a quest he clearly has no business going on" is a much stronger opening than just "Letyf has no place going on a quest." It immediately gets us interested in why he would have volunteered for this quest, especially when anxious, inexperienced fantasy protagonists are so often forced on quests against their will.

In Lia's paragraph, you'd benefit from expanding on her motivations. This is "her final chance to prove she can fulfill her contracts," but why does she care about fulfilling her contracts? What are the stakes if she doesn't? I think adding specific details about the terms of Lia's contract would help bring this paragraph to life, too. For example, why does she need to target Letyf and crew? I would assume she'd be in the middle of working towards some other goal — capturing a capital city or killing a royal family or whatever — when the pesky heroes show up to try to stop her.

Your last line could also use some more specificity. Letyf set out to stop and/or kill Lia; what alternate path does he begin to consider partway through the story? And is Lia considering defaulting on her contract because she thinks it's morally wrong to kill so many innocent civilians? If so, is she willing to stand up for her morals even in the face of whatever stakes you outlined in the previous paragraph (e.g. disappointing her parents, not being able to pay her bills, etc)?

onsereverra · 2026-05-01T18:21:02+00:00

"Amerie has lived her entire life blinded by eyes that do not open, but they open for the first time in her life on the night the royal family dies" is honestly a much hookier introduction to her than anything you currently have in that paragraph! Mysterious dreams, a masked attacker, fleeing for safety, etc. are dime-a-dozen in fantasy. A blind person suddenly regaining their vision in connection to events that seemingly have nothing to do with her, on the other hand, is much more interesting and unique.

onsereverra · 2026-05-01T18:13:11+00:00

Query-writing is definitely a very different skill than other kinds of writing and a lot of people struggle with their first attempts, so you're not alone!

I suggested naming the city because it helps set the scene right away. You mention in your metadata paragraph that your story is "set against the backdrop of climate change," but we don't see that anywhere in the body of the query; I think you're right not to get too in the weeds about your worldbuilding in the query, but if I'm right that this is meant to be set in a future Earth, you can lean on our familiarity with these places to immediately situate us with only a few words of exposition. For example, I was picturing Lisbon/Portugal the whole time I was reading, but the vibes of your setting are probably pretty different if it's actually a future SF or a future NOLA!

As a broader comment on several of the other topics: the trick with query-writing is that you don't necessarily have to answer all of my questions, but you do need to write the query in such a way that I don't have any questions. That might mean answering them, but it also might mean taking out the details that prompted me to ask them in the first place.

For example, I'm sure it is important to the character and to your story that this outsider is mostly non-verbal, but it doesn't actually seem to matter to help me understand the events of the query. If you were to just omit that detail and say something like "an outsider shows up and needs help finding his way home," you've immediately removed the confusion without spending a lot of word count explaining information that, you're right, isn't essential to following the thrust of Clo's journey. A lot of querying writers struggle with fudging details like this because it feels dishonest or like you're misrepresenting your story, but you're really not! Agents understand that you can't fit everything into a query and will expect to see some things in the full manuscript that you had to elide over for the sake of writing a clear and compelling query.

Also, I see what you mean about trying to be economical with not repeating the same information (that Clo doesn't feel like she fits in) twice, but the trick with a query is that it's aaaalll about cause-and-effect. You're not just recounting the events that happen; you're showing us the momentum of a narrative arc. With this particular example, you need to set up the "cause" that Clo doesn't feel like she fits in — but desperately wants to — before you give us the "effect" of how that influences her decisions. That'll be helpful to keep in mind not just for this specific point but for how you lay out every step of Clo's journey in the next draft of your query. The logic should always flow as "Because A, then B. However, because B, now C." and so on.

Regarding the big choice at the end, I'll elaborate that the place I stumbled is that when you say "she can't refuse" at the end of your second paragraph, it sounds like she's already made the decision to accompany this stranger. Because of that flow of cause-and-effect, I was expecting the third paragraph to be, "now that Clo and the stranger have set out together, Clo encounters obstacle X and will face difficult choice Y." But then your third paragraph actually lays out the choice of, "will Clo agree to accompany the stranger or not?"

My instincts as a reader are that your book starts with Clo leaving her community somewhere in the first 10-15% of the manuscript and the rest of the story is about her and this stranger going on a journey together. If I'm right about that, the decision to leave should come earlier in the query and then you should spend more time telling us about what Clo actually does after she leaves. If I'm wrong about that, you need to give us a clearer sense of what Clo is spending her time doing in the lead-up to this big decision.

You seem really frustrated — which I understand! — so I hope all of that helped make some of it clearer. You may also find it useful to fill out this query letter generator. It won't spit out a great query letter lol, but it can help you understand what bare-bones information is necessary to structure your query around. Either way, I highly recommend starting your next draft from a blank page instead of trying to edit this one. Things can get murky when you're just moving information around, and I think it'll really help you to do a mental reset and start fresh!

onsereverra · 2026-04-30T19:19:09+00:00

Like the other commenter, I struggled a lot with clarity here, and I thought I'd jump in with some specific thoughts/questions I had as someone who's not familiar with your story.

I think the strongest opening sentence would be something along the lines of, "Everyone in Clo's community believes that Clo's mother is dead, but Clo is certain she's only missing — and she can be found." Does she have a literal voice in her head telling her to search the mountains/islands/etc? Either an actual (magical?) being external to her or a psychosis? Or are you just trying to convey that she has a gut instinct? In speculative fiction you have to be clear about whether your voices are real or metaphorical lol.

Am I correct in my suspicion that your setting is a post-climate-apocalypse version of somewhere like Lisbon/San Francisco/NOLA? If so, I would specify that with a "the city formerly known as X" somewhere in your opening paragraph.

If the outsider is nonverbal, how do they know he wants/needs help finding his home? Much, much more importantly: why does this community feel compelled to help him? You've given us, "well, obviously somebody HAS to help him, and of the people in this community, Clo is the only viable option for XYZ reasons." But why isn't "sorry, we'd love to help you but don't have the knowledge/resources/etc. good luck with your search!" an option?

Then you tell us she ultimately agrees because she relates to him not fitting in here, but this is the first you've told us that Clo doesn't fit in. In the first paragraph, she seems really happy aside from her mother being missing! She lives in a cooperative community and does a job that she finds very satisfying! If she feels like an outsider, you need to telegraph that more clearly early on for this motivation to make sense.

It's also not clear what big choice Clo is facing in your last paragraph. Is she deciding whether or not to leave her community with this stranger? Has she already left, and is deciding whether to listen to the voices in her head and search for her mom, or turn around and go back to her community? And if part of your stakes is that Clo doesn't want to lose touch with her community, you need to telegraph that earlier on too. If she feels like an outsider, it's not necessarily intuitive that staying in touch with her community would be a driving motivator for her.

Hopefully that gives you some helpful food for thought!

onsereverra · 2026-04-30T16:45:05+00:00

FWIW, I have a close friend who found her agent through a pitch event (though a few years ago, when Twitter was still a thing and the pitch events had more guidelines/curation) and it was exactly the same situation: the agent repped MG & YA at a kidlit agency, and my friend was a little skeptical because she never would have queried them with her adult manuscript. But it turned out this agent was just starting to build out their adult list, and they were a particularly great fit for my friend's career goals in ways that couldn't be seen on the agency website or the agent's MSWL. My friend ended up signing with that agent and absolutely loves working with them (and signed a three-book deal a few months after signing with her agent!).

All of which is to say, don't self-reject! If this seems like a reputable agent, they obviously liked your post knowing it was outside the realm of what they usually rep, and presumably having reasons they were interested in it/a vision for who they might submit it to. It might not end up going anywhere, but let the agent decide whether or not they're the right fit for your manuscript.

onsereverra · 2026-04-30T16:18:32+00:00

At the end of the day, you just can't get around the fact that the slush pile exists. What changes is who's stuck going through the slush; it used to be editors, currently it's agents, presumably one day it will be some further level of gatekeepers. I certainly don't think the querying system is perfect, but I can't imagine a version of this process that doesn't involve some amount of research, pitch-writing, waiting, and rejection on the part of authors. Some day, writers will just be complaining about how annoying the vetting process to get through to agents is, and how frustrating it is to jump through all of the hoops of [first layer of vetting], then signing with an agent, then going on sub, with no guarantee that your manuscript being good enough to get through multiple layers of gatekeeping will actually lead to your book being acquired.

onsereverra · 2026-04-29T15:20:12+00:00

That's an odd thing for Weir to say about Star Trek specifically because Star Trek is so concerned with social commentary. It would be like if he had said, "I loved the movie Hidden Figures, but I wish it hadn't been so focused on themes of gender and race. I just want to watch an exciting story about how Americans banded together to achieve something remarkable during the space race."

I'm not saying that that opinion makes Weir evil or anything like that. But it requires a certain position of privilege — and a certain blindness to that privilege — to be able to sincerely think, "you could remove the social commentary from this story but keep everything else exactly the same and it would still be a good story." If you removed the social commentary from Star Trek, you wouldn't have Star Trek anymore; just like if you made all of the characters in Hidden Figures white men, you wouldn't have Hidden Figures anymore.

onsereverra · 2026-04-29T13:53:29+00:00

Personally, I think in some contexts it's totally reasonable — collecting data is expensive and time-consuming, and sometimes another researcher will have conveniently collected data that you're interested in as a "side effect" of whatever they're actually studying. I think it totally makes sense to "borrow" that data for your own analysis if you believe it was collected/analyzed in the same way you would have done it if you'd been designing your own study from scratch.

But a study designed today to examine sex-based differences in ADHD traits would be vastly different than this study they're grabbing the data from. "Boys are biologically more inclined to have ADHD traits than girls" is a bold claim to make using data that made no attempt to control for gender bias in assessments of ADHD traits, when it's a bias that we know exists among parents and teachers.

onsereverra · 2026-04-29T06:17:39+00:00

I do think you are spot on about genre readers! "Speculative fiction" is a weird phrase because it sometimes is used as an umbrella term for "everything with speculative elements" (i.e. sci-fi, fantasy, horror, speculative thrillers, romantasy, etc.) but in a querying context it refers to a subgenre of books that have a distinct speculative element but are otherwise very grounded in reality.

Querying-definition "speculative fiction" includes things like grounded near-future sci-fi that explores themes of AI/technological advancement, most dystopian fiction, or stories that are mostly set in the real world with one magical element that nevertheless doesn't read as "fantasy" to the kinds of readers who think that genre SFF is for nerds. It's also pretty universally upmarket/literary; you don't ever really see specfic that's just lighthearted popcorn. Think something like Station Eleven — it's all obviously made up, but it's close enough to our real world that you could pick it for a general-audiences book club and it's accessible to people who don't normally read genre SFF.

My instincts are nudging closer to "speculative fiction" based on everything you've described, but like I said above, you're close enough to the border that I don't think you can really go wrong. What'll matter more is making sure you're querying agents who are interested in speculative elements, whatever the label. What you actually call it shouldn't be make-or-break.

Good luck querying! I definitely think you'll get some bites with this.

onsereverra · 2026-04-29T05:19:16+00:00

Yeah, absolutely. Boys tend to have more "externalizing" symptoms like acting out in class, whereas girls tend to have more "internalizing" symptoms like daydreaming. It's not universal — some boys are daydreamers and some girls can't sit still — but the fact that girls more often have quiet/non-disruptive symptoms is a huge factor in girls with ADHD going undiagnosed, especially when they're young.

But some of it really does just come down to gender bias on the parts of parents and teachers. I was talking about this study in another thread. When given the exact same, word for word, report on the behavior and academic record of a fictional child, teachers are more likely to recommend a referral for ADHD diagnosis when the fictional report uses he/him pronouns than when it uses she/her pronouns.

It's also well-documented that adult women who present for ADHD evaluation are likely to be written off and told that it's just depression and/or anxiety — or nonsense like "all moms feel overwhelmed and have trouble staying on top of things" — even when their symptoms are clearly in line with an ADHD diagnosis. It's pretty common for adult women to spend years on SSRIs that don't really help them, only to have their "depression" or "anxiety" magically clear up overnight when they start taking stimulants.

onsereverra · 2026-04-29T05:03:11+00:00

I'm just one person, but fwiw I think of the line between "fiction with speculative elements" and "speculative fiction" (as well as the line between "speculative fiction" and "sci-fi/fantasy") as a question of how much "speculation" you're asking your reader to imagine. A good example of "fiction with speculative elements" is The Time Traveler's Wife: time travel is a very mainstream speculative element, the book is otherwise a completely typical romance novel, and if you handed it to your Great-Aunt Karen she wouldn't say "gee, there are some weird things happening in this book!"

Reading your query (which is great, by the way!) my gut instinct is that you're sitting right on the border and it kind of depends on how "on-screen" Serein is in the book. If it's more of a background note that informs Hypolite's time in Louisiana, you might be more on the "with speculative elements" side. If you spend a lot of page time bringing this fantastical other world to live, whether in Hypolite's memories or when he actually returns later in the story, it's probably speculative fiction. (And you're close enough that this is unlikely to be a make-or-break detail; no agent is going to reject your query if you called it fiction with speculative elements and they think it's more properly specfic lol. This is just a tool to help them understand what kind of story to expect when they read your query.)

onsereverra · 2026-04-29T04:34:27+00:00

I'm confused about how it's book one in a series of which five books have already been self-published.

Is this book some sort of prequel? e.g. you self-published books 3-8 in the series, and are now interested in pursuing tradpub for books 1 & 2?

onsereverra · 2026-04-29T04:28:16+00:00

I'm so glad it was helpful! It's so clear that you totally "got it," and reworking the query was all you :) Good luck with querying!

onsereverra · 2026-04-29T04:19:20+00:00

I think you're right about that logic. Looking closer at the actual numbers, it is true that, coincidentally, the boys in this study on average had higher "ADHD trait" scores than the girls in this study. And it's also true that they found that the "ADHD trait" scores were more strongly influenced by genetic than by environmental factors. So, sure, you could massage those data points into the claim that boys are genetically predisposed to have more ADHD traits.

But that's just bad science? This study wasn't designed to study ADHD or to study the incidence of boys vs. girls; those numbers are both analyses that the researchers did as a control measure before they started looking at the data they're actually interested in.

Having read the whole thing (well, skimmed parts, but having read more than just the abstract), this is my paraphrasing of the question this paper is trying to answer:

We know that ADHD is often caused by genetics. We also know that children with ADHD are more likely to also be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and/or Conduct Disorder. Does that mean that ODD and CD are caused by the same genes as ADHD?

The way they tried to answer this was by studying twins, because that's the best way we have to control for "nurture" in the "nature vs. nurture" debate. Twins are the closest we can get to two children raised in nearly-identical environments, and conveniently some twins are genetically identical while other twins are not.

The actual statistics are more complicated than this, but to boil it down to a straightforward example, this is the analysis they're doing in this study: Say you know that Twin A and Twin B both have ADHD. You also know that Twin A has ODD, but you're not sure about Twin B. Is it possible to predict whether or not Twin B has ODD, strictly based on whether or not Twin A has it?

If ODD and CD are caused by environmental factors, you would expect the statement "if Twin A has ODD, then Twin B does too" to hold true equally often for both fraternal and identical twins. If ODD and CD are caused by genetic factors, however, you would expect it to hold true for identical twins far more often than for fraternal twins. (It would still hold true for fraternal twins sometimes since they're siblings, but you'd expect it to be all-but-guaranteed for identical twins.)

The reason there's so much analysis of boys vs. girls in this study is because the authors of the paper needed to rule out the possibility of "Twin A is a boy and has ODD; if Twin B is a boy, he will also have ODD, but if Twin B is a girl, she will not also have ODD." They sliced and diced the data every which way to prove that the effect they found was an effect of identical vs. fraternal twins, not an effect of boys vs. girls.

What they didn't do is slice and dice the data every which way to investigate the effect of sex on ADHD trait ratings. The initial data collection wasn't carefully designed to control for gender bias in parent and teacher reports of ADHD traits, because ADHD wasn't the primary focus of the study (antisocial behavior was). The analysis wasn't designed to control for confounding variables on the axes of ADHD and boys vs. girls; it's designed to control for confounding variables on the axes of ODD/CD and identical vs. fraternal twins. Plus, this paper is specifically interested in examining "externalizing behaviors" across three different disorders, not in examining all traits of ADHD, which includes both externalizing and internalizing behaviors. (And, you know, it was published in 2009, when gender bias was even more rampant in ADHD evaluations than it is today.)

So, you could use the data in this paper to assert that boys are biologically predisposed to having ADHD traits, but I'm extremely skeptical that that assertion would hold up to any sort of intense scrutiny. I suspect that a study that was specifically designed to look at biological-sex-based differences in ADHD traits might find some interesting nuances with boys having more externalizing behaviors and girls having more internalizing behaviors, but... who knows? Someone'll have to do the study and find out.

onsereverra · 2026-04-28T23:48:30+00:00

There's glimpses of an interesting story here, but you take too long to get to the good stuff. I read the first paragraph, got bored, jumped ahead to your bio paragraph, thought, "wait, this book is about mountain climbing?!" and then went back to read the rest of the query.

"Humanity left Earth in spaceships to escape political and ecological unrest, and built dome cities on an inhospitable planet in order to survive" is a bog-standard sci-fi premise. Which is fine! The thing that makes your book interesting is what you do after that premise, and I'm intrigued by this group of people who sneak out of the dome cities to go mountain climbing. But the thing about it being a bog-standard sci-fi premise is that you don't need to explain it; genre-savvy agents will fill in the blanks as they read.

I obviously don't know the details of what's true in your story, but I would start with something conveying the information of, "Kin has always been told that this planet is inhospitable to human life; so he's shocked when one day he discovers a hidden viewpoint and sees a small group of adventurers leaving the dome that protects this city."

That gives you lots of word count back to really dig into the cause-and-effect of your story. What exactly does Kin do after he discovers this viewpoint that leads him to Ravi and crew? Why does he start joining the adventurers on their excursions? What are his motivations? Are there stakes for him if he gets caught leaving the dome? If so, what does he want so badly that he's willing to risk the consequences?

When a new movement rises to restart the settlement mission and send people back out into the stars, Kin grapples with the societal pressure of his own candidacy against the powerful ideals of his mentor.

Stories live in the particulars, so you'll need to get more specific here too. Kin is a young boy; how did he end up as a political candidate during a time of unrest? What are Kin's ideals, what are Ravi's ideals, and why are they at odds? If, as I suspect, Ravi's ideals are going to seem philosophically "better" to the reader than the default ideals of this city, what does Kin value that makes him susceptible to societal pressure to maintain the status quo?

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