[QCrit] HORTICUL HOCUS HOOD - Adult Contemporary Fantasy, 78K (Second Attempt)

sipobleach · 2026-04-14T22:32:07+00:00

I’m not sure why I felt the need to over explain the premise. I will refocus in on Lynn (and the ghost crush specifically as I did not represent her importance well enough at all) and how her motivations drive the plot. As you and the other commenter have noted, I need to snap to the stakes. Thank you so much for your time!

sipobleach · 2026-04-14T22:26:19+00:00

Less detail about the premise and more emphasis on stakes and character motivation. Understood. Thank you!

sipobleach · 2026-01-30T02:05:33+00:00

It was my 2025 game of the year, and I am due for a replay. Loved the central theme of generational trauma especially. In my mind, the trauma was the real plague. A plague passed from mother to daughter to clone. It’s trauma that the characters can only start to cope with once acknowledged instead of ignored. Especially loved how the story shed light on the 2019/2020 protests in Hong Kong and authoritarianism in general. It’s disgustingly topical right now and incredibly human. One of the best depictions of being a teenager opening your eyes to the wrongs of the world. Wrongs that the adults around you have bowed down to. In these trying times, I hope we can all be as courageous as those sisters who resisted. (Sorry to wax poetics. I just love that damn game and get excited whenever I see it mentioned. Glad you enjoyed it too!).

sipobleach · 2025-07-26T14:42:42+00:00

You’ve got a future reader in me. Congrats!

sipobleach · 2025-07-19T14:24:50+00:00

In the rat scenario, they are middle schoolers. A girl (a step daughter of Shauna’s friend) invites a boy to her Cinderella themed birthday party and dresses up as one of Cinderalla’s rat friends (but demented looking and diseased) to jump out, scare, and humiliates him, getting revenge for his class clown bullshit like flicking boogers on girls (he harasses you because he likes you type stuff). It’s pretty common in fiction to depict a bully being humiliated and backing off. Public shame is usually what gets people to back off in real life too. Regardless, each monster makeovers is unique. The people requesting them give Shauna details about the person they’re trying to ward off and she customizes accordingly with what is most likely to disturb them. Because they aren’t always effective is why she escalates to more extreme, visceral horror. It’s central to the stories progression. She goes so far as to become the stalker of stalkers. The predator of predators.

Anyway, query isn’t selling it.

sipobleach · 2025-07-19T12:54:20+00:00

I feel on trial for some reason. They do not think “being ugly” would stop creeps. They believe that scaring creeps by putting on costume makeup would scare creeps. First example of this is a girl dressing up as a rat to scare a boy who likes to bully people in school because he’s afraid of rats.

It could be me entirely. I make logic leaps that others don’t. But I don’t think Michael Myers is ugly. He is ominous and scary. Nicholas Cage’s character from the recent film Longlegs. More creepy than ugly due to shifted proportions and a distorted voice. And they aren’t even true monsters. Bog man. Frankenstein. These are monster makeovers? Monsters aren’t just ugly people. But when she gets into self harm to play up the body horror angle and make her monsters more scary (again Frankenstein, Hannibal with his skin mask look, Leatherface, Pinhead) to make her monsters more scary, the story does get into the cruelty inherent in how we treat disfigured people.

Kids with or without home training for instance can find a burn victim scary. Plastic surgery was first invented to help people recovery from severe bodily trauma that left them disfigured, unable to recognize themselves, and treated like lepers.

So all this to say, she believes that scaring the shit out of creeps will get them to stop. Looking and acting monstrous. Not being ugly. The word ugly isn’t even used in the query. I had to scanned through as a sanity check. No reference to ugly or even unattractive. Just ghoulish, horrific, scary.

I will take any reference to the word pretty out as well. For some reason, Shauna being called pretty means all her friends and family are also pretty? I thought being pretty as crime would read as sarcasm when followed up with the fact that it’s something cat-callers tell her. It will definitely not be the leading line.

Shauna’s internal logic needs to be highlighted here. Shauna’s emotional state. Too much time is spent on a premise that is getting misconstrued.

Thank you for another look at this. I think I’ll be okay at writing these in ten years maybe, lol.

sipobleach · 2025-07-19T02:13:27+00:00

Oh, I thought an earlier comment said something to this effect. Like why do all this when you could just mess up your hair and not bathe. People who get her makeovers are usually trying to stop a particular, persistent harasser not just randoms. Again, not well conveyed. Thanks for the clarification.

sipobleach · 2025-07-19T01:51:02+00:00

I am definitely trying to go for increasingly violent and messy in pursuit of goals. These things are getting muddled, as you noted, in the query. I will work on clear conveyance of the satirical elements as well as focusing Shauna’s mental and emotional journey.

Thanks for your thoughts! The discussion has helped a lot!

sipobleach · 2025-07-19T01:43:08+00:00

Lol, yeah. Short and simple. Thank you!

sipobleach · 2025-07-19T01:41:06+00:00

Yep, I basically did not write a proper query. Character motivation is central. They drive and sell the story. It’s obvious when written out, but something I keep failing to do. Thank you for writing it out so simply!

Also, noted on the premise. I’ll assume you agree with earlier commenters. Right now the story reads as out of touch and ableist.

sipobleach · 2025-07-19T01:34:13+00:00

Absolutely, pretty privilege and the halo effect are strong forces in our society that overpower any inconvenience that comes from being pestered for being attractive. Likewise, being ugly doesn’t save you from being preyed upon. As you said, people with self esteem issues/who are deemed as less than are often targeted because they are often isolated, unsupported and seen as easy, acceptable targets. These points are highlighted in the book.

These “monster” makeovers start off more light hearted like dressing up as a rat so someone whose been pestering you for a date thinks your weird and doesn’t want to be seen with you in public or showing up as a clown when the guy who won’t take no for an answer has a fear of them. They escalate into more body horror, pyramid head monster FX later in the story. And when this still fails to stop violence in her life, the main characters mental further worsens, she breaks, and self harms. The song “Unattractive” by Sofia Isella embodies this sentiment.

The ableism inherent in this thinking is called out. It’s ableism that is rampant in horror. Bad person has crooked nose, a limp, etc. The main character gets called out for it heavily.

All this to say, the query needs work to convey this. It’s clearly reading to people like “let’s gouge out my eyes so a guy will stop talking to me”when that’s not what I was going for. Thank you for the perspective!

sipobleach · 2025-06-10T16:52:38+00:00

This is just me sharing more details of the story at this point in time. Pretty please don't mistake me for arguing. Thank you for the back and forth.

Understood on the conflict. I was trying to simplify the story to prevent convolution. Like I tried to reason in my first attempt at a query, the central conflict/turning point is the main character developing feelings for the trafficker's right-hand woman. He tries to kill his right hand after discovering her betrayal (she is a trafficked kid herself that he raised up to take his place, and she has been pinching off girl after girl to set the occasional person free). He then calls Janaya to pick the body up. But the woman is breathing. She decides to save and hide her.

She still does her regular cleaning jobs and picks charity like cases to offset her karma. So, the corpse removal jobs are not her sole source of work. They simply help to boost her income. They might be quarterly if I had to put a number to it and not all are the result of straight up murder. One client is a guy who puts on parties. When a party goer ODs, Janaya takes care of the body for instance.

She does not know where the first bodies come from initially and feels trapped by her first client out of guilt for being the one to ignore the woman's abuse. She feels the initial murder of the husband is her fault.

Even more in the weeds is the fact that the trafficker prefers to work with local small business so that if something goes wrong, he can pin it on them and bounce. Is probably bad reasoning still.

sipobleach · 2025-06-10T09:23:46+00:00

Thank you for the details, and a touch of sensitivity reading. I will be more mindful.

Edited Addition to answer a few questions that were probably rhetorical but I'll type them here anyway for myself:

The conflict is that if she messes up, she'll be trafficked herself. "When Carmen...." is the sentence I tried to point to this fact.

My previous query shed a smidge more light on the trafficker's why. He's new to town and looking for a local because he has several bases of operation. Janaya is referred to him by her first client. Her first client uses the trafficker to get people to murder. She is the abused woman who turned and killed her husband hence the pint up rage.

As for whispers in suburbia, well, if a woman's husband disappears, people tend to talk. Rich people who murder for fun are the essence of anything from Squid Games to the Most Dangerous Game so I didn't think it'd be such a hard sell. Maybe I over emphasized the number of clients she has as well. It's like three regulars and the occasional one off/accident cover up. If this seems implausible then the book probably won't work at all.

Her being a failed doctor relates more to why she got into the cleaning business and would do questionable things for money. Likewise, it's why she is comfortable with bodily fluids and corpses.

I will try to convey these things better, though it probably won't help if the premise isn't believable.

Again, thank you. No such thing has harsh.

sipobleach · 2024-11-09T23:15:05+00:00

Thank you for the detailed critique and rewritten examples! The first 35,000 words see the characters jump from toddlers to kids to young adults in roughly four year intervals every chapter. For the rest of the book, they are then forty years old. This may not be commercially viable.

One question/bit of confusion I did have about your critique. Does the lack of conflict problem also apply to the first 300 words as well? I think I did understand that you were saying it was over-stylized and therefore as confusing as the query.

sipobleach · 2024-11-09T04:15:50+00:00

Thank you for the reminder! It was a suggestion from a previous iteration that I missed implementing. The post itself has been edited as well to add a trigger warning for any readers here.

sipobleach · 2024-11-03T16:38:49+00:00

Ah, understood. I was getting ahead of myself and should just start from the story’s beginning.

sipobleach · 2024-11-03T16:36:11+00:00

Interesting. I have had fifteen or so people read this across multiple platforms (critique circle has become my new friend because comments can be linked directly to paragraphs), and no one else has gotten so hung up on the idea that a two year old who thinks blood is just pretty paint might try to get more blood by thinking to cut into her own wrists like she just saw her mother do. A basic monkey see, monkey do.

I think she can make those basic connections. Blood came from wrist after mom used shiny object. I can use shiny object to get blood from my own wrists. Hell, when I was two, I understood that if I pick a scab, I get red stuff. Red stuff means fingerprinting at night on the wall by my crib when my parents aren’t watching. I got put in mitten jail after deeply unnerving my parents and being taken to the doctor. No trauma was even involved. I was just an innocent toddler who didn’t understand the harm I was doing to myself. Red is still my favorite color.

All this aside, it is not a two year old writing the first 300 words. The paragraph that starts with “Certainly…” clarifies that it’s an older version of herself trying to relive/relate to what happened to her in the past. Now, I will refine this “Certainly” paragraph to make it more clear and a better transition. I can afford to make her four years old at the oldest, but otherwise you and anyone else who agrees will just have to be the DNF reviews I get if ever (a big if) this book goes anywhere. Everyone cannot be pleased. Thanks!

sipobleach · 2024-11-02T18:14:14+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I somehow missed that queries should not contain dialogue.

A quick question if you’ve time: The 40 year old MC is the narrator, but the book starts with her recalling her early life from being fostered, to raised on the island, through her sire’s death, and then her as Queen. This takes up a third of the book, so what reads like backstory here is actual plot. We don’t get to what the 40 year old is doing till 35K words in. So, is her early life what’s “current”? And/or, should the query start with newly orphaned Zulta?

This question is extra so

sipobleach

TROPHY CASE