Agent For a Day

If you haven't stopped by yet, go check out the Agent For A Day chaos on Nathan Bransford's blog.


I've actually read through all 50 queries, and only one made me step away from the computer to rant and rave. That's pretty good!

Right now my short list looks like this:

The MAYBE Pile:

1- Australian talks to animals

49 – Nicky the hit man series

48 – POV camera murder

43- MG time travel

40- Becoming Emily Novak

38- Bloodright YA about shields and the Wild

37- Dead people posed 79k

36- Rosie’s Child- Irish adoption and house w/ love story

31- A Single Pearl

29- CAT scan Non-fic

27- YA – Promised Land - freckles

17- Inugami PI chased by Japanese curse

16- Race car engineer in college

12- butterfly emblem murders

10- 5 people with alien DNA and romance

5- Dead people in first person (romance)

Not all in my beloved sci-fi genre. Not even all fiction books. Some of them were great queries, and some just sound like great stories. Now I have to pare down the list to those that are marketable and ready to be published... all from a query! We're only allowed to choose 5 books.

I'm learning a lot from this. Especially about what a bad query looks like. Oh. My. Word. There were some bad queries. Not make-me-gag queries but ones where I was staring at the screen baffled. I tried desperately to think the best, but some of them gave you nothing to work with!

At least none were actually written in crayon...


After looking over my list 7 novels stand out to me... which means I still have two I need to lose. Most of these I read yesterday so the fact that I even remember them is good.

#48- a POV murder through a camera.... a magical camera allows the MC to see places through a photograph and she wittinesses a murder she has to stop. That's just cool. Now I need to look at the query and word count to see if the writing matches the story premise.

#37- dead people get posed in weird ways. I like the idea, I didn't like the drug culture context the MC was entrenched in. That's really subjective and a personal choice, but I think it's going to kill it for me.

#36- Rosie's Child... an unwed mother gives her child to her married, but infertile, friend and the grandkids wind up trying to figure everything out. I really liked the writers voice. I can hope for a happy ending. So this is a strong maybe... it's just not a genre I'd normally read.

#29- A Non-fic about the dangers of CAT scans and children. I have kids. I'm intrigued. I want to read this one way or the other, there's no short list about it.

#17- A PI is chased by a Japanese curse. Cool! There are some other things in the query that make me nervous about requesting though. I need to read it again.

#16- A terrible query, but a really intriguing story. It's a biography of a college student who gets involved building race cars for intercollegiate competition. It sounds like a really fun story but I have no idea what this person's writing is like. Still, even with the lousy query, I hope it's good.

#12- This query started out really well, talking about a brand put on murder vicitims that was also found on walls and a few other obscure places. But I didn't get why the query fell apart from there. With a writing sample I could probably say Yes or No with more authority. Right now I'm waffling.


I'll let you know how this plays out.