Don't be afraid to ask for help with the most critical first step of your writing journey - the query.
I’ve been blogging since 2011 and have critiqued over 200 queries here on the blog using my Hatchet of Death. This is how I edit myself, it is how I edit others. If you think you want to play with me and my hatchet, shoot me an email.
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My thoughts are in blue, words to delete are in red, suggested rephrasing is in orange.
HER MOTHER’S KILLER is a 71,000-word dual-POV, dual-timeline, adult psychological suspense with speculative elements. My novel is a twist on “Fatal Attraction" that combines dark secrets, trauma, and twisted relationships similar to “Look What You Made Me Do” by Elaine Murphy with the unreliable narrator and morally grey characters in "The Housemaid's Secret" by Freida McFadden. Good comp titles, they need to be in call caps, like your own title, while the name of a film should be in italics.
When Norma was eight, she testified to seeing her father murder her mother. Perhaps use "witness" instead of "seeing." He was sentenced to death.Combine these two sentences: "...her father murder her mother, sentencing him to death. She went through years of therapy, broken and alone.
Twenty years later, she's not the girl who put daddy behind bars. She's the woman looking for hook-ups with different men, deceiving herself that she isn't still broken, and keeping her distance from everyone-except the little girl no one else can see. A little more here. What is her relationship with this girl? Is she scared of it? Why does she not keep her distance from the little girl?
Tonight, the new man is Norma’s reserved boss, Paul. But when she beckons for him to come hither, he doesn't.
Paul knows he shouldn't touch Norma — he's the one who really killed her mother. But Norma is as seductive as her mother; the married woman he slept with when he was eighteen. Norma is Paul’s second chance at the only woman he's ever loved. But why would he / did he kill her mom? And also - ew - he thinks of Norma as his second chance at... her mother? How is the reader supposed to feel about Paul? Becuase this sentence makes me think he's a total creep, but the para below makes it sound like he's charming and an actual love interest. It's confusing.
Norma entices Paul into her typical hook-up. But I thought he rejected her? Does she try again, and succeeds? But she's captivated by Paul’s reserved boyish charm and falls desperately,obsessively in love. What about him? How does he feel? He appears to have rejected her, then went ahead and went through with it anyway? Then the little girl, the manifestation of herself as a child, helps Norma remember what she really saw when she was eight: Paul, not her father, killed her mother, destroyed her family, and broke her. But... why? Why would Paul kill her mom? And why would she not remember it that way? Getting an 18 year old boy confused with her father seems like a long shot, even for an 8 year old.
Now Norma's not thinking about hooking up. She's thinking about killing. But what's at stake? A query has to do a few things -- establish what the main character wants, what stands in their way of getting it, what they'll do to overcome the obstacles, and what's at stake if they fail. So... what's at stake? I don't have an indication of how the reader is supposed to feel about this relationship. Are we rooting for them? Not rooting for them? Is Paul a creep, or what? What is Norma's relationship with this little girl, and does she have any concerns at all about her own sanity, since she only has a relationship with a hallucination of her child self? This all needs to be much more fleshed out in order to be compelling.