Guess the Plot The Life of a Teenaged Hero
1. Choosing a name that hasn’t been used by some stupid comic book. Finding tights that don’t bunch. Pretending you need glasses when you have telescopic vision. Not retaliating when the high school quarterback kicks sand in your face at the beach bonfire.
2. When your parents won’t let you out on school nights and hold you to a ten o’clock curfew on the weekend. How are you supposed to fight crime, save chicks in peril, and deflect in-coming asteroids if you're studying algebra and civics instead?
3. Being the country's greatest superhero, but you kinda want to hang up your cape and just be an average teenager, except an evil scientist in a robot suit threatens to destroy the world and you're pretty sure all the other superheros would screw this one up.
4. Not using your powers to become the star of the basketball team so that Samantha Jordan would finally notice you. Having to resist using your X-ray vision to see through Samantha Jordan's clothes, even though she wouldn't suspect a thing, so probably it wouldn't hurt to take a peek. Or even a nice long gaze.
5. Getting in trouble for cutting class even though the only reason you cut was because your arch-nemesis Wrecking Ball was planning to destroy the gym and who the heck else was gonna stop him?
6. Having to put up with your little brother's torment just because the time you used your super powers on your little sister who kept bugging you, you killed her and now you have to follow all these silly rules.
Original Version
Dear Evil Editor
Being a teenager is stressful enough when dealing with cute boys, messy Biology lab accidents, and a girl ready to expose your darkest secret, but try having to save the world on the side.
Sixteen year old, Momoko Yoshimi, [No commas needed. Also, her name sounds like a sushi museum.] is an everyday teenaged girl, [I'd go with "average"; pretty much all teenagers are teenagers every day.] but she's also her country's greatest superhero, Shadow Warrior. Her double life becomes even harder to manage when an evil scientist in a robot suit threatens to steal the powerful Shadow Crystals thatcould possible [that could possibly] destroy the world. [An actual robot would be scarier.
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| Man in Robot Suit |
THE LIFE OF A TEENAGED HERO is an action packed YA Fiction novel [All novels are fiction, unless the author calls it a novel so no one will know it really happened to him because it was so embarrassing. In any case, when a book has a superhero and powerful shadow crystals that could destroy the world, we know it's fiction.] about a young girl who has to make the decision of a life time, ranking [weighing] in at 74K words.
Sincerely,
Notes
What chance does a guy in a robot costume have against the country's greatest superhero?
Does Momo have the shadow crystals? Where does she keep them? Shouldn't they be destroyed? Are they the source of Momo's power?
Maybe this should have a younger audience. The YA crowd may not buy into a guy in a robot suit as the villain.
Your plot summary is four sentences. Double that by elaborating on what's already here. What are Shadow warrior's powers? What are the crystals used for? What is the robot guy planning to do with them? (Presumably not destroy the world.) What kind of fighting is going on?
7 comments:
So with Evil's comments. I fell off at the mc's decision although I was mainly with you (robot suit hiccup excepted) because you let me down.
Needs a better or different choice. The query trails off and is extinguished.
How do the shadow crystals relate to the Shadow Warrior and the guy in the robot suit. Why is he in a robot suit?
Don't think this is YA.
Rethink the whole shebang is my advice. Needs stakes and a better choice. Unconnected, the let down doesn't endear me.
Sounds like a fun story but the query is so brief and vague we're left guessing about many aspects of the book. That's not good.
Hi author, you've got to make this query as action packed as the book. Superhero teen saving the world while passing Biology exams and dating has been done so much that that concept in itself is not the hook.
Your hook will be what her superpower is (you didn't say! Plus, is the coincidence of "shadow" in her name and the crystals name not a coincidence at all?), how the crystals can destroy the world (by making the ocean boil over or whatever), and especially why she might have to hang up her cape (does she lose a year of her life every time she uses a power? Are the crystals the source of her own power? Show why it's a big enough decision to be characterized "a decision of a lifetime").
Is Momo already considering giving up her cape before robo-man attacks?
what is her special, personal quandary before the villain comes on the scene?
Tell us about the choices she has to make, not just that they are difficult.
By a guy in a robot suit, I took it to mean the villain has robotic extra arms (like Doc Oc) or a giant mecha thing he rides in rather than that he dresses like a robot. You may want to clarify since the point seems to have caused some confusion.
I also want to know what's at stake for her if she DOESN'T hang up her cape. Is there a love story, for example, that she wants to focus on, and can't if her shadow-senses keep interrupting her dates? Is there another career she wants to pursue? Why is there a decision to be made? I think if you included somethin along those lines in the query, you could be 3/4 there.
Basically, I feel like it needs more conflict. Yes, there's a good girl and a bad guy, but that's still a very superficial description, and I'm sure there are other layers (of conflict) to your story.
I can fully understand why she might want to retire from the superhero lifetstyle, but I still think it bears more explaining why Momo is being suddenly faced with the choice. Is balancing these two aspects of her life becoming increasingly untenable? Is the job somehow more dangerous than when she started doing it? Are people being endangered that weren't before?
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