Vitality Discovered
1. You, yes YOU can sprightly JUMP out of bed in the mornings, keep those bright eyes OPEN, and get UP every other part of you that needs getting UP. Buy this book and everything but your bank account will be REVITALIZED!!!!!!!!!!
2. In a world where people can steal the vitality of others, siphoning their lives from them, is it immoral for Lucy Fellows, a woman whose body is riddled with leukemia, to steal the vitality . . . of her own children?! This and other questions of ethics.
3. Failed software-pirate-cum-barista Lon Zebos reaps billions through pinpoint targeting of a susceptible demographic: people who still use email. Yes, old people. Thanks to his uncanny ability to devise irresistible email subject lines, the over-70 set respond by the millions with the numbers of their bank accounts and credit cards.
4. The planet Fertile was colonized to let the Children of the Plenty do what comes naturally. When a virus attacks the ability to create the Seed, women exile the infected to a remote island, and kill any men who attempt to escape the island. But the joke's on them, because a plant found only on the island is making the infected virile again.
5. Olivia is suffering. Call it apathy, inertia, melancholy, sluggishness. She mopes all day every day, the weight of the world on her shoulders. But that all changes the day her secret crush, 15-year-old Bradley, while passing her in the hallway between classes, nods at her.
6. When Lauren complains that she's lost her "get up and go," her doctor prescribes the same remedy doctors prescribed a century ago: cocaine. It works, and if it begins Lauren's long plummet into the depths of addiction, homelessness, crime, and an early death, so be it.
Original Version
Dear Evil Editor,
Eighteen-year-old Emily Fellows has lived with debilitating lethargy throughout high school. [That describes every high school girl.] [Or boy.] [Or teacher.] Tracking her healthy times leads to a disturbing link: she only has energy when her mother, Lucy, is away. [What teenaged girl doesn't have her energy drained by her mother? On the bright side, she's 18; time to move out and go to college or get a job. Problem solved.] [Does she mention this link to her mother?] And worse, her precocious thirteen-year-old sister Kayla is starting to experience the same symptoms.
[Dr. Cuddy: House, I have a case for you. Two teenaged sisters who are lethargic whenever their mother is around.
Dr. House: This sounds serious. Lock down the hospital. I'll drop all my other cases and get my team right on it. Are the girls in quarantine?
Dr. Cuddy: That's sarcasm, right?]
For sixteen-year-old Justin Fellows, breaking his leg at soccer is amazing. [That would be amazing. Make him a parkour racer] inner sight blossoms and he sees sparkling energy coursing along his blood, as well as in an overarching pool.
[Now I'm lost. Does "inner sight" mean he sees his blood coursing through his veins?] [Or did he break his leg so badly that his femoral artery is spewing blood all over the place?] [I don't think "overarching" is a good adjective for any kind of pool.] [If you break your leg, you would be screaming in pain, the game would stop, other players would gather around you, and someone would call for an ambulance. Instead, everyone ignores Justin while he gazes at his blood and thinks, Wow, pretty sparkles! Maybe he should just skin his knee. That's at least as likely to draw blood as a broken leg.] [I hope the kid who broke Justin's leg at least got a yellow card.] And he can influence this network of vitality to heal himself. [Just in time to get back in the game and score the winning goal! This is just like The Karate Kid!] Seeing the same vitality configuration within his sisters, he is delighted-- until he realizes that he's stealing from them. Self-blame spikes: Emily doesn't have an energy problem; she has a Justin problem. [Every teen girl with a younger brother has a Justin problem.]
Despite Justin's doubts and self-recriminations, the youths investigate their abilities. Vitality networks seem unique to them, and Justin learns how to heal minor injuries in others [and immediately opens a highly profitable orthopedic clinic.], while Emily and Kayla gain some control over how they share vitality. It's a wonderful secret adventure until they learn that healing can go wrong, and sharing can be deadly. They see a special spider quite literally sucking the life out of a special butterfly. [Spiders suck the life out of butterflies all the time. It's called lunch.] And during a campus tour, a creepy boy calls Emily his Chosen and starts draining vitality from her. [Can you tell when someone's draining your vitality? If so, does Emily say, Whoa, whoa, GTF away from me? Does she call the campus police?] Childhood stories from their great aunt spring to mind... Stories in which they have powers, and the dangerous Chosen suck the life out of special people just like them. [If the bad guys call the people they suck the life out of their Chosen, and the good guys call the bad guys the Chosen, all of your characters are Chosen.] [And if everyone's Chosen, suddenly being Chosen isn't such a big deal. It's like if everyone could talk to fish, Aquaman would be just another guy.]
Lucy returns from a long trip exhausted and horribly gaunt. Her system desperately needs energy, and she unknowingly siphons vitality from her daughters. [I've been wondering about the mechanics of the transfer of vitality from one person to another. So it's a siphon? Presumably a metaphorical siphon, as it would be impossible to unknowingly siphon anything out of anyone using a hose.] The Chosen may be a scary reality, but a more immediate and terrifying danger confronts them.
Leukemia is killing their mother. [Finally, the genre is revealed: literary fiction.]
Vitality Discovered is my debut novel and is complete at 99,000 words. It shares difficult discoveries and the mystery of hidden powers found in The Light Through The Leaves by Glendy Vanderah, and the exploration of rare genes and the importance of relationships in Alice Sabo's Children of a Change World series.
Fifteen years abroad, mostly in Asia, help me set the scene for several important chapters in this book. Now permanently resettled in Toronto, my wife and I enjoy travel and the theatre, and I try to stay young by playing old-guy recreational sports.
Thank you for your consideration.
Notes
I don't see why Emily's and Kayla's lethargy would abate when their mom is away, if Justin also unknowingly steals their vitality.
If Emily is two years older than Justin, why hasn't she noticed sparkling energy in her blood? Pretty much every 18-year-old girl has seen her blood. With regularity.
When does unknowingly siphoning someone's vitality happen? Anytime you're near someone with more vitality than you? That wouldn't explain why Justin was unknowingly stealing from Emily. Or why lethargic Emily wasn't unknowingly stealing from Justin.
I think it would be better to focus on one person as your main character. I was gonna say drop Justin from the query, but now I'm thinking, drop him from the book, and make Kayla the 16-year-old soccer player. This is America, where girls are better at soccer than boys anyway. Not only would you have one fewer character to manage, but you'd cut a lot of words, which is a good thing.
Your characters are teenagers. You should declare the book YA.
Can Emily heal minor injuries? Or is everyone affected differently by their network of vitality? Speaking of which, the terms "network of vitality" and "vitality configuration" may be clearly explained in the book, but leave them out of the query.
It seems unknowingly siphoning vitality is a genetic trait that runs in the family (apparently the great aunt is familiar with it), yet it seems Lucy knows nothing about it, as she would have told her children it was coming. And taken steps to avoid stealing their vitality.
There was a Star Trek episode called The Empath, in which the empath could absorb other characters injuries and pain. She was handy to have around if you'd been tortured, but she could take only so much. Is Justin an empath?
Start over. Paragraph 1: Pick a main character. Tell us who they are, including any super powers they have. Tell us what their overarching situation is, including whatever goal they hope to accomplish. Possibly that's saving their mother. If so, don't wait until the last sentence to mention it.
Paragraph 2: What obstacle must they overcome to succeed? Possibly that's the fact that to provide vitality to their mother requires losing so much of their own vitality they'll die. Or maybe it's these annoying Chosen people. What's their plan to deal with this obstacle?
Paragraph 3: Presumably their plan fails. What went wrong? Do they have a plan B? Is there a crucial make-or-break decision they must now make that will determine the outcome?
Possibly that organization will need some tweaking. You don't want the query raising lots of questions that you don't have room to answer.
4 comments:
Not fond of the title. If this is YA, 99K words is a bit long.
Queries need to be very clear. The back and forth between disconnected events happening to different characters isn't helping.
In addition to what EE mentioned, saying that vitality networks seem unique to them and then having another character stealing vitality from one of them sounds contradictory. It would be better to leave out the statement than rely on "seem."
General advice is to limit named characters to protagonist and maybe one other with significance (usually romantic interest or antagonist depending on genre). Also, you might want to try showing a bit more cause->effect progression.
Hope this helps. Good Luck.
Thank you for your comments. Back to the drawing board. I am finding it extremely difficult to:
1) Pare down to one protagonist when the three kids are pretty equal chars.
2) Define the powers succinctly.
3) Focus on one plot line
Emily has been sick for 3 years and begins to suspect a link with her mother (Lucy).
Kayla starts to exhibit the same symptoms.
Lucy goes on a long trip and the girls return to health.
Justin heals himself, first without knowing anything about it, and a second time when he suddenly gets the first hints of his special powers. He can see energy in all living things and, in some limited ways, control it and heal himself with it.
Emily first begins to feel the energy within herself and slowly develops the ability to see it too (much less well than Justin).
Justin sees two energy networks in each living thing. Usually both are tightly wound around the circulatory system (or the equivalent in plants). In he and his sisters, one follows the circulatory system but the other is in an overarching pool that spans their whole body.
Justin sees that he is stealing energy from his sisters. He has to fight to control his pull and blames himself for Emily's long illness.
Justin and Emily bring Kayla on board and training helps her, too, see the vitality networks.
Emily half-remembers her aunt healing a little cut on her hand when she was little girl. She also remembers her aunt's stories where she and her siblings would grow into powers and that warn of a horrible cult that would hunt them.
While away on her trip, Lucy becomes very ill and comes home early. This is when they learn that she has leukemia and are able to verify that the girls' lethargy was indeed caused, however unknowingly, by their mother...
The kids devise a plan to keep feeding their mother the vitality she needs to hold the cancer at bay, while not draining themselves of vitality (which they knew was bad from their investigations which found a similarly powered spider, butterfly, cat and crow.) They navigate chemo session 1 so successfully that Lucy is allowed to rest at home (this all happens in 2005 when acute lymphocytic leukemia had a less than 30% overall survival rate - and less than that for adults). They celebrate and relax and forget that the girls needed to replenish their vitality overnight (which they had been doing while their mother was in hospital).
In the morning, Kayla's pool is empty and they just make it to emergency when her heart stops. Restarting her heart (defib) seems to also restart the vitality network and her pool begins to fill (Lucy remained at home) and her recovery is startlingly fast.
This is about 38% into the novel and, I felt, didn't stretch the 30% query letter coverage guide too much.
There is a lot going on as described above (and a lot I didn't include in this quick synopsis).
Anyway, just thought I'd put my angst on display!
This is about 38% into the novel and, I felt, didn't stretch the 30% query letter coverage guide too much.
I’m not familiar with the 30% coverage guide. Is that a secret formula you found in a book?
You can put all this information into the synopsis you’ll be asked for by some agents. The query should included a shorter plot summary, about 10 sentences. I provided a basic outline in the notes of this post, and an incomplete sample of a query in the feedback request post’s notes. You don’t seem to have any interest in either.
I have a file of all feedback and one for suggestions. My next attempt will certainly try to take them into account. As I tried to do with my first one.
My long post was mostly a result of frustration at myself. The overall directness and simplicity of your suggestions are very helpful, but some of the details don't work. As well as not resonating, my first two attempts also didn't make some basic plot elements clear.
The 30% coverage was something I was told by three different commentors in a Facebook forum and I have been trying to adhere to that. Without that constraint, I think, I hope, it will be easier.
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