Guess the Plot
The Edge Girls
1. The life and times of a group of roller derby girls. Just with more drama and less derby. And a knife. And a sword. And - you know what? These girls are just violent.
2. Drugs and lying and cliques and backstabbing. Your typical high school? No it's one weekend at an Aspen ski lodge. Also, a murder.
3. Three talented starry-eyed ingenues who form a girl band and find fame and fortune with their first album endure personal conflicts, scandals, affairs, alcohol and other substances that threaten to tear the band apart and . . . You know the drill.
4. Edge girls are girls on the edge of getting their first period. Ruby is one of them, and she gets over the edge just before a virus rips through the world killing every prepubescent child. She's relieved--until she realizes she won't have her younger sisters to pick on anymore.
5. The Bronte sisters become vampire hunters. When Emily falls for Vlad, a blood pack-only type, can she convince Charlotte and Anne that bleeding on the page in a non-literal manner is a worthwhile goal?
6. The Edge Girls. They're rule-breakers. Excitement junkies. They'll do anything for a thrill. Even if it means getting thrown out of third grade.
Original Version
Dear {agent}
Since you’re looking for {personalized with their MSWL}, I’m excited to present THE EDGE GIRLS. Imagine the deadly virus in The Last of Us combined with the fertility crisis of The Handmaid’s Tale. [Now imagine slogging through a book even more depressing than that.] This multi-POV speculative suspense is complete at 88,000 words and explores why we choose to have children. [We choose to have children so the children we had by accident will have someone besides us to annoy.] It would sit on the shelf between The Power by Naomi Alderman and The Measure by Nikki Erlick. [It will sit on the shelf somewhere between those books only if your last name falls alphabetically between Alderman and Erick. (Thanks for allowing me to cut and paste a comment from two queries ago.)] [As you've already likened it to The Last of Us combined with The Handmaid’s Tale, there's no need to mention additional books on the shelf. Let's get to your book.]
Late bloomer Ruby Inman finally gets her first period but her relief is cut short hours later as a contagious virus rips through the world killing nearly every prepubescent child and rendering women infertile. Ruby’s younger sisters die, as do millions of children born during a population boom caused by a government stimulus plan to combat decreasing birth rates. [So the plan to combat decreasing birth rates has brought the birth rate to approximately zero. Then again, has any government plan ever produced the results it was intended to produce?]
Three years later, the world is frantic at the potential extinction of humans. [Not the world. Just humans and some dogs and cats. The rest of the animal world are thrilled to get rid of people.] It’s discovered that only the Edge Girls – the females who’d gotten their first period just before the virus hit – are able to bear children. When now 17-year-old Ruby accidentally becomes pregnant, everyone has an opinion about what she should do with her unborn baby. [Not everyone. Republicans.] As her pregnancy progresses, she must decide if she’s going to accept her fate, fight, or flee as the government attempts to capture the Edge Girls and take their babies. [I'd let a dingo take my baby before I'd let the government.]
This is my debut novel. After two decades in corporate America, I quit my successful job with the goal of becoming a career novelist. [It's never a good idea to let an agent know you're financially capricious. She might try to convince you she deserves 60% of your income.] [Or she might not want the pressure of having a client who quit her job to be a career novelist, believing if she can't sell your book you'll end up living under a bridge, starving.] In March, a TikTok I made about my midlife gap year went viral and led to a segment on Good Morning America and articles in Scary Mommy and Upworthy. I’m hopeful these media contacts could lead to follow ups once I’ve published a book. [Have you already had the gap year? Did you consider writing a novel about a woman who takes a midlife gap year, in which you include things that happened during your midlife gap year, but embellish them with fictional events to make the gap year seem interesting? For instance, instead of your main character lazing around the house doing nothing for a year, she moves to Paris and has a torrid affair with a handsome French artist who paints her in the nude and the painting ends up in the Louvre, and when her husband comes to visit near the end of the gap year he goes to the Louvre and sees the painting and . . . well, you can take it from there. It'll practically write itself.] Additionally, I have a connection at Netflix who has shown interest in optioning my book for a limited series. [Once you get a connection at Random House, she can do lunch with your connection at Netflix.]
Thank you for your consideration,
Notes
I'm not saying a novel about a woman taking midlife gap year would be any easier to sell than a novel in which all the children in the world contract a virus and die a horrible agonizing death. There's an audience for that book too. I suppose. But if you're hoping for follow-ups from Scary Mommy and Upworthy, it seems more likely you'll get them with a book somewhat related to the subject that attracted them the first time.
That paragraph about your TikTok and quitting your job doesn't seem relevant, as it might if your book were about a woman who made a TikTok and quit her job. Perhaps it would be better to give us a few more sentences about what happens in the book. Your plot summary is mostly setting up the situation: The world is dying, Ruby is pregnant, and the government wants her baby. What does she want, what's her plan to get it, what goes wrong?
Of course my comments may seem irrelevant too, as you don't currently have a gap year novel, and you do have a dystopian . . . thriller?
Why don't the babies born to the Edge Girls die when they're exposed to the virus? Or did the virus disappear when there were no children or women left to infect?
If this were like The Handmaid's Tale, the Edge Girls would have been rounded up by the government and forced to get pregnant. Again and again. There wouldn't be any "accidentally" getting pregnant.
What is this "government" that's trying to capture Edge Girls? Is there one world government? Or is this just happening in certain countries? Is Russia kidnapping all the Ukrainian Edge Girls? As it's the countries with the most Edge Girls that will increase their populations, wars will be fought, Edge Girls being the spoils of those wars. I assume your book covers all this?
4 comments:
Congrats on finishing the book. EE already provided a lot of good comments. The only thing I will add is that I'm a little hung up on how a virus could strike down the world's children with such precision and speed. We've all just had a front-row seat to how viral pandemics function, so the bar is now raised for suspending the public's disbelief. Maybe I'm misreading; is she relieved to get her period because she had already heard about this virus and now believes she will not be killed by it? But then her relief wouldn't be "cut short".
It's the "hours later" bit more than anything. What we learned in 2020 was that it would take weeks or months for a virus to spread worldwide, and weeks or months for the effects to be studied and described, and about 700 years (give or take) to combat all the misinformation generated in those first weeks or months.
To avoid that question, I'd suggest a bit of reworking in that second paragraph along these lines: A virus rips through the world killing nearly every prepubescent child and rendering women infertile. Late bloomer Ruby Inman finally gets her first period, which means she likely won't die, but the thought brings no relief. She has younger sisters.
That's a good starting image, but it sounds like the story is more focused on her pregnancy and the danger it poses, so that's where the meat of the query should also hang. Exactly what fate would she be accepting? Who would she fight, and how could she win? How would she flee, and to where?
Aside from that, as a fan of dystopian fiction I'd say I am intrigued enough to want to know more about Ruby and her struggles.
Hey author, congratulations on finishing your book.
You might want to combine (and reduce) the first and last paragraphs. The general advice I've seen is to lead with the story, put housekeeping at the end (ymmv).
A few other things:
What about all the, um, stock at fertility clinics? There's currently more than a few viable eggs out there awaiting their potential parents. Is that dealt with? (And artificial wombs are getting close to being reality. If females carrying to term is the real problem, well, in the plague we saw what happens when technology people want suddenly gets a lot of funding.)
Your first plot paragraph has two sentences saying essentially the same thing - the children died. You probably don't want your agent wondering if all the information in the book is duplicated.
Age 14 is well within the norm for a first period, aka not a late bloomer - if she's the last in her group of peers, might want to say that instead.
A little math, numbers approximate, courtesy of google. There are approximately 25 million 14 year olds in the world, roughly half of those are likely female. Given a 4 year spread of starting menstruation between ages 12-15 (and there will be outliers on either side of that), again roughly, you will have 50 million females divide by 12 months - is probably a little over 4 million "Edge Girls". Minimum viable population is considered to be something like 500 to not worry about genetic drift. It can go as low as 50 individuals before worrying about inbreeding. As creative as people are, we could possibly go even lower but it would need to be well-managed which admittedly might be an issue.
tldr: Your plague is nowhere near causing the extinction of humanity. You may need to make a few adjustments.
It would probably help to define what accept her fate, fight, or flee each involve.
Good Luck.
This is well written but the query falls flat.
But, I see what's missing here and what could make this a great read and take it over the edge. If this is what you want to write then you should!
This question will change everything:
WHO got Ruby Inman pregnant?
I suggest the son of someone at the very tippy top, the rebellious son of someone who's pulling all the strings. And Ruby is forced to marry him for the sake of his image. This would give Ruby a chance to take the reader into the inner workings of this dystopian place while dealing with a jerk of a husband and trying to raise a child among evil people. Ruby finds out some secrets and could help people with them, and she has the power, but she has to be careful. What's holding her back and what's at stake? I think one would be losing access to her child. And you could really dig into the emotional tension between her and this jerk husband and his snobby family.
Step into the nucleus of this society and show us what it's all about from the perspective of an intelligent, curious, strong woman living on the inside looking out.
Also, I think EE's suggestion would make a fun beach read and probably sell really well:
"Did you consider writing a novel about a woman who takes a midlife gap year, in which you include things that happened during your midlife gap year, but embellish them with fictional events to make the gap year seem interesting? For instance, instead of your main character lazing around the house doing nothing for a year, she moves to Paris and has a torrid affair with a handsome French artist who paints her in the nude and the painting ends up in the Louvre, and when her husband comes to visit near the end of the gap year he goes to the Louvre and sees the painting and . . . well, you can take it from there. It'll practically write itself."
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