January in Shadow - YA Contemporary Fantasy - Melissa Caruso

Dear [AGENT]:

Fifteen-year-old January Stone desperately wants not to be alone. But she doesn’t realize her isolation is the only thing keeping her alive.

January makes uncontrolled jumps across America in her sleep. With her world starting from scratch each morning, love seems impossible — until she meets Cassie, a haunted, bookish girl who isn’t willing to let January go. But their attempts at romance across the ever-changing distance that separates them attract the attention of the Fallen: once-human monsters with pits of black mist for eyes. They’ve hunted January for years, and now they’re out to devour her soul.

She isn’t the only one they’re after. Running from the Fallen, January encounters other Dreamwalkers: teens like January, who protect sleeping minds from an invading presence that creates the Fallen and turns people into puppets. With friends at her side, January is ready to fight back at last... if she can keep the fractious Dreamwalkers from turning on each other. But when evidence surfaces of a traitor among them, January uncovers a secret from her own past that may force her to abandon Cassie — or become a Fallen herself.

JANUARY IN SHADOW is a YA contemporary fantasy, complete at 65,000 words. [PERSONALIZATION & BIO HERE]

XO - Adult Contemporary - M. A. Nicholson

With her marriage on the rocks, forty-one-year-old Juliet has just looked up her first boyfriend on the internet thinking she can innocently reminisce about times gone by. But she’s lying to herself.

In 1982, when Juliet’s crush on senior Nick is suddenly reciprocated on her sixteenth birthday, it’s a dream come true. But she soon learns that the emotions and sexual tensions of a romantic relationship are far more complex than she ever anticipated — especially when her new boyfriend has an abusive father, a stalker ex-girlfriend and a plan to leave home as soon as possible. Shell-shocked by the darkness in Nick’s life, her infatuation for him unexpectedly fades. She wants to recover those tingly feelings of young love, but she’s too inexperienced to know what love is. When Nick decides to escape his home life, she’s ready to let him go.

Twenty-five years later, Juliet is married with a grown daughter. Due to her own indiscretion, her husband Ethan has moved out. She has fought to win him back to rebuild their stable home, but she’s exhausted from apologizing and trying to regain Ethan’s trust. Rose-colored memories of her relationship with Nick begin to hit her at odd moments and eventually she contacts him on the pretext of rekindling an old friendship, unprepared for the emotional powder keg she’s unleashing.

Complete at 90,00 words, XO is an Adult Contemporary that alternates between time lines.

Query Clinic is Open

This is meant as critiques for your query letter - not your pitch or first chapter.

Email your query to me: laclos [at] gmail.com. I'll post it as its own blog post and we can post our critiques in the comments.

UPDATE: Because the number of query help seekers is exceeding the number of query help givers, I'm going to stop accepting new queries to post from anyone who hasn't already given feedback to someone else. Preferably not cursory feedback just to get theirs posted either. I'm not running this clinic - we all are together. Please go back and look for entries that haven't had any feedback - the more you do, the more it will help you to fix your own .