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Okay, I can't stand what I've written. Any of the twenty-odd queries I've written. But the book is interesting, I think, and so I owe it to my self of five years ago (that's how long ago I wrote this thing!! It just keeps bouncing around!) to write a decent query so that this one last editor will want to read it and discover how brilliant a book it is.
Now. The queries are all terrible. I'm failing to express the interesting thing about the book.
This is what's interesting about the book:
It's got a late-stage terraformed world in it, where the consequences of the needs of terraforming are heavily in fluential in everyday life, not just laws and economic practices but also culture. It's got a struggling misfit kid in it, who wants very badly to fit in with a licentious but very conformist collectivist community. It's got redemption several times over, and both self-sacrifice and self-assertion, and culture clash, and industrial espionage, and sabotage, and romance.
The thing that's hard to express is that the romance is different because of the culture in which Chuy lives. His dreams and aspirations are formed in his collectivist, conformist imagination. He's not at odds with his community because he's a rugged individualist but because he's an impulsive, troubled kid with a "broken family" -- that doesn't mean his parents divorced -- they didn't -- but that his collective household broke up and his parents moved away. So he doesn't dream of the suburban house with the picket fence, the wife and the golden retriever: he dreams of the collective household, the compañeros de casa, the novio who is a committee man, the place in the volunteer committees. He doesn't so much rebel against the prying of the neighbors and the committees as he longs for their approval.
The thing he does to get into trouble arises from that: he keeps getting wild drunken ideas that are supposed to benefit the community, only sobering up to discover he's done something stup[id and destructive (yes, you and I know what's really going on here, but this is his perception). And, in fact, when the community decides to "save" him once and for all, they do it in their own terms, and these are terms he believes in. They decide -- using a metaphor from the Biomes Authority which oversees all the human interactions with the carefully-groomed habitats of the planet -- that Chuy is an "indicator," like an organism which can only survive if the habitat is healthy: and that saving Chuy is important -- not just because everybody likes him but because the community itself feels embattled by political and ecnomic changes on the horizon. And here is the measure of how different Chuy is from your standard rebel: when he's offered the chance to be more controlled and conformist, he takes it.
Then there's plot stuff: how Chuy begins to settle in, how the man he loves comes to terms with his old love and comes to accept Chuy: how Chuy, trying to please his neighbors, oversteps the intellectual-property line and, using a manual he hasn't got the license to, makes modifications to a machine he hasn't got the authorization to work on, and finds himself whisked away to work off fines in a distant and thoroughly alien factory town elsewhere on the planet: how Chuy struggles just to survive there long enough to come home: how his mechanical talents are tapped by a faction in a bitter struggle within the company: how he risks his life to uncover the secret of the prototype sabotage and save the machines: how he saves the life of the man who tries to kill him: how he returns, unsure of his place in his old home.
But, see, even "factory town" and "company" are misleading: even these things are organized quite differently than the words suggest. The "company" is a different kind of corporate structure, involving an ownership collective and "free labor," people who don't own shares, and don't belong to the collective, but move freely from job to job (naturally, they're the lower paid people). The factory town is not quite: there's dormitories for workers, and a place like a mall some miles away where things can be bought.
Okay. That's what's interesting about the book. How do I fit that into a half a page? How do I express it so that a stranger would want to read the whole book?
Now. The queries are all terrible. I'm failing to express the interesting thing about the book.
This is what's interesting about the book:
It's got a late-stage terraformed world in it, where the consequences of the needs of terraforming are heavily in fluential in everyday life, not just laws and economic practices but also culture. It's got a struggling misfit kid in it, who wants very badly to fit in with a licentious but very conformist collectivist community. It's got redemption several times over, and both self-sacrifice and self-assertion, and culture clash, and industrial espionage, and sabotage, and romance.
The thing that's hard to express is that the romance is different because of the culture in which Chuy lives. His dreams and aspirations are formed in his collectivist, conformist imagination. He's not at odds with his community because he's a rugged individualist but because he's an impulsive, troubled kid with a "broken family" -- that doesn't mean his parents divorced -- they didn't -- but that his collective household broke up and his parents moved away. So he doesn't dream of the suburban house with the picket fence, the wife and the golden retriever: he dreams of the collective household, the compañeros de casa, the novio who is a committee man, the place in the volunteer committees. He doesn't so much rebel against the prying of the neighbors and the committees as he longs for their approval.
The thing he does to get into trouble arises from that: he keeps getting wild drunken ideas that are supposed to benefit the community, only sobering up to discover he's done something stup[id and destructive (yes, you and I know what's really going on here, but this is his perception). And, in fact, when the community decides to "save" him once and for all, they do it in their own terms, and these are terms he believes in. They decide -- using a metaphor from the Biomes Authority which oversees all the human interactions with the carefully-groomed habitats of the planet -- that Chuy is an "indicator," like an organism which can only survive if the habitat is healthy: and that saving Chuy is important -- not just because everybody likes him but because the community itself feels embattled by political and ecnomic changes on the horizon. And here is the measure of how different Chuy is from your standard rebel: when he's offered the chance to be more controlled and conformist, he takes it.
Then there's plot stuff: how Chuy begins to settle in, how the man he loves comes to terms with his old love and comes to accept Chuy: how Chuy, trying to please his neighbors, oversteps the intellectual-property line and, using a manual he hasn't got the license to, makes modifications to a machine he hasn't got the authorization to work on, and finds himself whisked away to work off fines in a distant and thoroughly alien factory town elsewhere on the planet: how Chuy struggles just to survive there long enough to come home: how his mechanical talents are tapped by a faction in a bitter struggle within the company: how he risks his life to uncover the secret of the prototype sabotage and save the machines: how he saves the life of the man who tries to kill him: how he returns, unsure of his place in his old home.
But, see, even "factory town" and "company" are misleading: even these things are organized quite differently than the words suggest. The "company" is a different kind of corporate structure, involving an ownership collective and "free labor," people who don't own shares, and don't belong to the collective, but move freely from job to job (naturally, they're the lower paid people). The factory town is not quite: there's dormitories for workers, and a place like a mall some miles away where things can be bought.
Okay. That's what's interesting about the book. How do I fit that into a half a page? How do I express it so that a stranger would want to read the whole book?