Don't be afraid to ask for help with the most critical first step of your writing journey - the query.
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My thoughts are in blue, words to delete are in red, suggested rephrasing is in orange.
Computer scientist Bex Pascoe has scored her dream job—a tenure-track position at Hamilton University. Her office may overlook the garbage bins, but the name on the door is hers. This sentence construction is a little bit awkward. There's nothing quite wrong with it, but I'd rephrase it slightly for flow. The problem is that her grad school sweetheart, Jake, has a job two thousand miles away. Bex grew up watching her mother depend on a man for money. Giving up her own paycheck to follow Jake is unthinkable. They’ve already spent two years apart, and Bex gives them one more hiring season to find jobs in the same place. This feels a little bit more like a synopsis, and it's not really tying together how watching her mother depend on a man affects her today. It's just a sentence kind of sitting there with the others.
When Hamilton advertises a position in Jake’s specialty, Bex enlists two members of the search committee: the inconveniently attractive Jayden and his polished ex-girlfriend, Maddie. With their help, she counts votes and calls in favors. Convinced that a major solo publication would clinch Jake’s interview, Bex makes one more adjustment. She persuades the editor of their breakthrough article to take her name off it. Jake prides himself on making his own name, but an office on the Quad is a hell of a cure for moral outrage. This is definitely wandering into synopsis territory rather than reading like a query. I don't know how Jayden and Maddie factor into this story, what the point of them is, or how they factor into the plot.
Jake makes the shortlist; then his name disappears overnight. Apparently, counting the votes is not the same as understanding how Hamilton works. The job goes to the dean’s niece. Their last hiring season is over. Her colleagues have instructions for everything down to the height of her heels. When she’s up for tenure in six years, it’ll be Bex’s turn to find out what her colleagues’ votes are worth. She can keep reshaping her life around Hamilton and risk losing Jake for good—or give up the salary and prestige she has fought for to start over with him. Again, not really sure that there's a great setup here. It doesn't sound like a very hard decision. She just found out that the place she works at is rife with corruption, so why would she want to stay there?
THE FALL SEMESTER is a 91,000-word upmarket campus novel about a relationship caught in the machinery of a tenure-track search. It alternates between Bex’s first semester on the faculty and the graduate-school years, in which she and Jake fell in love. It will appeal to readers who enjoyed the academic satire of Elaine Hsieh Chou’s DISORIENTATION and the tangled loyalties of Caroline O’Donoghue’s THE RACHEL INCIDENT.
My debut novel draws on my marriage to another academic and our repeated efforts to solve the two-body problem: finding academic jobs in the same place. I am a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. I have published op-eds in The Guardian and the Toronto Star.
I can see that there could be something here, but 91k words is a lot for something that doesn't feel like it has much kick to it. If the only thing at stake is choosing between a job in a controlling atmosphere and a romantic relationship, I just don't feel like there's much at stake here. We also don't have any understanding of the relationship based on this query. Jake might totally suck. This relationship might not be good for Bex, either. Right now this query is lacking urgency. If you can find a way to make the struggle a little more clear, and the plot more urgent that would help. But right now this is not reading as a particularly intersting read.