It occurred to me that it might be helpful to provide this query to the general writing public.
Last month, I won Runner-Up honors at #RevPit, a contest in which 15 editors each review 100 queries and pick about 10-20 of them to request pages. Of those 10-20, one winner and one runner up are selected. This means that my query was in about the top 15% and my query, synopsis and pages were in the top 2%.
I’m starting to get a handle on what querying a manuscript looks like, but for a long time, I did not know what the heck I was doing. And I wished I could see what queries had received positive attention. So I’m going to pay it forward and publish my query below, for those of you who would like to see it:
Responsibility doesn’t know why she has wings instead of arms. Responsibility doesn’t know why she was abandoned, nor why her dragon mother left her among humans. Nor why, on the endless ocean that the Century Ship Ekkaia trades across, she is the only halfdragon anyone has ever seen. Disgusted by her freakishness, but in dread of her mother’s return and retaliation, Ekkaia’s crew keep their hated Responsibility in safe, but despised, isolation.
But when Ekkaia captures a shipwrecked man whose face resembles her own, Responsibility seizes the chance to learn more about her past. That night, she frees him from his cell, and discovers that he is her half-brother, Avnai, and that her mother foretold their meeting before she disappeared. Together, they escape and return to their father’s kingdom.
Among a family she has never met, Responsibility experiences love and belonging for the first time. She also finds herself cast into a world larger and more complex than she has ever known. She learns true flight, and the use of magic. And she discovers danger: the shadowy sea empire called the Consortium, which holds her father’s kingdom in an uneasy vassalage, is watching her: because twenty years ago it was their attack that drove her mother away.
But when Responsibility’s part in a diplomatic ceremony reveals a plot to destroy her new home entirely, she will have to seek help from an unthinkable source: the crew of the Century Ship Ekkaia. Assuming they don’t kill her on sight.
ACROSS THE ENDLESS OCEAN is an adult fantasy complete at 119,000 words. It is the story of Responsibility’s transformation from prisoner to warrior-princess. It is an adventure in the vein of the Miles Vorkosigan novels, set on a stage the size of the Ringworld. With dragons.
Scott Huggins trains teenagers both in the inevitability of death (history) and in overcoming a fate worse than it (public speaking). He has sold a dozen F/SF stories to professional markets, and is a Very Nearly Award-Winning Author, who won Runner-up in the Writers Of The Future (1999), The First Baen Adventure Fantasy Award (2014).
G. Scott Huggins 