I  just started working on a new query letter.  This one’s a little different. You see, I’ve only written about three thousand words of the manuscript.  About fifteen pages.

Write the letter before the novel is a piece of advice I’ve heard over and over (yes, on the internet.) and now, I have an idea that’s fresh and crispy enough to give it a whirl.

There’s no distilling 80-100 thousand words down to their essence, because there aren’t 80-100k words.  There aren’t dozens of characters to choose from.  Right now, I think I have fewer than ten characters total.  One of them is incredibly minor.  Four of them are dead.  (Proper dead.  Crime novel dead, not SF/Fantasy dead.)  That leaves my protagonist and my antagonist.

There are no subplots to distract me, no secret-favorite characters that I want to tell you about, regardless of whether they deserve to be a part of my letter.

Right now, putting the cart before the horse seems to be working fairly well.