u/quietnbright

Hi there! First time querier, feedback appreciated! Jumping in:

Dear [Agent], 

WING DING PARADISE is upmarket speculative fiction complete at 90,000 words. It will appeal to readers who enjoyed the near-future world of Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel and the later-in-life self-discovery in Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures. 

When Delle Richards refused to hold a funeral after her husband’s death three years ago, she was sent to a retreat-like rehabilitation program on a Pacific Northwest island for people who show too little or too much emotion. To go home, she must pass a discharge evaluation by convincingly recreating the grief she never properly demonstrated. But she’s already failed several attempts, unable to cry on command for the program director who seems to delight in her failure. One more strike means permanent residency, a life of mocking therapy-speak in uniform. 

Delle is no social butterfly. But when the program shoots to national attention, she starts receiving fan mail from people whose lives she’s touched, undermining the “heartless” persona the program has assigned her and pulling her deeper into a past she’s spent decades trying to forget. Worse, she’s forced into group work with a burnt-out therapist, a man on conditional release from prison, and a young woman who won’t speak. As her once-small world expands through unlikely friendships, and with the final evaluation looming, Delle must choose whether to finally act the part of a good widow as the program demands, or hold on to the one regret that’s kept her from doing so, even if it costs her the chance to leave.

[Bio/closing]

First 300 words

I’ve reconciled to the fact that an all-in-one undergarment will never exist. Not in my lifetime. If it secures, it doesn’t stretch. If it stretches, it doesn’t absorb. If it absorbs, it doesn’t breathe. We’ve got self-flying airplanes and chatbots that tell us how many blinks per minute makes us engaged but not creepy. And not an engineer in the world who can counteract the pendulum of a woman’s moving body. A titty in motion stays in motion.  

“Deep breath in as you return to center,” Navid says. “Tighten-that-core-tighten-that-core, arms long, palms together.”

I fold, hovering my hands so my ring doesn’t hitch the whole way down my pant leg. They can enforce my wearing it, use it to oversee what I eat, curate my library checkouts, send data on the stress chemicals in my sweat to tech CEOs barely old enough to grow upper lip fuzz. What they can’t do is make me buff their matte black piece of scrap metal to high shine. 

To my left, Princess is cross-legged on her mat, massaging her calf. “Yes?” she says. She must sense me watching. “Cankles are an aphrodisiac in certain parts of the world, Delle.” She sweeps her long braids over her shoulder as a privacy curtain. 

My uniform top pulls taut across my shoulder blades. Sudden movements are out of the question. I trust Navid is doing a fine job stretching the rest of the group into transcendence, but unlocking the lower back-tailbone region while keeping a thread count intact is the work of grown women. Us, long-haul truckers, and dental hygienists. 

“Perfectly fine to close your eyes,” Navid sings in tune with the wind chimes.