Despite the extent to which I hate writing them, I have completed a first draft query letter for the book. I’m tossing it out here in public, and requesting humbly that anyone interested take a look at it and tell me if it makes sense and, hopefully, makes you want to read the thing. Any specifics would be especially appreciated.

I’m still not entirely sure what the title is, but in the time in between reads better to me in a query letter than weathered, I think.

Attn. Mr/Ms. _______________:

I’m writing in regard to my completed 107,000 word novel, In The Time In Between. (sentence explaining whatever reason I’m sending to this particular agent)

The Storm (you can hear the capital letters whenever anyone talks about it) hit New Orleans a year ago, but the streets remain largely unreconstructed.

Jonathan Summers, after three years spent out in America, occupying himself with odd jobs and part-time lovers while waiting for his life to resume, has come to rebuild.

Jackson Potter hasn’t come to rebuild; he’s come to escape, an expatriate within America’s borders. His second album changed the rap game, and he did his very best to vanish from the public eye instead of releasing his third. There’s nowhere he could find where he could be as invisible as in New Orleans, and he tried almost everywhere.

David Everett is the starting quarterback for New Orleans, but that doesn’t mean he’s all that good at the game, or anything else in his life, and he never sought the city out anyway – he was traded. But the eighteen year old daughter of his estranged brother sought him out, looking for a pizza, a place to sleep, and some answers about what happened between her father, her uncle, and a woman whose name she never learned five years earlier.

For David’s half-sister Eunice, coming to New Orleans was just coming home, even if no one else she knows did the same. She’s got a backpack full of spray paint and a tag that’s covering the parts of the city that no one lives in anymore, to prove to everyone that she came back. But she’s not the only one - the day after she and Jonathan spend a few hours naked together in the room he rents on Decatur Street, she receives a frantic phone call from a person named Caitlin, desperate to put some affairs in order.

With the threat of the next storm constantly lurking, the characters’ lives converge. Jonathan and Eunice begin a mutually destructive relationship; Eunice and David try to come to terms with their own definitions of family; Jonathan saves Jackson’s life atop the roof of a Mid-City church. As their personal struggles become inseparable from those of the city, they’re all confronted with the reality that there are forces more powerful in the world than storms. In The Time In Between answers the question – how do you return to something that’s been destroyed?

I’m a twenty-seven year old touring spoken word performer with several records and a previously published book of poetry (Sometimes You Gotta Fight The Bear, Shotgun Honey Press, 2006) to my name. In The Time In Between is my first novel.

The complete manuscript is available upon request. Thank you for your time and consideration; I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,
Dan Solomon