Barbara V Evers

I write for a living. I possess a graduate degree in professional communication. If you need a training manual, marketing copy, business letter, or resume written, I'm your woman. BUT...there's one aspect of writing that jerks me to a halt. Like a towering concrete wall, I struggle to surmount the task of writing that perfect query letter to an agent. Now for some of my readers, the term query means setting criteria to retrieve a subset of data from a database. Those are easy, let me tell you. The queries I refer to are letters written to agents persuading them to say, "Yes! Send me your wonderful novel. I'm dying to read it." I got most of my job interviews by artfully spinning words in a cover letter, so you would think the query letter would be no problem. Alas, I wish it were so. Writers spend their precious free moments toiling at the keyboard, creating worlds of wonder and imagination. The minimum length of a novel is 75,000 words. My fantasy novel

Decapitated tree Thunder droned in the distance.  Heavy clouds darkened the horizon, and neon-bright streaks of lightning cracked the sky.  We urged the dog to hurry up with his business, so we could seek comfort and shelter inside.  The rising storm distracted him, but we did get him inside before the monster hit. Monster might sound strong for a thunderstorm, but this storm struck with vicious fury.  Wind shoved trees into horizontal bows, and I peered out the window praying the pine tree's shallow roots would cling to the earth.  Towering above the house, the pine tree struggled against the onslaught, bending further than imaginable.  A loud crack threatened disaster and I dashed away from the window, bracing for the impact on our house.  Remarkably the tree didn't fall, but later we discovered another tree in our back yard sheared in half, maybe struck by lightning. That's NOT snow...it's hail! Not to be outdone by the gusting wind, hail pummeled the yard