Book Proposal

I wrote this book proposal and query letter for Daniel Weaver’s Book Publishing class in December 2022 as practice for what to expect to see in such and for practice on how to sell a book. I’m not currently serious about serious about writing this book and pursuing its publication; I have not in reality sent this query to Rebecca Podos.

Dear Rebecca Podos,

I’m writing to request your representation of my debut novel, Pulled Under. I was drawn to your agent profile as a current Emerson student in the Publishing and Writing graduate program. I’m currently trying to break into the industry, and you’re an inspiration to me and my cohort for how an Emerson student might do so upon graduation! I’m responding to your manuscript wish list (#mswl) on Twitter for a queer, paranormal romance and your description on your website of a book exploring trauma and identity through horror. This book exists, and I’ve written it!

I love to describe Pulled Under as a cross between The Love Boat and The Twilight Zone (but make it gay!). I think this story will appeal to those who want to explore grief through a “soft” horror lens or to fans of period romances with an edge. I’m also seeing a relatively new market for queer horror or queer stories with horror elements that this book could use to its advantage, which I’ve detailed in my proposal.

In the tradition of include One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston and Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, Pulled Under is about a character in the middle of a cruise ship time slip fighting for her sanity and the afterlife of a 1920s lesbian relationship. The story follows Shelby Tucker, who’s been dragged on a seven-day cruise by her family to cope with the recent suicide of her brother. In the thralls of grief, she has odd, paranormal experiences on the ship which center around two ghostly women—Bonnie and Leona—in love but separated by time, space, and death. Shelby–for whom the story is more psychological horror than romance–attempts to help them find each other again in a bid for her own sanity.

I plan to take a hands-on approach with my own publicity by hiring a publicist with my advance and promoting the book heavily on social media, including TikTok (or “BookTok,” specifically). Also, I plan to contact leadership at Autostraddle, a digital magazine which centers queer women, about promoting the book in a magazine article and getting a blurb from Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, staff member and author of novella Helen House (also in this lesbian horror space).

An excerpt from the novel’s first chapter is included here. I think it really encapsulates the narrator’s voice and subtly hints at the paranormal elements to come. I’m submitting my book to you exclusively because of my confidence in the fit of my manuscript with your wish list elements. I would be delighted to send the full manuscript upon request! Thank you so much for your time and for your attention to my spooky, gay book.

Warmest regards,

Lane Porter

they/she/he

TITLE: Pulled Under

HOOK: The Love Boat meets The Twilight Zone.

LENGTH: 255 pages, 7 chapters

SYNOPSIS:

The day after her brother’s funeral, Shelby Tucker’s family drags her on a seven-day Caribbean cruise. She finds herself–and the ship–haunted by past passengers of voyages on this stretch of water. Two of the ghostly passengers, Leona and Bonnie, who fell in love on a Prohibition “cruise to nowhere,” were separated in life and now in death. Shelby– consumed with grief and unsure of her own sanity– helps them find each other again.

AUTHOR BIO:

Lane Porter is a Publishing and Writing graduate student at Emerson College. A bookseller by day, they’re a new voice who’s excited to contribute to the exciting world of weird queer fiction. Lane is an avid reader of cross-genre queer fiction and is consequently an expert on the audience reception to and desires for new stories in this space, especially as they cross into genre-fiction like horror and romance.

In her free time, Lane loves watching the film Moonstruck (1987) and making the same banana bread recipe over and over. They live on the North Shore in Massachusetts with their husband and cat.

AUDIENCE:

The audience of this book is women and queer readers in their late teens to late thirties. The story would appeal to those interested in horror and/or romance spaces, especially queer ones. The book sits in the niche of a queer paranormal story with romance elements. I think this niche is particularly promising because of an emerging queer horror market.

There has been an increase in queer paranormal books published the past two years: among them are Dead Collections (about a trans vampire archivist), Helen House (about a woman meeting her girlfriend’s parents in their haunted house), and Our Wives Under the Sea (about a woman’s wife replaced with a deep sea monster clone). These books have modest BookTok cult followings (with Our Wives Under the Sea becoming trendier than the other two), but I think this phenomenon is just getting started. Audiences are connecting the dots between queerness and horror media (this is especially apparent looking at It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror from Feminist Press this year or Autostraddle’s Horror is So Gay series this spooky season), so I think an audience hungry for queer books with eerie elements is not far behind.

If in doubt of this growing audience, the viability of marketing to queer audiences, or the possibility of success with a mixed-genre book, Pulled Under could instead/also be marketed to fans of period lesbian romances à la The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, which just finished its 91st week on the NYT trade fiction bestseller list.

COMP. TITLES:

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield occupies a similar gothic, sapphic, nautical space to Pulled Under. It’s captured the attention of “BookTube” and “BookTok” and currently ranks 9th in Amazon’s LGBTQ fiction. Pulled Under would keep a lot of the psychological horror from Our Wives while adopting a more commercial style to appeal to a wider audience and adding the drama and camp of a cruise ship setting.
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston was an instant NYT and USA Today bestseller when it came out in 2021. Like Pulled Under, it also features a queer romance and paranormal time slippage. However, One Last Stop stays solidly in the realm of a traditional romcom while Pulled Under has the potential to pull in horror (and maybe even SFF) audiences along with the romance crowd.
Under the Whispering Door by T. J. Klune explores the concept of grief through a fantastic tea house as the stopping place for souls on the way to the afterlife. This book deals with grief/trauma and queer relationships through the paranormal, but Pulled Under has a different, edgier tone with horror elements to replace Klune’s sentimentality and didacticism.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid is an instant classic and NYT bestseller. Pulled Under shares its concept of telling the story of a forbidden, period, sapphic romance while adding an emotionally charged, nail-biting frame.

PROMOTION:

I plan to hire a publicist with my advance to work with the publishing house. I think this is a smart strategy to get more eyes on the book. Also, I will be an active force in promoting Pulled Under. I am in the process of making social media accounts for the book on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and TikTok. My strategy will be to share aesthetic boards, “for fans of” recommendations including Pulled Under, and to create videos detailing the plot as if it happened in real life, then reveal that it was the plot of my book all along (a common “BookTok” video format to promote books or talk about books one loves).

KEY WORD METADATA:

LGBTQ, LGBT, queer fiction, queer, gay, lesbian, lesbian romance, sapphic, romance, horror, psychological horror, paranormal, ghosts, afterlife, grief, gothic, time slip, time travel, cruise ships, nautical, Prohibition, cruise to nowhere

OUTLINE

255 pages, 7 chapters (following the cruise itinerary)

On the first day of the cruise, Shelby tries to ignore her family’s initial bonding attempts in the wake of her brother’s suicide. She meets Bonnie as a bartender while trying to ignore her sister and Leona as a ship passenger while having a mind-boggling experience getting lost in the ship’s sometimes-labyrinthine hallways. Both women seem somewhat otherworldly and out of place. Shelby notices them but doesn’t register them as ghostly.
Shelby can’t sleep and goes to Bonnie to get drunk early in the morning. At one point, her hand passes through Bonnie’s, but Shelby thinks she’s imagining things/isn’t in her right mind. Shelby is scared to go back to the lower decks because of the last time she tried to go back to the room. She tries to get Bonnie to go with her, but Bonnie cannot physically go downstairs. Shelby makes it back with the help of Leona. They talk about Bonnie and Leona’s relationship.
The ship docks in Labadee, Haiti, but Shelby doesn’t get off the ship. She spends the day looking for Bonnie and Leona. There is a different pool bartender who doesn’t know Bonnie. She cannot get access to the passenger names. Shelby spends the day researching and questioning her sanity. She now suspects Bonnie and Leona are ghosts or hallucinations. Her room slowly closes in on her until her sister Brooke returns.
The ship docks in Falmouth, Jamaica. Brooke threatens to tell their parents about Shelby’s incident the night before if she doesn’t join them on shore. Shelby obliges but is anxious the whole time and does not want to talk about her brother Aidan’s death.
Shelby finds Leona and demands to know what is happening. Leona explains that they’ve been on a cruise to nowhere to drink during the Prohibition. She is more aware of the situation than Bonnie, who is more attached to the present. We get the sense that after death, Leona and Bonnie went back to where they were most themselves during life, with each other, but their ghostly ship got tethered to this modern one. Shelby tries to talk herself out of believing Leona but ultimately cannot deny her weird experiences. She presses Leona about death and the afterlife, begging Leona to connect her with her brother. This, however, is not how death works. Leona disappears.
Shelby returns to the pool bar and dances around the situation with Bonnie, who misses Leona. Shelby empathizes and determines she must help them so Bonnie doesn’t face the same grief she herself does. She rationalizes that even if she’s “crazy,” it might put her mind to rest. After a few different hypotheses, Shelby decides to try to untether Bonnie and Leona from the ship by taking personal items from each of them—a compact from Bonnie and a scarf from Leona—and throwing them into the ocean together. Shelby does this in the dark, in a ship asleep, racing against time and odds.
Shelby wakes in a pool chair with people rolling suitcases across the deck. She must disembark and doesn’t know if she was successful or if it was all in her head anyway. As she is getting off the ship, there is another ship leaving the dock. Everyone on deck is waving goodbye, and Shelby thinks she can see Leona and Bonnie together. She doesn’t wave back in case she’s imagining it.

FIRST CHAPTER EXCERPT

Day One

I didn’t want to be there, but the Mai Tais and all seven days were on dad. The lido deck was full of kids from Florida and Ohio sprinting into cannonball splashes or spitting up on their mom’s shoulder, too young to ever remember this cruise. I was at the pool bar.

“Already?” I recognized my sister’s voice over my shoulder. She found me.

“I’m surprised you haven’t joined.”

“Not so fast,” she said. “A pina colada? Room, um—"

“She’s with me,” I told the bartender. She smiled, cold and tight, and nodded once. Her uniform looked vintage but crisp. I caught myself staring. The blender whirred. A baby was crying. The ship’s horn signal blasted. My sister sat on the empty stool next to me, and I waited.

“You missed waving bye to strangers,” she said.

“Pity.”

“So you’re gonna drink our farewell trip away.” Brooke didn’t ask; she was stating a truth we both knew.

“Mmhm.” I paused, then rounded on her. “’Farewell trip’? Come on. You know how you sound?”

“Like I loved our brother very much and am trying to have a good time to remember him by?” Brooke smiled to the bartender as she presented her pina colada. “Thank you so much.”

“This is Aidan’s memory?” I gestured to the pool where a group of teenagers were trying to shove each other into the pool. “Or did we forget about resting in peace?” I should’ve gone somewhere quieter, but I had been more concerned about getting 140-proof down my throat and forgetting everything. The bartender giggled. I looked back at her, surprised. She was pretty. Her hair was pinned in finger waves. And she seemed more here than earlier. Warmer. I smiled. She turned to clean the counter behind her.

“Great,” Brooke mumbled. “Now everyone knows our business.”

“I don’t give a fuck who knows my brother is dead—I’m the one who has to deal with it.”

“Language,” she hissed. “There are kids.”

“Fuck off.” We both sipped our drinks. “Kids say ‘fuck’ all the time.”

“I hate having this conversation. You’re not the only one hurting. You’re being selfish. Mom and Dad are making an effort. I’m making an effort! We’re trying to get through this together. If you could join us…?”

“As much as I would love to play the role of alcoholic middle child—oh wait, youngest now!—in the family Caribbean cruise grief support group, I think I’ll pass.”

“You’re not making it any easier on yourself, Shelby.”