Mourning Dove: Agent Query for MOURNING DOVE, a Family-Saga Genre, Eco-Fiction Novel

Dear <FirstNameOfAgent>,

I am an established writer. Ballantine Books published a short novel I wrote and it sold 25,000 copies. George R. R. Martin eulogized our departed mutual agent, Kirby McCauley, as "the best in the business." I loved working with Kirby. My new novel, MOURNING DOVE, an eco-fiction genre hybrid complete at 81,000 words, is about a post-apocalypse family of climate scientists, engineers, dreamers, and sharpshooters that travels from their climate-extinction-prevention station in Alaska to Antarctica to join distant family rebuilding civilization. In the journey, the family sees how tragic and heart-rending a climate apocalypse can be. I am hopeful MOURNING DOVE and I fit your list because you represent Jane Doe, who writes about climate change, and John Smith, who writes strong character novels involving family relationships.

"Dammit Jen! You didn't have to die to get me to grow up." Ttuuee, MOURNING DOVE's main character, knows he's lying. Witnessing his sister's murder triggers his coming of age as a diamond, hard and brilliant, with sparkling but brutal humor. Leading the family, his experiences include drawing into his arms the painted body of his adopted witch, as she sobs regretting she was born truly evil. Sleeping at the bedside of his deathly ill father, he awakens with joy hearing his Dad use a fake-delirium joke to announce his recovery; Ttuuee no longer will be listening for Dad's last breath. Ttuuee wipes ocean-mist from his face as he watches the pirates who attacked flee in their damaged ship. He forces an evil queen (a cousin) to remove handcuffs from his father's wrists. He savors a grateful hug of thanks from his Rembrandt girl for his suggesting and then digging a grave to bury the gray-bearded dog she grew up with and loved. A few years later, he places a billion-dollar engagement ring onto the Rembrandt girl's finger.

Bruce Holsinger's DISPLACEMENTS is comparable to MOURNING DOVE, though not as uplifting, as it’s the saga of a family upended by climate change, showing how parents and children suffer because of it. Identifying with characters is at the heart of MOURNING DOVE. Paolo Bacigalupi is a master at it, and I learned from him by reading WATER KNIFE, a novel of heroes and anti-heroes who struggle through terrible climate-caused drought. I was inspired to write MOURNING DOVE by climate scientist Dr. James E. Hansen's Congressional testimony and his book STORMS OF MY GRANDCHILDREN, which tells why the climate will change and how it will affect the lives or deaths of his grandchildren.

My published novella, "Oceans Away" was nearly fifty percent of STELLAR SHORT NOVELS, edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey. I was a ghostwriter for a U.S. Senator. My op-eds, under her name, appeared in major newspapers. Articles under my name are in national journals, including The Nature Conservancy Magazine and the American Psychological Association Monitor. I studied writing with my master's thesis creative writing professor, novelist J.R. Salamanca. I participated for years in the "Vicious Circle" workshop led by Amazing and Fantastic editor Ted White and Bram Stoker Award winner Tom Monteleone. I am dedicated to marketing MOURNING DOVE. I already built an author website and a climate novel blog recognized by climate activists and scientists. I connected with more than 66,000 potential readers on social media, some famous. I performed in six podcasts and spoke to a high school. All of it, so far, is to help acquire an agent and a publisher for MOURNING DOVE. I plan to do far more. I will not self-publish.

This is a multiple submission. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Richard Shawn Weinstein, SFWA member