The advantage of a reputation like mine is you can give this sort of news and people expect it of you. But you're missing both my intent and Kleinmann's intent.
As Overkill, you came to QLH in April of 2008. By the end of the month, you had a pretty decent query. Premise came through, plot came through, had some voice. In other words, it met all the technical requirements needed for a successful query.
Now after querying a bit, you came back in December wondering why you got rejected. I don't know how many agents you queried, but your new query is substantially the same as your old one. Now if (and this is an if) Kleinmann is referring to your query, his issue isn't really with the opening, it's with the fact that after getting rejected with a perfectly decent query, all you're doing is trying to tweak the query.
I can tell a fair amount about your book from your query. You're opening isn't killing you with every agent. I can think of some books (Clive Cussler's ICEBERG springs to mind) that have worse openings than yours.
But at a certain point, something isn't working. Instead of doing some major overhauling, you're trying to take a sinking ship and hope it doesn't happen. As I told you in a PM, I'd query the hell out of this and see what you get.
Then you need to decide. Is this a trunk novel? Could well be. You won't be the first author with one and definitely won't be the last. Or take the whole book back into the shop, and rework it. You can pretty much guarantee that if a query is getting rejected (where the query isn't crap and yours isn't), the opening needs some serious work. After all, that's a central point of a query.
What Kleinmann is saying, and I agree with him, is for people to stop obsessing about their queries. Although I love playing around with queries, at a certain point you need to understand that time invested in them is not time well spent. You're at that point. I haven't seen a substantial change in your queries since the end of April. And my guess is you could play around with this from now to the end of the century, and as your book presently stands, it's not going to change.
Maybe you do need to change your opening. Maybe you need to change other things in your book. But more importantly, you've got a decent query and need to use it. Hopefully you won't need to write another query. Or maybe you'll need to rework your book.
Your problem is part of a bigger trend that Kleinmann was referring to obliquely. Writers are spending too much time working on producing the perfect query. We've got a couple people in QLH who are also obsessing about their queries.
I'm thinking we should have a "Get out of QLH" pass. People need to accept when they've gotten a reasonable query and try it with 50 agents or so (personally I'd go with more, myself). Then maybe they need to come back to QLH and rewrite the crap out of their query. The new query should be entirely different.
And one thing to remember in this industry: One person's opinion is exactly that -- one person's opinion. Unless it makes sense to you, wait until there is agreement.
Best of luck,
Jim Clark-Dawe
