Wednesday, February 16, 2011

A Query Letter

Please click here to return to part one of this post.

April 28, 2008


I am looking for professional representation, and in a world where few people take an avid interest, I wanted you to know that what I have finished will make you sit up and take notice. My 65,000 word contemporary romance novel entitled Twisted Romance has a unique feature that is designed to hold the reader's interest to the very end: a completed novella within a novel.

The novel opens with Wally Wurld sitting at his computer, feeling very confused about how an ongoing relationship with is co-worker Azalea Gold is turning from a simple office friendship to something far deeper and personal. He decided to work out his confusion by writing a story about it. Initially meant to be nothing more than an emotional release, the story soon becomes a running parallel to his relationship with Azalea. Every planned encounter (work, supermarket and the hockey game), and unplanned encounter (scooter ride in the country, supermarket, his family, work and her condo) with Azalea is so skillfully woven into the story by Wally, that it soon becomes impossible to tell whether his life is mirroring the story, or the story is mirroring his life.

I have been writing for only a short period of time. The connection that I have with my novel is very personal. I was experiencing marital problems in the winter of 2005, and one way that I found to work them out was to write this novel.

As per your agency's guidelines that you have listed in the 2008 Guide to Literary Agents, you will find enclosed a SASE, an outline and three sample chapters. The outline and chapters are recyclable. Please note that this is a simultaneous query. I thank you in advance for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

G

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Clueless In Connecticut

Rant on.

Why is it that when teenagers say or do the most outrageous things imaginable, they expect us as parents to accept what they did with no questions asked and act like little sheeples, but yet when we have the audacity to actually disapprove of what they did, they are shocked, shocked I say, to think that somehow they must've did something.....WRONG!

Case in point.

Sometime last year I found out that my son had taken up smoking (the legal kind after getting busted for smoking the illegal kind), and unlike when I got caught smoking at his age (18), it was treated like no big deal by my mother.

Gag.

I say "gag" because not only smoking seriously bother my asthma, but it leaves the entire house stinking to high heaven because my son doesn't have the smarts to air out his room while doing it.

Anyways, earlier this afternoon, I was getting out of my car when I noticed that my family was in my mother's car getting ready to go somewhere. I walked over to the car and gave my wife her chocolate bar and I was about to head inside the house when my son piped up and we had this incredibly scintillating conversational snippet.

Son: "So dad, you don't have a problem with my smoking?"
Me: "Of course I have a problem with your smoking, but apparently my opinion doesn't mean squat in this household."

Yeah, the joys of living in a house where my opinion/wishes don't count  for shit.

Now I would like to think that my son was puzzled over that utterance of mine, but realistically, it went in one ear and out the other. I would like to think that this created a little bit of friction between my wife, my son and my mother, of which my mother has a tendency to side with my son on such stupid ass nonsense. I would also like to think that this put a small damper on his day of potential fun (he was planning on doing some quadding with a friend).

I'm sure that mother would say something stupid like this, "Well, at least he isn't chewing tobacco."

Like smoking is supposed to be BETTER than chewing tobacco?

Yeah, I also found out about the chewing tobacco purely by accident one evening, and apparently I was the last to know about this as well. So happy to be a parent of a dumb ass teenager.

Look, if he wants to smoke, fine. We all gotta die of something in the long run. Me, I'll probably drop dead of diabetes related complications when I'm old and gray, but I can definitely tell you I'm not trying to rush things along. I just wish that he waited to take up cigarette smoking after he moved out of the house, not while he's living here and making my breathing unbearable and my clothes stinking to the nth degree.

About the only good thing about this (yeah, there is a good thing about smoking), is that with the average price of cigarettes in Connecticut hovering around $8.50 per pack, he'll try to make whatever he's got last as long as humanly possible.

Rant over.