The 9th Circle of Hell Is Called "Query"

Fear.

Fear is a fantastic motivator. We fear failing, so we try our absolute best in whatever endeavor we choose to partake in.

In my case, fear of not having anything to post today was my motivator. I went into last weekend with the basic idea of writing a first draft of my query letter. Imagine not to my surprise that I had accomplished absolutely nothing towards my goal of writing a first draft. However, imagine my surprise that here it was the day before my scheduled post and I had absolutely nothing on tap.

Nada. Zip. Zilcho. Empty. Devoid.

Well, you get the picture.

Anyways, yesterday (3/15) I got to thinking about my query letter while I was busy trying to close my payroll. Having the law laid down, not just to me, but to all of us in a staff meeting last week (fyi: i work for the govt. my govt is $3 billion in the red. need I say more?) about doing everything under the sun to show that we are needed, all I had to work with for writing my query was my brain. By the time lunch rolled around, I did enough brainstorming to overwhelm any professional motivator, so I was determined to do something with all that information.

In less then ten minutes, I had taken pen to paper and wrote out 101 words for my query. Thus, my query now looks like this:

The game of public sex is hard enough to play when you got the family loan shark looking for a piece of your action, but when your internal twin wants a piece of the action as well, its enough to question your own sanity.

Flat broke and with no job, Jeannie was terrified of winding up like one of her uncle's deadbeat customers. Oh sure, she was able to get her uncle to agree to a five day extension to get current with her juice payments, thanks to her ability to turn a word on its ear, but a lot of good that did her. Still, somebody up there must've felt something for her, because no sooner than she hung up her phone, a young man began chatting her up. Next thing she knew, she was holding a card that was her potential salvation.

Not bad for someone who normally doesn't write well under pressure (or self imposed deadlines for that matter). I still got about another 50 words or so to play with (rule of thumb is about 150 words for a synopsis) plus a little extra because I have absolutely zippo for a writer's bio, and with those 50 plus words I still have to work in Jeannie's symbiont Aissa, her loser boyfriend Geoff and the fact that Jeannie and Aissa wound out on spiritual journey of sorts as well.

Trust me, the final version will be hell of lot more polished than this, but for now, I am damn proud of the fact that I was actually able to write this much of a query letter to begin with. Hopefully by next Wednesday, I will have a final version to share with everyone.

And to bring back an oldy but a goody feature, I have a two part question for you!

"Rule of thumb states that the request for representation, plus the title and other assorted things like word count, genre, etc, should go at the very beginning of the query, just before the hook and the synopsis. I was thinking of either splitting it up, with half (say, the request and title) at the beginning and the other half after the synopsis, or putting it all after the synopsis. Or should I scratch that idea and do it like everyone else?"

Or if that question is a no-brainer, how about this?

"What genre would you throw Line 21 under? To refresh, it contains the following themes: graphic sex (adult movies), fantasy (a symbiont along the lines of DS9 with the ability to swap control of the body with the host, and vice versa), and a mix bit of bitter romance (boyfriend who has ulterior motives) and platonic love (childlike bodyguard who develops a crush on Jeannie)."