queries – The Red Pen of Doom

Dear Agent Sir or Madam,

This is a follow-up to my querying letter about a million-word fictional novel trilogy. You can read that letter anywhere on the planet by firing up AOL and clicking on this World Wide Web thingy here: The Mother of All Query Letters.

Maybe you haven’t gotten to reading it yet, seeing how you’re busy selling my trilogy to Warner Brothers for one million dollars (I figure a dollar a word is fair). My niece Daisy has a library card and her nose in all kinds of books, not just Twilight, and when I told her about my fictional novel, she said I need to send every agent and editor in Manhattan a synopsis.

Now, “synopsis” sounded Latin and possibly dirty to me, so I asked whether that word involved sins, and Daisy said, “That’s a good way to look at it. List all the sins you commit in that book of yours.”

So here’s my list of the sinful things happening in each book of the trilogy, with each novel coming in at 333,333 and 1/3rd words apiece.

Book 1: I KNOW WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED, DARTH SAREK OF VULCAN

A grave-digger falls into a grave and hits his skull on a fat hunk of rock, then wakes up on an alien planet to find he’s six inches taller and half-ninja, half-Jedi, half-Vulcan.

First off, he’s bound for alien slavery on a pirate ship, and I believe slavery to be a sin, despite what Uncle Will says about the War of Northern Aggression.

Second, he kills bushels of aliens, and killing is a sin, though he does it to win his freedom from slavery, so I figure those sins cancel each other out.

Third, our hero does have relations outside of marriage with an alien princess or three, plus an android on a planet run by robots and an evil super-magneto computer made by Bill Gates himself after he bought up an entire Best Buy and started soldering stuff together.

Book 2: LOST IN SPACE AND TIME WITH A GREEN LASER SWORD AND A PURPLE ALIEN PRINCESS

The robot king and his super computer can plug you in, like that Matrix or that Tron video game they had at the 7-Eleven on third street until some pansy replaced it with Ms. Pac Man.

The robot king makes our hero think he’s waking up in that grave, and that nothing in the first book really happened, kinda like that season of Dallas before J.R. got shot and such, and let me tell you, I’d shoot that man myself with my grandpa’s Colt and proudly do whatever time a judge handed down with the bang of his mighty gavel.

Back to the story. After learning kung fu and how to bend more spoons than Yuri Geller, the hero busts out of the fake holodeck world of the robots and uses his laser sword to cut Bill Gates and his super-magneto computer clean in half. Murder is a sin, but he says his prayers and gets forgiveness from his maker while the aliens rejoice in their freedom and put him in charge of their army of spaceships and purple alien princesses.

Book 3: MASTER OF OUTER SPACE,INNER PEACE AND DESTROYER OF SUNS

There’s peace in the galaxy with the hero running things, so he studies his Jedi and his Vulcan to learn the secrets of immortality, raises generation after generation of his young ones with the purple alien princess who’s his queen, and teaches the purple alien army how to be kung fu ninjas — but a new threat arises.

See, suns are alive. That’s right — they’re born, they live, they evolve and they die, with new baby suns arising from the dusts of their supernova. And they see themselves as gods, seeing how they create all the elements in the universe and provide all the heat and light and such. They’re mad as tarnation and they’re not gonna take it one second longer.

I see this third book as a tale of redemption, seeing how the hero starts out committing all kinds of sins in books one and two. Now he’s married and living right, unlike my second cousin Nellie, who’s on her fourth divorce and odds are she’ll hit number seven before we wheel her into the Willapa Valley Nursing Home.

Back to this book: Our hero flies right up to the face of the biggest, maddest, meanest sun and finds a way to communicate, but the solar gods are hell-bent on war and destruction, and they start frying alien planets like eggs on a hot grill with a fine sheet of lard already melted on top.

As a last act of sacrifice at the age of 984, the hero mind-melds with the suns and hypnotizes them into calmness by bringing them into his memories and dreams, which lands himself into a coma for a spell until I figure out the next trilogy of 1 million words, which I figure has to involve the only thing bigger, badder and more amazing than killer suns: black holes with father issues not even Dr. Phil can solve.

So, that’s a full-on synopsis of the first trilogy, with book one attached as an encrypted WordStar document and also available on 5.25″ floppies. Though like I said in that querying letter, I’m running out of those floppies, so make it snappy.

Sincerely,

Sensei George Lucas King

P.S. This is my new pen name, guaranteeing my trilogy sits smack dab next to all those books by Stephen King while appealing to fans of Star Wars and all those kung fu movies, which I figure covers just about every man still breathing, then you got the alien princess love story thing for the women. To write me checks, you’ll need my full legal name, though I’d prefer cash on account of some trouble with the IRS that started in 1997.

Dear Agent Sir or Madam,

I am writing to you, or your agency, to acquire literary representation in Manhattan, Hollywood, London and wherever else such deals are made to publish books and turn them into movies.

Why? Because my 333,333 1/3rd-word fictional novel (Book One of a 1 million-word trilogy) is guaranteed to be bigger than Star Wars crossed with Fifty Shades of Gray with Oprah and Brad Pitt on top, like two cherries on a chocolate sundae instead of the single little cherry they give you at Dairy Queen over on 15th Avenue because those cherries, let me tell you, they taste like rubber mixed with corn syrup.

Now, I know the book world establishment is liable to pigeonhole books, and a person could say I KNOW WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED, DARTH SAREK OF VULCAN is a mystery about an ordinary gravedigger who’s secretly a half-ninja, half-Vulcan, half Jedi and only finds this out on account of him falling into a freshly dug grave on a Saturday night and waking up in a strange world where he’s six inches taller, has pointed ears and a sweet green laser sword.

And I suppose you could say it’s a romantic comedy set in a sci-fi action universe, since this hero gets more action than James Bond himself judging one of them Miss Universe contests, but that would be selling this story short. Who doesn’t want to see ninja Jedi adventuring through space and time with laser swords and starship battles? Also, instead of green alien women, I’ve got purple and orange ones.

It’s got fighting, cussing, dark deeds, giant space battles with starships way out in outer space and new life forms with their own languages and strange ways of fighting, cussing and doing dark deeds.

As for reviews and such, all five of my cousins, my momma and even Grandma Wilma, who hasn’t read a book since she stopped reading Archie’s Digest back in 1963, well, they all say this story sounds like a sure-fire winner, the kind they’d pay full price to see at the drive-in, long as the weather held up.

The full fictional novel is attached as an encrypted WordStar document. It’s also available on 5.25″ floppy disks, and I’m running out of those, so act now. I’ll give the winning agent the password to read it. Also, I’m fixing to finish the screenplay for the first two books before Christmas, so the best agent should also sell a lot of of movies.

Some agents want a synopsis, but reading the story is a lot better than reading about the story, especially the parts after the hero falls into that grave and wakes up.

My cousin has one of those internet phones and says agents want to know about my publishing credits. So listen: I’ve been a professional gravedigger for 23 years and have published 983 stories all over that world wide web on http://www.blogger.com, keeping my site set to private because I don’t want people stealing my ideas. See? That’s how VALUABLE they are.

The only question is this: are you gonna hop on this money train or are you gonna let it pass on by?

Sincerely,

Stefan Kingsley

P.S. This here is my pen name, guaranteeing my trilogy sits smack dab next to all those books by Stephen King, who I figure from looking at his photos is older than Roy Rogers’ uncle by now and fixing to retire or die, whichever comes first. To write me checks, you’ll need my full legal name, though I’d prefer cash on account of some trouble with the IRS that started in 1997.