09 September 2006
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Update:Acting on reader feedback some minor modifications have been made to the letter to make it even worser and some thoughts about the unpublishability of this plot as well as a bonus sonnet to the slushpile: Ozyfandias
So I've been reading the SR Crapometer entries at Miss Snark's blog and decided that, while there are many pathetic query letters, there looks to be something missing. So, in the spirit of the Bulwer-Lytton award (dishonorable mention in 2002 - Dark & Stormy Night Category), I'm going to present what I hope will be the ultimate bad query letter, the slow motion train wreck of a query letter so bad that it causes the agent who receives it to keep on reading because you wonder what else is going to be wrong. Feel free to add your own suggestions or even alternatives in the commentsdear ozysnarkias
hope you don't mind the casual greeting but i'm a casual guy and if you're gonna be my agent you gotta handle it
NEway the suits at haprercolings told em that you were keen on stuff like mine which is a african american alternate history litery fiction novel set in the past so i'm sending it to you. i didn't bother with the sase because i just know your gonna dig it and get me rich. i'm 15 and i showed this to my mom, my pastor and my teacher and they all said it needs to be published because it shows the problems of life in the projects and how it simialr iot is to the victorian poets like shelly and byron. you know todays rap artists are just as misunderstood and so in this book i'm showing how these poets were the rappers of the 18th century. my teacher got in trouble for teaching us about these poets so its like how the radio won't play the rap songs when they got swearing in them.
the story is called ozymandyRAP and its about a kid from a bad neighborhood in dc who travels back in time to meet shelly and byron on a trip round greece and turkey. his name is ozzie and he's got some serious issues in the hood. so he goes to school one day packing a glock 45 and a hundred rounds of ammo because he wants to do another columbine and blow away all the kids that beat up on him and treat him like shit. the glock is a really cool gun the seals use it and blow away the ragheads in iraq and afghanaistan like you wouln't believe but when he gets to school he has to go through the metal detector. his homey was supposed to fix it so that it didn't buzz but by mistake he turned it into a time machine so when ozzie goes through it he's zapped back in time and space to turkey just in time to rescue percy and mary shelly and lord byron from a gang of robbers when they are looking at the statue of ozymandias. it was a good thing he had all the ammo because there are like 30 robbers and then they got to protect the statue from this nasty french aristo who wants to take it back to paris so you know the ozy thing is like the key to why ozzie ends up where he does.
oh yeah you probably want to know how long it is, because all the chicks ask that, and its kind of variable. right now its 72641 words but i got to change ti a bit because i realized that ozzie has to screw mary shelly and right now she's all lahdida british so i got to make her a bit less stuck up but the hero always gets laid when he rescues a babe so i got to fix that. do you reckon i need tobe all hard core on the sex or just kind of smoochy? and is it true that chicks then all wore whalebone corsests all the time and how do you get one off?
when you've found me a publisher you better contact me. mom keeps on getting evicted and i think we're going back to philly so you better try looking at my myspace.com account (ozzysplace) because i always check that from the library and i can easily come to see you in new york and sign all the contract stuff
my name is oswald harvey and like i say i'm 15 but the ozzie in the book isn't me because he's 16 and doesn't have a girlfriend and anyway i'm white and i don't have a glock and we used to live in alexandria not dc
and don't forget to sell it to hollywood. get hugh grant to play percy shelley and emma watson from harry potter would be mary. i'm kind of stuck for who plays ozzie because ozzie's really very spiritual so its got to be a younger spiritual keanu reeves only african american and he's like really thin and he has glasses and he doesn't have a girlfriend which is why he takes the glock to school like I said earlier
bye
oswald
ps i attached the current version as a rar file because rar is much better at compressing text than zip so its only 150k not 220 but i renamed it as zip to confuse anyone who wants to steal it and i always got the latest version up at myspace
pss can you get me a gmail account?
