QUERY: The Odd I See

Dear Agent,

I am writing to you because I read your interview on XYZ, your submission guidelines, and (novel you represented). Please consider representing my novel The Odd I See, a 71,000-word work of slipstream fiction.

Following a falling out with her favorite hallucination, a half-assed stay in the loony bin, and entry into the “real world” by way of graduation from college, Fifi wants to know what the meaning of life is… and she wants to know immediately.

Fifi, The Odd I See’s narrator, is twenty-two, working an underachiever’s dream job, and struggling to reconcile her worldview with modern middle-class American living. Something about the combination of what her overbearing mother, pothead friends, and (likely imaginary) vampire lover are telling her isn’t quite jiving with what she thought the world would be like. Not entirely sure she wants to continue doing the whole “existence-thing,” she gives herself a month to reason her way through it piece-by-piece. Meanwhile, Byron (the soulmate Fifi discovers in the midst of an adventure in pretending to be a prostitute) tries to keep her from stumbling over the pitfalls of a society that claims mental illness explains her dysphoria… and out of the clutches of a vampire only she can see.

An excerpt of this novel was published in the spring 2009 edition of the Newport Review literary magazine. A separate excerpt was published in the 2006 edition of Loyola University Chicago’s annual literary journal, Cadence. I was editor-in-chief of Cadence in 2009 and, from 2006 to 2008, I was editor-in-chief of Loyola University Chicago’s quarterly literary arts magazine, Diminuendo. I very much appreciate your time and consideration in reading this letter. I have pasted the first chapter below and would be delighted to send you the rest. I can be reached by phone at xxx xxx xxxx, by e-mail at bre@jamstage.net, or by postal mail at 123 XYZ st.

Best regards
Bre Kidman