Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Dear Agent,

I know you get lots of queries but I'm betting none can beat mine and that you will represent me as soon as you can because my friend Mr. F.A Mousauthor said you would.

Have you ever wondered what happened to your pet goldfish once it was flushed down the toilet? Well now you're about to find out. Flappy, the imaginatively named goldfish, appears to be dead and so its owner's mom throws it into the toilet and flushes it away. Trouble is, Flappy isn't dead and when he wakes up, he finds himself in Sewer Land.

Flappy meets up with the Sewer equivalent of the Mafia (The Bogfather) when he gets hit by The Bogfather's rat driven rollerskate. This leads to Flappy becoming a target for The Bogfather's enemies even though he hasn't done anything at all yet.

Flappy has to face evil rats, slimy snails, floating things that he'd really rather not know about and other assorted bits and pieces in his quest to make his way home.

The Light at the End of The Tunnel will be a 70,000 word YA novel that contains much hilarity, examination of family values and how to avoid bullies. This isn't finished yet but I know that you'll love the concept so much that you won't be able to help yourself, you'll take me on as a client immediately!

Yours Impatiently,
Mrs. Goldfish.

JL, I didn't realise you had a line about goldfish in that post! Please don't sue me for plagiarism, please?!

On another note, 'stupid as a sack of gerbils' is quite possibly the best line ever. It made me snort coffee through my nose.

dementedtinkerbell:
"Have you ever wondered what happened to your pet goldfish once it was flushed down the toilet? Well now you're about to find out. Flappy, the imaginatively named goldfish, appears to be dead and so its owner's mom throws it into the toilet and flushes it away. Trouble is, Flappy isn't dead and when he wakes up, he finds himself in Sewer Land."


Funny thing is I did once write a demented short story for my son about a little boy who liked to flush everything down the toilet. One day he flushed his pet fish, and then it fed off everything else that he was flushing. It grew and grew. The fish missed the little boy so much that it swam its way back up the toilet. When it reached the top it caught the boy, and flushed him down the toilet with him, so that they could be together forever. Unhappily ever after.
My son stopped flushing random stuff down the toilet afterwards, and remembered to feed his fish every morning. Does that make me a bad mom? My mother-in-law thought so.

I don't think you're a bad mom. I think that you're an awesome mom who knows how to use the written word in such a way that kids will either learn their lesson, live in fear of what could happen or both. This is a skill every mom should have!

Man, this is the BEST thread to read when you are having an off day. You guys did a great job and made me laugh.

Thanks ;-)

"Young New Adult Literary Romantic Steampunk Urban Fantasy Thrillers"

BWAH HA HA HA!!!!

So, I got bored again and decided to do this some more. I would post my own query, but it's apparently been laughed at enough by agents.

Deer Ajent:

My therapist told me it wood be good for me to try to publish my memoir. Other ajents have turned me down, butt I'm sure your way smarter then them. It's almost done, and about 85 pages so far, single spaste.

When I was a kid, my mom said that I'd never amount to nothing, that Joe Cocker was my sperm donor butt not stupid enough to claim me. I moved out when I was only twenty-seven since I couldn't take living with her and doing chores like some slave. I joined the circus as a tent erecter, a widely respected profeshun in case you didn't know since us circus people can be secretive.

On the road with the circus for almost three whole months, I lerned alot about live. I also reelized I am attracted to my mom and miss her alot. I think other maskulin men can learn from my story and except there own desires for their moms. Most of what I put in my book is true, so it should be in the self help part of the bookstore, I think.

I borrowed this email from the libary. I'll check back every couple weeks to see if you ansered yet. I'm back home with my mom, and she doesn't let me out much.

Thanks,

I. D. Jit

LMAO! No that is a good one Christi!!!

~JD

Ahaha, reading over all of these right now!

I'm bored now too and so I'll try my hand at this fake ridiculous query thing...

Dear Agent/Snookums/Pooh Bear/Baby Boo,

Have you ever found true love? Do you know really what true love feels like? What if this true love was with something not even real, yet you still loved it with all of your heart and soul and mind? Agent, have you ever experienced this before?

Because Linda Cisne has. Linda Cisne has fallen in love with...........him. The man of her dreams. Linda is an average girl who lives in an average world in an ordinary town called Mountain Valley with ordinary parents named Frederick, who's a businessman and Yolanda who works at a bank and friends who's names are Tiffany, who's a cheerleader with a boyfriend named Robbie who's cheating on her with this other cheerleader named Pamela, Jessica who's on the dance team and secretly bulimic and Bertha, who's on the Mathleetes team and who's parents Joseph and Mary are now currently getting a divorce. Linda Cisne falls in love with him......

And.
his.
name.
is.
Adonis. But really, his name is Adonis and he falls in love with Linda because he believes she is his soulmate. And Adonis has blonde hair and green eyes and olive colored skin and he's really from the year 1697 and came forward in time through a time machine that's inside a Shell station a few blocks away to Linda's high school and becomes the most popular guy there and makes everyone jealous.

But Adonis has a secret that threatens to tear him and Linda apart. This is the kind of secret that threatens to make the universe explode and then realign all in one day. Adonis is a mermaid. How will Linda deal? Because Linda hates water because her dog Fluffy drowned when she was eleven years old and ever since, she has become hydrophobic.

My novel, GOLDEN DUSK MOONLIGHT, a passionate tale of love, danger and the perilous waters of high school and life, is complete at 500,000 words. I have attatched the entire manuscript for your delightful perusal.

@Christi - ROFL! I love your query! It's horrrible!
@Bronwyn- I love your's too! Especially the part where he is a mermaid!

Here is mine!

To my future agent,

I worked ten long years to finally finish my manooscript! I skipped work and even mised my 56th birthday to finish. Now I give you the exclusive oppertunity to take a look at my writing. By the way my name is Buttkiss and I am a janitor at a high end spa.

Loon is a teenage boy that hates his life. Loon is in highschool. Loon has grey eyes and blond hair but sdrangely he is African. That is why Loon is bullied. Actually when I was writing Loon I decided that he has two heads as well. Loon meets Fredrika and decides to start a rock band. No body like's Loon's band until he goes into hypnosis and starts to hypnotize his audience's to love him.

Soon though, Loon starts to grow drugs and is caught by the police. Loon looses his freedom and goes to jail while Fredricka dies after being pregnant with Loon's alien twins who are both bald and uber-hairy. So Loon escaped from jail only to jump off a building.

I think that my one million word book called "Loon the goon" will inspire young adults all over the world to achieve freedom just like Loon. He made a choice and achieved his goal while he was free. I dson't have a computer so I wait here for your e-mail on a laptop I borrowed from a dead old lady. Don't worry I won't get hungry because her purse has ton's of snicker's bars in it. I think you should reply in minutes. I hope. Please. Ok I guess that is all. Bye. Hugs.

Buttkiss
I can't give you my address but I am in the subway for now.

I'm bored, so I'm writing another terrible query!

Attention Sir or Madam,

Today in this note, I wish to delightfully inform you of my Young Adult Middle Grade Crime Thriller Horror Sci-Fi Fantasy Fiction Novel. It is entitled REVENGE OF THE HEART and it is now currently 800,000 words long (but I am still not finished yet, alas) or over 1,100 pages on Microsoft Word in 12 point bold Comic Sans font single spaced. I wrote this book for all of the youth in the world because I believe it examines hard and terrible problems of our youth and their society today.

Have you ever had your life destroyed? Have you ever experienced pain? Have you ever had your home invaded by a guerrilla army of sinister leprechauns? Well, Geneva Caracas Santiago Alsace-Lorraine has. Geneva Caracas Santiago Alsace-Lorraine, or Gin-Gin for short, is a youth of sixteen years who lives in an average home and has an average life, as I'm sure you do, madam or sir. Gin-Gin is average too except she has violet orbs for eyes that shimmer in the sunlight and golden blonde silky hair with turquoise streeks through it that change color when the moon comes out at night. Her skin is also very beige and sparkly too. She is very beautiful but everyone else thinks she's really average. She's so pretty she doesnt even have to wear makeup. Well one day, while Gin-Gin is doing her math homework, leprechauns invade her house and kidnap her and make her their slave in their sinister extraterrestrial spaceship. While on the spaceship she meets a couple of vampire/weerwolve hybrids named Rhodesia Daar es Salam Bangkok Jakarta and Santo Domingo Tegucigalpa Montreal Edinburgh, also known for short as Rhoddy and S.D. Well since Gin-Gin is so beautiful and wonderful S.D. falls in love with her and Rhoddy becomes jealous and attempts to kill them both but she fails and she herself is killed when the leprechans figure out that all of them want to escape from the sapace ship. Ok so then S.D. and Gin-Gin move to an island together and have kids.

I wrote this story for the youth of today beacuse I feel that Gin-Gin is a relatable character to many youth in our world today because she is just an average girl in a conflict. Thank you for your time, sir or madam.

"Have you ever had your home invaded by a guerrilla army of sinister leprechauns? "

This is totally my new idea that I'm stealing from you for my next book.

All righty, I got bored, thought I would give this a shot. I'm not near as creative as some of you - but here goes:

To whoever:
I’m writing to introduce the new best seller: WRONG WITH THE BEND. I’ll get the word count and genre later, cuz first I wanted to tell you about my stellar writing skills.

I graduated from high school, top of my class by the way, and didn’t really know what I wanted to do with myself. Mom and dad pushed me to go college, so I did, and I found a niche in creative writing. I didn’t major in creative writing, though. I was a gamer and my degree was in technology. I found out I was good at putting the goods down on paper when I wrote and expose on my college’s spyware information technology system that blew the lid off a theft and pornography ring. I blew up an entire department with that, I’m telling ya’.

Enough about me, let’s talk about my best seller, WRONG WITH THE BEND. It’s about Harlet Mohara and a dude named Bret Nutler. It’s set during the civil war area in Louisiana. Harlet lives on a plantation named Cara and she’s pretty much likes every man she meets. She gets married a bunch of times, but never to the man she really wants: Bret. Bret is a rogue and a tough one the catch. Lots of stuff happens, people die, things burn down, Harlet makes a stagecoach out of straw from her field. And, because vampires, time travel, and suspense seem to be doing well in the market right now, I’ve added some of that too.

I know you think this story may sound a little like Gone with the Wind, but it’s not. It’s totally different and waaay better. No only that, it’s twice as long, complete at 800K. So, I guess you could call it a romance, but it doesn’t have a happy ending. I hope that’s not a problem because I refuse to change it. It’s jammed packed with information that the reader will be sucked right into. Page-turning-quality is my middle name (really, it is) so you can only imagine how good this book is and how much money it will make you.

I’ve only queried you because I know you are the best and you will immediately pick up this project. I’ve attached the complete manuscript and to further help you, I mailed you a hard copy. So, don’t freak out when you get a 75 pound box delivered to your door tomorrow.

Later Tater –
The one, the only, Dou Noisuck

Dear Mr/Ms Agent Man/Woman,

I understand if you don't have time to read this. Just tuck it away for later and call me when you can. I totally understand.

But when you have time, I wanted to tell you that I wrote a story. It's about a girl who meets a cute guy and they kiss and stuff. Nothing too gross, though, because I wanted to write something that everyone would like. One of the characters says "crap" once, but I could change it to "poopy" or take the whole sentence out if you think that's best. The book is called Happy Days and it's about 120 pages, but I could add more if you want, since long books seem to be popular. Probably something about the mom, because I think she's the kind of mom we all wish we had and I liked writing about her.

Anyway, that's about it. I'm sorry if I took too much of your time. It's a great book and I wanted you to know that. Please give me a call whenever you can. I'm home most of the time, so it's no problem for me to wait for you. My number is in the phone book.

Love and hugs,

Sally Smith

Erica75, LOVE IT! That's what runs through my head every time I think about sending out queries.

Everyone else, I've sat here laughing and successfully procrastinating for a full 20 minutes. Thanks! I think you are all brilliant and surprised you aren't published yet. You're really holding out on us aren't you?