What's Snooty, Goes Bump in the Night and Rhymes with Orange?
I am Maria's query-writing obsession.
How I've done this to myself, I have no idea. I'm marketing TWO books. A comedy thriller and the memoir. (For the record, I hate the word "memoir." It sounds so snooty patooty. My mem-waaaah. Yech.) I promise you that my mem-waaah is not only sensational enough to stop your granny in her tracks as she pushes a cart through Target, it's crazy enough to set fandom aflame. I've shared it with people over the years only on a need-to-know basis, and even then, 1) only once they knew me well enough to realize I'm a reliable narrator and 2) I also knew they were trustworthy (although I occasionally made mistakes).
It's that kind of story.
This could make finding an agent tricky -- as if that weren't challenging enough. While I've always known that someday this story would make its way into the world, I've never been sure exactly how. It would have to be carried by someone who believed in it as much as they believed in me. And they'd really kind of have to know me, I think. But maybe not.
My previous agent was wonderful, but she was more interested in my nutty childhood religious upbringing. If you've read, "Dogma, Darth Vader and My Sexual Awakening," then you've got the gist of how that went. I've had great fun telling those stories over the years, about my family starting Greek Orthodox and then converting to Judaism, Mormonism and much more. But it's not the story I want to tell because it stops at me becoming "born again" at age 16 -- which is, you know, hella depressing. And if it continued to The Story I Really Want to Tell, it would be way too long. Besides, the nutty religiousness is just part of the much bigger story. It's only one type of dust layered in the meteor.
And, man, does that meteor leave a motherfucking crater.
As shad_0 read the original, much shorter version of The Story, he sat on the living couch as I waited in the bedroom reading. When he reached that ending -- that mind-blowing, knuckle-punch-to-the-soul ending -- I heard him gasp. That one sharp intake of air pierced my gut. It reminded me of miracles and madness and how I have to tell what happened, as it happened, whatever that may mean.
But first that means finding an agent.
That will be a special person indeed.