I sat down to work on my query letter, today.

It’s a relaxing pass time that guarantees I will never run short of stomach acid. Well, I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it would be so much easier just to send all the nice publishing people a nice Husker-themed gift box. (Here’s an extravagant box of scarlet and cream llamas. Now, publish my book.) On the other hand, it does focus my thinking, and it has a nice tendency to remind me that someday… someday, I’m actually going to need a query letter again.

So I grabbed my steno-pad and pen, sat down to write, and….

Realized exactly how political a pair of pants can be.

Sheee-it.

Maybe my novel was political all along, and I just never noticed. Maybe it wasn’t, and then the world changed around it. I don’t know. I don’t particularly want to write message-oriented anything. I want to write nice, escapist fiction, with rockets and aliens. Okay, and some not-so-nice escapist fiction with serial killers and psychopaths. But no sermons. No themes. No meanings.

Stories that are just stories.

I thought I had a cigar that was just a cigar, dammit.

The first line of my query letter (version 32.6 B) is: Thousands of immigrants and refugees…

It’s a really good line. It’s a big part of the story. And there we are. Five yards of fabric to make one pair of pants.

Anybody have any idea how to package a llama?