I’ll Be Writing More in a Week or Two: A Query Letter Gone Wrong

By Mike Karpa

Dear Saoirse,

I hope you’ll remember me. I’m writing you to pitch my new book, which I think would be a great match for your agency. We met at last year’s San Francisco Writers Conference when you were on the pitch-o-rama panel and heard my thirty-second spiel and told me to come up to you afterwards for your card. I confess, that was very exciting. I mean, I was the only one you asked, besides that woman who used to be the editor at Tiger Beat and had that great tag line: “When I was twenty-four, every girl in America wanted to be me.”

Oh, I almost forgot, we spoke again at this year’s conference, outside the women’s restroom, when everyone was breaking for dinner. This is the same book I told you about then. I hope that was OK. You were kind of making a face. I think. I’m not good at reading faces, but you had your lanyard on and you’d said earlier it was OK to talk to you when you had your lanyard on, so I guess it was OK.

Anyway, anyway (I repeated that to give you an idea of my writing style), DENSE FOG is a tightly plotted 238,000-word novel set in India in the Sixties. It’s sort of a cross-genre, ensemble-cast thing that’s hard to describe but if I had to I’d say it was a gay romance about nuclear proliferation.

It’s kind of made the rounds already, but has been getting a lot of positive attention. I sent it to Jonathan Franzen’s agent, and she didn’t read it, but she gave it to someone at Writers House who wrote lots of nice things about it, though he said no. I guess technically you could say it’s been rejected by someone I didn’t even send it to, but he said I was sure to get an agent, so this could be your chance to prove him right!

I realize I am probably not on your list of hot prospects. I remember you said that when you look at a book your first thought is “can I sell 10,000 hardbacks of this at 28 bucks a pop,” which kind of sucked the hope out of me, since people keep saying I’m “quirky.” So I’m not expecting miracles, especially given that I’m past sixty and Joyce Huang of Folio, who I met at Bread Loaf (#namedropping!), said I was too old and that was, god, fifteen years ago. But I’ve also heard most agents only represent an author for one book, so … selling point? Like Stones for Ibarra? Buy this book, he’s so old!

I have a track record. Evergreen magazine told me I was almost a finalist in their novella contest once and more recently I was an actual finalist in nonfiction at North American Review. Or was it American Book Review? It wasn’t American Short Fiction, though I once got a polite rejection from them, apologizing for taking a year to reply. Anyway, anyway, North American Review (or whoever) told me the news that I was a finalist was embargoed, meaning I couldn’t tell anyone (why am I mansplaining that to you?), but I can tell you now because the Rejection button is now lit up on the Submittable website, the same way it is for any rejection.

I’m going on too long, so I’ll wrap this up by saying I have been published: by Crawdad Nelson once, and by an online magazine in New Jersey whose URL appears to be dead, and in the Japan Air Lines flight menu, and the International Solid Waste Exhibition Handbook.

I should mention I can’t do tours because I don’t fly, since I lost both legs in a car crash. Also, I’m on the high end of pre-diabetic and have this sore on my arm that’s not healing so you may want to hurry getting back to me. Ha ha! I made all that up to show you I know about stakes and sympathy. Also what hair I have left is white, but I do have a great potential author photo from thirty years ago, taken in the kitchen of my first writing mentor. It’s blurry, but I think that adds to the charm.

Saoirse, I attached it. I don’t think you can tell that I was drunk, but I’ll let you be the judge.

In desperate hopefulness, and promising to check in weekly (kidding / won’t / #learnedthatthehardway), shutting up now,

Mike Karpa
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Mike Karpa is a gay San Francisco writer whose short work has appeared in Tin House, Foglifter, and Mouthful of Salt. His first novel, Criminals, was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2022 (Indie) and his third, The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg, won Best Gay Book at the San Francisco Book Festival. He until recently taught Japanese translation in the Master’s program at Kent State University.

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