Self-Serve Query Letter & Chap 1 Contemporary Fiction

Greetings!

Learning to Limbo (100K words), is a playful, big hearted tragicomedy in the Russo/Irving mold that chronicles the misadventures of middle-aged Jack Irwin and his family as they bounce across the country in search of gainful employment, domestic tranquility, and a few people they can trust. It is a story that working parents past, present and future will see as part of their own: the triumphs, the tragedies, the innocent mistakes and the not-so-innocent mistakes, and above all the forgiveness that keeps families together to face another challenge. If you know how to limbo, you can get through anything.  

Synopsis

According to the history books, The Limbo Dance originally developed on slave ships as men tried to squeeze under the low beam that separated them from their women below decks. Like those men, Jack Irwin, a middle-aged, 12-month-unemployed family man, finds himself in a 21st century version of that same tight spot.

When Jack’s parental gravy train derails, he is forced to take a low

paying marketing gig in the low cost Midwest, leaving native Norcal behind. A month after settling in Indianapolis, they're moved to New England, the nerve center of BFC (Big Fat Corporation) where Jack is lured into a French-style "stress-relief" relationship with sex-crazed poodle-haired exec. Meanwhile wife Carrie has gotten embroiled in a nasty email scam. Eventually incriminating photos wind up in her husband’s hands.  

The tightest of the tight spots? Not by a mile. Jack gets implicated in a revenue reporting scandal and is terminated. The affairs come to light. Jack gets crabs, Carrie gets paralyzed. Son Robbie flunks out. Only 11-yr old Lulu knows how to save the family with her ownversion of the limbo: the happy hop.

Background

I've been in the business of writing my entire career, both agency and client-side.  My debut novel, Hack, was represented by John Galvis Literary Agency and published by HD Media Press in August 2012. My business and corporate satire is gaining steam on The Huffington Post and other sites, along with a steady stream of quirky humor. I'm looking for a long-term partner that is interested in creating great, timeless fiction in the tradition of the classic storytellers. More on about.me.

Sample below. I think you'll want to read the manuscript - I have a feeling  Learning to Limbo is right up your alley. I look forward to hearing from you.

Jeb Harrison

www.jsh-creative.com

Learning to Limbo

Part 1 – San Anselmo

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick

Jack go unda limbo stick

All around the limbo clock

Hey, let's do the limbo rock

Limbo lower now

Limbo lower now

How low can you go?

Chubby Checker – The Limbo Rock

Chapter 1 – In a Tight Spot

[Which describes the condition and profession of our infamous and odoriferous hero John Henry Irwin the III.]

Jack Irwin parked his rustbucket diesel Rabbit as far away from the lobby of Luna Microsystems as he could, hoping the long walk across the parking lot would allow his odor to dissipate. He had driven all the way from San Anselmo north of the Golden Gate through a bone-chilling January mist with all the windows and the sunroof open, down 19th Avenue past San Francisco State University and onto 280, where he floored his rusty bunny in hopes of generating a purifying hurricane that would leave him springtime fresh by the time he checked in for his interview. At age 43, a year on unemployment, with wife, requisite two kids, dog, mortgage, car payments, computer payments, insurance premiums, orthodontist bills, cable bills, bills of every shape and size, and a blossoming addiction to prescription painkillers, Jack was in a very tight spot. The last thing he needed was to asphyxiate his would-be employers.

Just three hours ago body odor worries were far from Jack Irwin’s mind.

His sleep was restless, as it had been since the layoff from the start-up that didn’t start-up a year ago,

and, as usual, wife Carrie had kicked him out of bed for his nocturnal spasms. So he had spread his long, banana-slug frame across the stained, child and dog-worn living room sofa, praying that the monkish one-note hum of the SubZero would quiet the bellicose cacophony of thousands of fast-talking recruiters half his age telling him what to say at tomorrow’s job interview and pulled a misty blue cashmere throw under his chin. The full-body sweats had finally passed, and he had poured nearly a quart of cold vanilla almond milk down his parched, smoke-ravaged throat by the soothing refrigerator light, letting the cool air blow softly over his drenched pajama top. Finally he stretched out on the sofa in the dark living room.

He was just drifting off when the alarm went off upstairs. He threw off the cashmere blanket and jumped up. “Shit,” he growled, rushing for the stairs, then stumbling over their slobbering, spastic yellow Labrador retriever, Barney, named by his 7-year old daughter Lulu after the famous purple dinosaur.

            
"Jesus...fuckin' dog!" growled Irwin, shoving Barney out of the way. He heard Carrie groan in the bed upstairs as the alarm continued to beep, and pictured her pulling the down pillow over her head as she had with reliable consistency all fifteen years of their marriage. Irwin dare not disturb Carrie before her designated wake up time lest she unleash a lethal swarm of killer bees or some other pestilence upon the household.

Alarm squelched, Irwin rushed downstairs and stood aside as the dog raced for the door, then dove into the cold January darkness to terrify whatever remaining nocturnal woodland creatures might be about. He grimaced as the dog squatted over what remained of the lawn, a hopeless patch of anemic fescue that perhaps Robbie, his nine year-old beamish boy, would someday learn to mow. Maybe Carrie would attend to Barney’s morning contribution before he came home and stepped in it.

            Sure enough, Carrie Irwin had her pillow in a death grip over her sleepy, frizzy-haired head. "God, Jack," came her muffled voice from underneath the pillow. "What time is it?"

 "Six AM, Thursday, January 12,” he announced as if to remind himself that it was big interview day.

“I gotta be outta here in 20 minutes." He rushed into the bathroom, quickly ran the electric razor over the graying stubble on his dimpled chin and wide, square jaw, then contemplated trimming his thick, wiry gray-flecked eyebrows, decided against it and jumped into the shower. He vigorously shampooed what was left of his rapidly receding sand-colored hair and whitewalls, resisting the usual urge to linger under the warm stream and soap his itching hemorrhoids. Instead, with a silly little TV jingle phrase gotta go, gotta go racing around in his head, he pulled on the corporate uniform: Nordstrom boxers, Ralph Lauren socks, Polo khaki slacks and Polo oxford blue shirt. He was working on his standard-issue red power tie when he heard the dog gouging another deep groove into the front door; grabbing his penny loafers, he bounded down the stairs and flung it open.

It wasn't until Barney had rushed in, skidded across the hardwood floor, and stood wagging in front of the cabinet that held the dog treats that Irwin smelled it: unmistakable, powerful skunk, so strong it made his eyes water. "Fuckin' A!" he muttered in a hoarse whisper, shutting the door, figuring Barney had chanced upon Mr. and Mrs. Skunk doing the wild thing in the bushes and had received a double shot of skunk lovin’.  He turned, woozy, and stumbled across the living room to the kitchen, expecting the smell from outside to dissipate. Instead, the smell was equally strong if not stronger in the kitchen.

Irwin took one look at the dog and groaned—he could practically see the odor wafting off his golden fur, like the hind end of Pepe Le Pew in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Irwin grabbed the stinking pooch by the collar, dragged him across the floor and shoved him back into the dark, nearly chopping off the tip of his golden tail as he slammed the door behind him. The dog turned and began gouging the door with renewed vigor, peeping like a maligned bird.

"What's that smell?" Carrie Irwin stood at the top of the stairs in her nightie, disheveled but still a distractingly ravishing sight to Irwin, even with his brain burning at five alarms. A few extra pounds had made her curves more pronounced, her luscious lips and cheeks a touch fuller; her almond-shaped hazel eyes more inviting.

"Barney got skunked," he said, marching up the stairs.

"Ugh!" grunted Carrie Irwin, squeezing her nostrils shut, crawling back

in bed and cocooning under the covers. "Disgusting," Irwin could hear her mutter as he walked past to retrieve his standard navy blazer.

Outside Irwin noticed that the skunk smell, though still strong, was not as strong in the chilly morning

air as it seemed to be in the house. He was closing the front gate when Barney came racing up, smashed open the gate and made a run for it. Irwin tackled, wrestled, grabbed the collar. Just when Irwin thought he had the dog, he slipped his head out of the collar and tore down the street. Standing there with the empty collar in his hand, Irwin didn’t even try calling after him.

Now, in the parking lot of Luna Microsystems where he was interviewing for a mid-level managerial position in the academic sector, Irwin checked himself in the rear view mirror, ran his fingers through his silver sidewalls and sighed. There was a new crack in the dashboard - a result of Magic Fingers relentless rattling - and he made a mental note: that was at least 67 cracks that he could count, which he did frequently.

 He heaved his aching 220 lb. six foot frame out of the tiny vehicle and shook himself all over like a wet, freshly skunked dog, his arms shimmying like spaghetti noodles by his side, tongue wagging, gut jiggling like the proverbial bowl-of-jelly in the weak winter sun. After a short time he noticed that a couple of workers had paused to observe his little St. Vitus' dance, so as he walked through the parking lot he threw in a couple of "happy hops", a sort-of Teaberry Shuffle that he and the kids broke into when feeling particularly silly, or in the current context, particularly fed up with the absurdity of being 43 years-old and interviewing for positions that required half his experience.

But the happy hop, for Irwin, wasn’t always mere silliness, rather, just like his St. Vitus warmups, had lately become disguised expressions of existential desperation – a physical manifestation of a psychological Houdini act where he figuratively shed his shackles and wriggled out of, squeezed under or hopped over, a sticky situation; often times to land smack dab in the middle of another, even stickier quagmire. So, just as he was about to enter the lobby of Luna Microsystems he threw in a subtle hop, like an extra sprinkling of Pixie Dust, partly for good luck and partly to ensure he was limber enough to run if things got ugly. Then he straightened his power tie and opened the big glass doors.

Irwin’s purity of purpose was blown to bits when he saw the receptionist falling out of her blouse. He imagined working around women like…like that. Who was harassing whom when the receptionist’s breasts practically jumped out and shook your hand? he thought.

He had just finished signing in when the receptionist gave him a queer look, wrinkling up her nose as if

Irwin had just passed some particularly noxious gas. Irwin attempted a smile and it struck him that perhaps the everlasting odor of Pepe Le Pew still clung to him like a cloud.

"Hi," he said. "I'm here to see Dinesh Singh."

The girl winced, and Irwin hoped that it was because she might have a little gas herself. "Please have a seat. I'll ring him for you."

                        
Then it was: "Hello," said a chocolate-colored Indian fellow with gleaming teeth. If he smelled anything unusual he was gracious enough not to let it show.

Irwin followed the young man through an incomprehensible maze of cubicles, extending almost as far into the distance as his increasingly blurry vision could discern. He was making yet another mental note to make an appointment with an eye doctor when he noticed that most of the cubes were empty. Irwin wondered what had happened to all of the former inhabitants.  Why couldn’t they have filled this job with one of those folks?

“All right then, my friend,” said Singh, clapping his brown hands down on the desk. “Do you have any questions?”

And so Irwin interviewed.

At first with a tall, middle-aged thin turkey buzzard of a man with yellowing skin who thought something was rotting in his trash can.

Then with a compact, broad-shouldered, thick-mustachioed Super Mario Brother who apologized for having too much garlic in his eggs that morning.

And with a very young, pudgy, rosy-cheeked girl with a garter belt collection of all sorts and sized adorning the rim of her cube and photographs of newly married couples on every available inch of desk space. She wondered if one of the garter belts was getting a little ripe.

Then Irwin met Abdul Abaya who had a big round table in the middle of his spacious office at the end of the hall, with a large window overlooking the bay to the north.

"Ah, welcome Mr. Irwin. Please have a seat. I have been so looking forward to meeting you!" Irwin felt flush, surprised by the sudden curiosity in his capabilities.

“Well, it’s another dry day out there, isn’t it?” he said, swiveling around to the wide window overlooking the serene silver water. The winter thermal inversion had turned the air around the Bay Area into thin layers of taupe haze. The “no burn” policy had been in effect all through the Christmas holidays, angering many Bay Area residents who insisted that you couldn’t have Christmas without a fire in the fireplace. “And no rain in the forecast, is that right?” Abaya added.

“Yes,” Irwin said.

Abaya swiveled back around. “I just hope there’s enough water left in July for my tomatoes.” Irwin nodded and was gearing up to talk about gardening when Abaya stood and gestured to the various pieces of marketing literature he had laid out on the table.

“Well,” he pronounced, “As you can see our problem is not tomatoes.” He waved his hand across the

piles of literature that looked as if they might have come from several different companies. “We need someone to get a handle on this mess.”

Then he stopped and sniffed the air like a dog, nose twitching uncontrollably. "Do you smell skunk? I smell skunk. Don't you?"

Before Irwin had a chance to answer he was on the phone to building services complaining that a skunk must have gotten into the ventilation system somehow. Then he dialed each of his direct reports and they all admitted that they smelled something odd and noxious, so he dismissed the team for the day, ended the interview, and started packing up his things.

And thus it was over. 

Irwin took a couple of deep breaths to loosen the growing constriction in his chest, then looked around and realized he had no idea how to find his way back to Dinesh Singh's office, much less find his way out of the building. After several panicky minutes walking up and down the corridors between the cubicles he found an exit sign, made his way to the lobby, took a final look at the receptionist's heroic cleavage, walked across the parking lot without a single happy hop, got in his rusty long-eared bunny buggy, engaged the diesel reverberation engine, and headed home through the hazy city.  

_________________________________________

Git 'er on der Kindler fer $2.99 ratnow!

Querying: Bassackwards & Cattywumpus

If you've never had the pleasure of "querying" literary agents in hopes of finding one that wants to represent your work and has the editorial contacts in the publishing industry that will want to pick it up, well, you're missing one of the great joys of life. 

First, there's the research. Almost every literary agent out there claims to represent "general fiction", which is Publisher's Marketplace only label for everything that isn't genre fiction or non-fiction. There are other sites like Query Tracker that allows the writer of "general fiction" to further categorize their work, but the agents in general don't distinguish between literary fiction and contemporary fiction, so all an author would be doing is limiting their choices. 

So the list of agent possibilities is quite long. In order to find agents that might be interested in your particular brand of non-genre fiction, you have to go to the agency's website and find them. However their description of what they like is mostly intended to be inclusive - they don't want to miss out on a blockbuster just because they intimated that they weren't down with religious mysteries, for instance. (ie: The Da Vinci Code). 

Once you find someone who has either represented a book that's something like yours, or they claim to like "riveting stories told with a compelling voice" or something you think might be relevant to your novel, you structure your query so they feel like y'all are a match made in heaven. And every agent wants a different type of submission: query letter, synopsis, first chapter, or first two chapters, or first 10 pages - every agent has different requirements. 

If you're a LImbolander you know I like to go for the funny bone. I have yet to find a single literary agent that has admitted to even a remote appreciation of humor, much less someone that likes funny stories. This, we're supposed to assume, is because the general reading public does not like funny stories. Or anything remotely light-hearted, fanciful, bawdy, or inappropriate, regardless of how meaningful it might ultimately be. If an unknown John Irving were to try and shop The World According to Garp, or an unknown Richard Russo was to shop Straight Man, these days it's unlikely an agent would even take a second look. When was the last time a tragicomedy like The Hotel New Hampshire or That Old Cape Magic was a bestseller? 

So here I am doing what I do, trying so hard to be serious for a change, trying to build some

pathos into the relatively insensitive hilarity and dark irony, feeling like I just arrived in a "no-laugh" zone. I'm certain it's just me looking out from what's a sorta dark unemployed place lately, and I'm probably only a third of the way through the query process. It's the same process I used to snare my first two agents, and Learning to Limbo isn't a far cry from Hack, so something is likely to break loose. 

But wouldn't it be great if the authors, the ones that are working for nothing, completely betting on the come, could publish the availability of their book and then let the agents do the research? Given that more and more great books are going to market without an agent or a publisher, but by the pure blood, sweat and tears of the author, wouldn't ya think that the shoe or at least the shoelace might be headed over to the other foot?

Get 'er for $2.99 on der Kindler right now this very minute!

I Was a Client of Melanie Mills - Part IV

Okay I've got it. Picture Dobby the House Elf with an over-the-hill beach-eaten face hidden by Scarface sunglasses and a platinum fright wig, and you've got Melanie Mills. While that image comes into focus in your addled brain, let me apologize. I know I've treated this riveting story with almost criminal negligance and it's not because I don't know how to describe what happened because I do. I was there. By now The Hairy Family Singers (a moniker I had given our family to give them that team spirit but mostly to embarrass them in public) had retreated to our 100 year-old carriage house in Ridgefield, CT., me with a few pages of hastily scribbled notes (I guess you can imagine why I was more than a little eager to expedite my little editorial meeting with my agent) and promises to make a few fixes to the novel in the next month. Which I did and more without too much trouble. When I was satisfied with the edits I called Melanie's office, only to get a voice mail that she was traveling in Europe and wouldn't return for several weeks and chances are she wouldn't get my message until her return. Which struck me as odd for I was under the impression that a writer's conference/Harley biker rally was being hosted by her in Myrtle Beach. Maybe that had already happened, I thought. I must of had my dates wrong. So I let several weeks pass and tried her again - I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was sitting at my desk in my office on the IBM Campus in Somers, New York, overlooking a lovely verdant lawn rolling into the distant woods to the north, wild turkeys scampering among the Canadian geese and the occassional red-tailed hawk diving for a meal of field mouse and greens. I got her voice mail. Or, more accurately, I got a recorded message from her assistant, Kat Baker, informing me that Melanie Mills had been killed in a car wreck in Germany, and, that if the caller was an author, all bets were off. Never mind that she looked like Dobby with a fright wig. I had sipped Sprite at her table on her deck overlooking the slough in Myrtle Beach just a few weeks ago, had shared a laugh about how she accidently applied hair spray to her face thinking it was sunblock, and had talked about my story, Hack. A story in which the protagonist, an artist,  fakes his own death and returns under a new identity to bilk an unsuspecting movie producer out of millions. More on that later. Then, at my desk, when I heard this news coming over the phone, I felt as if someone had kicked me in the crotch. I couldn't breath, I lost the feeling in my hands. And I bemoaned my bad luck. Now what was I going to do? My literary agent was dead!

Obviously I could no longer work that day, plus the IBM campus was already like a ghost town due to the wave of "work at home" knowledge employees who simply didn't bother to come to the office anymore. (My boss, unfortunately, was not one of these.) I couldn't exactly tell my boss about my literary agent, any more than I could tell him that I was playing in a rock band and had to set up early. No, at IBM, work/life balance means you eat, sleep, exercise and do what's necessary so you can work 12 hour days. So I made something up and went home, in too much shock to really contemplate what I should do next, and just generally sad that Melanie Mills, a stand-out character on her own account, was no longer roaming the planet.

Did I make the connection that the events of my novel had perhaps planted a seed in her head? Of course not. At this point, I had no reason to believe that she wasn't really dead, and that I at some point would have to start scouting for a new agent. Which I didn't think would be too hard - "hey my agent died, would you mind reading a few chapters of the novel she was representing?" And I was right. I had many tire kickers, right away, and within months a new agent with a whole notebook full of new ideas for Hack. Along with that were all the rejection letters, and one of the rejection letters suggested I look at a website entitled "Writer Beware". And it was here that I discovered what really happened to Melanie Mills. You could even go there yourself today, cut this tedious blog short, and find out. You might as well cause I'm tired, my feet hurt, and I'm going to save the ugly truth for the next edition of "I Was a Client of Melanie Mills". Stick around if you can stand the suspense. I will try and make it worth the wait!

I Was A Client of Melanie Mills Part II

I can't remember if I finished the first draft of "Hack" before or after I was diagnosed with Lyme's disease. I only remember that I was lit up with fever, at my Connecticut desk in my jammies, with the visuals of those final events coming in faster than I could type. (My current editor noted that the ending seemed "rushed". Well, yeah. In more ways than one. Fortunately the Lyme's has not been in play during the endless rewrites so I have been able to slacken the pace a bit.) Of course I did not package up that first draft and send it off to agent-land. It was to be several drafts and several months later before I compiled that first hit list, and why I included Melanie Mills from Myrtle Beach S.C. was, in retrospect, a strategic oversight.  A literary agent in Myrtle Beach was likely to have a very limited scope (ie: needlepoint how-to books), or be semi-retired with a blue chip client list and simply forgot to mention that new authors need not apply in Publisher's Marketplace. However Melanie Mills turned out to be neither of the above. Before I got to her on the list, I hit up "friends of friends" in the biz - good feedback but no takers. So then I did a fairly targeted "mass mailing" and was encouraged by the high percentage of agents asking for samples and in many cases full manuscripts. So when Melanie Mills officially accepted "Hack" part of me was saying I could do better than Myrtle Beach, but the voice of the bird in the hand was louder, so I signed on with Melanie. At first the relationship felt very dry, impersonal and business-like- almost secretive.  She had a few broad-brush changes (make the female protagonist "less of a bitch" in her words), and asked that I send her a ream of a particular type of paper - and that was the only thing she ever asked me to pay for. She shopped the novel to 4 publishers, and, in her typically quirky fashion, scanned their responses and sent me .jpgs. Everything seemed fairly normal, and completely legit. No reading fees or any other nonsense that the vampires in the publishing business typically use to dupe the unsuspecting author.  So after the first four rejections, she came back with some more broad-brush changes and suggestions, and vowed to go another round. This, as it happened, was around the time of the kid's spring break in Ridgefield, CT. Very coincidently, I found an unbelievable condo rental in none other than Myrtle Beach, which in April promised plentiful rays of warm sun, sand, surf and miniature golf on every corner. So, even though it was a 9-hour haul from the still-snowy and frozen lawns of New England, we packed up the family and set out for a truly spring vacation, and, of course, a meeting with Melanie Mills (details coming in Part III!). It was only a short 6 weeks later, after I had established somewhat of personal relationship with Melanie (despite her undoubtedly oddball demeanor), that I was to get the shock of my life - one that literally felt as if someone had dropped a 40 lb bag of Quickcrete on my chest. And of course it was much later when I realized that Hack's exploits - his story as it were - might have been partially responsible for the chain of events that unfolded in the coming year. So stay tuned! The crazy shit is yet to come!

I Was a Client of Melanie Mills - Part I

Here is an honest-to-god "truth is stranger than fiction" story that surely must stand alone in the history of artist/agent relations. Melanie Mills (aka Elisabeth Von Hullesem, her true name, along with almost 20 other aliases, one of which - Linda Ray or something like that - was a published novelist) was for a short year or so my literary agent. Ah but she was so much more! So before I go any further, a caveat: I make no claim that my accounting of Ms. Von Hullessem's expoits are factually correct, nor do I endeavor to chronicle her sordid history. Because what I saw of her, and what happened between us, is plenty. More than enough. And though it may leave you, the reader, wanting more, it won't be coming from me. As I said, I am sated. Perhaps the periphery where I stood was about as much real-life weirdness as I could handle. Perhaps the remote chance that she got the idea to do what she did from the fictional events in the novel she was representing for me is too much responsibility. If I thought just a few of my gentle readers were stupid enough to take my stories as some sort of guide to reaping fame (be it behind bars or otherwise) and fortune , I would put down the pen and stick with the brush and the stringed instruments. But the truth is that Melanie Mills, after having read my novel, "Hack", (to be published Spring 2012, Harper-Davis Publishers) about a painter faking his own death to drive up the value of his work, did shortly thereafter mysteriously die in a car crash in Germany, only to show up in Canada a few years later. Coincidence? Cause and effect? I'll leave that for you to decide after you've heard the whole story. So stay tuned. It just gets more bizarre.