2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The Dreaded Query Letter of Doom, or How Not to Write a Query Letter

So, I’m stuck in college county, the good old Carlow, on my own for the weekend. What do I do? Throw a house party, of course! No, sorry, I mixed myself up with a cool kid who has friends for a second there. Of course I don’t throw a house party! I sit inside all day, music blaring, and write a query letter and synopsis.

To answer your question: yes, I was born this cool.

I’m not gonna tell you how to write a query letter.  I’m not qualified to. I know as much as you do about queries. Unless you’re an agent or a published author. In which case: ‘hi’ and ‘sorry for you having to read this rubbish’. Or, y’know, unless you’re an absolutely hopelessly bad writer. Which I am not.

I hope.

I present:

How Not to Write a Query Letter (for better examples see here and here.) Or, How to be a Winner Like Charlie Sheen.

Dear Mistress/Master of the Pen/TypeWriter/iPad/Computer,

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a 78-year-old vampire pensioner, who is disillusioned with life and has a rampant libido? Stephenie Meyer has. (See Day Break, due for publication in 2051.) Margarine Snufflepod has. Once a normal old lady, privy to doing crosswords and knitting, now the Vampire Queen of the Underworld. Stalked by her lost-long son, Buffy Snufflepod, Margarine must stop him from killing her. It’s kill or be killed. Now with a barren uterus, she doesn’t want to kill him. Unfortunate situation, that.

However, shit gets real when she falls in love with a 17-year-old super sexy vampire, and a werewolf with rippling abs and a squishy nose. Buffy Snufflepod, her son, decides he cannot kill his mother, but can kill her young, possibly underage, lovers. And so begins an epic chase to Mordor, where the Ring/Item of Importance, must be destroyed.

SUPERCOOLAWESOMEBOOKOFWONDERS is my partially completed YA/cosy mystery/romance/action novel. It is currently 125,000 words long and is the first of a fifteen part story arc. It is like Harry Potter meets the Bible, with elements of Murder, She Wrote and Shakespeare’s greatest tragi-comedies. I don’t like Romeo and Juliet, so it’s not like that. It’s also a bit like Skins, insofar as there’s an evil therapist who harnesses the power of the baseball bat, and there’s a funny misunderstood ginger. It will appeal to everyone and be a multi million dollar bestseller.

I have known your clients Banksy, the enigmatic street artist, and J.K. Rowling (I think she’s your client. If not, I’m sure you’ve heard of her?) for several years. Please find pasted below photographic proof of said claims. I have written since I was six and have self-published many books as I believe the world cannot be deprived of my literary genius. May I request that my advance be forwarded to me prior to contract signing in the form of a jar full of one cent pennies? I do not trust the banks, especially as I still do not know what a tracker mortgage is.

Yours in good faith and health, etc.

Me.

Photographic proof:

An ironic post-modernist non-cubist era representation of me, as painted by Banksy.

One of Joanne Kathleen's characters that was loosely based on me.

Seriously, Joanne, I'm considering suing. This is uncanny.

Thank you for your time. I’m sure we’ll have a long and beautiful relationship together with frequent visits to the beach, where we will walk hand-in-hand and sing lovely songs together. May I suggest “Fuck You” by Cee-Lo as it’s a favourite of mine. Peace out.

-

Er…yeah. I might be a tad nuts. But there you go: that’s how not to write a query letter. As for how to write a query letter? Don’t ask me. Ask QueryShark or Nathan Bransford or something.

My actual query letter is a bit rubbish and far less entertaining than SUPERCOOLAWESOMEBOOKOFWONDERS.

Dear Agent,

On Christams Day, Lexi Dwyer woke up in a hospital in Canada to find that she is the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed 163 others. Since January 8^th, she has written letters to a dead boy. She thinks that Liam, the boy she writes to, survived. He didn’t.

Faced with instant fame for her status as sole survivor, she has to fend off journalists and religious crazies. Misguided adults ask for prayers while their children stare and ask for autographs as if she’s Justin Bieber. Add a complicated relationship with an older man into the mix, and life is anything but normal. On top of that, Liam’s ‘survival’ is literally driving her mad. Plagued by nightmares and frequent visits from Liam, can she keep her sanity in the most tumultuous year of her life?

A ROCKET TO THE MOON is my edgy YA novel complete at 60,000 words. Thank you for your time.

See, far less exciting. Any suggestions? SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME. I BEG OF YOU. No, for reals, any comments would be appreciated, unless they’re spam. Those will be doubly appreciated because spam is funny.

Peace, Love, and Potter,

Lisa.

Kenneth Tong is a nutter: Managed Anorexia?

It’s all gone Kenneth Tong.

So, there’s this wonderful specimen of humanity called Kenneth Tong who’s creeping trending on Twitter.

You might have heard of him. Skinny guy. Big Brother 9. Gym buff. Provider of a supplement to help you reach size 0. Heard of him? Nah, me neither. Well, not until several minutes ago when I logged onto Twitter. Not that I have a Twitter account.

He’s trending. I clicked on the trend topic. I thought he was satirising the obsessiveness towards weight loss. He isn’t. He’s a one-man managed anorexia champion. Yeah…managed anorexia.

MANAGED ANOREXIA.

Now, that, at first, might not sound so bad. What’s wrong with managing anorexia? But oh no, he sees ‘managed anorexia as a lifestyle, not as a diet.’  His ultimate goal in life is to create a world of skinny bitches.

No, his ultimate goal in life is to create mentally ill, insecure, malnourished teenage girls. Size zero isn’t healthy. It’s a disease that he’s all too eager to spread.

Jutting bones, pronounced rib cages, collar bones that scissor, cheek bones that cave. There’s nothing sexy about it. Anorexia isn’t some easily sustained lifestyle. It’s a mental illness.

It’s no more a sustained lifestyle than self-harming, or bulimia, or depression. It’s not something anyone wants. No one wants to hate themselves, to be so desperately hungry but unwilling to eat, to look at themselves in the mirror and hate what’s reflected. Their bodies are tempered with disease.

There’s nothing glamorous about it.

Let’s look at some of his inspired posts:

Really?

To be thinner, skip dinner. Guy's a genius, right?

I haz no words.

“Had your anorexia been supervised” – it’s probably easier to list the things that are right about this statement than list what’s wrong with it.

Right

• He can punctuate fairly correctly.
• He’s literate.
• He @replies his followers.
• He can read?

Wrong

• Everything

So the right list is actually longer than the wrong list. I’m surprised.

At what point is anorexia considered managed or supervised? At the point wherein the person reaches size 0? When they have a stroke, or a heart attack, or die? That’s pretty well managed, Kenneth. Nothing like death to make a figure look appealing. Yay for dead people.

Or maybe one day they wake up, look themselves in the mirror, think ‘gee whiz, after months/years of starvation, I look super sexy this morning’ and sit down to eat something more than the 300 calories they’ve allowed themselves.  Maybe they don’t excercise until they collapse. Maybe they don’t look in the mirror and be utterly repulsed by what stares back at them.

Anorexia isn’t a lifestyle. It’s a fucking mental illness.

Now, I’m not about to advocate obesity or being over-weight, but there’s nothing wrong with curves. That’s how a body is intended.

The following photo is of Isabelle Caro.

This is what anorexia looks like.

Isabelle was 28 when she died in November. She’d suffered (n. the pain, misery or loss of someone) from anorexia for fifteen years. It killed her. Had she been supervised better, as Tong suggests, would she still be alive? If she’d popped one of his magic pills, would her body still rest in a coffin, rotting underground?

There’s nothing sexy about anorexia. There’s nothing there to aspire to. Mental illness isn’t something to want. There’s nothing perfect about it, or death.

Dear Kenneth Tong: you promote rotting ideals that some poor, unwell person will look up and aspire to. Anorexia is a cancer: not a lifestyle. You, sir, are a bastard. As Stewie Griffon once said: I’d love to stay and chat, but you’re an idiot.

Cheers.

On the plus side, he should write for the Daily Fail. They’d love him over there.

ETA: Tong posted a tweet claiming his pro-anorexia stance was a carefully maintained search for attention and noteriority. He and a friend bet that he couldn’t go from being a nobody to a somebody in a single week.

Who knows if this is the truth or not. Is it his shameful reaction the the backlash? His tweets were too real to be staged, but what do I know? The chilling thing is he retweeted messages from girls claiming he was their thinspiration. So: hoax or not?