Query Letter / Query Letter, ITI

September 27, 2008

Mr. Laghi,

My name is John Thornton, and I'd like to submit the first chapter of my novel, "The Institute Of Temporal Illusions", for consideration at LJK.

Here's the Urbis copy of the first chapter:

http://urbis.com/media/view/122858/institute-of-temporal-illusions-ch-1-in-progress

I'm just giving you the link to this because I don't want to flood the submissions queue on your Urbis page. If you'd like, you can contact me to get a .doc version of this, or a paper copy--or I can of course just submit the thing to you directly on Urbis. All of my contact info is at the bottom of this letter.

The title is a mouthful and is probably subject to change.

As far as the plot goes: there are three major characters. The first two, Julie Thatch and Robbie LeBlanc, show up in the attached first chapter and I don't want to spoil them for you now. The third, Patrice, is introduced two chapters in. The entire book is set in Austin, Texas, where I spent six years living and working.

In broad strokes, here's the plot: Julie Thatch was raised largely by her sister, Tabitha. Tabitha dies (a drawn-out death, the climax of several years of drug abuse, school failures and relationships with older men. Thatch, driven by the compulsion not to fall into the same trap, is looking for a way out of her mother's house and into adulthood. Eventually she thinks she's found a way--a summer job as the live-in housekeeper of Patrice, a young woman who works for a local cult. The cult--the Institute of Temporal Illusions--believes that time is a fiction, and drains money and work from its members by requiring them to take tedious "memory courses" and "concentration training" in order to achieve the state of grace known as being "Unbound" from time.

Thatch starts to see elements of Tabitha in Patrice, notably her inability to deal with the facts of life in the real world. Patrice, for her part, is attracted to Thatch for her practical abilities, which she believes she can learn from in order to become a better Institute member. Slowly this draws the two into a sexual relationship with obvious problems. The rest of the book is driven by Thatch's attempt to make this relationship work.

In one sentence: "A suburban lesbian girl romances a cult member." Film at eleven!

The first draft of the book is complete. I'm currently working on the second, which in practice involves tightening the language, removing extraneous plot elements, and trying to bring into focus some of the background characters from the first draft without making the book unwieldy as a result. I handwrite my initial drafts, so I can't give you a precise word count, though I'd estimate about 75-80,000 words.

As far as promoting the book goes: I have three major avenues for online publicity. The first and best is my website, The Fiction Circus (http://fictioncircus.com). We have consistent traffic of around 150-200 unique visits per day, with about one to two large spikes per month for individual articles. The second is my webcomic (currently on hiatus), The Man Who Hates Fun, which has a readership of around 100 unique visits/day when active and which has far more occasional readers. This would be useful mostly as a cross-promotion opportunity since there's not a huge overlap between the literary fiction world and the world of webcomics. The third is my work with Valentine Software, producers of the game Immortal Defense (which I wrote the script for, and which won several awards from GameTunnel and other websites and which was specifically cited as the best-written independent game of 2007.) Immortal Defense has an extremely large following, and much of that following is there because of my writing. I can guarantee a large number of crossover sales by promoting my book in that independent gaming market. Other contacts include Bat Segundo (literary podcaster in New York), the STAPLE! Independent Media Expo (annual Austin convention for small press writing; I've been to every one since the founding in 2005), and the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, where I worked for several months and which I'm certain would be willing to help me promote this book.

Aside from that, here's some information about me. Again, the name is John Thornton. I'm 25 and will be 26 in February. I've lived in New York since 2007. As mentioned, I'm an editor at fictioncircus.com, with some other editorial work done for Chief Magazine in Brooklyn. I've had two short stories published, one in the Santa Clara Review and one in Apocalypse Magazine (Chicago.) I'm always working on publishing a third and more, plus I've done a huge amount of self-publishing with my earlier work (though I'm trying to get away from the self-publishing world now. It's too easy.) Right now I work as a copy editor and freelance writer for a variety of companies around the world.

That's enough query letter, I think. Here's my contact information:

John Thornton
(512) 507 6191
jwthornton@gmail.com

34-17 9th Street, Basement
Astoria, NY 11106

I hope you enjoy the chapter. If you're interested in seeing more, let me know and I'll send it your way, of course. I look forward to hearing from you about this.

- John Thornton

You need to log in to urbis or create an urbis account to review this writing.