Query Letter

This is the story of an adolescent; some young punk fresh out of university trying to run away from that inevitable adulthood; he runs to where every college kid with half a wild spirit runs to around that age, he runs to Europe for two months with some friends in tow and a light bank account.

Some people tell me this is what's called a memoir, but I've always had the idea in my head that a memoir covers much more ground in the whole lapsed-time sense of the thing so I'll call this something else; it's a picture.  A snapshot.  It's a portrait; a self-portrait of who I was at that age; of what I believed in, what I loved, and how a wide loop of western Europe in the summer of 2010 brought a foggy future some clarity (not a lot, mind you; just a little bit more).  It's part travel guide, part vice analysis, part free-flowing thought as my friends and I stayed with strangers in London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, Prague, Zurich, Rome, Barcelona, and Paris, sometimes just trying to keep food in our bellies.  Like anyone traveling there's always thought towards home, to where the heart nests, and at the time my heart rested in Santa Cruz, and everything I remembered was with fondness.  All the crazy times, all the benchmarks, all the things we talked about with the people we met in the Old World.  It's a sort of back-and-forth format; the present being Europe, the past being that last year at university.  Occasionally, it jumps between the two with each new chapter.

Me, I'm not wholly unlike any other 24-year-old out there.  I like to think I strike my own chord though.  First off, I'm left handed, and if you ask my father he'd tell you it was his doing (as soon as I learned how to grab with my fingers, he only put things in my left hand and played with it constantly or so he says).  When I was young my father liked to keep me busy.  I played basketball at the Y, I played soccer with AYSO, and I went to one kindergarten in the morning, and then another in the afternoon, and just for the hell of it I was enrolled some after-school math and reading school right through to high school.  We didn't have cable, just the antenna networks, so in elementary school I'd mostly just watch old movies and read books.  I loved the classics, and not the abridged big-fonted Illustrated Classics, but the real ones.  Big words and complex grammar fascinated me until it turned into homework.  Then, of course, I despised it, but school came easy.  It was a breeze, the whole sixteen years of it, but I never wrote for fun (except a few poems I wrote for a girl I liked in third grade).  Then in the spring of my senior year at UC Santa Cruz I met a crazy free-spirit of a girl who just happened to be the most beautiful thing I'd ever laid down next to.  She had soft skin and a pretty button nose, and she liked to take pictures and make drawings with charcoal, and for some reason that led me to buy a leather-bound notebook that caught my eye on a bookstore sale rack.  On the first page I wrote her sweet nothings and tore it out and gave it to her, and I've been writing with a sort of hair-pulling manic-depression ever since.  Two and a half years later I self-published this book, and the most pressing thing I feel now is the weight of more books I need to write on the horizon.

If you're still reading this, I thank you sincerely for your consideration and the time this took out of a no doubt busy day.  I've attached an early galleys pdf that included a table of contents for you to peruse at your pleasure.  And if you like, I'd be more than happy to mail you a copy of the finished work (the publishing house gave me a bunch of e-books on plastic cards, and I've got a few hard copies left that I haven't sold yet.