Posts from — May 2009

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After seeing the success of QueryDay on Twitter and some of the great suggestions that came from it, I’ve decided to post a query letter I’ve written for my novel, Memories of Ys: Angel Down. Please read over it and tell me what you think about it in the comments section. I’m looking for any constructive feedback so feel free to say anything you’d like (short of a personal attacks, of course, but don’t hold back on on really useful thoughts). I have put some generic information in the greeting to make it easier to post and review.

In appreciation of your help, whoever posts the most useful critique of my query letter will get a $20 Amazon gift certificate. Contest will run until Friday, May 22, 2009. I will e-mail the winner, so please be sure to leave your e-mail address with your comment.

Thanks!

Dear Agent,

I am writing to you because you represented TITLE by AUTHOR, and I feel my book is in the same vein.

My story, a 93,800 word science-fantasy novel titled MEMORIES OF YS – ANGEL DOWN, follows an amnesic combat cyborg who is yanked from her life as a farmer and into a conspiracy to keep a millennia-old secret from being revealed, while trying everything she can do to protect the ones she loves from harm. The resurrection of her memories will end the civilization which created her.

I have attended and will be graduating with my Master’s degree from Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction program in January. While having lived in Florida for most of my life, I’ve traveled and lived in a variety of different places, including the site of where the city of Ys once stood off the coast of Brittany.

I am publishing a graphic novel version of my social fiction story CALLING HOME. It was a dialog only science fiction story written entirely within the social networking sites Twitter and Plurk. It can be found at http://callinghome.us

My entire manuscript is ready to be sent at your request. I look forward to hearing from you.

Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you how much I love coffee. The sentence after that they’ll mention how much I love my Keurig brewer. It is the best of the single serve coffee brewers out there. But it does have one problem with it’s Kcups: Once you use them, there’s no way for you to use them again. It’s the ultimate in convenience but not the most environmentally sound think to do.

Now Keurig does have an answer to using your own coffee in their brewers and have a reusable system that minimizes waste: The My Kcup.

The My Kcup is a great system, but it’ll cost you about $15 for a single one. If you want to have some more, the costs can add right up. And to top it off, the My Kcup’s plastics aren’t exactly the best around (drop one on the floor and you’ll see what I mean). So again, where does that leave anyone who doesn’t want to send more plastic to a landfill and would rather drink their own personal blends?

The My-Kap is an interesting middle step on the scale between the a regular Kcup and the My Kcup. Put simply, to use the cap, all you need to do is to rinse out the used coffee or tea out of a regular Kcup after you’ve peeled back the foil top. Then after refilling the used Kcup with new coffee or tea, you insert the My-Kap and the put it back in the brewer. That’s it, you’ve effectively re-used a single use Kcup.

You can get more than 10 uses out of the Kcup (I found it starts to break apart not to long after that), but that’s still pretty good compared to throwing the used Kcup out. Even better is the My-Kap plastics are a lot more durable that the My Kcup, easily handling multiple trips to the floor while I was trying to remove it from a Kcup using the included extraction tool.

Now, the My-Kap does have its shortcomings. The first is that when you’re initially setting it into the used Kcup, it tends to fit very snugly so you’ll be spending some time rocking it into place. The second is that hot liquid will pool around the top of the My-Kap and will spill when you open the brewing chamber. Fortunately this isn’t too much of a problem since the spilled coffee will collect and drain out toward your coffee cup. Either way, these two nitpicks aren’t enough to have me stop using the My-Kap.

Overall, the My-Kap is a great system for people who don’t already have My Kcups to use their own favorite coffees and have less of an environmental impact from using a Keurig brewer.