Sample Query Letter

If you're not sure what to write in a query letter, here's an example of what we're looking for:

Dear Mr. Toogood and Ms. Fossett

Attached is my story, "The Real Thing," for consideration for publication in Tainted Tea.

It is approximately 6,500 words, and is a short horror story about a young writer, struggling with her prose, who discovers one of her characters sitting in her apartment at three in the morning.

I am the editor of Tainted Tea, a quarterly horror ezine. My articles have been published in The Temple News, Temple University's campus newspaper, and The Compendium: Philly's Music News. My fiction has never been previously published.

Also, this is a simultaneous submission, and I will inform you if it is published elsewhere.

Thank you for your consideration.

Kris Fossett
(XXX) XXX-XXXX
email_address@gmail.com

Kickass Trailer: "Apollo 18"

According to IMDb, Apollo 18 is "about the real mission to space in the 1970s that was canceled by NASA."

In this found footage film, the audience watches as their moon mission becomes one from hell when the crew, one by one, begins to get killed off by aliens.

Learn more about Apollo 18 and it's April 22 release here.

Hello from Eastern State Penitentiary

Sorry, but no guest post for this week. Instead, take a look at these photos I took during a recent visit to Eastern State Penitentiary, a former prison in the center of Philadelphia's Fairmount neighborhood.

It's supposedly one of the most haunted places in America, but I didn't see any ghosts (well, except for maybe this cute little guy I found on a wall).


However, it is a very creepy, ruined, looming building that's worth checking out for the atmosphere alone.

Ghost Cats is an art installation in the prison. These cat statues are everywhere, representing the stray cats that resided in the prison after it closed in 1971.

Some writing I found on walls of a cell.

Prison cell where no famous criminal stayed.

Prison cell where Al Capone stayed.

"There is No Bird" by Richard Dansky

There is certainly not a golden bird, caged just above my heart.

That would be silly. He’s on the other side. A little higher than the heart, I think–that’s where I feel the fluttering. When I cough, or lose my breath, or just hold very, very still when he thinks I’m not paying attention.

The fault is mine. I caught him. I put him there. One lung down, the other failing, and so I did what any sensible man would do – caught a mythological creature, bound it to my breast with half-understood magics, and lived in fear of its leaving every moment thereafter.

Because the bird will leave someday. That I know. He will burst through the bars of his prison and shatter them. Shatter me. Leave me behind, broken and gasping and empty, and forget me as he flies away. He is immortal, after all. Were I to keep him for a hundred years, it would be as nothing to him. But he will be free.

This will happen. I have seen it in a dream, heard it in the song he sings late at night when sane men have long since gone to sleep. He is warning me, I think. It is a kindness, or a warning, or a torment. His ways are inscrutable, as, perhaps they should be. He is, after all, eternal. He is, after all, not human.

He hasn’t left me yet. I don’t know why. Pity, perhaps. Or fear.

Silence.

Flutter.

I wait.

About Richard Dansky

Named one of Gamasutra’s Top 20 Game Writers, Richard Dansky is the Central Clancy Writer for Ubisoft/Red Storm. He has written for groundbreaking series such as Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six, as well as contributing extensively to tabletop RPGs in White Wolf’s World of Darkness setting. Richard is the author of five novels, including Firefly Rain. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and their inevitable cats.

Winter 2011's Letter from the Editors

I write because I love it. There’s no other reason. Yes, literary fame and glory would be amazing beyond my wildest dreams, but it’s not the end goal. I write for me. For my benefit.

I don’t have an explanation, either. Many people seem to expect one, but to me, it’s like asking someone why they breathe or why they wear a coat outside in a snow storm. It’s just the natural thing to do.

And I can see why some people don’t understand. Writing is hard. It’s hard to form a cohesive idea, it’s hard to get motivated and start writing (like this editoral), and it’s hard to continue and finish to the end. Writing is messy. Ideas don’t often come in chronological order. And most of all, writing is risky. It’s nerve-racking to put so much of yourself in one project that might fail and be the subject of ridicule for all to mock.

But, as Philip Pullman wrote, “What is worth having is worth working for.” Writing is exhilarating. There’s nothing more thrilling than saying, “Fuck it,” tossing all your fears and doubts out the window, and just facing your words and ideas. Nothing is better than just telling yourself, “That’s what revision is for,” and just watching one sentence become a paragraph, a paragraph become a page, and a page become a story. That’s what writing is all about.

Writing is my own private thrill. It’s my passion and my pain.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tainted Tea Winter 2011 is available now on Lulu.com.



For a complete list of contents and a free preview, visit the Web site.

"Cat Nip" by Len Kuntz

I didn’t know how the cat got in. You weren’t allowed to have pets in our building, and I certainly didn’t own one. I hated animals.

When I opened up the shower curtain, the thing bristled and hissed at me. It had pus-colored eyes and smelled like sewage. When I told it to get the hell out of there, it leapt up and ripped its claws across my cheek. Bloody paw prints were all I saw once my eyes stopped burning.

Returning from work that night, I heard chaotic bumping and shuffling noises in 42B. I might have suspected wild romance, but my neighbor was Mrs. Kindling, seventy-seven and sluggish. When I knocked, all the motion inside ceased. I put my ear to the door. I thought I smelled sewage. I thought I heard mewling, then a ripping noise.

There was a work party the next night. I drank too much, flirted with the boss’s wife. Decided to walk it off. Took an alley I shouldn’t have.

Six dozen of the creatures were waiting. They flew at me like bats. I saw a blizzard of fur, felt their swipes like razors.

The cops who came to the hospital didn’t believe my story. They said I was suffering from shock, trauma.

The press dubbed my assailant The Slasher. On the news I saw a reporter describe my attacker. Then she showed a “disturbing and graphic” picture of my face, covered with row upon row of stitches.

Coming home, I noticed cat fur coating the carpet like cottonwood fluff. I stopped at Mrs. Kindling’s door. Knocked. Nothing.

When I wrapped on the Superintendent’s door, he buzzed me in and the hinges sent the door swinging open.

It was dark. I stepped on something meaty and wet. I bumped into a chair. I called, “Mr. Andoni?”

The door slammed shut. The light flicked on.

A huge calico, wearing an eye patch and chomping on a stubby cigar, sat across the desk.

“What the hell?” I said. “Where’s Andoni?”

The cat burped up sandalwood and licorice notes—Andoni’s cologne! “You killed him? Ate him?”

The cat raised his paw, curled a claw. He wanted me to sit.

When I did, he flipped his lap top toward me. On the screen were four separate stories—Cleveland, Seattle, Memphis, Bismarck—about a certain Slasher on the loose.

“You gave us the idea,” the calico said.

“So, you’re, you’re attacking innocent humans?”

“You should try subsisting on rodents and Kibbles your whole life.”

“This is insane.”

I sprang out of the chair, but a posse of black felines had my passage blocked. Seated on their haunches, fangs bared, most foamy-mouthed, they looked a demonic crew.

“You can’t do this.”

“No?”

“Please.”

“Say the secret password, and we’ll let you go.”

“Secret password? I don’t know.”

“Tough luck then.”

“Wait! How, how about abracadabra?”

“Nope.”

“Open sesame?”

“Nah.”

“Please.”

The cat chortled, motioned his men forward and said, “I like mine a little on the rare side.”

About Len Kuntz:
Len Kuntz lives on a lake in rural Washington State. His writing appears widely in print and online at such places as The Ramshackle Review, Blue Print Review, Troubadour 21, and also at lenkuntz.blogspot.com

Fall TV Lineup: ABC's detective drama, "Poe"

Illustration by Byam Shaw, Source: Wikipedia

Despite his lack of leading-man potential (and the fact that he wasn’t a detective), it still seems fitting that Edgar Allan Poe, whose early mystery stories were the foundation for future detectives in literature, will be getting his own detective drama on ABC this fall.

According to Deadline.com,

Human Target executive producer Brad Kern has been tapped as executive producer/showrunner on ABC’s drama pilot Poe. The crime procedural, from writer-exec producer Chris Hollier, Warner Bros. TV and Dan Lin's Lin Pictures, follows Edgar Allan Poe, the world's very first detective, as he uses unconventional methods to investigate dark mysteries in 1840s Boston. Kern previously served as showrunner on the WB’s Charmed.

It’s reported that Alex Graves will direct the pilot.

Known prominently for his Gothic tales of terror and revenge, Poe was the author of several detective stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said were “a root from which a whole literature has developed...Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?”

Read “The Murder's in Rue Morgue” here.

Later this year, John Cusak will star as Poe in the James McTeigue-directed film, The Raven. The movie is a fictionalized account of Poe’s mysterious last days—spent, as speculated by some, following a serial killer inspired by his horror stories.

Cusack as "Father of the Macabre," Edgar Allan Poe, in the upcoming psychological thriller The Raven.