I’m seething. Absolutely spitting mad.

Indulge me a metaphor moment, please.  The Call of Duty video game: Multiplayer mode, where our avatars swim in Sony’s map environment, humans playing against one another. There are times when I will see another guy’s avatar running across the map. Because of the angle, there is no way he sees me. He runs behind an object. I aim my sites at the other side of the object where I expect him to materialize in a second or two. Because I know the rhythms of the game, I actually start firing before he appears out of the other side, just to make sure his avatar steps out into a barrage of digital death.

There is no way this other guy is not going to die. I’ve got the drop on him nine ways ‘til Sunday.

And his avatar does appear, exactly where I expected. And I do drill his avatar with a hail of bullets exactly as I expected. But somehow, somehow he turns (while he is being drilled with bullets), looks at my avatar (while he is being drilled with bullets), sites on me (while he is being drilled with bullets), and shoots me dead with a single pop of his .50 cal.

“WTF? No way that just happened! How… What did… How did… NO EFFING WAY! I just put two and a half magazines worth of imaginary bullets into that guy’s blind side… and he still fucks me?”

Yep. I executed perfectly and he still got over on me.

There are a myriad of reasons why this happens in Call of Duty. The shorthand is that the reality I see on my screen is not necessarily the reality that the master host server interprets. The reality on the other guy’s screen was almost two seconds ahead of the reality on my screen. In his reality, my bullets were hitting behind him. He heard the ricochets, turned to see who was shooting at him, and had all the time in the world to aim and kill my avatar.

So…  End metaphor. Back to querying.

I am paranoid about sending email queries to agents. I’ve learned that sometimes the reality of the text I see on my browser is not what shows up on the agent’s email client. Especially when I cut and paste a form letter and then modify it for the particular agent. The modified text sometimes gets whacked on the receiving end and I can’t see that it’s whacked.

So…

I test. First I email a copy of the query to myself. Then I send to an agent and I bcc: myself and check that my query emails look exactly as I intend them to look on the receiving end.

And… Goddammit.

Here is an unforgivable mish-mash of mistakes in one of the query letters I sent that I noticed when it came winging back at the bottom of an agent’s rejection letter. Some of these mistakes are mine. Some of these are gmail formatting bullshit I did not see and over which had no control.

Colon in the wrong spot. That’s on me. Way to start a query letter, Shawn! Dumbshit.

Note that I miss the punctuation after “Mr.” Yay. I am too stupid to live. But also note what happens with the size of my text where I modified the query letter (this guy had a “NO VAMPIRES!” directive on his bio, btw). Bigger and smaller typeface? Really? I didn’t do that! I didn’t see that! It didn’t look that way in my browser window! I had no effing way of knowing gmail was screwing me until I happened to notice the copy of my email below the agent’s rejection (primarily because I gorked the colon in the subject line). It’s a flashing neon sign saying “THIS IS THE PART OF A FORM QUERY THAT WAS CUSTOMIZED FOR YOU, MR. AGENT!!!”

Gah. Humiliating It makes me positively homicidal. Whose ass do I kick?.

“Be professional.” How many times have you read that advice in an agent’s blog or an interview on Galleycat? “Be professional. You are selling a business relationship, so be business-like.”

Oddly enough, about a third of my requests for pages for novels six and seven came as a result of my being a smartass and not professional. I was feeling defeated or dejected or I ran reports on querytracker.net which confirmed to me the agents weren’t really requesting pages or looking for new clients.

This is an example of what I’m talking about: Take a look at this agent’s website bio. She hasn’t requested pages in years. And that picture! Phone to her ear. Jesus. She is absolutely clueless that her bio web page screams “Me! Me! Me! I’m so important! I can’t be bothered reading your query now, I’m on the blower with somebody dreadfully important, luv! Too busy to take headshots when the photog came for the rest of the agency. Just use this cell phone photo my husband took of me while we were on the Costa Concordia.”

Gah.

Ergo, these are the times I pull forth from my duodenum what I have coined as the “Hail Query.” “Heck. I know this query is a waste of time. Might as well throw ‘professionalism’ out the window and have a little fun.”

One agent had a single male represented in her long client list. As the closer to my form query I added, “Besides, Bob Johnson really needs somebody to talk sports with at the agency Christmas party.”

Request for pages.  Wow.  Of course, I immediately tried to milk that schtick three more times for agents with an underrepresentation of male clients and earned myself three non-responses.

“Be professional [ECHO] essional [ECHO] essional.” Sigh. Okay,

I sent one Hail Query to the cat in the agency website photo. Request for pages!

I sent a smartass Hail Query to the intern in the back of an agency website photo. Nonresponse.

I noticed the agent I was querying represented Nate Bransford. I added a postscript to my form query: “P.S. Please tell Nathan Bransford to get a haircut.”  Request for pages.

“Be professional [ECHO] essional [ECHO] essional.”

Until the gimmick factor of the Hail Query results in an offer of representation, “Be Professional” wins.  But if it’s third-and-long, late in the fourth quarter, I just may take the snap out of the shotgun formation and throw a Hail Query into the endzone.

One of these days somebody just might catch it.

Or not.