Saturday, October 25, 2014

NoQS Minion 1: I'M NOT A ZOMBIE, BUT I PLAY ONE ON TV, MG Humor

Title: I’M NOT A ZOMBIE, BUT I PLAY ONE ON TV
Genre: MG Humorous Contemporary
Word Count: 30,000

My Main Character’s Most Fearsome Obstacle:

I thought my worst fear was being covered in cold, limp spaghetti, but I’d gladly swim in an Olympic-sized pool of the stuff to escape the nightmare that is this zombie sitcom. Eating brains and eyeballs is nothing compared to dealing with a demonic director, a humiliating stage dad, and a rabid, rival kid star. Being undead is killing me.

Query:

When Marty Ruckers' dad loses his job as a high school drama teacher, the extremely squeamish sixth-grader auditions for a Crunchy Clowns cereal commercial to help pay the bills.  Instead, as if by some cruel cosmic joke, he's tapped for a starring role in the new zombie sitcom, Z Street.

With foreclosure on his family's home looming, Marty reluctantly takes the gig. Now the kid who can't swallow soggy cereal has to train himself to stomach intestines without hurling every take. But Marty has headaches bigger than scrambled brains for breakfast, including an obnoxious stage dad, a drill sergeant director, and a rival veteran kid actor, who sabotages all Marty's scenes. Marty's not sure he can adjust to life as a big star. In fact, being undead just might kill him.




First 250 Words:                                                                                               

Only three things grossed out Marty Ruckers: uncrispified food, guts, and girls. And no girl grossed him out worse than his kid sister, Prunie. Especially when she sucked pureed prunes through a straw, like she did right now.

“Dad, can’t you make her stop?” Marty begged, cutting his dry toast in half. “You know I can’t eat when she slurps prunes.”

Prunie grinned and took an extra slurpy suck. She may have been only three and three-quarters, but she knew exactly how to make Marty mad. In fact, she was an expert at it.

Marty’s dad looked up from his crossword in the California Sunny Times and said what he said every morning at breakfast. “Martin, you know your sister has preferences, just like you.”

“Yes,” added Marty’s mom, opening the jelly. “You like your food dry and crunchy, and she likes hers . . . pruny.”

Staring at his paper again, Marty’s dad said, “Hmm. I need a three letter word for ‘retch.’”

Marty sighed. It was true; Prunie had been prune-crazy ever since she was a baby. His parents finally limited prunes to one meal a day to save on toilet paper.

He, on the other hand, was the king of crunch; slick, slimy food made him puke. And Marty could think of nothing (short of being covered in cold, limp spaghetti) that he dreaded more than puking.

He grabbed a handful of dry, Crunchy Clowns cereal and ate it, one clown head at a time.

“Have you tried ‘gag,’ sweetie?” his mom suggested.

7 comments:

  1. Please send full to uwe@triadaus.com and mention NoQS request in the subject line.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Shriek! Please send the pages, synopsis and query to chquery@mcintoshandotis.com, and please put Nightmare on Query Street request in the subject line.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Shriek! Please send query and pages to mail@donadio.com with #NoQS and my name in the subject line. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Shriek! Please send me the ms in Word doc format, as well as the pitch and your bio, to my email address at Clelia@martinliterarymanagement.com. #NoQs in the subject line will help me recognize it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Shriek! Please send in word doc to laura@redsofaliterary.com

    ReplyDelete
  6. Shriek! Please send query + word doc pages to taylor@waxmanleavell.com

    ReplyDelete
  7. Please do email the full manuscript to mgottlieb@tridentmediagroup.com

    Trident Media Group (TMG) is a prominent literary agency located in New York City that originally formed in 2000. TMG represents over 1,000 bestselling and emerging authors in a range of genres of fiction and nonfiction, many of whom have appeared on the New York Times Best Sellers Lists and have won major awards and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the P.E.N. Faulkner Award, the P.E.N. Hemingway Award, The Booker Prize, and the L.A. Times Book Award, among others. TMG is one of the world’s leading, largest and most diversified literary agencies. For more than six consecutive years, TMG continues to rank number one for sales according to publishersmarketplace.com in North America. TMG is the only U.S. literary agency to be in the top ten in both UK fiction and UK non-fiction.

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