Writing a book is easy. Writing a query letter is hard.

After putting off the task all during the holidays, I tackled the first query letter yesterday. Not that I hadn't been thinking for days already about what to say. I spent three hours struggling over it yesterday, then another two hours this morning after getting some useful feedback from my wife █████.

Here's the one-page query letter I have, after much hair-pulling, constructed for The New Yorker:

January 8, 2002

Re: Query—"The Fanatic in the Street"

Mormons turn up everywhere these days: arts, entertainment, politics, Olympic organizing committees, even as characters in The New Yorker's fiction pages. You can't throw a Bible without hitting one, and being offered a Book of Mormon in exchange. They are mainstream America—or so you might think, from the image the church and its members doggedly promote.

Attractive as that image is, it downplays the creepy insularity of core Mormon practices—none so creepy as the secret rites enacted in their temples. Derived from Masonic ritual, the so-called endowment ceremony teaches Mormons the passwords and handshakes necessary to pass through the gates of Heaven. Until 1990—that's 1990, not 1890—inductees swore blood oaths to preserve the secrecy of those rituals. I'd tell you more, but then they'd have to kill me.

I'm only half-joking. I first participated in the endowment ceremony in 1986, a 19-year-old Mormon preparing to serve a two-year mission in Canada. I left the temple shell-shocked. The experience shook me as much for its tenuous connection to the doctrine I'd learned as a child as for its sexism and implicit violence. I hadn't known the afterlife was so much like Rush Week.

In my article "The Fanatic in the Street," I report my impressions of that first endowment, interleaved with a history of the ceremony's development. What I've tried to write is the article I wish I could have read at 19, before I strolled blithely into the Salt Lake temple and found myself a fanatic in embryo, soon to be an accused terrorist. My experience may even shed light on the making of fanatics overseas, something New Yorkers are struggling to grasp today.

I'm a freelance writer living in Queens. My short fiction has appeared in several science-fiction magazines and anthologies, and I wrote for the December On Magazine about Web-based WTC survivor registries. I've just completed a memoir, Missionary Man, represented by the McCarthy Agency, which details my arrest and trial for hijacking while a missionary in Calgary. "The Fanatic in the Street" is adapted from a chapter of that memoir. It runs about 10,000 words and I'm pleased to offer it for your consideration. I look forward to hearing back from you.

Sincerely,
Bill Shunn

enc: SASE

Start at the top, right? Isn't that what they always say?

I'm off to mail it now. I shall return and report.