Hell Hath No Fury

I wear a size 7 ½ shoe. Now, let’s say that Johnny Depp announced that he was searching for a bride and vowed to marry the woman whose foot perfectly fit into a size 6 glass slipper (designed by Tim Burton, of course). Would I simply curse my genetic makeup and get on with my life?

Hell no! I’d scrape some bone off the first metatarsal. I’d definitely ditch the distal phalanx of the second toe.  I’d get rid of the pinky toe completely and file down my heel. Then I would paint my remaining toenails black because in 1985 I read in Teen Beat that black was Johnny’s favorite color. 

Manipulating one’s foot to make it a perfect fit for Johnny Depp is a metaphor for what it’s like to go through the query process. Many of you are writers and therefore fully understand the hellishness of querying. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the process, allow me to quickly explain. 

In order to get an agent to represent your book, you must query. First, you must research to find which agents represent the kind of work you do; then you must take hundreds of pages of work and painstakingly whittle them down into a few measly paragraphs that must convince the agent that your work is amazing and a perfect fit for him or her. 

Then, you sit back as rejection after rejection after rejection after rejection roll in. 

One agency that rejected me was the one who represented the diet book Skinny Bitch. I thought we would be a perfect fit because Skinny Bitch, like my book, incorporates a sassy, humorous approach to relatively dry material. And, frankly, I was surprised that they rejected me because people in the United States are much more concerned about their grammatical correctness than their weight, right?

On the one hand, I am glad they rejected me because my agent is rad. On the other hand, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. 

So here’s the thing: yesterday, I read that Skinny Bitch is being turned into a movie. 

Here’s the premise as described in Publishers Weekly:

“A vegan chef loses her job and her boyfriend in quick succession, then finds a new beginning after launching a vegan cooking school and falling for a meat-eating man.”

Now, I feel like I simply must turn my Missed Periods and Other Grammar Scares book into a movie. A better movie! A movie that will make that agency regret the day that they tossed my query letter into the recycle bin.

Any ideas for a premise? This is all I’ve come up with so far:

An English teacher loses her job and her boyfriend in quick succession, then she opens up a grammar school and falls for The Situation.