YA Guy Posts a Letter

Now that Scott Blagden's DEAR LIFE, YOU SUCK giveaway is over, I thought I'd offer the following treat to those who enjoyed Scott's interview: the actual query letter he sent to Liz Bicknell at Candlewick Press. It's written in the voice of his irrepressible anti-hero, Cricket Cherpin, and it gives you some idea what to expect when you read DEAR LIFE, YOU SUCK. (It also says something about Scott's chutzpah!) So enjoy!

Dear Ms. Bicknell,

I just read a book you edited and I was like oh my god this author reminds me of the dude who’s writing my story like when he tells how my English teacher Foxy Moxie whisper-growls at me in class like she’s some highfalutin Roxbury street corner candybar bullhorning that she’ll oodle-a-noodle in the poopadaloopa if the price is right which reminds me of testicles on breasticles but don’t heavy-hymnal my ass if that naughtytime hankering is over the top onacounta I told him not to write it but he was like sometimes you have to write about old men poking little boys in the bum and sticky thongs and girls tinkling in the woods and other scratchy understuff as a way of exposing silky upperstuff and my author does a million things like that with goofy idiotsyncrasies and other poetic bisons like sometimes he’ll communicable things without actually saying them by dripping them metafornical and stuff and I’m not saying that my story is any great shakes or anything but it’s kinda interesting onacounta my fisticuffing encounters and my scar and Caretaker and my friend Grubs Dillar who ends up getting killed which is sad and my stupid crappy past onacounta how people like to read about bad things happening to other people which personally I think is fucked up and I’m like why don’t you go and read a story about your own stupid life and sometimes I feel like walking into Borders and popping some Harry Potter-eyeglasses-wearing douchebag square in the nose and be like there’s your blood and guts asshole how do you like it but I know I’d just get in more trouble than I already am and get like my two hundred and fifty millionth speech from Mother Mary Mothballs who punishes me like a real mom which is probably the only reason I’m still Superglued to this enormous floating ball of shit and my Dear Life You Suck English ASSignment letter which is really the funandmental point of the hole story which Moxie wants me to elaborate on like she’s all SPECIFICITY and I’m like this sliver of flimsy pulp ain’t nothing more than a see-ya-on-the-flipside farewell but to be honest I know it’s more and I do want to finish it before my eighteenth birthday which is in May and which is also D-Day and the place I live which I call the Prison but it’s really not a prison but I call it that onacounta it was a prison a long time ago back when dudes dressed like beefthiefs in silky knee-highs and poofy pantaloonies and the story room which used to be a guard tower where I tell tall tales to my roommates the Little Ones who are the reason I get in so many fights onacounta I defend them from bullies except Mother Mary says my fist flailing is really about something else and I use the Little Ones getting picked on as an excuse but I’m like oh yeah right like you dishing out free eats and sandpaper sheets to abandoned doorstep turds ain’t about something else too and my nighttime giggle-juice-induced rumpus ruckus on the Silky Jets that has wicked awesome God Art views of the briny deep and of course the silky girl Wynona.

Well, I gotta run on now.

Sincerely,

Cricket Cherpin (yeah, it’s my real name so you can corkitate the snickerfizzles.)

Professional Tagonist

PS        You should like write Scott a letter and ask him to send you some of his word diddlings onacounta I think you guys would hit it off and I don’t mean for that to sound sexplicitly grandiose or anything but literarically-speaking I mean.

PMS    I put his address on the flipside.  Graciass for reading this.