answers, part 2: query letters

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Lacey asks:

Would you post us the query that got you your fabulous agent?

I would if I could. Except it didn't quite work that way. But bear with me, folks. And I will post two query letters and in the process Tell A Story with a Moral.

First, we have to go back in time to my first book. A nonfiction travel memoir, which, at the time I was querying it, was called Hobbits On The Silk Road: Dispatches From A Shrinking World. This is the...