Balancing Act

Monday, September 12, 2016

#SonofaPitch #8: Improbable Girl

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for.

For participants, welcome to my blog! I'm happy to host you and excited to see what kinds of stories you've written. Please remember that only the author of this piece and the participating judges are supposed to comment. All other comments will be deleted.

Title: Improbable Girl
Age and Genre: Adult Women's Fiction
Word Count: 82,000

Query:

Daniel knows how many steps there are to his fifth floor walk-up, and tonight he counts as he climbs a little slower than normal. Inside his apartment, his numbers and rational logic can't comfort his wife, Jane. When he finally opens the door, it’s worse than he thought: Jane’s in the tiny living room trying to put a crib together—but she isn’t pregnant.

IMPROBABLE GIRL is a dual narrator, dual-timeline love story that begins in the middle as a marriage cracks under the weight of infertility. The story bounces back and forth in time, connecting the dots between the excitement of first dates and budding love to the turmoil of needles and ultrasounds. In the present, Jane, a former dancer who’s always been in control of her body, is so consumed by getting pregnant that she neglects everything else in her life. Daniel, a hyper-logical math teacher, can never say the right thing, so he retreats into silence. In the midst of an expensive and exhausting third round of IVF, Daniel’s infidelity is followed by a confession that he can’t handle the emotional toll of more treatments. Jane packs a suitcase and walks out, barreling forward with her third egg retrieval. She browses a sperm bank, unsure of what she wants more, her marriage or a baby. When doctors discover a tumor on Jane’s ovary, Daniel's fear of losing her for good impels him to find her and earn her forgiveness. For Jane, more than a baby is at stake now, and she recognizes that she can’t do everything alone. Reunited, they face Jane’s surgery together, knowing the cancer may have spread and she could wake up from surgery unable to ever carry a baby.

First 250 Words:

I counted the stairs on the day we moved in. There are 50 steps to our apartment on the fifth floor, so every five steps is equal to 10% of the trip to the top. That is, if you ignore the 6 steps on the stoop. If I count those, then every 5.6 steps is 10% and really, that is not so nice. I’d have to break the steps into fractions, and therefore break the rise of my foot as it travels between one step and the next. I walk home tired after teaching eleven year-olds and I can’t achieve that level of precision. So we’ll disregard those first 6 steps.

Tonight as I walk up, I count by ten percent as I always do. It’s a nice rhythm as my foot strikes each step and my shoe scratches across the surface. One, two, three, four, ten, one, two, three, four, twenty. That’s five-four time in music—five beats to the measure. If it was four-four time, it would be symmetrical, but five is prime. Tough choice, symmetry or primes. In general, four-four is my favorite, symmetrical with two downbeats.

One, two, three, four, fifty. Fifty percent is nice, but my legs are burning a bit. By seventy-five, I’m getting close, so I take the steps two at a time.

I like to know exactly where I’m going and how long it will take to get there.

Beyond these stairs and their five-beat rhythm, I don’t know where Jane and I are going or how far away it is. That distance is undefined.

#SonofaPitch #7: Best Laid Plans in Scotland

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for.

For participants, welcome to my blog! I'm happy to host you and excited to see what kinds of stories you've written. Please remember that only the author of this piece and the participating judges are supposed to comment. All other comments will be deleted.

Title: Best Laid Plans in Scotland

Age and Genre: Adult contemporary romance
Word Count: 74,000

Query:

Marie Christie’s ex-boyfriend is a dirtball. When given the opportunity to escape his drama for her oldest friend’s destination wedding inScotland, she pounces. The trip gives her a chance to heal her heart and earn the coveted *I don’t need a man card*. Nothing can stop her. Well, except for the hot Scot tour guide she has to spend a week with on a small tour bus. Exploring Scotland with the most delicious kilted man in the British Isles makes protecting her heart and keeping her distance…complicated. Marie must steel herself against his charms and focus on returning to her life back home because she needs to support her sister since their flake of a mother won’t stick around long enough to do it.

Oliver Stuart has the chance of a lifetime to expand his tour business and offer his part-time guides full-time jobs, unless rival beats him to the opportunity of a lifetime. Not to mention the distracting American lass he can’t get out of his mind. Add a bus full of well-meaning busybodies playing matchmaker (and a few trying to get in the way) and they’ve got a wild holiday in Scotland. They can’t deny their burning attraction, but they live an ocean apart and can’t ignore their responsibilities at home.

First 250 Words:
Whisky flavored condoms? Marie chuckled as she reached in her purse to snag a few coins for the vending machine. Her first day in Scotland and she’d already found the perfect souvenirs for her friends. The toilets may not be clean at this Glasgow pub, but at least it offered flavored prophylactics in festive packaging.

She admired the red and orange tartan cardboard packages as she exited the bathroom. Her body slammed into a hard chest. She tore her eyes away from the packets and looked up. "Excuse me. I'm sorry, I-"

A curly haired sexpot with eyes as bright as the Caribbean Sea gifted her with a wicked grin.

Her first thought? She wanted to jump up and wrap her arms and legs around him.

Second thought? Don’t. That's inappropriate behavior.

Third thought? Wuss.

She stared at him and watched his eyes lower to the ridiculous handful of condom packets she pressed into his chest.

"Hoping to pull?" he said with a toe-curling brogue.

"Pull? No, these are souvenirs." A laugh bubbled up and escaped her throat in the form of something far too close to a squeak. "These are hilarious. Back home the condom machines don't have anything as fancy as this."

He grinned down at her. She appreciated that he was at least six inches taller than her. “The flavored ones are only in the machines. I prefer the plain ones.”

#SonofaPitch #6: Dead & Buried

Title: Dead & Buried
Category and Genre: Adult, Historical Mystery
Word Count: 90,000

Query:
Will Dwyer is a police constable and a convicted thief, but that's common in Van Diemen's Land, where the police are poorly paid and the labour force consists mostly of convicts. He is tired of being looked down on for being a felon, no matter how hard he works. When he has to take charge of an outlaw found dead in the bush, Will is subjected to one dismissive comment too many. He resolves to find killer, even if it takes him into parts of town he's been warned off, and once he apprehends them, he'll earn himself a pardon and be just as good as the free men who sneer at him.

Nobody wants to help Will investigate. Not his partner, not the rich man who found the body, and not his new friend Luke, whose scorn inspired the quest. But Will persists, trudging through the streets and taprooms of Hobart Town, until his investigation uncovers a secret that endangers Luke and negates the work he has so far down. Faced with increasing self-doubt, Will has a choice: continue his fruitless quest at the risk of betraying his friend, or stick to patrolling the streets and accept that those that look down on him are right.

First 250 Words:
I am a constable at Hobart Town. On the morning of the fifth of November, I was in the taproom of the Duke of Wellington when I saw a crowd coming down the street, following, as best I could tell, a man with a horse. Not a man on a horse, but a man walking beside a horse.

Above them, the sun shone bright in a blue sky, another day of no rain with not even a wisp of cloud. In here, in this tap-room, it was shaded and cool, even in the doorway, and the mug of ale in my hand was just a mouthful from being full. A waste of good coin to put it aside now, and if I waited long enough, there was always a chance whoever was actually on duty would arrive to take care of the crowd.

I wished they'd hurry.

"Something has your interest there," said a deep voice. A stool scraped over the floor and then the big hulk of Pete Woodrow joined me in the doorway, or behind me, there not being enough room for both of us. "That's quite a gathering up the road. Shouldn't you be bothering them, lad?"

The mug I held was smooth under my fingers, the ale within would be just as smooth as it slide down my throat, its warmth spreading out through the rest of my body. After being roused from my bed at some unholy hour this morning, I deserved this.

#SonofaPitch #5: Simple Acts of Grace

Title: Simple Acts of Grace

Age and Genre: Adult, Historical Fiction

Word Count: 80,000

Query:

When a young nurse uncovers horrific abuse at a Nazi baby factory, she saves the children by joining forces with an unlikely ally — an SS officer working covertly for the resistance.

When Allina Strauss arrives at the notorious Nazi baby factory called Hochland Home, she has nothing left to live for. SS officers have murdered nearly everyone she loves and killed her innocence. The only thing standing between Allina and death is a set of forged papers that hide a terrifying secret: Her mother was Jewish, making her a half-bloodMischling.

Traumatized and grieving, Allina’s despair grows as she becomes both participant and witness to Heinrich Himmler’s ruthless eugenics program. Girls of pure blood mate with SS officers to breed offspring for the Führer, while nurses like Allina must follow strict protocols and treat babies like inventory, without affection. Hundreds of Hochland Home's neglected, disabled children wind up in experimental hospitals, slated for execution.

But grace often appears at the most hopeless moments. When Gruppenführer Karl von Strassberg catches Allina cuddling a baby, she’s afraid she’ll be punished for breaking house rules. Instead, Karl is intrigued by her gentle approach and seeks out her company. He even secures Himmler’s approval for a rehabilitation plan for the children.When Karl learns Allina is half Jewish, he vows to protect her and shares a secret that changes both their destinies: While outwardly loyal to the Reich, Karl works in secret to smuggle Jewish children to England. As their shared work brings them closer and friendship deepens into love, Karl and Allina are forced to live double lives amid the growing threat of war. And when Allina becomes pregnant, the couple faces a harrowing decision: Will they continue to risk their lives, and the life of their unborn child, to transport more children to safety?

First 250 words:

Evil rarely falls like a hammer, Uncle Dieter always warned, for at its core, evil is a cowardly thing. Evil lives in the shadows. It sneaks around, like a pickpocket. We must be vigilant, child. Even the smallest act of evil can destroy.

Allina accepted her uncle’s words as truth, because he was the smartest, kindest man in her world. He was the only father she’d ever known.

Three years ago, on the day the Führer became Chancellor, Allina rushed home from school to find her aunt and uncle at the kitchen table, weeping. Shocked silent, she’d hesitated in the doorway while their sobs filled the room. Her aunt and uncle had wiped their tears and beckoned her inside with smiles, but Allina wasn’t fooled. Uncle hugged her so tightly her ribs had burned, and Auntie’s hands trembled when she poured Allina a glass of milk. She’d realized the truth that day, at thirteen: Adolf Hitler was the evil Uncle warned her about.

Allina knew evil existed. But she never thought she’d recognize it in the face of a friend.

“You’d have those filthy Jews here? Why?” Fritz’s voice was high and sharp, like the crack of a horse whip. Sitting up in the grass, he made a show of brushing bits of leaves off his grey trousers and smoothing the untidy strands of his blond, razored hair.

Allina’s cheeks prickled with alarm. His obnoxious jokes usually made her sick to her stomach, but Fritz had never been so vicious.

#SonofaPitch #4: Talisman

Title: Talisman

Category and Genre: Adult/Fantasy

Word Count: 90,000

Query:

In Talisman, ordinary people are drawn to ordinary objects with the power to fill the holes in their lives. A plain young woman discovers a mirror that transforms her into whatever person she wants to be. A hopeless gambler finds a lucky coin. A blind girl obtains glasses that enable her to see. The main protagonist, Adam—a millennial stuck in a mind-numbing job, with no girl, no prospects, no purpose—finds a key that enables him to summon untapped willpower and envision possibility. So of course he has no idea what to do with it. That’s when Adam meets Delilah and is drawn into the middle of a secret war between the Order, which believes the talismans are the key to natural selection, and the Following, which believes the talismans herald the Second Coming and that Adam may be the martyr for whom they’ve been waiting. So Adam must find his true purpose, decide whether he can trust Delilah, and avoid becoming a casualty.

First 250 Words:

A darkness without end, she had been born without sight. She likes to think that the fleeting memory of being born into the world, a world of light and movement, was real. Her doctors had ignored such reminisces.

If true, no matter how unlikely, it is unimportant now. What is more cruel, a child who could once see or one who would never know the loss? Such questions were philosophical.

She likes to imagine red. It seems pure. Is it like "sharp" or "hot"? Is it "blaring" or "piercing?"

There are those who muse that one person's red could look blue to another and vice versa. The subject and the name would be the same, the experience divergent. Who can tell?

Some brains were wired differently. They could smell green or see sweet. It was all a matter of perception, not worse, just different. She had consoled herself with such thoughts.

The doctors had given her mother too much oxygen or perhaps it was the nurses. They had not heeded the monitors. She had been a newborn. Her mother died giving birth to her. Everyone said there was nothing that could have been done.

She did not accept that. Her attorney had won compensation. She got A's studying Braille high school text books. Some things just happen. Some things people make happen.

The apartment building is quiet but not silent. The floors creak. Someone is moving about behind a closed door.

#SonofaPitch #3: Chained

Title: CHAINED
Age and Genre: Adult Fantasy
Word Count: 118k

Query:

When slavers steal her from her village in the wastes of the southern continent, Astara doesn’t expect to emerge from a horrific ritual with the power to accomplish unexplainable feats. But being cursed with magic also bestows her with another unwelcomed gift: a lifetime of enslavement.

Wishing to return to her family, Astara is instead sold to a pair of cosmopolitan, ladder-climbing nobles who already own a famous dancer, Dahlia Vessa. But Dahlia is not who she seems to be: she’s a double agent, spying on her masters for a clandestine faction called the Nameless Circle.

The Circle fights to free those branded with magic, but they’re not the only ones set on freeing the city’s slaves. Astara and Dahlia are soon caught in the middle of an underground war between the Circle, and another faction who seek to exterminate those without magic.

The factions soon discover the two women are a pairing of Arcana SiFayn, an incredibly rare type of mage who combine powers to cast devastatingly strong magic. With control of either one of them, the Circle and Revs believe they would have the power to change the tide of the war against the masters to their subversive objectives.

But after Dahlia is arrested for murder due to the wild powers of their connection, Astara must find a way to free her friend before she’s executed for her alleged crimes, or worse: the Revenants convince her to join them in their genocidal crusade.

First 250 words:

Ministers escorted a line of captives across the length of the square training area, cruel cold cobblestones under their bare feet. At the end of the queue, shivering and teeth chattering, a young woman followed, shuffling her steps before crossing an open door’s threshold and entering a crumbling wood building. Holding her chained wrists against her chest, she stared at the floor, the pale morning light casting the Ministers’ shadows across the planked boards like mythical phantoms ready to strike. She startled when the door clapped closed behind her.

Nearly all the Ministers Astara encountered possessed magic–powers they could use to do things she had only dreamed of before slavers kidnapped her from her village on the southern continent. Lighting. Fire. Throwing objects without touching them. Slamming a door without so much as lifting a finger was hardly the most impressive feat, but she still didn’t understand how any of them did it. Her people didn’t have magic on the Mountain; in all her twenty-two years of life on the Great Southern Plains, in the region known as the “Dustbin” to the local Rykonians, she’d never seen anything like it.

In front of her, the other captives continued to walk in sync further into the building, and Astara’s chains attached to them yanked her forward. She stumbled and wobbled, her vision blurring, but managed to stay upright, feeling like she’d been awake for days on a hunt. Maybe she’d not quite woken up, her body sluggish and lethargic.

#SonofaPitch #2: Forge Bay

Title: FORGE BAY
Category and Genre: Adult Fantasy
Word Count: 108,000

Query:

Jona is a young warrior, bonded as concubine to a powerful kin chief she despises. Forbidden to wield her spear, she rails against a life trapped behind the loom, but cannot leave if she hopes to preserve the final shred of her family's prestige.

When one of the chief’s fighters is killed in a failed ambush, his honorless kin captures the man they deem guilty. Roused by memory of her brother’s unlawful death, Jona attempts to free the captive before he faces retribution. After botching the rescue, she inadvertently opens a Farstep, an entryway to a lost realm enabling her to travel anywhere in the world within moments. Jona must decide whether she can trust the stranger beside her as she chooses between the unknown dangers beyond the Farstep, or the swift wrath of the kin she’s desperate to leave behind.

Meanwhile, Age is a reluctant prodigy of the people who maintain a tenuous link to the little magic left in the world. His unmatched ability to control the essences of nature should be a boon. To Age, his talents only mire him in suffocating responsibilities.

When a strange new power beckons to him in a way he can’t ignore, his instincts urge him to investigate. Eager to spy on the Farstep and avoid the awful sacrifice his people demand of him, Age uses his magic to infiltrate the kin. But he never expects to befriend Jona, and to regret the lie that has her believing he’s someone he’s not. Caught between conflicting loyalties, Age faces an impossible choice: to serve his people, or save his friend.

First 250 Words:

The band of raiders returned at sunset.

Jona sensed the glimmer of a dozen lives in her mind as they neared the seaside farm on horseback. She stilled the shuttle of the loom she shared with Elva, and lifted a hand to block the light from the setting sun so she could watch the raiders’ triumphant return through the weaving room’s narrow window. Sunlight speared defiantly across the plains, threatening to dazzle her vision—but wasn’t bright enough to wash out the thrashing profile of a person tied behind one of the mounts, being dragged through the grass until the riders dismounted in the yard. And atop that horse—

It couldn’t be.

She lunged, kicking aside her cushions to reach the open window. Golden sunlight glinted off motes of grit churned up by the people and horses milling in the yard a stone’s throw away. Coughing, Jona waved away the dust as she pulled herself into the overgrown window well.

The answer to her prayers rested casually over the rump of the nearest horse.

“Jona?” Elva’s voice, empty of its normal laughter, nearly drowned within the roaring of Jona’s own heartbeat as it echoed in her ears. “What’s wrong?”

“Our raiders are back,” Jona said, hardly paying attention to what she was saying. There was a man lying in the grass, covered in dirt and straw, trying to draw himself up to his knees. As he stirred, one of the raiders turned and booted him in the ribs.

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