Bouncer Post #2

Title: THE DREAMSPEAKER'S DIARY

Genre: YA 

Word Count: 70,000

Query:

Yardleigh Brier isn't a typical Grayson High teenager. She isn't striving for popularity or attention, and she's definitely not looking for a boyfriend.

Her dreams are difficult enough to manage without her real life complicating things further. Because Brier has a secret. Whatever she dreams, she can speak into existence. Not people, or fairytale creatures--there are limits to her strange ability--and nothing lasts more than a day. A frightening childhood event has taught her to hide her talent--and she does everything possible to prevent her dreams from taking shape.

At least until Keller Temms comes to town.

Suddenly, Brier's closely controlled life is thrown off balance, and her dream residuals seem to be re-writing the rules of dreamspeaking. What is the connection to Keller? And what happens when the mysterious foster child from Seattle makes her reconsider the source of her power--as well as her place in her well-ordered world?

When regulators from a secret dream research institute come after her, she will be forced to explore the limits of her abilities, and decide if Keller is an ally or the reason she is a target in the first place.

First 250:

Prologue

If I’m not careful, they’ll come for me and take me away. That’s what my mother told me the one and only time we talked about my condition. That memory is buried deep in my mind, so old that it’s hazy around the edges. Back then the lines between my dreams and reality often blurred—until I got it all under control.    

But it’s happening again, and the more my control slips, the more I think that what she said is true--and that they may still come for me after all.

Brier Yardleigh

Dream Diary, entry 1

Chapter 1

When I turned six, I learned the monsters in my closet were real—but what scared me most was realizing I had put them there.

This is my first thought when I wake in the basement closet sprawled beside the baseboards. My fingers trace the grooves of claw marks—in the place my mother couldn’t cover with paint. Her words from that night come back to me and I’m reminded that, as scary as the creature in the closet was, the people who will come for me if I’m discovered are worse. My second thought is that I have to get my dreamspeaking under control, because this is the third time this week I’ve woken up in the damn closet.

The floor creaks and a light switches on.

“Brier?” My sister’s muffled voice reaches me beyond a wall of old coats.

Squinting against the sudden brightness, I scramble out on my hands and knees.