Title:
ELEMENTAL FIRE
Genre: YA Fantasy
Word Count: 70,000
Query:
Fourteen-year-old Brook wishes she could merge
the two halves of her life: the fearless girl who flies across the countryside
on the back of a runaway horse and the timid misfit who flails at communicating
with her friends and father after her mother’s death.
Her father’s repeated disappearances don’t help
either. Brook hides in his workshop as he turns a solid rock wall into a
blinding doorway to another world. She follows and must confront all her
insecurities to prevent the theft of five ancient talismans by a madman
responsible for the bizarre blizzard that killed her mother.
Only by trusting two boys with the secret of her
new ability to track hidden people by their Heartfires and discovering the
mind-healing power of the Fire talisman can she prevent the destruction of her
path home.
ELEMENTAL FIRE is a YA Fantasy, complete at
70,000 words. It functions as a standalone book, but is intended to be the
first of a five book Elemental series similar to Piers Anthony’s Incarnations
of Immortality with touches of The Last Airbender.
First 250:
I peered into the stone-walled room Dad used as
his home laboratory. I’d never gone inside without Dad around, but I needed to
punch holes in my stirrup leathers. I got my first horse three months ago, and
my inherited saddle was made for someone much bigger. Even when Vienna behaved,
my skinny butt slid all over.
Contraptions Dad built for the university physics
lab littered steel workbenches. Shivering, I avoided bony metal arms bolted to
magnifying glasses, laser tubes and LED displays. No idea what the latest
project did, but Dad’s gadgets hadn’t topped our discussions for several
months.
I dug through drawers filled with soldering
irons, resistors and meters. Nothing looked capable of poking holes through
leather, so I made sure nothing looked out of place and returned to the garage
part of the old apple shed. Buried under unfinished projects, I found a large
nail and hammer. Wouldn’t be pretty, but it’d get the job done.
As I raised the hammer, the lab door opened. A
thin man wearing a ridiculous Futurama tee rushed through.
Dad’s head above robot Bender’s body. I would have laughed, but maybe it was
the perfect uniform.
“Dad? Where’d you come from? I was just in
there.”
Brown eyes gawked from behind thick lenses. His
mouth opened and closed.
“Brook, stay out of my shop. My equipment’s
expensive.” He stabbed a finger in my face with each word. “Just. Stay. Out.”
Seriously? He appears in a locked room, and I’m the
one in trouble?
This concept sounds really fascinating. I can totally empathize with Brook and her fearless/shy conundrum.
ReplyDeleteThe query is really pretty solid. There's a lot going on in it so maybe it could be cut down a bit, but I still really loved it!
The only improvement on the first 250 that I could suggest is that I found it a little strange that she referred to her Dad initially as "a thin man wearing a ridiculous Futurama tee" ... did she not recognize him at first?
I loved all the details about the stone-laboratory and the juxtaposition of that with the LEDs and the Futurama etc were all really nice touches to give the reader an immediate feel for the setting ... as well as the tension between her and her dad! Nicely done!
Carissa -- #24