Bouncer Post #126

Title: SILO

Genre: YA Post Apocalyptic

Word Count: 84,000

Query:

After a global disaster strikes, seventeen-year-old Lizzie Wallace is

kidnapped from the rubble of her high school in Los Angeles and flown

across the devastated country. Her new home is an underground silo

hidden deep in the Adirondack Mountains. Like a modern day Noah's Ark,

the children are there in pairs - male and female, ranging in age from

ten to eighteen. They are the future, each one chosen for their

special skill to rebuild society. There's only one problem - Lizzie

doesn't have the skill they think she does.

Her repeated failure at the one thing that she's expected to

contribute to the group cements her belief that she doesn't belong

there. Even her growing attraction to eighteen-year-old Brand doesn't

stop her from plotting to escape the silo and return to the family she

knows is frantic about her. But when the man who brought her there is

killed, Lizzie learns a secret that changes everything she believes

about the silo and her place in it.

SILO is an 84,000 word YA Post Apocalyptic that will appeal to readers

of Legend and Divergent.

I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting from the

University of Southern California and am a member of SCBWI.

First 250:

The first explosion rocks the room, sending my books flying off the desk. The second makes the ground tremble and the lights flicker.  Ms. Clark drops the dry eraser and grabs the corner of her large desk. I brace for a third and don't have to wait long. This one flings the glass specimen jars from the walls, smashing them onto the concrete floor. The smells of formaldehyde and death fill the science class.

"Everyone remain calm," Ms. Clark says, her voice shaky.

"Should we get under our desk?" I ask.

Ms. Clark, now frozen in place, doesn’t respond. I don’t wait for an answer, crawling under mine.

“Lizzie,” Christopher calls to me, but in the chaos I can’t find him. Bodies swarm everywhere in panic. Doesn’t anyone remember the drills we’ve been practicing for a decade now? We’ve been hearing about The Big One since we could walk. They’ve trained us for this. Get under your desks, curl into a little rock, and remain calm until the earthquake stops.

Only this isn’t stopping. The ground shakes again and the lights go out. Screams and sobs reverberate over the din of the creaking building, its beams groaning in protest. Hazy patches of sunlight cut through the room and I wonder how long the windows will hold.

I feel a hand on my arm, strong and warm. I don’t even have to look to know whose it is.I have every callous on Christopher's hand memorized.

Bouncer Post #125

Title: ROCK WILL YIELD

Genre: Literary Fiction

Word Count: 90,000

Query:

ROCK WILL YIELD is a work of literary fiction about relationships beginning and ending, families forming and disintegrating, and principles colliding with people. The novel is narrated by three interweaving voices.

Stephen James is a gay man who loves a woman. When their marriage fails, Stephen is despondent until he meets a man who offers him a second chance at love. But even as his relationship with his partner deepens, Stephen struggles to forget his ex-wife, and on his trips to the city for visitation with their daughter, he begins spending more and more time with her. When his partner asks Stephen to start a family, Stephen has to decide between the man who wants to move forward and the woman he can't get past.

Higen Nishida’s future is set, defined by the expectations of his culture and his family: upon graduation, he will return to Japan, work for the family law firm, and enter into an arranged marriage. Then he falls in love with the football team’s star tight end. As their relationship develops, Higen’s future plans are unsettled, and he must choose between breaking promises and breaking hearts.

Raven Madison is attacked and blinded following a moonlit tryst on the beach. As she struggles to adjust to life without sight, her already frail emotions are further agitated by the romantic attentions of Jack, the one-night stand she never expected to see again. Raven questions Jack’s sincerity, and his touch triggers violent flashbacks. Bit by bit, his steady devotion wins her over, and she falls in love. But when Jack proposes, Raven panics. She must decide whether to face her fears or lose her love.

First 250:

Maximilian the cat is off exploring the yard, which is teeming with crickets and cicadas. Bats are snatching mosquitos from the air. A possum is foraging by the fencepost. Maximilian will live with Danni and warm her lap on cold days, hunt the field mice she refuses to kill.

I wanted to see the sunrise, but I don't think I'll make it. Two handmade envelopes sit beside me, handwritten letters inside; I hope that Grace and Danni will understand, and that Truth will not forget me.

Two pills every twenty minutes. Not so close together that I'll vomit them up, but close enough to do the trick. I've lost nearly all the dexterity in my hands, and my eyelids are cumbersome. I find myself fighting it.

Ants crawl between the blades of grass around my chair — or perhaps they are only shadows cast by the clouds passing in front of the moon. Across the road, a street lamp taints the sky.

My lips are numb now, my lips and my extremities. I can feel the wind moving over my bare legs, my neck, my cheeks; Gabriel used to love to kiss my lips, to tickle them with his stubble. But Gabriel is gone, murdered, the funeral closed casket.

#

My phone rang.

"They caught him."

"Raven?"

"They caught him, Stephen."

I opened my mouth to speak, but only air came out.

"It's over. It's finally over."

Silence.

"I thought you'd want to know."

I nodded, hung up the phone, braced myself against the doorjamb and waited, but nothing came. An hour passed, two. No tears. No relief. I called the police looking for details, but they wouldn't give me any information; I "wasn't family."

Bouncer Post #124

Title: ENVISION

Genre: YA science fiction

Word Count: 104,000

Query:

When Naia Imrie, daughter of the world’s foremost neurotechnologist, witnesses her father’s murder, she believes his death is revenge for inventing the ports, revolutionary implants that transform human brains into computers.

And now his killers are after her.

Naia heeds her father’s dying words and flees to EnvisiTech, the powerful company responsible for marketing port technology. But Evan, the secretive leader of the anti-port resistance, kidnaps her. He claims EnvisiTech is corrupt and that her father was involved in a twisted plot to control humanity. The resistance insists the ports are harmful, causing devastating physical symptoms and opening the door for memory tampering and mind manipulation. As if these accusations aren’t sinister enough, the situation compounds with the emergence of DELETE, an enigmatic terrorist group that infects port users with a fatal digital virus.

While struggling to come to terms with her father’s death and true motivations, Naia must determine whom to trust. But it isn’t as simple as choosing a side. An unexpected discovery reveals her father’s legacy: the means to take down the enemy, which makes her both the ultimate threat and the ultimate target. She must find her place in the fight and face her growing feelings for Evan, whose real identity could be one of the greatest obstacles of all.

In a world where it’s possible to inload anything into your brain, it’s hard to discern the truth, and with tangled connections everywhere—synaptic, electronic, between people and sides—making the wrong connection could be deadly.

First 250:

Perhaps something interrupts the stillness of the hall, a faint sound surfacing through the music in my head, or a slight stirring of air. Maybe it’s the shiver that tingles up my spine and all the way to the nerve endings in my fingertips, or the simple fact that the door is ajar. Whatever it is that alerts me, I know something’s wrong.

The kind of wrong that changes everything.

Stop, I command, and the song blaring between my ears immediately cuts out, the drumming of my heart replacing the beat of the music. I flatten a cautious palm against the door and swing it open wider, revealing the room beyond.

Against the backdrop of our trashed apartment, my father kneels on the carpet, shaking hands elevated in surrender, eyes wide behind his broken glasses. A masked thug holds a gun to his forehead.

Dad’s gaze darts in my direction. Horror-stricken at seeing me framed in the doorway, he defies the weapon and risks a warning. “EnvisiTech! Run, Naia!”

The thug’s head whips around, catching sight of me through the eye holes in his mask. There’s no mistaking the message reflected there: You’re next.

My fight or flight response kicks in, my body instinctively deciding on flight, feet moving of their own accord. Behind me, I hear my father bargaining with his attacker, pleading with him to leave me alone. I’m not banking on it. I tear down the hall toward the elevator, and the sharp sound of a single gunshot reverberates through the air.

Bouncer Post #123

Title: THE STONETALKER

Genre: MG Fantasy

Work Count: 57,000

Query:

Birthdays shouldn’t be this tough.

But ever since his dad died, Asher thinks they’d be a heck of a lot easier with him around. When Asher turns 13 his mom gives him a pretty unusual present. An old pin that belonged to his father.

And that’s when everything changes.

Strangers start showing up at Asher’s school. Objects begin moving around on their own. Mysterious creatures keep lurking around every corner.

And when Asher gets chased into a world called Eden Worn through his school’s boiler room, he finds out why. It’s because his dad’s not really dead. He’s being held prisoner by Lord Balor. A madman who wants something of Asher’s. Something Asher doesn’t even know he has.

The power to use the magic from the ancient Stones in Eden Worn.

Asher has to make a decision. If he leaves Eden Worn, he’ll never see his dad again. But making a deal with Lord Balor could mean the end of both worlds as he knows it.

Nope. Birthdays shouldn’t be this tough.

First 250:

Birthdays royally suck.

Hold on. Back up. They used to royally suck. Especially Asher’s sixth. That was the day his dad died.

During the service, Asher never cried. Not because he didn’t want to. He wanted to throw himself on top of the closed casket and empty about a million gallons of tears and say bad words and kick things and scream.

But he didn’t.

He needed to be strong for his mom. His dad was strong. His dad was a bricklayer and had big muscles all over. And he never let anything bad happen to them.

No, Asher didn’t cry because he had to be the strong one now. While everyone else blew their noses into little tissues and sniffled and wiped their eyes, Asher held it all in. Even Em cried the whole time. She sat a few rows back in the non-family section, but Asher could tell it was her. Best friends always know things like that.

The preacher stood up front, whispering things about being reunited one day. But Asher couldn’t listen.

He knew he’d never see his dad again.

And every birthday after that one was just a reminder. Happy birthday, kid, hey remember how your dad’s dead?

It took a while for birthdays start to sucking a little less. But eventually, October 9^th became just another day. The sting was still there, sure. It always would be. But Asher sort of got used to being the kid without a dad. 

Bouncer Post #122

Title:  THE HOUSE ON GROSVENOR STREET

Genre:  YA Fantasy

Word Count:  95,000

Query:

Fourteen-year-old Freddy just wants to stay beneath the radar, surviving high school by not drawing attention to herself.  However, everything in her life seems to be going wrong at once.  Her friends are pulling away from her, her mother and stepfather have disappeared into their own little world, her stepbrother’s presence in her house is becoming intrusive, and Freddy’s constant directionless anger is beginning to escape her control.  When a scatterbrained private investigator and a sarcastic teenager named Josiah move in next door and attach themselves to Freddy, it seems just another complication.  Then Freddy and Josiah walk through a door into the middle of a battle in medieval Sweden.  Moreover, Josiah is completely unsurprised that they have done so.

Freddy finds herself bouncing around through space-time, forced to negotiate the perils of Stone Age social customs, futuristic gang warfare, burgeoning hormones, drug-induced poetry composed by a manic-depressive, and an incarnation of chaos with a fixation on squirrels.  Simultaneously, she must both try to find a way back home and puzzle out exactly what her new neighbours—whoever and whatever they really are—want with her and her fragmented family.

THE HOUSE ON GROSVENOR STREET is a darkly comic time-travel tale that also deals with the power, and the danger, inherent in stories.  This 95,000-word novel follows Freddy’s struggle to come to terms with herself against the backdrops of high school and the entire history of the human race, not necessarily in that order.

First 250:

Freddy never knew exactly how well or how badly she remembered that encounter in the park.  She hadn’t done much with the memory—taking it out whenever she touched the key, but not for more than a few seconds at a time—and she sometimes thought she preferred it vague.  But she found it varied much more than her other memories did.  Some things that had happened to her she remembered sharply, as if she had stepped away from the time of the memory only just now; some had faded to a fuzzy grey.  Mel told her once that this was supposedly normal and had something to do with synapses, but Freddy didn’t pay much attention to Mel when she used words that were bigger than she was.  The encounter in the park was sharp and fuzzy at the same time.  She could feel the wood of the bench digging into her legs; she could see the key flashing between the woman’s fingers.  She thought she remembered every word they had spoken.  Maybe she was just pretending she did.  A lot of the images were blurred, incomplete.

She thought it had gone like this:

The voices from the house faded behind her as Freddy tore across the front yard and then the street, heading into the park.  She had run into the park a lot lately.  Her parents didn’t ever really talk any more; it was all screaming, broken by intervals of icy silence.