Blind Speed Dating #4 (MG)

Title: DRAGON SPOTTING IN GRUMBLING PARSNIP

Genre: MG Contemporary Fantasy

Word Count: 50,000

Query:

More than anything, ten-year-old Joshua Quick would like his dad not to be dead. Failing that, he'd like him to at least be dead in a normal way, instead of a shambling, zombie-like way.

Even for the magical village of Grumbling Parsnip, this is unusual behavior. Joshua’s barely over saying goodbye the last time, but with zombie-dad proving uncharacteristically murderous, he must find a way to tuck him up beneath the ground again. An old legend provides the solution: dragon's fire, the only substance powerful enough to destroy zombie-magic and calm excitable dead people down.

A final twist in the legend makes Joshua’s quest even more urgent: dragon’s fire will not only cure his dad of being a zombie, it might just be able to bring him back to life as well. Nothing’s going to stop Joshua as he sets off on a red-hot adventure to find himself a dragon and climb down inside its belly. Without that fire, he’ll lose the greatest prize of all: the chance to bring his dad home again.  

First 250:

The village of Grumbling Parsnip sits at the very center of the British Isles. Not the geographical center, which would place it in the middle of a field close to Lancaster, but the magical center, which moves about and is never quite in one place or the other. Road signs sometimes hint at its presence, but often they point in several different directions at once, and sometimes they don’t point anywhere at all.

Surrounding the village are rolling fields of brilliant red poppies and bright blue flax, dotted with teetering haystacks and clumps of white cotton. The fields, in turn, are encircled by a ring of spiky knolls, not quite high enough to be considered mountains, but far too pointy to be mere hills.

Grumbling Parsnip is the home of Joshua Quick, a boy with hair so unruly it often tries to launch itself from his head in a bid for freedom. Joshua lives in an ancient cottage, tiny and cramped on the ground floor, but with an upper story that balloons out above it, giving it the appearance of an enormous mushroom balanced on its stalk. When it’s warm, the cottage is covered in climbing roses; when it’s cold, in moss.

Were you to go looking for the village, you would find it next to impossible to locate, but some people do stumble upon its cobbled streets. Most of them arrive entirely by accident, but there are some who only think they have found their way there by chance.