WIP #1: GIRLS OF GREEN (YA Fantasy)
Status: revising/querying
Comp titles: Tamora Pierce’s Wild Magic, Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, Victoria Aveyard’s Red Queen.PITCH:
The Prohibitors arrested and killed her lunatic mother years ago – now they’ve returned for her.
Seventeen-year-old Ree lives as an herbalist in the swamp, evading her fellow villagers who ignore the forbidden way she talks to plants, so long as she sells them her treasured cures. When Prohibitors follow a fugitive into her swamp, Ree’s in trouble. Her green blood is the mark of those genetically able to practice Greenworkery – magic that can tamper with nature. When Ree finds a girl in her swamp who bleeds green and carries a letter from the Greenbleeder Resistance, she knows she’s found the fugitive. She treats her injuries, but when the girl awakens, she claims to remember nothing.
Hateful of the Prohibitors that killed her mother and sick of living in oppression, Ree helps the fugitive recover her memory, hoping this will lead them to the Resistance. To do so, Ree must make peace with the malevolent magic in her blood that she’s ignored for most of her life, the same magic that turned her mother into a lunatic and led to her death.
WIP #2: IF I WERE YOU (Beauty & Beast adult retelling)
Status: revising
Comp titles: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca set to a Loreena McKennitt soundtrack.PITCH:
Iris Hardt understands books better than she understands people. Selectively mute after a horrific childhood accident, she is the bookkeeper of the family bookshop. Disconnected from the rest of her peers living in the seaside town of Windsmeet, she desires to be heard and acknowledged despite her damaged voice, longing for adventure as in the storybooks she so loves. The chance comes in the form of Koren, a rumored telepath and reclusive customer of the shop. At the risk of disappointing her father and sisters and abandoning their family like their mother once did, Iris travels to Koren’s tower. When she learns Koren’s telepathy is real, he blackmails her into restoring his dilapidated library. Staying with him in his tower, she discovers not only the secret to his telepathy, but also that her own family is to blame for the curse that binds him to his tower.
Koren Wynne lives under a madwoman’s curse. Damned long ago with immortality and telepathy, doomed to hear his peers’ opinions of his disreputable ways, he has confined himself to his tower for decades, cultivating a reputation of fear and the supernatural. Only a love returned can break his curse. He longs for redemption, yet when the opportunity arrives in the form of Iris Hardt, the shame of his past cripples him into inaction. When he finally dares to act, his hopes are quashed when he realizes that Iris will never be able to love him as long as she is unable to love herself.
WIP #3: (working title) THE AMBER EATERS (Adult contemporary fantasy)
Status: writing
Comp titles: An adult Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefwater’s, an Adult House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig, and an f/f Bridget Collins’ The Binding.PITCH: N/A
