Feb 17, 2010

Query- 7 Days (Revision 3)

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All pastors claim to believe in God; some even believe in demons – too bad Nathan Hanlin isn’t one of them.

Tired of preaching about a God who supposedly loves mankind, Nathan figures life would be easier if he took destiny into his own hands. And it is, easier that is, until a demon shows up. But it’s not just one demon that Nathan encounters, nor is he the only one having this problem. It turns out that when Nathan turned his back on God, he created a crack in the spiritual shield protecting his town, a shield that has stood in place for over 100 years.

All Nathan wants is for life to get back to normal. He’d like his nightmares to end, his friends to accept he’s never going to preach again and for his older sister to stop insisting God is trying to get his attention. Enough already. Actually, what Nathan really wants is to step back in time, to a place where he was happy, fulfilled and there were no demons to deal with. When Nathan finally gets the courage to go through his dead wife’s things, he finds out the life he thought he had never really existed.

Nathan must now choose to stop blaming God and accept his life or completely forsake everyone and let whatever comes have its way, demons and all.

7 DAYS TO REDEMPTION completed at 77,000 words is a supernatural suspense in which a pastor's faith in God is tested and his trust in his sister is betrayed.

Query: Shifting Sand (Revision)

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Dear Agent:

Sadie Sloan is discovering that it's hell on a marriage to love another man.

Sadie, a thirty-six-year-old art teacher on the brink of divorce is in self-imposed exile on Tybee, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia that is heavy on small town southern charm and social deviants.  One night after yet another bartender cuts her off, Sadie runs into Kyle, the man who left her shattered eighteen years ago.  Seeing him releases a torrent of suppressed memories of that summer after high school when she fell in love with Kyle, her boyfriend's best friend and her best friend's boyfriend.  The shocking suicide of Sadie's best friend drove them apart and Sadie never quite recovered.  Now it seems like they have another chance to discover the happiness that was denied them so many years ago.

Sadie is too busy trying to pretend to be a teenager again to listen to friends and family who are all warning her to stay away from Kyle.  Sadie's husband is too busy trying to soothe his bruised ego to tell Sadie that he loves her and desperately wants her to come back home.

Before Sadie throws her life away for Kyle, she must learn for herself that the past only exists in her memories and that as much as she may want to, she can't go back again.

Shifting Sand, a work of women's fiction, is complete at 89,000 words.  Please contact me if you are interested in seeing my novel.  Thank you for your consideration.

Query: Mayhem, Inc.

Dear Agent

The end of the world is coming in two weeks. Or so Thaddeus Sinclair would have you believe. He is a member of a covert group of anarchists called Mayhem, Inc. Sinclair has carefully devised a plot to convince the world an asteroid will collide with the earth. He has bribed, manipulated, and murdered people to get all the pieces into their exact positions. After years of meticulous planning, the endgame is set. Society will soon collapse into a quagmire of mayhem and destruction.

There is only one problem with his plan: Archer Quinn.

Quinn, a courier, only eats food he can count, organizes his clothes by color, and polishes every bullet before loading his gun. Mayhem, Inc. hires his courier service to deliver a package that includes the orders: “Kill the messenger”. But they didn’t plan on Quinn’s former Special Forces training. He escapes with their encrypted data and scarce clues on why someone wants him dead. His hunt for the truth leads him to junior reporter, Tamara Bruce. She is investigating a mysterious tip about a cover up of an asteroid strike and is at dead end until Quinn shows up.

Harrowed by strange men in gray suits, and Sinclair’s minions who want the data back, Quinn and Tamara untangle more of the plot and realize someone is manipulating everything—including them. With startling clarity, Archer Quinn realizes the chaos surrounding him is not random chance, but a set of orchestrated events. Quinn’s obsessive compulsive mind rails against the idea of organized chaos, and summarily shuts down.

As society teeters on the edge of bedlam, Tamara helps calm the order/chaos storm raging in Quinn’s head, but a new conundrum takes its place: should he continue his efforts to stop Sinclair and Mayhem, Inc.—or should he be helping them? They are after all, the order behind the chaos.