The Writer's Voice: Query and first 250 (Treading Water)

Query and first 250 words of my YA novel, Treading Water, for an online competition, The Writer's Voice. (Also good if anyone wants to know how my novel opens and the query I've written!).

QUERY: 

I am writing to you to seek representation for my young adult contemporary novel, TREADING WATER. Treading Water is a story about what happens when everything you know is about to change, as well as family, growing up, and first love. It is complete at 64,000 words.

Eighteen year old Marian Key and her famous artist father have always lived in the same old crumbling farm house. Marian has been looking forward to returning home from school for a summer of swimming and solitude all year, and she can’t wait to shed her winter self.

But when her father announces that he is selling her childhood home and moving to America, everything Marian knows is threatened. Suddenly, the summer is fraught with the prospect of change and losing everything that she loves. She is desperate to hold onto her home, no matter what the cost, but she doesn’t know how. Time is beginning to run out, as the house is invaded by family, including a cousin who she doesn’t see eye to eye with. As Marian finds enemy forces moving in, she struggles to remember what it is she loved about her home.

Then there’s the mysterious boy Marian comes across in the woods. Sebastian Hawk is a student and artist, who is fascinated by fairy tales and finds a magic in Marian’s home that she thought had gone. After an uncertain start, Sebastian and Marian team together, as Marian tries to come to terms with growing up, moving on, and ghosts from the past, as well as falling in love for the first time. Can Marian save her home before it’s too late?

I recently completed a Creative Writing MA at the University of Exeter. I am a member of SCBWI and write for MuggleNet. In 2013 I had a short story, ‘Tide’, published in an eBook, Jam, and another short story, ‘If I Remember’ was a runner up in a YA short story competition. I was also shortlisted for an IdeasTap and Writers Centre Norwich fiction mentoring scheme in 2014 and have been awarded a Young Writer’s scholarship for the Winchester Writers’ Festival this year.


FIRST 250: 

We found the ants in the honey the morning my father made an announcement at breakfast. It was two days into the summer holidays. This seemed important, although the ants stick more in my memory. After all, it wasn’t every day you came across drowned ants in a honey jar. The morning sun bounced off the gold lid, lighting up crumbs that were scattered across the table.

 ‘Marian,’ my father said, the rejected honey pot in front of him. He laid his knife down on his plate. His voice was hesitant and hoarser than usual. His movements were slow. I paused as I buttered my toast.

 I didn’t want to look at him, nor did I want to hear what it was that he had to say. I stared at that honey pot, with the tiny black bodies floating in the thick mix. They were small dots that could have been breadcrumbs or bits of dirt. How had they even got there? They were ants on a suicide mission. It was sad to see that they had all followed one another, like a group of soldiers who trusted their leader implicitly, not realising that they were heading to their death. I shuddered.

‘Marian.’ My father cleared his throat. ‘I’m going to sell the house.’

        

Query and First 250 words of George

Posting my query and first 250 words of George's Garden here for a contest, The Writer's Voice, which I got into! Whoop! Very happy. Thanks to the lovely Heather for emailing me about it. (Find out more about the contest here). Anyway, here's my query and first 250:

George Thackery, aged eleven, hasn’t had the most exciting of summers. He has been banished to the garden due to his mum's illness, and so when he finds a girl at the bottom of his garden and stumbles into another world, he cannot be sure if it is real or not.  To be more precise, the girl is a bossy, ten year old princess, who demands if George likes birthday cake. 

A princess. Yeah right. What on earth is she doing in his garden?

GEORGE’S GARDEN is a children’s novel of princesses, adventure, forests, secret worlds and friendship, for ages 8+. George’s Garden was inspired by the time spent running around my grandparents’ house and garden when I was a child, and is influenced by classic and contemporary authors, including Lauren St John and Enid Blyton.

Chapter One: The Bottom of the Garden

The tatty old tennis ball flew over the hedge and disappeared with a thud. George Thackery stood in the middle of the lawn and stared at the place where the ball had disappeared. Paddy, his spaniel sped off after it.

Sitting down on the grass to wait for the dog, George stared up at the clear sky. He felt as if he was in the middle of a giant blue ball, with no clouds in sight, boxed in by hedges that surrounded the garden. The hedges loomed over the lawns, creating giant shadows, which betrayed monsters and creatures, roaming the garden.

His stomach rumbled as he tore at the grass, crumpling it and throwing it aside. He could think of nothing better to do than walk around the garden, counting his footsteps, in an attempt to devise a new game he could play alone. Of course it wasn’t a proper game. But after weeks and weeks of summer holiday, being told by his dad every day to ‘go play in the garden’, he was finding it hard to think of new ideas.

In the books he read the children were always going off on adventures without the adults, but he was alone. His only friends at school were all away on their summer holidays, and even if they were around, his dad wouldn’t have taken him to their houses or picked him up. Unlike the children in his story books, he just walked in circles round the garden, picking leaves off the trees and shredding them to pieces.