Title: Exposed: A Memoir of Love, Tainted Blood, and a Pharmaceutical Scandal (working title)
Genre: Memoir
Description: During the early days of the AIDS pandemic, young photographer falls in love with her charming and funny neighbor. When she learns he has contracted HIV and hepatitis from the blood product he used to treat his hemophilia, she believes she can handle the situation, unaware that he is part of one of the worst, (and largely unknown) pharmaceutical scandals of the twentieth century – killing tens of thousands of people worldwide.
Page One: December 1, 1985
Through the windowpane, I saw Dave clutching a fist-sized vial and a syringe. The December air bit my cheeks as I cracked open my back door. It wasn’t like him to show up uninvited in the evening. “Are you okay?” I asked, unsure if I was ready for what might come next.
“I climbed Mount Monadnock today and hurt my hip,” Dave said. “I keep missing my vein. Will you infuse me?”
I swallowed in disbelief. Dave’s hemophilia turned real in an instant. I was a twenty-six-year-old newspaper photographer, not a seasoned nurse. Sure he lived next door, but we’d only been on three dates––if you count the night we shot pool at the dive bar on the edge of the Nashua River. Certainly, we had not discussed a situation like this between barstool kisses. He’d asked me about my tastes in food, music, and books, but not, How good are you with a needle? But on his strained face, I glimpsed at years of bleeding injuries. Injuries that would require a girlfriend who could handle the interruptions. Not that I was officially his girlfriend––but those barstool kisses sure tasted sweet.
I invited Dave inside to get him out of the cold and to figure out how to handle his request.
“Thanks,” he said. “My hip’s throbbing like crazy.”
I winced as he limped across my kitchen floor to the living room, muffling his groans. I could feel Dave’s suffering, as though my own body ached. It’d been two weeks since he told me about his medical condition, and I was still getting used to it. Was he testing me to see if his hemophilia was a deal breaker?
“Have a seat on the couch,” I said. Dave settled in, and I handed him a soft pillow from my bedroom. I lowered the volume of the television, muting my Sunday night favorite, Murder She Wrote. I’d have to wait for reruns to watch Jessica figure out who injected the prison doctor with a fatal dose of morphine, leaving a needle and empty vial on her office floor. Instead, I turned my attention to the vial in my living room, along with the realization that I could not send Dave away.
Gosh- for someone post surgery for whom blood is very much on my mind, this is so powerful. I realize this is memoir, so you can only bend and tweak so much, but I do wonder in the pitch if it's possible to try and align the photographer's profession with the lover's plight a little bit. If this were a novel, I would say for example, oooh, can we make the person a photographer for the pharmaceutical company who provided the blood product? Even a hint at some kind of union between the narrator's job and Dave's plight could help you nab an agent's attention. Just a thought!
Yes! I was a news photographer always in search of the truth, and the Dave’s plight and the scandal were a result of a web of lies and deceit. I didn’t “see” the scandal/story I was living. I can say that better in print. Thank you, Courtney! I hope you have a better week, and that your surgery is a success. ❤️
You might try to place a personal essay or two on this topic somewhere-- that would help you on the query circuit! PSYCHOLOGY TODAY might be a good place to pitch.
Description: Ten years ago Hattie Stevens spent just a little over twenty-four hours with the attractive, creative, always moving, slightly chaotic writer, Ed DeArmas. Five years later Hattie attends Ed’s book signing, to her utter heartbreak, he doesn’t recognize her. Now, Hattie agrees to spend the summer rent-free on the Oregon coast with her two best friends and their partners, one who also brought a friend…Ed.
First page:
Summer Solstice 5 years
Time is not on my side today. I’m late and I’m never late. When I finally make it to the bookstore I’m out of breath. Sweat beads at the nape of my neck. The bookstore is too hot and crowded. I take out my ear buds, Stevie Nicks still crooning about thunder and rain. For a moment, I toy with the idea of leaving, heading back into the sunshine, putting my earbuds back in and going to get a solo glass of wine somewhere. Because I’m a strong independent almost twenty-four year old woman and that’s what I do now—walk around Helena with empowering women in my earbuds and am perfectly capable of getting dinner or a drink by myself. I never have, but I am capable of it.
“Name please,” the woman at the door asks with a clipboard in hand.
“Hattie Stevens.”
She flips to the next page and scratches a check next to my name. “Enjoy.”
All the neatly lined up chairs are taken, so I stand in the back tucking my freshly dyed blonde hair behind my ear (break up hair), clutching the book, his book in my other hand.
Will he recognize me with the new hair? The last time he saw me it was brown, well brown and unfortunately green. I take a deep breath. Of course he will recognize me. I still have the same face, the same blue eyes he once called mesmerizing. There’s no way he won’t recognize me. Not after what we shared. But what if he’s not happy to see me?
I’m not sure what I expected from this reading. That’s not true I know exactly what I expected, more like hoped for, but it certainly wasn’t this humid and crowded in my fantasies. I should’ve known it would be packed by the fact that I had to get a ticket, but it didn’t occur to me. All I thought was how amazing it’s on the solstice. Exactly five years later.
This part also stood out to me, like a wonderful little flashback into what it's like to be figuring out who you are in your early 20s! I reckon I'd want to be Hattie's friend 😄
"Because I’m a strong independent almost twenty-four year old woman and that’s what I do now—walk around Helena with empowering women in my earbuds and am perfectly capable of getting dinner or a drink by myself. I never have, but I am capable of it."
I'm so looking forward to this class, and the timing is perfect. Thank you... and my best wishes for healthy, happy healing!
TITLE: Hurricane Lessons
GENRE: Memoir
DESCRIPTION: A 32-year relationship is tested by a same-sex attraction, an open marriage, and an involuntary mental health stay in Hurricane Lessons, one woman’s story of a mid-life reckoning and realignment.
FIRST PAGE:
I remember the moment it happened, the single spark that set my entire existence aflame. I was in a brightly lit Pilates studio in the small Ohio town where we’d recently relocated for my husband, Chris’s job. I had paid for a private lesson.
Colleene stood behind me on the reformer and pressed her legs into my back, her hands into my shoulders. The strength of her long, lean limbs drove my body into submission. Her long, golden hair tickled the back of my neck.
“Connect your pubic bone to your sternum. Hold it.” Her voice was deep, throaty. “Even while I’m pushing you. Hold it. And breathe.”
But I could not breathe. There was no oxygen left in the room. It had been consumed by her touch, her fire.
Spontaneous combustion.
Then, a burst of confusion. I was a 45-year-old happily married mother of four. I had a big life—one that looked enviable from the outside. House in the suburbs on a lake, swimming pool in the backyard, two late-model cars in the driveway, four teenagers who lit up my world, a husband who had loved me hard since we were younger than our oldest kids. Why was I suddenly feeling this intense and undeniable yearning?
My chest heaved with the weight of this longing. It felt simultaneously familiar and forbidden, known and mysterious, natural and foreign. I searched for air as every nerve in my body shouted, This! This is who you are. This is who you’ve always been.
Whoa, intense! I love how quickly we enter the action and this inciting moment for the main character. I felt connected to the voice of the narrator, the use of language here, the rhythm of the mix of longer and shorter sentences.
There's allure in the description, the big topics this memoir will cover, that feel relevant to me and make me want to read this book. Ugh, and that involuntary stay. The vulnerability and conflict already present on the first page draw me in and create empathy for the main character. Exciting start!
Description: The story of three women whose lives are entangled with a modern fundamentalist church in a depressed Colorado town. Layered with dark stories of women from the Bible, some famous, some obscure. The story is primarily told from the perspective of Abigail, who grew up in the pews and now works for the church. Abby is permitted by her husband to take classes at a nearby university and finds herself living in a funny and dangerous no woman’s land between two worlds. Just before graduation, she stumbles across financial irregularities that help catalyze her personal evolution. Every small awakening threatens her marriage, her standing, and her job. Eventually she’s forced to make an impossible choice between the only community she’s ever known and the classes that give her soul oxygen. It’s a story about church secrets, curiosity, and female friendships, both ancient and modern.
First Page:
Included in the holy volumes of the Old Testament, between the chronicles of the kings and the alarums of the prophets, in a book of sayings handed down by men of ages past to the men of ages to come, there are a fair number of proverbs about the bane of living with a quarrelsome woman, and even more proverbs about the splendors of living with a virtuous one.
There are no verses in the canon whatsoever, about living with a mediocre woman, which as proverbs go, would come in handier.
For the men of Gospel Tabernacle, along with church-going husbands everywhere, the portrait of the virtuous woman in the book of Proverbs is so captivating and so famous, that the chapter number has come to be used as a shorthand compliment for notable wives. She’s a real Proverbs thirty-one woman, they say, and it's a very big compliment.
The problem for Abigail Murdy, a thirty-three year old secretary who works for Grace Tabernacle Church, is that the woman in Proverbs 31 set the bar a little high. The benchmark wife of some three thousand years ago brought home food from afar like a merchant ship. She made her own clothes in silk and purple. She opened her mouth and wisdom came forth. She rose in the dark, spun her own wool, wove her own tapestries, fed her kids, fed her husband, fed the poor, bought a field, planted a vineyard, and turned a good profit. Then after lunch, she really got busy.
Apart from wearing purple, Abby doesn’t do any of those things. Once a week, when her husband isn’t working a night shift, she cooks him dinner. If using a can opener can be called cooking.
The skills that Abby was born with don’t manifest through her fingers or a well-stocked pantry, or a loom, and they don’t really register on the virtuosity scale. Abby’s only real talent, and sometimes her curse, is an infinite need to know why.
She never outgrew that stage as a child. Why do they glow? Well, because the females are trying to attract a mate. But why? I guess so they can make baby lightning bugs. But why? Because that’s how God made them, sweetie. But why? Landsakes Abby, I don’t know. Maybe He wanted the world to sparkle.
Abby tortured her parents nearly to self harm until she discovered the public library. She’s a hoarder of stories and theories and minutiae, most of it useless for daily life. Abby does make an excellent secretary, though.
Her boss, Big Dave Wright, the founder and pastor of Grace Tabernacle, relies on Abby’s quick recall for all sorts of things. Sometimes he asks for information he doesn’t even need, so he can watch her serve up scripture references at the same speed as the electricity moving through her brain. She’s a walking concordance, that girl.
3) super short description (1-3 sentence summary) of the work:
Mechanical Flowers is a nostalgia story set in a future where a memory man crafts recordings of all five senses and trains them as living holograms of lost people.
4) first page of the manuscript:
1. A Stag Lion
We can miss the most painful things.
The thought possessed me as my prospective client pulled a real cigarette, out of her tiny silver case, and lit it. I skipped the rabbit hole of how she still acquired tobacco when that was one of the first crops to fail. Frigid wind danced through our bench in Golden Gate Park and made me want to retreat from San Francisco to a place where June is warm. I nod along to Mrs. Ellie Tulane’s indulgent puffs, sentimental for the last time I enjoyed that vile, delicious smoke.
“Would you care for one, Dave?” she asked.
I’d lost the knack for saying “no” when I fled here, seventeen years ago. My hometown had wrecked my heart but inspired my career.
“Thank you, Mrs. Tulane.”
“Please, let’s dispense with that. If I can call you Dave, you should call me Ellie.”
Her engraved clamshell lighter sparked to life. What did former smokers use lighters for now? And when the flame caught, I swear I sighed. She smiled with such politeness, I blushed.
I sipped gray smoke in the present as if it were the fog in the distance and returned to why we met here.
Description: Jaime Martelino has a mom who’s disappeared, a billionaire narcissist dad, an asshole younger brother named Miko, and Pompy— a secret potbellied pig who was supposed to be a mini but just kept growing.
Jaime leaves home to save Pompy from being found and sent away by his dad, and to search for his mom, but Miko insists on coming and chaos ensues.
Page One:
I am worried about my pig.
He lives in our lanai and his name is Pompeo. His nickname is Pompy. He’s not officially my pig—my brother Miko ordered him from teacuppiggies.com without telling anyone, and the next day there was a tiny black and white pot-bellied piglet in our living room. He was pretty scared and kept running around on his hoofs that look like high heels, but then he calmed down and it was like he’d always been here.
Miko has never fed him, taken him to the vet, or given a shit about him since he got here, so I took over and now he’s mine. Pompy is still black and white, but the dude who sold him to my brother was definitely lying when he said he was a miniature. We watched him go from 18 pounds to 35…67...110. He’s at least 165 pounds by now and he’s not going to stop growing anytime soon. Which is kind of a problem.
See my dad, who pays for everything in this house and is NOT an animal lover, has no idea Pompy exists. Dad lives in our other house, in the village across from this one on Ortigas Ave. He comes to visit us every day for about five minutes, ten max.
It hasn’t been easy keeping Pompy a secret, that’s for sure. It helps that my dad is the least spontaneous person I know. We always know when he’s coming. Which is probably one reason my mom left him. That’s why my brother and I live in this house by ourselves.
Well actually—there’s our housekeeper Yaya, plus a cleaning lady, a driver, and two houseboys so we’re not really “by ourselves” come to think of it.
So anyway, when Dad says he’s coming, we hide Pompy next to the dirty kitchen and turn the music up to cover any grunts. The other day I left my phone upstairs and didn’t hear Dad calling. I walked into the living room and almost choked on the protein shake I was drinking when I saw him sitting in his emperor chair.
He yelled at me in his usual fatherly manner, glaring at the piles of dirty clothes that hadn’t made it to the laundry room, dumbbells, and other random stuff sitting on the Ming Dynasty opium bed in the middle of the living room.
“Putangina Jaime, do you know how much I paid Christie’s for that bed?! This house is one big garbage can! What the fuck do the maids do all day?! I don’t know how you and your brother can stand it here. You’re twenty years old already, when are you going to start acting like it?!”
I kept my cool. I thanked St Anthony (patron saint of pigs) that Pompy was asleep near the pool, out of Dad’s sight and not snoring, which he does sometimes.
I love the humorous tone of this narrator and the very fact of Pompy and how he is a secret. I felt riveted by the plight of these characters. Such fun and engaging writing. Love it.
😬😃 yes it is! May I also say that given your background in processing intergenerational trauma, it might interest you to know that PIG is actually about narcissism, but you may have already sussed that out 🐷😊
Description: In the 1960s, I was the oldest of three daughters born to Ray - a handsome carpenter and self-proclaimed authority on almost everything - and Kass, a teen bride who drank whiskey sours and wore diaphanous nightgowns in the daytime. I learned that in addition to blue eyes and bad teeth, my birthright included mental illness, alcoholism, and multigenerational trauma. I determined to shed my family's ways, without shedding my family.
Page 1 , Chapter 1 - I'll Be Home for Christmas
“Dad, just call the cops,” I said.
“I’d have to be a gaping asshole to call them at the end of their shift,” Dad said, transfixed by his Timex.
“Or someone with an actual emergency,” I muttered to my sisters.
At the stroke of 7 a.m., Dad said, “The day shift starts now,” and waved his cigarette ash and us toward the couch, by the window. “Wait right there.”
He bolted into the kitchen to dial “0” on the beige wall phone and asked for the police. This wasn’t our first call to the Willingboro, New Jersey Police Department, or the first time Mom stayed out all night. This time, it was a week before Christmas in 1977.
A Douglas fir drenched in silver tinsel dwarfed the living room. I unplugged a tangle of multi-colored blinking tree lights, and then scoured the room for other evidence that we’re the kind of folks who the cops needn’t take seriously. Overflowing ashtrays and Welch’s Grape Jelly glasses half-filled with whiskey were easy enough to clear. There wasn’t time to cure the acrid smell of a house that had never been deep cleaned, or the dark circles under our eyes.
“She’s probably fine,” I sighed and settled in between my sisters by the darkened tree.
I kept watch for her through the center of the plastic wreath on the living room window. I fidgeted with the frayed sleeves of my cowl neck sweater and counted seconds. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three – and peered out onto the street and its familiar pattern: a cape, a rancher, then a colonial, each one with a bare locust tree by an asphalt driveway. The sameness was comforting and mind numbing and I feared I’d never know anything else.
Dad paced around the first floor in the sweat-stained t-shirt he wore the day before.
“Have you noticed the presents in their room?” I whispered to Crystal and Alexis.
My sisters nodded, and we smiled, and for a few seconds we were three ordinary girls awaiting the midyear wardrobe refresh that was critical to our thin veneer of stylishness.
Description: It’s 1944 and the wartime shipyard in Richmond, California is a dangerous place for women. Hostile male co-workers shake them off rope ladders, and worn-out welding gloves tear open, burning tender skin. Elena, a gutsy young welder has fled El Salvador, where she helped her father run a progressive newspaper. Now Papá’s in jail and she’s desperate to send enough money home to help him escape. But she’s wanted, too, so she adopts an alias and finds comfort in friendship with Ruby Mae, a Black riveter fresh from Baton Rouge, and Rachel, a Jewish nurse from the shipyard’s clinic.
Page One:
ALL IN HER HANDS
Kaiser Shipyard
Richmond, California
May 1944
ELENA
Luisa Gonzales needed an alias. She stepped off the bus in front of the shipyard hiring hall and stared at the crowd waiting in line despite the rain. She was tempted to ask the bus driver to take her back to the Oakland YMCA, so she could pack her battered suitcase and get on the next train bound for home. But that was impossible. El Salvador had become the most dangerous place she could be. She had to make this work.
She got in line behind a young woman with blond wavy hair, so wispy compared to her own lush dark braids. The woman struggled to keep her umbrella from flipping inside out against the wind, clutching her purse as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, her black patent leather heels spattered with rain. Luisa’s own leather oxfords were so worn that rain seeped in along the seams, her socks now wet, her toes raw.
“Excuse me,” she said to the woman. “Is everyone here wanting a job? Or wanting a house?”
The woman peered at her for a moment, her eyes on Luisa’s damp clothing, and then lifted her head and laughed, her voice deep and throaty.
“Listen lady,” she said, “if you’re lucky, you might walk outta here with a job and a place to live. Or maybe you’ll walk out with nothing. Hell if I know. Here, hold this, okay?” She
handed Luisa her umbrella, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and lit one with a silver lighter. “Want one? I’m Chrissy, by the way.”
My name is Vicki Gladwish (@vickigladwish on Substack). I'm not sure why my handle isn't showing. Ahh, technology.
Title: Tin Roof
Genre: Upmarket/Family saga
Description: Kimber Macfarlane, training to swim the English Channel, returns to her hometown for a friend’s funeral and encounters the lingering history of her father’s business and the wounds he inflicted on the community. Forced to reconcile her past wrongs and the secretive nature of her cousin’s death 20 years before, Kimber unravels the past and comes to accept that blame needs to find a home. A novel about the events that shape our lives and the way we are ultimately shaped by the circumstances of our upbringing, asking do we ever know our parents?
First Page:
A drowning victim does not voluntarily submerge.
The boy’s adrenaline must have spiked. The kid, who looks to be in his early teens, is thrashing. Water swirls around us. His face contorts in fear and desperation––eyes wide, mouth agape in a silent scream, fighting for his life against the unforgiving current.
My mind screams to stay calm. Adrenaline floods my body. Every ounce of training comes rushing back, and I instinctively react, my heart pounding. Fear grips me. Push it aside. Focus.
I’ve gotten too close. The kid is on top of me––his legs kick my chest and back. He grabs and yanks my cap and goggles, reaching for me like a child might look to a mother. My lungs are bursting, my vision blurry. The only way to help this kid is to let myself go further down. I cannot be the kid’s flotation device. I go under. The kid won’t follow.
Underneath him, I propel him to the surface like a dolphin might a calf. Pushing his midsection with my leg blocks him from getting closer. Not enough to wind the kid but enough force so he lets go.
Beneath him, I free my legs from swirling in the weeds and dart away. Clear from the struggling, I shoot back to the surface. Heaving for air, I use every last ounce of strength to push a thick branch towards the boy, my arms straining to keep him at bay. My muscles burn with the effort, and blood trickles down from a gash about my eye. The chilly water quells the pain. I can’t stop now.
“Grab it,” my voice is muffled by the chop. Sculling my arms and eggbeatering my legs to keep vertical, I push the woody limb again.
The kid looks dazed.
“Grab the branch.” My voice echoes off the barren rocks lining the shore, but alarm infects my tone. I turn my back to him and frantically scan the choppy waters, squinting against the blinding sun in search of the rescue launch. Each passing moment brings us closer to blackness.
I so hope the surgery does the trick for you, Courtney!
Title: Revision: An Intergenerational Gender Story
Genre: Memoir
Description: This is the tale of three women from the same family: a curler-wearing silent, a hippie boomer, and a genderqueer millennial. Framed by everyday objects and experiences such as menstruation and dead bodies, the connected stories move back and forth in time to capture the evolution of gender identity, expression, and behavior and their role in the work women do to be both the same and different from their mothers.
First Page:
I shook from the November cold while standing on a Brooklyn sidewalk with exposed kneecaps, white anklets, and black patent leather Mary Janes. With one hand, I held onto Dad’s coat and with the other clutched my white rabbit muff. I tipped forward a bit so I could see my older brother, Howie, on the other side of our father. The three of us were in front of Brooklyn Jewish, not destined to enter. As was true of all hospitals in 1958, there was a prohibition against children as guests, so our visit had to be curbside. Suddenly, Dad pointed and shouted at us, “There! There! Wave, children. Wave!”
I craned my neck and tilted my head back as far as it would reach, scanning the windows. I was as methodical and patient as a four-year old desperate to see her mother could be. Feeling that Dad’s and Howie’s laughter and waving mocked my inability to follow their gaze, tears welled up and dripped down my cheeks. I dropped my father’s hand, wiped the tears gently with my muff, and glanced up at Howie. Why did he get to see her when I couldn’t?
All at once, there she was, waving and smiling back from what seemed like the hundredth floor, the biggest number I knew. I caught a glimpse of the familiar blue negligee with the matching robe that secured with a silk ribbon at the neckline. Although Grandma Molly explained that it would still be a few days before Mom came back to me, she hadn’t explained how enormous the brick building would be or how tiny my mother would look. The wind whipped at my face and my stomach churned. The tip of my nose was cold. I thought visiting Mom would be different. I wanted to go home.
Description: Nora, a hopeless romantic, gets her heart broken one too many times and swears off dating and romance. Zander believes falling in love is a lie, and romance is unrealistic. Nora convinces Zander to pretend to date so they can get all the busy bodies in their lives off their backs during a season of weddings and family events.
First page: Nora sipped her ginger ale and flipped through one of the magazines she’d picked up at the airport that evening, adjusting her cashmere sweater. She glanced up briefly as a hint of expensive cologne signaled the arrival of the traveler who would be sitting next to her on this long flight to Milan. Louis Vuitton’s Imagination, if she had to guess. She had added it to the fragrance collection in her family’s storefront last year.
The silver-haired gentleman smiled at her as he settled into his seat, the gesture polite but not forward. Nora returned the smile, then turned back to her magazine. In the past, she might have said hello, introduced herself, and engaged her new travel companion in conversation. But today, she was tired and had a lot on her mind.
She was flying to Milan, as she did every four to six months, as part of her job as vice president for purchasing in her family’s import business, Everyday Luxury Fine Italian Goods. More importantly, she would also be seeing Gabriel, her boyfriend of more than a year. Something in her gut told her this would be an exceptional visit, and it was taking all her concentration to keep her imagination in check, an imagination that wanted to spin visions of white lace and tulle and champagne toasts and…and…and.
As she turned another page in her magazine, her gaze lingered on an advertisement for a jewelry store that featured a gorgeous emerald-cut diamond front and center on the page. She permitted herself a smile and indulged her imagination for just a minute. A tiny daydream wouldn’t hurt, right? Would this visit be the one? Gabriel had been married before; would that make him more—or less—likely to go all-out for a proposal? No, flamboyance wasn’t his style. He’d be more likely to take her to that restaurant with the hidden garden and amazing tiramisu and propose to her in whispered tones with eyes full of fire and intensity. She shivered, then quickly turned the page.
I love this title so much. I have some follow up questions about your description-- this sounds like a friendship that turns into a romance? Also, for pitching purposes I'd put a ticking clock on Nora's decision - my notes are cushioned between asterisks. For example: Description: Nora, a hopeless romantic, gets her heart broken one too many times and swears off dating and romance ***until her 30th birthday/for the rest of the year/something else?***. Zander (***who is he? her best friend?***) believes falling in love is a lie, and romance is unrealistic. Nora convinces Zander to pretend to date so they can get all the busy bodies in their lives off their backs during a season of weddings and family events. (***and...unexpectedly their friendship turns into something else? give us a little hint of what's to come! That's allowed in rom com***)
Planning celebrations at The Lodge for her mom and her daughter, Brynn is afraid she is going to spill the truth about the wild affair that ended in there 35 years ago. Her cousin, Lisa, looks for a home in a place she swore off that same summer, so long ago.
May 2023
Brynn was going to be on her best behavior on this afternoon river cruise. She was going to remember that her daughter’s boyfriend’s name was Chris, not Chad. She was going to make small talk with Chris’ parents instead of playing with her phone. Above all, when the boat reached Rheas Bend, she was not going to startle like a bunny rabbit at the sight of The Lodge rearing up on the bank like her own redneck Manderley.
She had been on this Tennessee River cruise a few times, at parties thrown by the history charities that she and James supported. The Lodge always looked the same, white paint peeling, boards missing from the dock, big “No Trespassing” signs, and a dilapidated air that said there had been a flood or a fire or both.
They were still a little way above the bend, and Chris’ mother, Jenny, was talking to James. Chris was talking to his dad, and her daughter Elle was gazing happily at Chris. Brynn peeked at her phone and saw a text from her cousin, Lisa.
“Call you?” Like their mothers, Lisa still believed in actual voice conversations, if not, God forbid, video calls, while Brynn thought texting was the most life-changing invention of her almost 56 years.
Description: Arthur Plaid's once revered restaurant has fallen on hard times. To keep his business going he convinces his wildly wealthy best friend Dale Fender to sell his father's wine collection. But when the wine turns out to be damaged and ruined, they are undeterred and conspire to make and sell painstakingly forged facsimiles of rare wine to New York City’s wealthiest collectors.
DECEMBER 15, 2017
Anyone who knew me knew not to call at 8:30pm on a Friday night. Certainly not a Friday night in December.
My phone vibrated as my corkscrew punctured the cork in a bottle of 2005 Dujac Malconsorts. The bottle of wine was for Lamar Tent, recently the subject of the article The King of Wine Collectors, featured on the NY Times Sunday Magazine’s cover. His spritely assistant had called earlier, charged more than I made in a month to Lamar’s card, and asked for the bottle to be opened and decanted two hours prior to Mr. Tent’s reservation. His reservation was in thirty minutes. I could say I’d been too caught up in service, lost track of time. I’d worked dining room floors for over twenty years and could toss off a casual lie to cover up a service misstep as easily as I could put one foot in front of the other. But when it came to Lamar Tent, I was equal parts terrified to see him and deeply annoyed that despite my best efforts to stash myself in the kind of tired, off the radar restaurant I’d spent my entire career avoiding, he’d found me anyway. Since the call with his assistant verified that his reservation wasn’t some elaborate prank, I’d been tracking time on the TV in the bar, the reservation system at the maître d stand, the point-of-sale terminals in the service station. I knew the time. I guess I hoped that by not opening his wine, I’d send some sort of cosmic smoke signal into the frigid New York night, and he’d decide to dine elsewhere. My entire year had been jammed full of wishful thinking. Why stop now?
I cradled Lamar’s bottle at a forty-five-degree angle with my left hand, its white label fading to yellow at the edges, and twisted the screw in with my right; the delicate and damp cork gave way too easily, started to crumble. Of course, the damn bottle wasn’t cooperating. I gripped the corkscrew tighter, sweating. If I pushed too hard, the cork would snap. If I didn’t push hard enough the point wouldn’t catch and I’d end up forcing the cork deeper into the neck of the bottle. There was no back up; not many restaurants in the world still had the wine on their lists period. From the inside pocket of my suit jacket, my phone kept buzzing.
Working Title: "Rebirth: A midwife's guide on how to mend in a world that wants us to stay broken"
Genre: Memoir
Description: At once a compelling, often-untold story of a woman reclaiming her power, an honest examination of culture and inheritance, and a spiritual exploration, REBIRTH is a story of a midwife's journey through burnout that is ultimately a hymn of hope. It explores how radical self-acceptance can birth our collective liberation into being. Think: "Women Who Run with the Wolves" only make it birth-y, and a tad more political.
First Page:
The first moment I really felt like a midwife was when I realized my hands could see in the dark. I actually have to close my eyes in order to see when I use my hands now. They don’t see in images, but in feelings. Curves and softness, weight and warmth. They touch souls and shadows and speak to me in a language of intuition. They know a space that is both here and there, dark and light–the liminal–where grief, hope, love and suffering live. They hold birth, life and death. And they have held the weight of the world, too. Over one-thousand new little worlds who have slid out of the darkness guided by these hands, blinking and reaching, gasping, turning air into sacred breath and filling up the world with more love and hope. One more thread folded in, weaved into the fabric of this story, of all of our interconnected stories, that will continue on for infinity.
For years, my hands were the most important part of me, until they weren’t anymore. Until I stopped feeling a connection to them, really. Because, slowly, with time, birthwork became a wound filled with pain, anger, and worthlessness that my hands couldn’t mend. Midwifery was my calling, but also my undoing. I wanted to make birth better for people–safer, more empowering, connective and transformative. I hoped that if people could experience birth as an act of love (instead of the fear that often surrounds it) perhaps there would be more tenderness, resilience, and liberation born into the world too. I kept trying, and hoping, and giving, giving, giving and depleting myself. I struggled against the weight of depression that inevitably arrived because burnout took over my life before I even knew what to call it.
The truth is the crisis of reproductive injustice and the perils of modern birth are not new, they are in fact as old as humanity itself. Lives held in the hands of wise women for millennia witnessed, tended to, nourished, lost. But I didn’t know how to consult the wisdom of those who came before me, the priestesses of the divine feminine spirit, as I was free-falling into the unknown and being swallowed up by the darkness of my burnout. Once I surrendered to it, however, these wise women took my hand and they led me down a path that was sublunary and shadowed, solitary, spiritual and connective. They told me the secrets of the world, how much medicine there is in the unknown, and the wonder that can be found in the mystery and deep inquiry of life.
This opening resonates with me. I felt gripped by the exploration and personifying of her hands. I loved the simplicity and beauty of this moment: "Midwifery was my calling, but also my undoing." As a health-care worker and daughter of an L&D nurse, I feel interested to delve deeper into the world of midwifery (of which I know a little, but not a lot) with this narrator and also, perhaps more familiar, to explore with her the topic of navigating burnout. I feel drawn by the promise some historical/critical exploration of midwifery and childbirth throughout the book as well.
I felt like I got a solid sense of some of the important details from this page: some of the who, what, why, and the thoughtful, engaging tone I can expect throughout the book. If I saw this as the Book Preview online, or read this first page in the store, I would keep reading.
Description: In the summer of 1974, eleven-year-old Kyle Wilkins moves with his family to rural Kentucky to live near his incarcerated dad. Kyle makes two friends: one’s dad is the prison doctor and the other is the warden. When Kyle’s older brother disappears, the three boys try to find him. Their quest leads to a haunted house and a child predator. The resulting tragedy upends their lives and shakes the prison to its core.
Page One - Prologue
Donald Gorman climbed the concrete stairs savoring the peculiar pleasure of destroying another life. Satisfaction softened the stony mask of his face as he pulled open the glass door and entered the prison.
Joining the queue with the other houseboys, he waited to pass through the metal detector and return to his cell.
Observing Donald’s closed-lip smile the corrections officer quipped, “Up to no good again, huh?”.
The flicker of a grin disappeared as Donald spread his arms and legs wide, gazing into nowhere. The guard proceeded with the body check and passed him to the next guard, who handcuffed and shackled him, and sent him to join the other houseboys on their way to roll call. Soon after, they filed back to their unit.
Once inside his cell, Donald sat on his bed, staring at the wall. Alone, he allowed himself full enjoyment, reliving again the terrible pleasure of a terrible thing. The grin returned and stayed.
3) Pitch: All Savannah wants is to form a friendly co-parenting relationship with her casual fling and baby daddy, Max--but his ex, Madison, has much more sinister plans in mind. Because that baby should be hers.
FIRST PAGE:
One, two, three.
Plus the one I'd taken right then and there in the grocery store bathroom. That made four.
Four white, plastic sticks sat perched on the edge of my sink. Each had a tiny window at its head.
In the window of the first test, taken in the dimly lit bathroom stall, were two blue lines that formed a cross.
Usually there was only one line. I'd stared at thousands of them over the past couple of years, each time hoping and praying for a miracle. But each one had produced nothing more than a single, lonely blue line. Then Jason had left, and I'd given up. Resigned myself to facing the truth.
But this one–this one had two lines, and they formed a cross.
I was so sure my delusional mind had manifested it right out of my own imagination. I'd burst out of the stall–before realizing my pants were still around my ankles, and I ducked back in to get myself together—and marched right back to the "family planning" aisle. I grabbed three more boxes, this time opting for the super-fancy, digital ones that promised me a word rather than an inconclusive number of blurry lines. I took them home, chugged an entire can of La Croix, and peed on all of them.
Now here they were, screaming at me—all saying the same word.
Pregnant.
I squeezed my eyes shut tight, blocking the image out of my head, and walked out of my bathroom. It couldn't be true. It just couldn't. Everyone had told me it wasn't possible for me.
I've finally lost it–the last remaining shred of my sanity. I've gone crazy. I'm seeing things.
I opened my eyes, rubbed them to clear the haze, walked back into my bathroom, and looked at them again.
Pregnant.
"What the hell?"
The buzz of my apartment's intercom pulled me out of my stupor. A female voice floated into the room: "It's me, let me in."
I had called Ellie, verbally vomiting a gush of unintelligible gibberish as I barreled out of the bathroom and tore through the grocery store in a panic. She'd finally interrupted my tirade and said, "Savannah–calm down, I'm on my way. I'll meet you at your apartment."
I opened the door and met her eyes–physically, but not mentally. Mentally, I was in quicksand, letting it take me as I sunk faster and deeper. Ellie's eyebrows were sky-high as she waited for me to speak, but she recognized that look on my face. She'd seen it before. Most notably, almost a year ago, on the day my fiancé had cleared out his things from the apartment we'd shared and took off, all while I was at work.
"Okay, okay. Come sit down." She pushed past me into the apartment and headed straight for my couch, grabbing my hand to pull me down with her. "Now–I can see you're panicking. Let's not panic just yet. People get false results all the time. Maybe it's a mistake. Especially if you bought one of those cheap ones. Maybe we need to get you another test, just to be safe."
Wordlessly I stood up, still holding her hand, and led her into my bathroom. Like a sad, broken-down Vanna White, I presented her with the four tests, all lined up on the edge of my sink, forcing me to face my future with a single word.
Pregnant.
Ellie's eyes just about popped out of her head; her mouth fell open
"Holy shit."
"Yeah...holy shit."
She turned to look at me, pure shock on her face. "Oh my God, Savvy–you're pregnant. You're going to have a baby."
"I'm...I'm...," My tongue simply could not wrap itself around those words.
I had made that mistake before, countless times over the past few years, as my ex-fiancé and I had tried desperately to make a baby. Once you spoke your hope aloud, it was out there in the world. It was real. It existed. Now the universe could either deign to grant it, or just decide to stomp on it, according to its whim. Me, I had learned that your chances of falling on either side were equal, and predetermined. Some people were just lucky, or blessed; others simply weren't, and there was nothing you could do about it. It wasn't up to you–it was up to the universe. The callous, evil, vindictive, bitch of a universe.
Ellie crushed me into a hug. "Oh my God...oh my God," she said over and over, rubbing my back. I stood there in her embrace, my body as limp as a noodle. How can this be happening?
I liked your opening paragraphs. The pitch was harder to follow. "Max" and "Madison" are too similar when introduced together and Madison could be a male or female name. Do you even need to mention Madison's name when the last sentence clarifies the stakes?
Hey Arthur! Writing you from my sick bed-- thank you for your enthusiasm but if you could turn down the volume on the negative/nit-picky type comments on other people's work, please. As I stated quite clearly in my post, if you don't have something nice to say, please refrain from saying it. I have no doubt that you believe you are giving constructive feedback to our fellow writers, but I am encouraging positive comments only to keep fostering a community where people can feel safe and courageous enough to share their work. Thank you for respecting the boundaries I posted in the guidelines.
Title: Exposed: A Memoir of Love, Tainted Blood, and a Pharmaceutical Scandal (working title)
Genre: Memoir
Description: During the early days of the AIDS pandemic, young photographer falls in love with her charming and funny neighbor. When she learns he has contracted HIV and hepatitis from the blood product he used to treat his hemophilia, she believes she can handle the situation, unaware that he is part of one of the worst, (and largely unknown) pharmaceutical scandals of the twentieth century – killing tens of thousands of people worldwide.
Page One: December 1, 1985
Through the windowpane, I saw Dave clutching a fist-sized vial and a syringe. The December air bit my cheeks as I cracked open my back door. It wasn’t like him to show up uninvited in the evening. “Are you okay?” I asked, unsure if I was ready for what might come next.
“I climbed Mount Monadnock today and hurt my hip,” Dave said. “I keep missing my vein. Will you infuse me?”
I swallowed in disbelief. Dave’s hemophilia turned real in an instant. I was a twenty-six-year-old newspaper photographer, not a seasoned nurse. Sure he lived next door, but we’d only been on three dates––if you count the night we shot pool at the dive bar on the edge of the Nashua River. Certainly, we had not discussed a situation like this between barstool kisses. He’d asked me about my tastes in food, music, and books, but not, How good are you with a needle? But on his strained face, I glimpsed at years of bleeding injuries. Injuries that would require a girlfriend who could handle the interruptions. Not that I was officially his girlfriend––but those barstool kisses sure tasted sweet.
I invited Dave inside to get him out of the cold and to figure out how to handle his request.
“Thanks,” he said. “My hip’s throbbing like crazy.”
I winced as he limped across my kitchen floor to the living room, muffling his groans. I could feel Dave’s suffering, as though my own body ached. It’d been two weeks since he told me about his medical condition, and I was still getting used to it. Was he testing me to see if his hemophilia was a deal breaker?
“Have a seat on the couch,” I said. Dave settled in, and I handed him a soft pillow from my bedroom. I lowered the volume of the television, muting my Sunday night favorite, Murder She Wrote. I’d have to wait for reruns to watch Jessica figure out who injected the prison doctor with a fatal dose of morphine, leaving a needle and empty vial on her office floor. Instead, I turned my attention to the vial in my living room, along with the realization that I could not send Dave away.
Gosh- for someone post surgery for whom blood is very much on my mind, this is so powerful. I realize this is memoir, so you can only bend and tweak so much, but I do wonder in the pitch if it's possible to try and align the photographer's profession with the lover's plight a little bit. If this were a novel, I would say for example, oooh, can we make the person a photographer for the pharmaceutical company who provided the blood product? Even a hint at some kind of union between the narrator's job and Dave's plight could help you nab an agent's attention. Just a thought!
Yes! I was a news photographer always in search of the truth, and the Dave’s plight and the scandal were a result of a web of lies and deceit. I didn’t “see” the scandal/story I was living. I can say that better in print. Thank you, Courtney! I hope you have a better week, and that your surgery is a success. ❤️
You might try to place a personal essay or two on this topic somewhere-- that would help you on the query circuit! PSYCHOLOGY TODAY might be a good place to pitch.
Well done.
Thank you, Arthur!
Title: The Now In Forever
Genre: Rom-Com
Description: Ten years ago Hattie Stevens spent just a little over twenty-four hours with the attractive, creative, always moving, slightly chaotic writer, Ed DeArmas. Five years later Hattie attends Ed’s book signing, to her utter heartbreak, he doesn’t recognize her. Now, Hattie agrees to spend the summer rent-free on the Oregon coast with her two best friends and their partners, one who also brought a friend…Ed.
First page:
Summer Solstice 5 years
Time is not on my side today. I’m late and I’m never late. When I finally make it to the bookstore I’m out of breath. Sweat beads at the nape of my neck. The bookstore is too hot and crowded. I take out my ear buds, Stevie Nicks still crooning about thunder and rain. For a moment, I toy with the idea of leaving, heading back into the sunshine, putting my earbuds back in and going to get a solo glass of wine somewhere. Because I’m a strong independent almost twenty-four year old woman and that’s what I do now—walk around Helena with empowering women in my earbuds and am perfectly capable of getting dinner or a drink by myself. I never have, but I am capable of it.
“Name please,” the woman at the door asks with a clipboard in hand.
“Hattie Stevens.”
She flips to the next page and scratches a check next to my name. “Enjoy.”
All the neatly lined up chairs are taken, so I stand in the back tucking my freshly dyed blonde hair behind my ear (break up hair), clutching the book, his book in my other hand.
Will he recognize me with the new hair? The last time he saw me it was brown, well brown and unfortunately green. I take a deep breath. Of course he will recognize me. I still have the same face, the same blue eyes he once called mesmerizing. There’s no way he won’t recognize me. Not after what we shared. But what if he’s not happy to see me?
I’m not sure what I expected from this reading. That’s not true I know exactly what I expected, more like hoped for, but it certainly wasn’t this humid and crowded in my fantasies. I should’ve known it would be packed by the fact that I had to get a ticket, but it didn’t occur to me. All I thought was how amazing it’s on the solstice. Exactly five years later.
If you haven't seen this German film about an anxious writer who goes to a summer home on the coast to work on his next book, you must must must! It's far enough away from what you are doing to keep your material safe but close enough to inspire you: https://www.wuot.org/2023-07-15/german-filmmaker-christian-petzold-on-his-latest-movie-afire
Ooh thanks!! I can’t wait to watch it.
I love this line:
"I never have, but I am capable of it."
It says so much about Hattie in so few words.
This part also stood out to me, like a wonderful little flashback into what it's like to be figuring out who you are in your early 20s! I reckon I'd want to be Hattie's friend 😄
"Because I’m a strong independent almost twenty-four year old woman and that’s what I do now—walk around Helena with empowering women in my earbuds and am perfectly capable of getting dinner or a drink by myself. I never have, but I am capable of it."
This honestly made my day!
Aw, I'm so glad! 😊🥳
I'm so looking forward to this class, and the timing is perfect. Thank you... and my best wishes for healthy, happy healing!
TITLE: Hurricane Lessons
GENRE: Memoir
DESCRIPTION: A 32-year relationship is tested by a same-sex attraction, an open marriage, and an involuntary mental health stay in Hurricane Lessons, one woman’s story of a mid-life reckoning and realignment.
FIRST PAGE:
I remember the moment it happened, the single spark that set my entire existence aflame. I was in a brightly lit Pilates studio in the small Ohio town where we’d recently relocated for my husband, Chris’s job. I had paid for a private lesson.
Colleene stood behind me on the reformer and pressed her legs into my back, her hands into my shoulders. The strength of her long, lean limbs drove my body into submission. Her long, golden hair tickled the back of my neck.
“Connect your pubic bone to your sternum. Hold it.” Her voice was deep, throaty. “Even while I’m pushing you. Hold it. And breathe.”
But I could not breathe. There was no oxygen left in the room. It had been consumed by her touch, her fire.
Spontaneous combustion.
Then, a burst of confusion. I was a 45-year-old happily married mother of four. I had a big life—one that looked enviable from the outside. House in the suburbs on a lake, swimming pool in the backyard, two late-model cars in the driveway, four teenagers who lit up my world, a husband who had loved me hard since we were younger than our oldest kids. Why was I suddenly feeling this intense and undeniable yearning?
My chest heaved with the weight of this longing. It felt simultaneously familiar and forbidden, known and mysterious, natural and foreign. I searched for air as every nerve in my body shouted, This! This is who you are. This is who you’ve always been.
I am HOOKED.
Whoa. That’s huge. Thank you so much!! 😊
Whoa, intense! I love how quickly we enter the action and this inciting moment for the main character. I felt connected to the voice of the narrator, the use of language here, the rhythm of the mix of longer and shorter sentences.
There's allure in the description, the big topics this memoir will cover, that feel relevant to me and make me want to read this book. Ugh, and that involuntary stay. The vulnerability and conflict already present on the first page draw me in and create empathy for the main character. Exciting start!
Thank you so much for such a beautiful, thoughtful response! You just made my day. <3
My pleasure!
Nice opening!
Thank you!
Very powerful. I really like it. It would suck me in and keep me reading!
Thanks so much!
Title: The Gullible Nature of the Feminine Kind
Genre: Upmarket Literary Fiction
Description: The story of three women whose lives are entangled with a modern fundamentalist church in a depressed Colorado town. Layered with dark stories of women from the Bible, some famous, some obscure. The story is primarily told from the perspective of Abigail, who grew up in the pews and now works for the church. Abby is permitted by her husband to take classes at a nearby university and finds herself living in a funny and dangerous no woman’s land between two worlds. Just before graduation, she stumbles across financial irregularities that help catalyze her personal evolution. Every small awakening threatens her marriage, her standing, and her job. Eventually she’s forced to make an impossible choice between the only community she’s ever known and the classes that give her soul oxygen. It’s a story about church secrets, curiosity, and female friendships, both ancient and modern.
First Page:
Included in the holy volumes of the Old Testament, between the chronicles of the kings and the alarums of the prophets, in a book of sayings handed down by men of ages past to the men of ages to come, there are a fair number of proverbs about the bane of living with a quarrelsome woman, and even more proverbs about the splendors of living with a virtuous one.
There are no verses in the canon whatsoever, about living with a mediocre woman, which as proverbs go, would come in handier.
For the men of Gospel Tabernacle, along with church-going husbands everywhere, the portrait of the virtuous woman in the book of Proverbs is so captivating and so famous, that the chapter number has come to be used as a shorthand compliment for notable wives. She’s a real Proverbs thirty-one woman, they say, and it's a very big compliment.
The problem for Abigail Murdy, a thirty-three year old secretary who works for Grace Tabernacle Church, is that the woman in Proverbs 31 set the bar a little high. The benchmark wife of some three thousand years ago brought home food from afar like a merchant ship. She made her own clothes in silk and purple. She opened her mouth and wisdom came forth. She rose in the dark, spun her own wool, wove her own tapestries, fed her kids, fed her husband, fed the poor, bought a field, planted a vineyard, and turned a good profit. Then after lunch, she really got busy.
Apart from wearing purple, Abby doesn’t do any of those things. Once a week, when her husband isn’t working a night shift, she cooks him dinner. If using a can opener can be called cooking.
The skills that Abby was born with don’t manifest through her fingers or a well-stocked pantry, or a loom, and they don’t really register on the virtuosity scale. Abby’s only real talent, and sometimes her curse, is an infinite need to know why.
She never outgrew that stage as a child. Why do they glow? Well, because the females are trying to attract a mate. But why? I guess so they can make baby lightning bugs. But why? Because that’s how God made them, sweetie. But why? Landsakes Abby, I don’t know. Maybe He wanted the world to sparkle.
Abby tortured her parents nearly to self harm until she discovered the public library. She’s a hoarder of stories and theories and minutiae, most of it useless for daily life. Abby does make an excellent secretary, though.
Her boss, Big Dave Wright, the founder and pastor of Grace Tabernacle, relies on Abby’s quick recall for all sorts of things. Sometimes he asks for information he doesn’t even need, so he can watch her serve up scripture references at the same speed as the electricity moving through her brain. She’s a walking concordance, that girl.
This is very very good. The description is flawless.
1) the title:
Mechanical Flowers
2) the genre:
Science Fiction
3) super short description (1-3 sentence summary) of the work:
Mechanical Flowers is a nostalgia story set in a future where a memory man crafts recordings of all five senses and trains them as living holograms of lost people.
4) first page of the manuscript:
1. A Stag Lion
We can miss the most painful things.
The thought possessed me as my prospective client pulled a real cigarette, out of her tiny silver case, and lit it. I skipped the rabbit hole of how she still acquired tobacco when that was one of the first crops to fail. Frigid wind danced through our bench in Golden Gate Park and made me want to retreat from San Francisco to a place where June is warm. I nod along to Mrs. Ellie Tulane’s indulgent puffs, sentimental for the last time I enjoyed that vile, delicious smoke.
“Would you care for one, Dave?” she asked.
I’d lost the knack for saying “no” when I fled here, seventeen years ago. My hometown had wrecked my heart but inspired my career.
“Thank you, Mrs. Tulane.”
“Please, let’s dispense with that. If I can call you Dave, you should call me Ellie.”
Her engraved clamshell lighter sparked to life. What did former smokers use lighters for now? And when the flame caught, I swear I sighed. She smiled with such politeness, I blushed.
I sipped gray smoke in the present as if it were the fog in the distance and returned to why we met here.
Loved this Arthur and would keep reading if there was more! Intrigued by the premise and love the little world building breadcrumbs on the first page.
I LOVE this title!
Hope you’re feeling better Courtney!
Title: PIG
Genre: Upmarket/Book Club fiction
Description: Jaime Martelino has a mom who’s disappeared, a billionaire narcissist dad, an asshole younger brother named Miko, and Pompy— a secret potbellied pig who was supposed to be a mini but just kept growing.
Jaime leaves home to save Pompy from being found and sent away by his dad, and to search for his mom, but Miko insists on coming and chaos ensues.
Page One:
I am worried about my pig.
He lives in our lanai and his name is Pompeo. His nickname is Pompy. He’s not officially my pig—my brother Miko ordered him from teacuppiggies.com without telling anyone, and the next day there was a tiny black and white pot-bellied piglet in our living room. He was pretty scared and kept running around on his hoofs that look like high heels, but then he calmed down and it was like he’d always been here.
Miko has never fed him, taken him to the vet, or given a shit about him since he got here, so I took over and now he’s mine. Pompy is still black and white, but the dude who sold him to my brother was definitely lying when he said he was a miniature. We watched him go from 18 pounds to 35…67...110. He’s at least 165 pounds by now and he’s not going to stop growing anytime soon. Which is kind of a problem.
See my dad, who pays for everything in this house and is NOT an animal lover, has no idea Pompy exists. Dad lives in our other house, in the village across from this one on Ortigas Ave. He comes to visit us every day for about five minutes, ten max.
It hasn’t been easy keeping Pompy a secret, that’s for sure. It helps that my dad is the least spontaneous person I know. We always know when he’s coming. Which is probably one reason my mom left him. That’s why my brother and I live in this house by ourselves.
Well actually—there’s our housekeeper Yaya, plus a cleaning lady, a driver, and two houseboys so we’re not really “by ourselves” come to think of it.
So anyway, when Dad says he’s coming, we hide Pompy next to the dirty kitchen and turn the music up to cover any grunts. The other day I left my phone upstairs and didn’t hear Dad calling. I walked into the living room and almost choked on the protein shake I was drinking when I saw him sitting in his emperor chair.
He yelled at me in his usual fatherly manner, glaring at the piles of dirty clothes that hadn’t made it to the laundry room, dumbbells, and other random stuff sitting on the Ming Dynasty opium bed in the middle of the living room.
“Putangina Jaime, do you know how much I paid Christie’s for that bed?! This house is one big garbage can! What the fuck do the maids do all day?! I don’t know how you and your brother can stand it here. You’re twenty years old already, when are you going to start acting like it?!”
I kept my cool. I thanked St Anthony (patron saint of pigs) that Pompy was asleep near the pool, out of Dad’s sight and not snoring, which he does sometimes.
I love the humorous tone of this narrator and the very fact of Pompy and how he is a secret. I felt riveted by the plight of these characters. Such fun and engaging writing. Love it.
Oh thank you so much for the kind words Danielle, I really appreciate them. Also so happy to hear that you were engaged by Jaime and Pompy 💕
My pleasure. P.S. It's also fun to say 'Jaime and Pompy'.
😬😃 yes it is! May I also say that given your background in processing intergenerational trauma, it might interest you to know that PIG is actually about narcissism, but you may have already sussed that out 🐷😊
Kelly Welsh
Title: Forever My Barbarians
Genre: Memoir
Description: In the 1960s, I was the oldest of three daughters born to Ray - a handsome carpenter and self-proclaimed authority on almost everything - and Kass, a teen bride who drank whiskey sours and wore diaphanous nightgowns in the daytime. I learned that in addition to blue eyes and bad teeth, my birthright included mental illness, alcoholism, and multigenerational trauma. I determined to shed my family's ways, without shedding my family.
Page 1 , Chapter 1 - I'll Be Home for Christmas
“Dad, just call the cops,” I said.
“I’d have to be a gaping asshole to call them at the end of their shift,” Dad said, transfixed by his Timex.
“Or someone with an actual emergency,” I muttered to my sisters.
At the stroke of 7 a.m., Dad said, “The day shift starts now,” and waved his cigarette ash and us toward the couch, by the window. “Wait right there.”
He bolted into the kitchen to dial “0” on the beige wall phone and asked for the police. This wasn’t our first call to the Willingboro, New Jersey Police Department, or the first time Mom stayed out all night. This time, it was a week before Christmas in 1977.
A Douglas fir drenched in silver tinsel dwarfed the living room. I unplugged a tangle of multi-colored blinking tree lights, and then scoured the room for other evidence that we’re the kind of folks who the cops needn’t take seriously. Overflowing ashtrays and Welch’s Grape Jelly glasses half-filled with whiskey were easy enough to clear. There wasn’t time to cure the acrid smell of a house that had never been deep cleaned, or the dark circles under our eyes.
“She’s probably fine,” I sighed and settled in between my sisters by the darkened tree.
I kept watch for her through the center of the plastic wreath on the living room window. I fidgeted with the frayed sleeves of my cowl neck sweater and counted seconds. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three – and peered out onto the street and its familiar pattern: a cape, a rancher, then a colonial, each one with a bare locust tree by an asphalt driveway. The sameness was comforting and mind numbing and I feared I’d never know anything else.
Dad paced around the first floor in the sweat-stained t-shirt he wore the day before.
“Have you noticed the presents in their room?” I whispered to Crystal and Alexis.
My sisters nodded, and we smiled, and for a few seconds we were three ordinary girls awaiting the midyear wardrobe refresh that was critical to our thin veneer of stylishness.
This title is EXCELLENT. And what a description! Wish you the best of luck with this.
Thanks so much!
Title: All in Her Hands
Genre: Historical Fiction
Description: It’s 1944 and the wartime shipyard in Richmond, California is a dangerous place for women. Hostile male co-workers shake them off rope ladders, and worn-out welding gloves tear open, burning tender skin. Elena, a gutsy young welder has fled El Salvador, where she helped her father run a progressive newspaper. Now Papá’s in jail and she’s desperate to send enough money home to help him escape. But she’s wanted, too, so she adopts an alias and finds comfort in friendship with Ruby Mae, a Black riveter fresh from Baton Rouge, and Rachel, a Jewish nurse from the shipyard’s clinic.
Page One:
ALL IN HER HANDS
Kaiser Shipyard
Richmond, California
May 1944
ELENA
Luisa Gonzales needed an alias. She stepped off the bus in front of the shipyard hiring hall and stared at the crowd waiting in line despite the rain. She was tempted to ask the bus driver to take her back to the Oakland YMCA, so she could pack her battered suitcase and get on the next train bound for home. But that was impossible. El Salvador had become the most dangerous place she could be. She had to make this work.
She got in line behind a young woman with blond wavy hair, so wispy compared to her own lush dark braids. The woman struggled to keep her umbrella from flipping inside out against the wind, clutching her purse as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, her black patent leather heels spattered with rain. Luisa’s own leather oxfords were so worn that rain seeped in along the seams, her socks now wet, her toes raw.
“Excuse me,” she said to the woman. “Is everyone here wanting a job? Or wanting a house?”
The woman peered at her for a moment, her eyes on Luisa’s damp clothing, and then lifted her head and laughed, her voice deep and throaty.
“Listen lady,” she said, “if you’re lucky, you might walk outta here with a job and a place to live. Or maybe you’ll walk out with nothing. Hell if I know. Here, hold this, okay?” She
handed Luisa her umbrella, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and lit one with a silver lighter. “Want one? I’m Chrissy, by the way.”
This sounds so fascinating! I can't wait for the movie!
My name is Vicki Gladwish (@vickigladwish on Substack). I'm not sure why my handle isn't showing. Ahh, technology.
Title: Tin Roof
Genre: Upmarket/Family saga
Description: Kimber Macfarlane, training to swim the English Channel, returns to her hometown for a friend’s funeral and encounters the lingering history of her father’s business and the wounds he inflicted on the community. Forced to reconcile her past wrongs and the secretive nature of her cousin’s death 20 years before, Kimber unravels the past and comes to accept that blame needs to find a home. A novel about the events that shape our lives and the way we are ultimately shaped by the circumstances of our upbringing, asking do we ever know our parents?
First Page:
A drowning victim does not voluntarily submerge.
The boy’s adrenaline must have spiked. The kid, who looks to be in his early teens, is thrashing. Water swirls around us. His face contorts in fear and desperation––eyes wide, mouth agape in a silent scream, fighting for his life against the unforgiving current.
My mind screams to stay calm. Adrenaline floods my body. Every ounce of training comes rushing back, and I instinctively react, my heart pounding. Fear grips me. Push it aside. Focus.
I’ve gotten too close. The kid is on top of me––his legs kick my chest and back. He grabs and yanks my cap and goggles, reaching for me like a child might look to a mother. My lungs are bursting, my vision blurry. The only way to help this kid is to let myself go further down. I cannot be the kid’s flotation device. I go under. The kid won’t follow.
Underneath him, I propel him to the surface like a dolphin might a calf. Pushing his midsection with my leg blocks him from getting closer. Not enough to wind the kid but enough force so he lets go.
Beneath him, I free my legs from swirling in the weeds and dart away. Clear from the struggling, I shoot back to the surface. Heaving for air, I use every last ounce of strength to push a thick branch towards the boy, my arms straining to keep him at bay. My muscles burn with the effort, and blood trickles down from a gash about my eye. The chilly water quells the pain. I can’t stop now.
“Grab it,” my voice is muffled by the chop. Sculling my arms and eggbeatering my legs to keep vertical, I push the woody limb again.
The kid looks dazed.
“Grab the branch.” My voice echoes off the barren rocks lining the shore, but alarm infects my tone. I turn my back to him and frantically scan the choppy waters, squinting against the blinding sun in search of the rescue launch. Each passing moment brings us closer to blackness.
I so hope the surgery does the trick for you, Courtney!
Title: Revision: An Intergenerational Gender Story
Genre: Memoir
Description: This is the tale of three women from the same family: a curler-wearing silent, a hippie boomer, and a genderqueer millennial. Framed by everyday objects and experiences such as menstruation and dead bodies, the connected stories move back and forth in time to capture the evolution of gender identity, expression, and behavior and their role in the work women do to be both the same and different from their mothers.
First Page:
I shook from the November cold while standing on a Brooklyn sidewalk with exposed kneecaps, white anklets, and black patent leather Mary Janes. With one hand, I held onto Dad’s coat and with the other clutched my white rabbit muff. I tipped forward a bit so I could see my older brother, Howie, on the other side of our father. The three of us were in front of Brooklyn Jewish, not destined to enter. As was true of all hospitals in 1958, there was a prohibition against children as guests, so our visit had to be curbside. Suddenly, Dad pointed and shouted at us, “There! There! Wave, children. Wave!”
I craned my neck and tilted my head back as far as it would reach, scanning the windows. I was as methodical and patient as a four-year old desperate to see her mother could be. Feeling that Dad’s and Howie’s laughter and waving mocked my inability to follow their gaze, tears welled up and dripped down my cheeks. I dropped my father’s hand, wiped the tears gently with my muff, and glanced up at Howie. Why did he get to see her when I couldn’t?
All at once, there she was, waving and smiling back from what seemed like the hundredth floor, the biggest number I knew. I caught a glimpse of the familiar blue negligee with the matching robe that secured with a silk ribbon at the neckline. Although Grandma Molly explained that it would still be a few days before Mom came back to me, she hadn’t explained how enormous the brick building would be or how tiny my mother would look. The wind whipped at my face and my stomach churned. The tip of my nose was cold. I thought visiting Mom would be different. I wanted to go home.
Good luck with surgery and recovery!
Title (working): You Didn’t Say Love
Genre: romance
Description: Nora, a hopeless romantic, gets her heart broken one too many times and swears off dating and romance. Zander believes falling in love is a lie, and romance is unrealistic. Nora convinces Zander to pretend to date so they can get all the busy bodies in their lives off their backs during a season of weddings and family events.
First page: Nora sipped her ginger ale and flipped through one of the magazines she’d picked up at the airport that evening, adjusting her cashmere sweater. She glanced up briefly as a hint of expensive cologne signaled the arrival of the traveler who would be sitting next to her on this long flight to Milan. Louis Vuitton’s Imagination, if she had to guess. She had added it to the fragrance collection in her family’s storefront last year.
The silver-haired gentleman smiled at her as he settled into his seat, the gesture polite but not forward. Nora returned the smile, then turned back to her magazine. In the past, she might have said hello, introduced herself, and engaged her new travel companion in conversation. But today, she was tired and had a lot on her mind.
She was flying to Milan, as she did every four to six months, as part of her job as vice president for purchasing in her family’s import business, Everyday Luxury Fine Italian Goods. More importantly, she would also be seeing Gabriel, her boyfriend of more than a year. Something in her gut told her this would be an exceptional visit, and it was taking all her concentration to keep her imagination in check, an imagination that wanted to spin visions of white lace and tulle and champagne toasts and…and…and.
As she turned another page in her magazine, her gaze lingered on an advertisement for a jewelry store that featured a gorgeous emerald-cut diamond front and center on the page. She permitted herself a smile and indulged her imagination for just a minute. A tiny daydream wouldn’t hurt, right? Would this visit be the one? Gabriel had been married before; would that make him more—or less—likely to go all-out for a proposal? No, flamboyance wasn’t his style. He’d be more likely to take her to that restaurant with the hidden garden and amazing tiramisu and propose to her in whispered tones with eyes full of fire and intensity. She shivered, then quickly turned the page.
I love this title so much. I have some follow up questions about your description-- this sounds like a friendship that turns into a romance? Also, for pitching purposes I'd put a ticking clock on Nora's decision - my notes are cushioned between asterisks. For example: Description: Nora, a hopeless romantic, gets her heart broken one too many times and swears off dating and romance ***until her 30th birthday/for the rest of the year/something else?***. Zander (***who is he? her best friend?***) believes falling in love is a lie, and romance is unrealistic. Nora convinces Zander to pretend to date so they can get all the busy bodies in their lives off their backs during a season of weddings and family events. (***and...unexpectedly their friendship turns into something else? give us a little hint of what's to come! That's allowed in rom com***)
This is such excellent feedback, thank you! Descriptions/summaries are my nemesis.
Nice title and clear setting from the beginning!
Are you sure this sentence is necessary? "But today, she was tired and had a lot on her mind." The next paragraphs already shows this.
The Lodge at Rheas Bend
Adult literary novel/ family fiction
Planning celebrations at The Lodge for her mom and her daughter, Brynn is afraid she is going to spill the truth about the wild affair that ended in there 35 years ago. Her cousin, Lisa, looks for a home in a place she swore off that same summer, so long ago.
May 2023
Brynn was going to be on her best behavior on this afternoon river cruise. She was going to remember that her daughter’s boyfriend’s name was Chris, not Chad. She was going to make small talk with Chris’ parents instead of playing with her phone. Above all, when the boat reached Rheas Bend, she was not going to startle like a bunny rabbit at the sight of The Lodge rearing up on the bank like her own redneck Manderley.
She had been on this Tennessee River cruise a few times, at parties thrown by the history charities that she and James supported. The Lodge always looked the same, white paint peeling, boards missing from the dock, big “No Trespassing” signs, and a dilapidated air that said there had been a flood or a fire or both.
They were still a little way above the bend, and Chris’ mother, Jenny, was talking to James. Chris was talking to his dad, and her daughter Elle was gazing happily at Chris. Brynn peeked at her phone and saw a text from her cousin, Lisa.
“Call you?” Like their mothers, Lisa still believed in actual voice conversations, if not, God forbid, video calls, while Brynn thought texting was the most life-changing invention of her almost 56 years.
Solid tension right out of the gate. Nice to see a livelier start to a literary story.
Thank you!
Title: Noble Rot
Genre: Crime (Literary)
Description: Arthur Plaid's once revered restaurant has fallen on hard times. To keep his business going he convinces his wildly wealthy best friend Dale Fender to sell his father's wine collection. But when the wine turns out to be damaged and ruined, they are undeterred and conspire to make and sell painstakingly forged facsimiles of rare wine to New York City’s wealthiest collectors.
DECEMBER 15, 2017
Anyone who knew me knew not to call at 8:30pm on a Friday night. Certainly not a Friday night in December.
My phone vibrated as my corkscrew punctured the cork in a bottle of 2005 Dujac Malconsorts. The bottle of wine was for Lamar Tent, recently the subject of the article The King of Wine Collectors, featured on the NY Times Sunday Magazine’s cover. His spritely assistant had called earlier, charged more than I made in a month to Lamar’s card, and asked for the bottle to be opened and decanted two hours prior to Mr. Tent’s reservation. His reservation was in thirty minutes. I could say I’d been too caught up in service, lost track of time. I’d worked dining room floors for over twenty years and could toss off a casual lie to cover up a service misstep as easily as I could put one foot in front of the other. But when it came to Lamar Tent, I was equal parts terrified to see him and deeply annoyed that despite my best efforts to stash myself in the kind of tired, off the radar restaurant I’d spent my entire career avoiding, he’d found me anyway. Since the call with his assistant verified that his reservation wasn’t some elaborate prank, I’d been tracking time on the TV in the bar, the reservation system at the maître d stand, the point-of-sale terminals in the service station. I knew the time. I guess I hoped that by not opening his wine, I’d send some sort of cosmic smoke signal into the frigid New York night, and he’d decide to dine elsewhere. My entire year had been jammed full of wishful thinking. Why stop now?
I cradled Lamar’s bottle at a forty-five-degree angle with my left hand, its white label fading to yellow at the edges, and twisted the screw in with my right; the delicate and damp cork gave way too easily, started to crumble. Of course, the damn bottle wasn’t cooperating. I gripped the corkscrew tighter, sweating. If I pushed too hard, the cork would snap. If I didn’t push hard enough the point wouldn’t catch and I’d end up forcing the cork deeper into the neck of the bottle. There was no back up; not many restaurants in the world still had the wine on their lists period. From the inside pocket of my suit jacket, my phone kept buzzing.
I love how this is coming together, Ron!
Thank you!!
Working Title: "Rebirth: A midwife's guide on how to mend in a world that wants us to stay broken"
Genre: Memoir
Description: At once a compelling, often-untold story of a woman reclaiming her power, an honest examination of culture and inheritance, and a spiritual exploration, REBIRTH is a story of a midwife's journey through burnout that is ultimately a hymn of hope. It explores how radical self-acceptance can birth our collective liberation into being. Think: "Women Who Run with the Wolves" only make it birth-y, and a tad more political.
First Page:
The first moment I really felt like a midwife was when I realized my hands could see in the dark. I actually have to close my eyes in order to see when I use my hands now. They don’t see in images, but in feelings. Curves and softness, weight and warmth. They touch souls and shadows and speak to me in a language of intuition. They know a space that is both here and there, dark and light–the liminal–where grief, hope, love and suffering live. They hold birth, life and death. And they have held the weight of the world, too. Over one-thousand new little worlds who have slid out of the darkness guided by these hands, blinking and reaching, gasping, turning air into sacred breath and filling up the world with more love and hope. One more thread folded in, weaved into the fabric of this story, of all of our interconnected stories, that will continue on for infinity.
For years, my hands were the most important part of me, until they weren’t anymore. Until I stopped feeling a connection to them, really. Because, slowly, with time, birthwork became a wound filled with pain, anger, and worthlessness that my hands couldn’t mend. Midwifery was my calling, but also my undoing. I wanted to make birth better for people–safer, more empowering, connective and transformative. I hoped that if people could experience birth as an act of love (instead of the fear that often surrounds it) perhaps there would be more tenderness, resilience, and liberation born into the world too. I kept trying, and hoping, and giving, giving, giving and depleting myself. I struggled against the weight of depression that inevitably arrived because burnout took over my life before I even knew what to call it.
The truth is the crisis of reproductive injustice and the perils of modern birth are not new, they are in fact as old as humanity itself. Lives held in the hands of wise women for millennia witnessed, tended to, nourished, lost. But I didn’t know how to consult the wisdom of those who came before me, the priestesses of the divine feminine spirit, as I was free-falling into the unknown and being swallowed up by the darkness of my burnout. Once I surrendered to it, however, these wise women took my hand and they led me down a path that was sublunary and shadowed, solitary, spiritual and connective. They told me the secrets of the world, how much medicine there is in the unknown, and the wonder that can be found in the mystery and deep inquiry of life.
This opening resonates with me. I felt gripped by the exploration and personifying of her hands. I loved the simplicity and beauty of this moment: "Midwifery was my calling, but also my undoing." As a health-care worker and daughter of an L&D nurse, I feel interested to delve deeper into the world of midwifery (of which I know a little, but not a lot) with this narrator and also, perhaps more familiar, to explore with her the topic of navigating burnout. I feel drawn by the promise some historical/critical exploration of midwifery and childbirth throughout the book as well.
I felt like I got a solid sense of some of the important details from this page: some of the who, what, why, and the thoughtful, engaging tone I can expect throughout the book. If I saw this as the Book Preview online, or read this first page in the store, I would keep reading.
Also meant to say I wish you a speedy recovery! Hopefully Chester has proved to be an excellent post-surgery Doula haha <3
Title: Smallest Hope
Genre: Literary Fiction
Description: In the summer of 1974, eleven-year-old Kyle Wilkins moves with his family to rural Kentucky to live near his incarcerated dad. Kyle makes two friends: one’s dad is the prison doctor and the other is the warden. When Kyle’s older brother disappears, the three boys try to find him. Their quest leads to a haunted house and a child predator. The resulting tragedy upends their lives and shakes the prison to its core.
Page One - Prologue
Donald Gorman climbed the concrete stairs savoring the peculiar pleasure of destroying another life. Satisfaction softened the stony mask of his face as he pulled open the glass door and entered the prison.
Joining the queue with the other houseboys, he waited to pass through the metal detector and return to his cell.
Observing Donald’s closed-lip smile the corrections officer quipped, “Up to no good again, huh?”.
The flicker of a grin disappeared as Donald spread his arms and legs wide, gazing into nowhere. The guard proceeded with the body check and passed him to the next guard, who handcuffed and shackled him, and sent him to join the other houseboys on their way to roll call. Soon after, they filed back to their unit.
Once inside his cell, Donald sat on his bed, staring at the wall. Alone, he allowed himself full enjoyment, reliving again the terrible pleasure of a terrible thing. The grin returned and stayed.
1) THE BETTER MOTHER
2) Women's suspense/thriller
3) Pitch: All Savannah wants is to form a friendly co-parenting relationship with her casual fling and baby daddy, Max--but his ex, Madison, has much more sinister plans in mind. Because that baby should be hers.
FIRST PAGE:
One, two, three.
Plus the one I'd taken right then and there in the grocery store bathroom. That made four.
Four white, plastic sticks sat perched on the edge of my sink. Each had a tiny window at its head.
In the window of the first test, taken in the dimly lit bathroom stall, were two blue lines that formed a cross.
Usually there was only one line. I'd stared at thousands of them over the past couple of years, each time hoping and praying for a miracle. But each one had produced nothing more than a single, lonely blue line. Then Jason had left, and I'd given up. Resigned myself to facing the truth.
But this one–this one had two lines, and they formed a cross.
I was so sure my delusional mind had manifested it right out of my own imagination. I'd burst out of the stall–before realizing my pants were still around my ankles, and I ducked back in to get myself together—and marched right back to the "family planning" aisle. I grabbed three more boxes, this time opting for the super-fancy, digital ones that promised me a word rather than an inconclusive number of blurry lines. I took them home, chugged an entire can of La Croix, and peed on all of them.
Now here they were, screaming at me—all saying the same word.
Pregnant.
I squeezed my eyes shut tight, blocking the image out of my head, and walked out of my bathroom. It couldn't be true. It just couldn't. Everyone had told me it wasn't possible for me.
I've finally lost it–the last remaining shred of my sanity. I've gone crazy. I'm seeing things.
I opened my eyes, rubbed them to clear the haze, walked back into my bathroom, and looked at them again.
Pregnant.
"What the hell?"
The buzz of my apartment's intercom pulled me out of my stupor. A female voice floated into the room: "It's me, let me in."
I had called Ellie, verbally vomiting a gush of unintelligible gibberish as I barreled out of the bathroom and tore through the grocery store in a panic. She'd finally interrupted my tirade and said, "Savannah–calm down, I'm on my way. I'll meet you at your apartment."
I opened the door and met her eyes–physically, but not mentally. Mentally, I was in quicksand, letting it take me as I sunk faster and deeper. Ellie's eyebrows were sky-high as she waited for me to speak, but she recognized that look on my face. She'd seen it before. Most notably, almost a year ago, on the day my fiancé had cleared out his things from the apartment we'd shared and took off, all while I was at work.
"Okay, okay. Come sit down." She pushed past me into the apartment and headed straight for my couch, grabbing my hand to pull me down with her. "Now–I can see you're panicking. Let's not panic just yet. People get false results all the time. Maybe it's a mistake. Especially if you bought one of those cheap ones. Maybe we need to get you another test, just to be safe."
Wordlessly I stood up, still holding her hand, and led her into my bathroom. Like a sad, broken-down Vanna White, I presented her with the four tests, all lined up on the edge of my sink, forcing me to face my future with a single word.
Pregnant.
Ellie's eyes just about popped out of her head; her mouth fell open
"Holy shit."
"Yeah...holy shit."
She turned to look at me, pure shock on her face. "Oh my God, Savvy–you're pregnant. You're going to have a baby."
"I'm...I'm...," My tongue simply could not wrap itself around those words.
I had made that mistake before, countless times over the past few years, as my ex-fiancé and I had tried desperately to make a baby. Once you spoke your hope aloud, it was out there in the world. It was real. It existed. Now the universe could either deign to grant it, or just decide to stomp on it, according to its whim. Me, I had learned that your chances of falling on either side were equal, and predetermined. Some people were just lucky, or blessed; others simply weren't, and there was nothing you could do about it. It wasn't up to you–it was up to the universe. The callous, evil, vindictive, bitch of a universe.
Ellie crushed me into a hug. "Oh my God...oh my God," she said over and over, rubbing my back. I stood there in her embrace, my body as limp as a noodle. How can this be happening?
I liked your opening paragraphs. The pitch was harder to follow. "Max" and "Madison" are too similar when introduced together and Madison could be a male or female name. Do you even need to mention Madison's name when the last sentence clarifies the stakes?
Hey Arthur! Writing you from my sick bed-- thank you for your enthusiasm but if you could turn down the volume on the negative/nit-picky type comments on other people's work, please. As I stated quite clearly in my post, if you don't have something nice to say, please refrain from saying it. I have no doubt that you believe you are giving constructive feedback to our fellow writers, but I am encouraging positive comments only to keep fostering a community where people can feel safe and courageous enough to share their work. Thank you for respecting the boundaries I posted in the guidelines.
Sorry, of course, no problem! Thanks and feel better!
Thanks for understanding, Arthur! Usually I keep comments paywalled and I run a super tight ship here-- I appreciate your kind response, thank you!