#4

Title: ELEMENTAL FIRE       
Genre: YA Fantasy
Word Count: 70,000

Query:

Fourteen-year-old Brook wishes she could merge the two halves of her life: the fearless girl who flies across the countryside on the back of a runaway horse and the timid misfit who flails at communicating with her friends and father after her mother’s death.

Her father’s repeated disappearances don’t help either. Brook hides in his workshop as he walks through a solid rock wall momentarily turned into a blinding doorway to another world. She follows and must confront all her insecurities to prevent the theft of five ancient talismans by a madman responsible for the bizarre blizzard that killed her mother.

Only by cooperating with two boys who fight their own desires to snatch the talismans, trusting them with the secret of her new ability to track hidden people by their Heartfires and harnessing the mind-healing power of the Fire talisman can she prevent the destruction of her path home.

ELEMENTAL FIRE is a YA Fantasy, complete at 70,000 words. It functions as a standalone book, but is intended to be the first of a five book Elemental series similar to Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality with touches of The Last Airbender.

I have a degree in Physics and train endurance horses—both of which play a role in this manuscript.

First Page:

I peered into the stone-walled room Dad used as his home laboratory. I’d never gone inside without Dad around, but I needed to punch holes in my stirrup leathers. I got my first horse three months ago, and my inherited saddle was made for someone much bigger. Even when Vienna behaved, my skinny butt slid all over.

Contraptions Dad built for the university physics lab littered steel workbenches. Shivering, I avoided bony metal arms bolted to magnifying glasses, laser tubes and LED displays. No idea what the latest project did, but Dad’s gadgets hadn’t topped our discussions for several months.

I dug through drawers filled with soldering irons, resistors and meters. Nothing looked capable of poking holes through leather, so I made sure nothing looked out of place and returned to the garage part of the old apple shed. Buried under unfinished projects, I found a large nail and hammer. Wouldn’t be pretty, but it’d get the job done.

As I raised the hammer, the lab door opened. A thin man wearing a ridiculous Futurama tee rushed through. Dad’s head above robot Bender’s body. I would have laughed, but maybe it was the perfect uniform.

“Dad? Where’d you come from? I was just in there.”

Brown eyes gawked from behind thick lenses. His mouth opened and closed.

“Brook, stay out of my shop. My equipment’s expensive.” He stabbed a finger in my face with each word. “Just. Stay. Out.”

Seriously? He appears in a locked room, and I’m the one in trouble?