Category: PITCH WARS

Title: Temping for Death

Age Category: Adult

Genre: Fantasy

Word Count: 94,000

Pitch:

When night-shift worker Ana injures Death in a freak forklift accident, she must take over his job while he’s on disability leave. Then an assassin targets Death, and Ana’s left holding the scythe.

First 250 Words of Manuscript:

This was the worst funeral Ana had ever been to. The chapel’s frigid air made her regret not bringing a jacket. Her folding chair was making her butt numb. And it was extra hard to maintain the right solemnity with the guest of honor sitting at the front of the room, looking back at her. He didn’t even have the decency to be dead, a point Ana previously believed was a requirement for a funeral.

The music crackling through the Ellsworth Lockburn Funeral Home’s decrepit sound system didn’t help. It added extra creep factor to the way Stan sat next to his casket at the front, watching the crowd like a shark eyeing a school of anchovies. Ana shifted uncomfortably, then stopped as Stan’s eyes turned in her direction. She hadn’t given anything to Stan’s pet cancer charity, in spite of him being an executive at her company. She planned instead to donate to the charity of Keeping Electricity On at Ana’s Apartment. Her night shift position at the Lowlight Gazette didn’t pay well enough for both options.

The music finally ended, and Stan rose to his feet. He straightened his impeccable suit coat and smiled through gleaming white teeth. “Thank you for coming, friends. And coworkers. As you know, it’s been a tough road for me.”

Ana hadn’t known, she hadn’t even heard about his diagnosis until it was corrected as a misdiagnosis. Executives at the Gazette didn’t hobnob with distribution workers like Ana. Not that Ana was interested in either hobbing or nobbing with Stan.

Title: Eternal Cuckoo

Age Category: Adult

Genre: Paranormal Romance

Word Count: 90,000

Pitch:

Every time Rebecca and Adam die, they wake in the body of someone new. Finding each other could end their loneliness, but to stay together, they must cope with the moral implications of their condition.

First 250 Words of Manuscript:

Leo has a gun pointed at me. The wall clock over his shoulder goes tick, tick. I try to focus on it and not the gun. It’s an anniversary clock, our twenty-fifth.  “I want my wife,” Leo sobs. His finger trembles. This makes the whole gun shake. According to the clock it is 8:10 in the evening and four seconds… five seconds… six.  I take a breath. “Honey–”

He shouts: “Stop using her voice!” A few blond strands from his comb-over drift into his eyes. This is my husband, a balding Omaha veterinarian; and I am his wife, fifty-eight years old, pudgy, but pretty, with a sparkle in my brown eyes. I’m a bake sale queen, a church deacon, and until a moment ago, I was gripping a mug of hot cider labeled with the name REBECCA.

He steps forward to push the barrel against the skin above my left eye, right into the star-shaped chicken pox scar that Rebecca — I — got when she was nine years old.

“Tell me where she is,” he says.

Little, insignificant things I know about Rebecca rattle through my head in staccato, like how she abhors coconut and is allergic to lemon balm. She’s a size ten shoe, and she’s been embarrassed about that fact since college.  “Leo, put the gun down.”

“Stop talking like her!” he yells into my face. “Stop looking like her!”