QK Round 1: Mississippi Crazypants versus Tall Ships and Magic

Entry Nickname: Mississippi Crazypants

Title: This Side of Crazy
Word Count: 86,000
Genre: Women's Fiction

Query:

Cissy Pickering swears that shooting her daddy in the back was the smartest thing she’s ever done. After surviving more than eight years of his abuse, she had to prevent him from having a secret with her two baby sisters. What she didn’t count on was being sent to the Greater Mississippi State Hospital instead of prison.

When a caring, yet unorthodox, hospital psychiatrist tries to unlock the family secrets that led to Cissy’s crime, the 16-year-old retreats to a world of make-believe and compulsive counting. Meanwhile, three generations of women struggle to understand and forgive Cissy while coming to terms with the loss of their son, husband and father. Only her maternal grandmother offers unconditional love and support.

When the psychiatrist digs too deep, Grandmother takes drastic action to ensure Cissy’s emotional and physical survival – even if it means breaking the law. Their tender relationship and an unearthed secret from Grandmother’s past force Cissy to make her most courageous decision yet.

First 250 words:

My sisters and I had already consumed an impressive stack of books since school let out, reading long into the sticky June nights, even under threat of punishment. We’d needled Mama until she finally agreed to take the three of us to the Biloxi library, although grudgingly. Her chief argument against getting more books – and a flimsy one at that – was that we read too fast and the books we had should have lasted all summer. I ignored her complaining because that’s one of my special talents.

In my room, I slipped into a plaid cotton sundress and my pink plastic sandals that squeaked when I walked and rubbed blisters on my little toes. The sound irritated Mama just enough to make those blisters worthwhile. Some might call this childish behavior for a 16-year-old but I took fun wherever I could find it.

Jessie, already dressed and downstairs in the kitchen, whined that we’d run out of her favorite cereal. Mama told her in the sternest voice that plain old Corn Flakes would have to do. When our housekeeper Bess offered to make pancakes, Mama shushed her, too. She was forever telling Bess that she spoiled us and that spoiled children grew up into spoiled adults.

The excitement of selecting new reading material sent my stomach into flip-flops, akin to the type experienced on Christmas morning. I rushed out of my room and down the hall toward the bathroom to brush my teeth. What I saw stopped me short, the plastic of my shoes sticking fast to the wood floor.

Versus

Entry Nickname: Tall Ships and Magic
Title: HMS Invisible

Word count: 106,000
Genre: Adult Historical Fantasy

Query: 

What if the Master and Commander had met Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? Like Naomi Novak's Temeraire series, HMS Invisible imagines an alternate history in which tall ships contend with the practicalities of magic while fighting a desperate war for survival.

In England of 1803, magic isn't forbidden—it's just lower-class. Gentlemen do not care to associate with vulgar enchanters, but the Royal Navy is fighting a desperate battle against Napoleon's forces, and cannot afford such nice compunctions. Shields of air, broadsides of flame, and swirling water currents are becoming part of the arsenal of His Majesty's fighting ships, while Catholic chaplains struggle to suppress the powers of enemy enchanters. Duty, discipline, and skilled ship-handling are still what make the difference between glorious victory and life inside a French prison.

Mr. Midshipman Nicholas Mitchell is training to command the sailors, gunners, enchanters, and Marines crammed aboard the towering ships of the line—until the stress of battle brings out powers unprecedented in an officer and a gentleman. His Navy career uncertain, young Mitchell accepts a commission into the King's Own Service, a shadowy organization founded soon after the Act of Tolerance made magic legal in the United Kingdom. Soon he will discover that the same powers excluding him from polite society permit him to slip unseen into French harbours and bring back information that may just affect the course of the war.

First 250 Words:

Shiphandling would win this battle—not cannonfire, and not the magic of the enchanter's mates belowdecks. HMS Steadfast was a long way from the French three-decker, but the two ships seemed to be heading for the same point. The moment the enemy had been spotted, the captain, the master, and the first Lieutenant had shot to the rail with their sextants and slates, and begun a veritable frenzy of observation and calculation which had not yet ceased.

Mr. Midshipman Nicholas Mitchell had never seen any behaviour to top it, though he'd been in the Navy for nearly two years: the captain had since gone himself aloft with a telescope, but the other two were still back and forth to the rail, scribbling on their slates and muttering to each other. Word had gone around the ship in urgent whispers: neck and neck. The two ships were still miles apart on opposite tacks, and were apparently heading for the same point in the ocean—neither one headreaching on the other. Mitchell stood at his post by the signal locker, holding himself erect as an officer was expected to do, and waiting for orders.

He couldn't predict which ship would be first to the meeting point, but he did know there would be a battle there—and it would be brief and violent. The first ship to arrive would cross the bows of the other and rake her horribly, but then it would settle down to a pounding match. With the two ships close together it would be brutal.