Tuesday, April 29, 2014

PitchSlam #5: Illusion of a Majesty, YA Fantasy

Genre: YA Fantasy
Title: Illusion of a Majesty
Word Count: 75,000

Song: Love Story by Taylor Swift

Pitch: Jenna can steal another's powers. It's her only form of protection from her psycho dad. But the more she takes, the more like him she becomes, until she must choose: her life, or her sanity.

250: The box, placed so deliberately on our welcome mat, made my skin prickle the second I opened the front door.

My crazy dad had found us again. We'd made it almost a year this time. But that little box always brought trouble and it meant in a few hours, before morning, we'd be gone. Moved on to the next place, the next school, like we'd never been here at all.

Damn it, I really liked Botany. 

I stepped out onto the dark porch and reached down to pick it up. It was exactly the same shape, weight, and color as every other one before it. Inside would be exactly the same, too. A doll's bodyminus the head. He'd already sent us that.

And I'd hidden it.

I threw a quick glance down the hall to where Mom was watching TV. If I hid this, too, she'd never know. We could stay in this laid-back beach town. I'd never have to leave my friends or the cheap, old, station wagon she'd brought me to learn to drive in. 

Despite that thought, there was a name in this box. Either me, my mom, or my sister, Vivien, were about to have some serious bad luck. I had to find out whose name my dad had sent us. Usually the head would be enough to figure out if it was me, because while we all had brown hair, our eyes were different. Theirs were brown, mine were blue.

3 comments: