The Writer's Voice

Query:

Dear Amazing Agent,

Take one shy albino guy named Ansel. Add his two younger brothers, and an injured runaway girl with a hidden past. Shake thoroughly and stand back because things are going to get interesting fast.

Letting the nameless girl with the banged-up ankle sleep in his parents’ book shed for one night *seemed* like a good idea. But Catskin, as Ansel nicknames her, needs more than shelter. She needs someone to help her figure out how rejoin society. Prone to panic attacks and acts of defensive violence, she turns out to be as dangerous as she is fragile. Slowly, the sweetly strange Catskin begins to find a sense of normality and the bond she and Ansel already share blossoms into a mutual attraction.

Then an accident leaves Catskin hovering between life and death. Pressured by doctors, Ansel contacts her estranged parents, reconnecting her with the life she left behind. His actions provoke a shocking confrontation between the wealthy world Catskin was born into, and the starkly average one she now shares with Ansel. When Catskin’s overbearing parents use hospital policy to force their daughter’s return, Ansel takes the drastic measure of kidnapping Cat in order to give her a chance at freedom.

A Contemporary YA inspired by the fairy tale Catskin, GONE MISSING GIRL is complete at 85,000 words.

I have had five poems published in the anthology Poetry Pact 2011 (Volume 1) and several short stories published in the online magazine Underneath the Juniper Tree. In addition, I have had two nonfiction short stories published in the magazine ‘laJoie’. I am a member of SCBWI.

Thank you very much for your time and attention

Happy reading,

Artemis Grey

First 250:

 I have never been that guy. You know, the one surrounded by adventure and covered in awesomesauce. That would be my younger brother, Ethan.

 But Ethan wasn’t in the book shed that night.

 I was.

 It’s not like you get to pick and choose life-altering events the way you do socks from the bargain bin.

 I went out to the shed for a bottle of spine glue.

 Simple, right?

 But when I flipped on the overheads, I found a shrunken zombie lurking just inside the doorway.

 *Insert very macho scream*

 Right about then the broom slid sideways, hitting the light switch and leaving me stranded in the dim twilight of the Alaskan summer.

 Lovely.

 When my brain wasn’t immediately harvested, I took several deep breaths. Convinced myself that I had not, in fact, just seen a zombie in the book shed. Turned the light back on.

 It was still there.

 But it wasn’t a zombie. It was a girl.

 Filthy, tangled, rumpled and undersized, but definitely female. Definitely alive. Her mouth hung partway open now, eyes wide, yet disturbingly empty. Like her entire body was deserted. The void inside her yawned at me. A sort of awful maw that might chew me up, if I got within reach.

 Which, I had no intention of doing.

 Hell, I couldn’t even find my voice to bother asking who she was, where she’d come from or why she was in there.

 Of course, she wasn’t exactly a Chatty Cathy, herself.

Everywhere And Nowhere All At The Same Time...

This will be a short post. Mostly because I'm really just wasting time while my laptop charges (it's an old laptop and sometimes refuses to charge and since it's willing to charge right now while I'm holding it open, I'm obliged to sit here for a little longer and let it keep charging) but also because it's been probably too long since I last posted.

So, what have you been up to, internet world?

As for me, I've been:

Writing on a new WIP, tentatively titled Rivana of the Twains. It's a fantasy (YA, of course) and right now, I'm madly in love with it. Tough to tell at this juncture whether it will be genuinely unique and marketable, but the important thing is it''s rekindling my passions. I'm stealing moments to write just one more sentence, and jotting down little notes on pasty pads while at work. I'd forgotten how freaking good that feels.

Working at the shop. Still loving it. Still learning. Things are great so far. I have, as of yet, avoided breaking any anvils... but give it time... *crosses fingers that I never *actually* manage to break an anvil*

I still have fulls of Gone Missing Girl out so several agents. So glad that they're 'out there' but I'm not hulking over my inbox. It's enough that they're in the works. I've got work and the new WIP to keep me busy. But it means the world just to have stuff with agents.

Getting feedback from a new critique partner... (THANK YOU CHRISTI!!!) which is a little frightening but mostly made of awesome because it means new eyes on my stuff and a new angle on things. Opens up an entire world of possibilities, one which I'm super excited about.

Also, I've watched the Boston Marathon tragedy unfold. Wept over the dead and injured. Selfishly wept a little more over the knowledge that friends who desperately wanted to run, failed to qualify and subsequently weren't there to be endangered. Watched the capture of the second suspect. Laughed at my niece, code name Walelu, and forgot about being sad. Laughed at Mad Max and forgot about being sad. Wrapped my cousin's fiance in toilet paper during Easter games, then got wrapped myself in a toilet paper wedding gown during a bridal shower for the same cousin. Caught the bouquet of a friend, which I did NOT want to catch, but was forced to in order to avoid getting the bouquet implanted in my front teeth :) Saw War Horse, and was less than impressed. Blech all around. Not to slight anyone who loved it.

So, yeah, been busy. Not been around very much on the internet, but been around in general. All right, off to write, and edit and all of that. See you round internet!

The Way Things Happen...

It's been a while since I posted. Things are going well, if strangely, some of them more strangely than others. Which brings me to the title of this post.

Sometimes things happen in the very strangest of ways and no matter how you try to steer toward normality, you miss it by a mile but end up in the same place anyway.

Most of this blather was inspired by the epic saga partaken by my mother and I in our hunt for special item X for my father. I'm not going to say exactly what it is because it's still in the works and I don't want any chance of him somehow finding out. And he's one of those people who always finds out somehow, even without trying.

But I digress. Mom and I have been on a hunt for item X. Turns out that item X is very hard to find. Very expensive. And pretty much impossible to get ahold of.

Then we found what we were looking for on eBay. I am not an eBay expert, but I know something about it. We bid. We were outbid. We bid higher. We lost.

Then I got an email from eBay saying I'd received a Second Chance Offer because the original high bidder had failed to pay or the sale had otherwise fallen through. This offer means that your high bid becomes a Buy It Now price, which you can agree to pay, or pass on. So I replied that I was interested, but had several questions which I itemized in the email. I had 3 days in which to respond to this offer. I got no reply from the seller until the end of the 3 day offer period, which was annoying but not insurmountable. At the end of the offer period I received a confirmation email from eBay stating that my offer had been accepted and gave me all the information required to pay by bank transfer. I also got an email from the seller saying my offer was accepted and to let him know when I got the confirmation from eBay. I replied, saying I'd received it, but I was confused because originally there had been several options for payment, and now it was only giving me the option to pay via bank transfer, and I didn't want to. While awaiting his reply (mind you, he hadn't responded to my first two emails) I tweeted about how it seemed weird that he was taking so long. A friend replied to my tweet and during our conversation, she told me it all seemed strange to her, and that I should do what made me comfortable but that she thought it was fishy. So instead of biting back my frustration and rushing to the bank to complete the transfer I didn't want to do in the first place, I felt bolstered by her support and did nothing but wait for the seller's reply. When it came a full 24 hrs later is said simply 'Please pay with bank transfer and I will ship item to * address supplied by me*' He still never acknowledged my questions nor answered them. At this point, I wen to eBay and contacted the seller directly through them, instead of by email. And while I was doing all this, I discovered that eBay has warnings about second chance offers and states that if you received one, you need to check your eBay message center because you will ALWAYS receive a Second Chance Offer there, in addition to you email. Guess who DIDN'T have a message in their Ebay message center? I promptly forwarded the fraudulent emails to eBay's security center and they have since emailed me, confirming the scam and letting me know that they were already attempting to track the emails down.

You just never know. Thankfully no vital information had been passed to the scammers.

BUT while I was on eBay dealing with all of this, I found ANOTHER item X even better than the one I'd lost which had spawned the spam (it should be noted that the original seller is innocent and on the up and up. He was getting scammed the same as me, as his name was being used in the commission of a crime. Thankfully neither one of us has suffered irreparable damage) and I was able to Buy It Now, and have already received proper invoices etc.

So, something crazy bad awful ALMOST happened, but didn't and as a result, I found the one thing my Mom and I wanted most. And God willing and the creek don't rise, this will work out perfectly.

It's sort of the same with querying. Not that agents try to scam you (well, not any REAL agent) But just that sometimes you think you're headed in just the right direction but then something happens and it's all a mess and you're on the verge of flinging yourself off a cliff and suddenly you end up precisely where you wanted/needed to be.

During all of this item X drama, I opened my inbox to find, utterly unexpectedly, an email from an agent I'd last had contact with in about November of 2012! She wasn't someone I'd queried, but someone I'd gotten involved with via a blog contest. But I love this agent! She is someone I've secretly pined for. I admire her, and I'd love to have the opportunity to work with her. Not because she's an agent and I'm a writer who wants an agent, but because she's who she is. And guess what? She was asking me if I was still seeking representation and if so, would I send her the full because she was intrigued!

Now, since I sent her my first fifty pages, my ms has been through a huge edit, mostly because of feedback from an editor at a publishing house. It was good feedback, and since requests for my ms had trickled to a virtual halt, I'd decided to look hard at the ms and revise. So I had. But now an agent wanted to see it. So I sent her the full, and explained everything. The first fifty she'd seen and my current fifty aren't gargantuanly different. It's the rest of the ms that's changed. I explained that to her as well.

Maybe having the ms change will bother her. Maybe she'll think I did the right thing. Maybe something awesome will come of this. Maybe it won't. But you just never know.

The way things happen... well, they can be amazing and unexpected and wild. And sometimes you end up right where you need to be, despite everything you went through on the way there.