Query Kombat Round 1: Punk Rock Waitress Rules vs Absalom, Absalom!

Title: Someone Somewhere Summertime

Entry Nickname: Punk Rock Waitress Rules

Word count: 88K

Genre: Adult – Women’s Fiction

Query:

Please enjoy my entry, a humorous piece of coming-of-age women’s fiction, complete at 88,000 words with series potential. It’s a post-punk, girl-power discovery journey described as Sweetbitter meets John Hughes. The novel chronicles a group of young women in the ‘80s, the first generation who were told they could have it all—love, education, careers, casual sex, meaning friendships, and creative fulfillment. No one mentioned the turmoil and frustration that would ensue when those women’s ambitions were set loose on the world, and they actually tried to get it all, post-college.

In 1984, punk is rampant, Warhol rules, and 23-year-old Pittsburgh art student Jessica is sick of missing the excitement. She sets her sites on a graduate study program in England she can’t afford, determined to grow as an artist and a person. Yet her long-time hometown boyfriend Drew decides they need to “see other people” if he’s not thrilling enough to keep her stateside.

Jessica and her avant-garde roommates set off to waitress in New Hope, PA, an upscale, culturally open-minded summer tourist town on the Jersey border, hellbent on saving the tuition to get to London. The girls rent a leaky basement apartment, braving waitressing chaos, slam dancers, drag shows, over-muscled townies, and co-workers of all sexual persuasions in search of the unsheltered, post-dorm life she’s been pining for. Then Jess meets Whit, a volatile new wave guitarist who crawls through her window and makes her head spin like a record.

But Whit turns out to be more trouble than the typical shiny new toy. He sends Jessica careening off the road in his Camaro during a heated tiff, draining her tuition savings with an ER bill. When lingering high school boyfriend Drew shocks Jess by transferring across the country, she’s left to decide whether being stuck on both guys is awesome, or a reckless personification of her cracked-glass mosaic art projects—and whether a commitment to either will hinder her dream trip to London.

First 250:

I’m not a good enough liar to get a job on the river side of New Hope, where the real waitresses work.

A restaurateur in a lavender silk shirt interrogates me, tapping a finger against his lips.

“Jessica Addentro,” he reads off my application. This is the seventh place I’ve visited today, and I have an hour before I have to meet the girls for a ride back to Trina’s house. My feet throb like a U2 drum kick.

I sit at Capresi’s Continental Restaurant in New Hope, sheltered between the canal and a creek that zig-zags as if it’s lost its way. Trina calls this Pennsylvania’s answer to San Francisco, where the lifestyle choices are as assorted as the menu selections. The whole town is an artsy tourist trap sprung between multiple bodies of water, including the Delaware River.

The restaurateur pronounces my name with an Italian flourish. “Ad-den-tro. Do you know what it means?”

I took high school Italian, but it’s been a while. “Inside?”

“Versed in.” He winds his free hand in a circle. “As in, full of insights. Does that sound like you?”

“Depends on the subject matter,” I say. “But okay.”

Sun-catchers shaped like owls and starbursts flash behind him, suspended from the ceiling amid twirling lanterns. Bookshelves and plants scream for a feather duster.

The man’s eyes flick down the page. “You live here in town?”

“Me and my roommates are moving into a place on Main Street this week.” Then life will begin.

VERSUS

Title: Hope

Entry Nickname: Absalom, Absalom!

Word count: 93K

Genre: Women’s historical fiction

Query:

“I did everything God asked of me, and He took away everything I loved.”

HOPE MACDONALD was a fiercely independent tomboy, even in her isolated early twentieth century mountain community where her life is guided by the customs of her Scottish ancestors and the strict tenets of her Protestant religion. But her thirteenth birthday marks her entry into womanhood. Without her trademark overalls, and no longer allowed to pursue her favorite pastimes of fishing and trapping, Hope struggles to find her place.

When a devastating storm destroys their crops and kills much of the livestock, Hope’s family faces foreclosure. Believing that the only way to save their farm is to produce a larger crop, they propose to rent fallow land from their neighbor, ABSALOM NEVILLE. But Absalom wants only one thing in return: Hope.

Guided by her belief that she must follow God’s plan for her life and by her fear of what might happen if she angers Him, Hope agrees to marry Absalom, a man twice her age. This marriage will test her strength in ways she could never imagine and keep her bound to a man who has stolen her spirit and threatens to take her life.

Can she leave? Not unless she can overcome the paralyzing fear of stepping outside the boundaries that have been ingrained in her since childhood—that will make her a “tainted woman.” She and her children will be ostracized by the community, thrown out of the church, perhaps thrust into even worse poverty.

HOPE is historical women’s fiction complete at 93,000 words. It is similar in content to Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay and Sentence of Marriage, by Shayne Parkinson.


First 250:

My parents named me Hope. I was born too soon, a frail and tiny child, and hope was all they could give me.

In the Adirondack Mountains of the nineteen-aughts, life was a scrabble. My mother bore seven living babies; four others had not survived. That was the way of childbirth then: there were no promises.

I was tiny, but I grew and I thrived. Being the only girl I had little choice. Although I was small-framed like my Ma’s side, I inherited Da’s Scots features: his deep emerald eyes and auburn curls. My father declared I looked like a tiny ball of flames as I streaked barefoot across the barnyard, my bright red hair flying behind me.

“How’s my Fireball?” he’d tease, coming into the house at dinnertime. He had an easy smile when it came, one that seemed to make his whole face glow. Da’s smiles were rare, but I took every ounce of love he could spare and shined it right back on him. I loved to crawl into his lap on the rare occasion when he sat, nuzzling my face into his rough, hairy chest. I craved the smell of him. It was earthy but pleasant: the scent of hard work and honest living.

It never came to me that I couldn’t do anything my brothers could. They might now and then complain I was too little to play with them, but they never excluded me because I was a girl.

But on my thirteenth birthday—May 15, 1920—everything changed.