QK Agent Round: Raspberry Moon

Title: Under A Raspberry Moon

Entry Nickname: Raspberry Moon

Word Count: 56,000

Genre: Middle Grade Fantasy

Query:

On the eve of the galactic alignment, all practically-eleven-year-old Emma Baines wants is to

escape the school’s miserable bully game, Pick-Off. She doesn’t have time for rumors about the universe collapsing and the moon turning pink when the planets align. Besides, she’s a math-and-science girl. There’s no science in that load of pink baloney.

But Emma quickly changes her mind when A.C. Enniston slams into her backyard. The universe is collapsing, and it’s because this old man has been busting through parallel realities, searching for—of all things—her. Emma is the last element Enniston needs for his perfect computerized reality, a reality in which he and his dying wife, an eighty-year-old Emma, can be healthy forever.

Emma can hide like she does every day in Pick-Off, or she can figure out how to outsmart Enniston and save the universe. As the moon blazes pink, Emma learns about being brave and gets advice from two very different versions of herself from parallel realities. Emma must race across alternate dimensions to learn how to repair the universe and return home. But Enniston isn’t about to let that happen until his computerized reality is complete. If Emma doesn’t act smart and fast, the planets will align, the raspberry moon will fade, and the universe is toast.

UNDER A RASPBERRY MOON is a stand-alone   novel   with   strong   series   potential, and the full manuscript is available upon request. My magical adventure would appeal to fans of THE VERY NEARLY HONORABLE LEAGUE OF PIRATES series and VOYAGE TO MAGICAL NORTH. Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

First 250:

Prescott Hadley City Honors campus was too quiet for a Wednesday morning, and Emma Baines didn’t trust it for one minute.

She gnawed a raggedy thumbnail and inched through the main gate. Even when it was raining, kids hung around in jabbering bunches, waiting for the warning bell. Not today. Today they sloshed through puddles straight to the front door. Where were the footballs, Frisbees, or those lousy rubber bands? They were the smallest but nastiest, zipping out of nowhere and snapping you into next week.

She took a few tiptoe steps. Today’s game could have been called because of the weather . . . but that was way too obvious, and it wasn’t raining that hard. Narrowing her eyes, she drummed her fingers around the purple umbrella’s handle.

All this quiet was just a trick, a trap, and she wasn’t about to be fooled. She’d stick with the original plan—sprint behind the school then bolt through the back entrance, the one near the picnic shelter. It would take more time, and she’d be drenched before coming anywhere near the door, but that route completely avoided today’s Pick-Off zone.

That psychopathic bully game moved every day, and if the P.H.C.H. buzz and Twitter had it right, today’s zone was the school’s front lawn. Scores doubled when the zone was right under teachers’ noses. Picking off advanced-placement kids earned twenty points, and Dillon Block had a wicked arm. That kid was the biggest, meanest commando-wannabe in the whole school— maybe the whole county.