TRICK OR TREAT D4: WHIRLED

Title: WHIRLED

Category:  YA

Genre: Time Travel/Romance

Word count: 95,000

Pitch:

When seventeen year-old Lu Dresden falls for a boy who accidentally slipped into her world from the year 1847, she’s forced to choose: her pretty awesome life, complete with indoor plumbing, or a chance at the kind of love that doesn’t come along every century. When Lu follows William back in time and halfway around the world, the harrowing time-slip is the least of her worries. William is funny, smart, and fiercely gallant, but the two have some serious coming-to-grips to do with the fact that his ideas about relationships—heck, about women in general!—seem downright archaic at times.

Q1: In your MC's voice, what costumed character do you most relate to and why?

Scarlet O’Hara had the right idea, not worrying about stuff until tomorrow. But no way will I do that corset thing…no matter how important it is to fit in with the cool girls of the mid-18^th century!

Q2: As an author, what makes your manuscript a tasty treat (unique/marketable)?

As if corsets weren’t bad enough, try chamber pots, stingrays, and fighting to escape a slaver’s ship—yikes! Still, what could be yummier than a transatlantic romp with a dreamy Australian boy and a love story that transcends time?

First 250:

Tommy cracked his gum and sent a waft of cinnamon-scented breath my way. I loved Big Red and had the sudden urge to put my mouth to his and see if he’d surrender his ABC-piece. Luckily, I wasn’t inclined to act on the stupider of the ideas that crept through my head.

We were gleaning the last of the summer vegetables, runty and stunted from shortening days and sporadic watering.

He reached for a fat zucchini vine and freed it with one sharp yank. I stared. When had his back changed? Tommy’s back—actually all of him but the stretch covered by his swim trunks—was generally on display all summer long.

Tommy, seventeen like me, has always been all long skinny arms and legs, sun-brown in defiance of his mom’s SPF 70. Out of nowhere, his shirt now revealed smooth lines of muscle, and a groove where his knobbly spine used to be.

“Hunh?” Had he said something? Warmth spread from my neck to my face.

 “Nothing.”  He tossed another armful of vegetation onto the Speedway, grabbed the handles, and headed off to the compost heap.

The bare plot was a little sad, now just torn up dirt where a month ago the profusion of green had been spewing out more bounty than we could keep up with.

“Lu!” Tommy rounded the corner with cupped hands.

I jogged over.

He stopped very close to me, his catch in the small space between us, and slowly lifted his top hand.