I have sent out the first official query letter to Andrea Brown Literary Agency!
Now I just have to modify the query letter for other agencies and personalize my query for specific agents...but the hardest part (writing pitch and summary) is over. Yes!
Here is part of my query...Let me know what you think...Does it make you want to read it?
Seventeen year old Alex de Luna has always been the “unkissed girl, the unaware girl, the under radar girl” who sketches magic on her jeans and creates word-art infused with beauty, pain, color, escape. But, Alex’s identity is about to take a 180 degree turn when sixteenth century destiny meets up with 2011 reality.
Alex lives in the contemporary, real world of a South Texas city, but her dream-sleep world of an ancient empire collides with her everyday reality when Mayahuel, a girl escaping Aztec gore, crosses borders of time, space, and culture, forever altering Alex’s core of being. Mayahuel’s spirit permeates Alex with vibrancy and new voice, empowering Alex to fight back at life, not just typical high school life built around popularity and getting a boy to notice her, but a life of violence at her upscale townhouse where her mother pretends all is right with the world. Where Alex may soon become another doormat for her father to shove, crack, and hit with brutality of words, of fists. Will Alex save her mother? Better yet, will Alex escape? Leave all behind? Even Ethan, her first love beneath the orange orchards? Only the sun, filtering through rivers known and unknown, whispers truth.
In your agent description for Andrea Brown Literary Agency, you define the type of YA writer you are looking for as one “who is reinventing and re-envisioning the genre,” and I believe my novel Awake provides what you are looking for with a contemporary, multicultural voice such as Sofia in Viola Canales’s The Tequila Worm, Maria in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Call Me Maria and Kana in Holly Thompson’s Orchards. Awake has served as my thesis for graduate school, and although it is written in free verse, Awake is a blending of writing genres, include lyrical prose, screenwriting, and ekphrasis. Awake re-envisions the YA genre by merging feminism, multicultural identity, spirituality, indigenous history, and fantasy through the voice of a modern day teen of Hispanic ethnicity. Although Awake may be categorized as multicultural or Latina/o literature, my novel fits in with contemporary YA novels featuring strong emotional power, crossover appeal, and narrative risk as written by authors represented by the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, such as Ellen Hopkins, Jay Asher, and Holly Thompson.
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