An Agent's Inbox #3

Dear Agent Awesomeness:

Waking with the sudden appearance of a tattoo on her stomach, sixteen-year-old Ellie Cox knows her recurrent blackouts aren’t simply related to the stress of her typical high school life. And she knows they’re getting worse, more difficult to disguise as forgetfulness.

When Ellie goes missing--her loved ones assuming she ran away--no one expects to find her in the apartment of another boy. Not even Ellie. Or her boyfriend. Another three days have escaped her and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the new boy, Griffin, keeps calling her “Gwen.”

Snippets of her memory begin to return, and after her adoptive parents reveal her biological last name, Ellie sneaks off to Idaho where, instead of unearthing truths about her birth parents, she is forced to confront a man who claims to be her uncle and another who says saved her from a fire when she was six. Both memories she does not hold. Upon returning home, she is sent to a psychotherapist where a haunting secret is uncovered: mistreatment as a child has fractured Ellie’s mind into three personalities. And awareness of the other two--a small child named Ruby who holds the memories of Ellie’s early years and Gwen, the reckless alter who cares for no one but herself--only sends Ellie spiraling further toward the brink of insanity.

PIECES OF ELLIE is a YA suspense novel following a girl’s harrowing journey to proper diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder). The completed work is 56,000 words. It is a stand-alone story, but has the potential for sequels in the point of views of Ellie’s alters.

A previous draft of this manuscript reached the semi-finals of this year’s Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award contest. I have served as editor and editorial writer for the Butterfly Facts, hold a Master’s Degree in Education, and also run YA Stands, a community site focused on young adult reading and writing.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Sincerely,
N.S.


PIECES OF ELLIE

You don’t remember?

In the last twenty-four hours, I’ve heard those words three times now. The first, yesterday, when I forgot to wait for Dani after school. Supposedly, she’d asked me for a ride home during English, but for some reason the memory of first period is sort of a blur. Or not really there at all. I must’ve been daydreaming. The second, this morning, when Mom forgot to put pancakes on my plate and when I pointed it out she said, “I didn’t forget. You told me you didn’t like them anymore.”

And now.

I stand on the dirt-covered floor of Beacon’s, the abandoned cement factory, watching Shane wrap a leather necklace around my wrist. He picked it up at the boutique next to his little sister’s Tae Kwon Do studio. His fingers are warm, brushing lightly against my skin as he secures the knot. The silver charm in the shape of a running shoe sparkles in the dull light.

“Fits perfectly over your scar,” he says, smoothing his finger over the inch-long layer of wound leather. And he’s right, it does fit perfectly. The vertical white line on my wrist is hidden. If only he had leather for all the others.

“You don’t like my scar?” I say, hiding my discomfort in a pouting face. He leans down, lips barely grazing mine.

“I like everything about you, Ells. Including your scar. But I know you’re self-conscious about it.”

I grin. “Suddenly you’re a mind reader?”