An Agent's Inbox #3

Dear Ms. Shea:

Samantha Cooper always believed that if you build it, he will come. Just like the whispering voice said in Field of Dreams, right? So she did. She earned good grades, made smart choices, and grew into the nice girl her mother’s friends adored. The picket fence and handsome husband had to follow. But as she approaches thirty, disillusionment has set in because nobody has come and apparently, all she has built is a lonely, empty life. So one day, Samantha Cooper tears the whole thing down.

In WILD CHERRIES, Samantha (Sam), an aspiring-writer/waitress in a California beach town, is brooding over the loneliness in her life, due to being a romantic outcast in a Sex-in-the-City world and a failure in becoming the writer everyone said she should be. Sure, there are laughs with her long-time friends Claire and Joe--especially Joe who’s harboring a secret crush on Sam--but those moments are lost in Sam’s growing dissatisfaction with such an uninspired life. Then her life changes in one unexpected moment. She meets handsome and bookish Nick, and inexplicably, she feels the spark of inspiration. Her joy is short-lived, however, when she discovers that he’s married. But tired of lonely Saturday nights, Sam chooses to be reckless for the first time in her life and begins a relationship with Nick. What begins as a wild ride toward forbidden places becomes an inspiring journey home to a love that had always been right in front of her. Turns out, he’ll only arrive if you’re building something for yourself.

WILD CHERRIES is women’s fiction and is approximately 84,000 words.

I am an English teacher and graduate of UCLA. I am a first-time novelist, but I’m committed to writing and willing to do whatever is necessary--editing and promoting--to work with you to get my writing published. I follow you on Twitter and appreciate your query tips. You said in the "Writer Unboxed" interview that as a little girl, your dream was to have a best-selling novel. Me, too. I hope that's something that can bring all of us--Samantha, you and I--together.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my work. Per the submission guidelines, the first 250 words are included below. The completed manuscript is available upon request. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
L.H.


WILD CHERRIES

I think I peaked in the sixth grade. As a writer, that is. Maybe romantically, too, considering that was the year of my epic first kiss with Collin Crosby, the boy who earned "cutest" honors in every yearbook from elementary school through high school. But definitely as a writer. Since that time, I’ve never come close to achieving the accolades I received during the springtime of that year.

Friday afternoons in Mr. Adamson’s sixth-grade class were devoted to Writer’s Workshop, a two-hour period when we hunched over our desks as we wrote and erased until we had finally come up with the perfect paper. Well, everyone but Ricky Simmons. He usually stared at Jenny Freeman the entire time; Jenny had been the first girl in our class to get boobs.

Writer’s Workshop was also the key to the best thing possible for a sixth-grade girl at Maple Dale Elementary School: a paper adorned with a shiny gold star, displayed on the Spotlight Wall and a Friday trip to Baskin Robbins with Mr. Adamson, probably the cutest teacher in the history of the world. It might have been his closely cropped brown hair or maybe those bright blue eyes. Most likely, though, it was his smile that made girls swoon.

So, I slaved away each Friday, hoping that on Monday I’d see my paper in the spotlight dressed with a brilliant gold star and start to plan out the perfect outfit to wear on my fake-date with Mr. Adamson.

There was always one problem, though: Susie Sloan.