a book proposal I intend to turn from an assignment into a real novel

Student Name: Anathema Harris Student ID Number: 220045193





ENCO310 Children's Literature: Children's Picture Books and Fantasy


Assignment One
Option 2
Book Proposal


Book Proposal: Details of the Book
Hook: "Janie is a very troubled sixteen year old. Her father is missing, her step father is dead, and of her twin brother's one is had a drug overdose less than a year ago. Her other brother is gone, left to work in Antarctica as a biologist. Why? Because it's the furthest away he could get from their mother. Janie is now running for her life, trying to escape her mother and discover the secrets that are buried in her troubled families past."
Back Story: This is a story of a teenager, Janie, who is growing up fast. She is learning that her family is not like other people's families with ordinary problems, her family is far different. Last year her brother Kyle had died of an overdose that had been waiting to happen; he was deeply depressed after breaking up with his girlfriend; his twin brother Cary had taken the first opportunity to leave and hadn't come back, he and their mother had been fighting terribly. She'd already been through the disappearance of her biological father when she was a child; her step father had died of no known cause at a healthy 45, he was fit, ran a successful local paper and enjoyed many friends. There had been no real reason for him to die, her mother, the so-called mournful widow had sold his booming business and was nicely set up for life.
For quite some time Janie's mother had been putting a lot of pressure her to do various things, some of which was becoming stranger and more uncomfortable. It started rather innocently, she had asked Janie to clean out all of her toys for a charity auction; Janie had happily done so but had kept a threadbare doll she'd had since she was three, a gift from her father. Her mother had fought bitterly about it, but gave in eventually. Later requests for her to change her appearance, probes into her personal life and finally hiring a prostitute to have sex with her drove Janie to run away two weeks ago.
Novel: Janie is waiting until her mother had driven away to go to work and breaking into her own house only to find that her room had been completely cleaned out of her things, and a university student border moved in. It seemed to Janie as though her mother had completely erased her from her life.
Janie is a fugitive, taken in by squatters, living on charities for food while she starts looking into who her mother really is. She is terribly afraid of being found by the authorities and made to go back to live with her mother so she is constantly looking over her shoulder, afraid of who might be watching.
What she finds is much more shocking that she realised. Her mother is a succubi, and was grooming Janie to be the same.
Particulars: This will be a fantasy novel, set in the present time. It will be a chapter book, comprising of eight chapters. The main characters will be Janie, her mother Sarah, her brother Cary, the squatters and a friendly medium who becomes terrified at what they discover about Sarah.

Chapter Breakdown
Chapter One: Breaking In. Janie breaks into her own home and bedroom to discover that her room has been let to a university student, all of her belongings are gone.
Chapter Two: Survival of the Fittest. Janie is running. She is hiding in a squatter's community in the inner city. This chapter introduces her fellow squatters as well as illustrates her current living conditions, she is living on local charity and there is violence around her.
Chapter Three: Soul Searching. Janie starts her investigation into her family past secrets, she scours library archives for articles on her family. She also uncovers that her mother has no past records (birth certificate/family). She also uncovers that her father is missing, presumed dead, but there is a flicker of hope he still lives. There are flash backs to disturbing encounters with her mother.
Chapter Four: A Brief Interlude. Another Squatter, Pips, an older boy helps her discover that there is a big wild world out there, a supernatural one. He reveals he has 'gifts', and senses she is not human. However, he learns to trust her when they have a supernatural encounter with a demon, and they fight. She is coming to terms with being different too, she finds she is very strong when confronted by violence, and has the ability to fight.
Chapter Five: A Visitation. Pip introduces Janie to a friend of his, Sylvie, who is a medium. Sylvie agrees to try and contact her dead relatives. She is possessed not by her brother's spirit but by a demon. He tells her she is descendant and she must embrace her destiny and bring souls back to him.
Chapter Five: Mother. Janie faces her fears and goes home to confront her mother. She reveals herself to Janie as one of the Succubi, and tells her she is of the same kind. Janie tells her that she will never be that way. While her mother laughs, Janie cries and runs away. She falls into an exhausted sleep, her mother dream visits her.
Chapter Six: Changes. Jamie awakens to find Pip shaking her. He is disturbed, she's physically changed. She looks into a mirror, she has changed, taken on the appearance of a demoness. Angry, she throws the mirror and it shatters. Later, after calming down, she assures him she feels no different. Before leaving to visit her brother Cary, she goes under disguise to confront her mother. There is no resolution between them.
Chapter Seven: Revelations. Janie goes to see her brother. He is currently working in Tasmania with the Antarctic Division. He is afraid of her, but reluctantly agrees to see her. He knows everything, he knows she is a Succubi, like her mother. He tells her both their father and step father are most certainly dead or worse. Kyle too. Cary admits he left because he was afraid of ending up like them - that being in the Antarctic most of the time meant being mostly safe from their mother.
Chapter Eight: Choices. Left alone in Cary's flat, Janie must now come to terms with who/what she is. She can't reconcile it, without embracing the whole package, she can only use her physical strength; this means she can't shape change to appear human anymore. She won't go back home and live with her mother, she knows she'll eventually change into her and she can reach out in her dreams. She can't live in human society like this either.
Chapter One, Paragraph 1 - 4 (opening paragraphs which also introduces the character).
The streets were black and wet, light flashed in and out of sight, along with the swoosh of water along the road that accompanied something sleek and powerful. A cat shrieked and a large crash as something fell somewhere, and then, preternatural silence.
Janie shivered. Ice felt as if it were forming under her nose where it was dripping. Her breath formed clouds. She crouched inside the jacket that seemed to be growing too small. She waited, patiently until she heard the sound of voices, car doors slamming and the engine starting. She held her breath. Soon, she breathed to herself, soon. She wiped her nose across the back of her hand and willed the shadows around her.
The car drew out onto the street, she could see it now and she hunched down as far as she could and shut her eyes lest they give her away. As soon as the blindness was gone she quickly scanned the street and felt the lightness and quietness as a peace, no one stirred. She casually walked towards the house and towards the gate. With familiar fingers, she lifted the latch of the garden gate and slipped it quietly back into place, skirting her way towards the back of the house. The back window’s latch still broken as she remembered it, she easily climbed through and into the dark house.
Uneasily she forced herself to walk into the kitchen; it smelt the same, the clock on the wall chimed on the hour of 6 am. Though she was hungry she ignored the food. It would be too obvious. She hurried through the lounge room and clunk! Her leg grazed the coffee table. Well, she thought to herself that’s different, and continued through the house to the back rooms. The patchwork craft cat doll with Janie stitched across her dress still hung on the door.



Rationale/Aim.
Recently, the marketplace has been flooded with the supernatural, particularly vampires and super heroes. While this indicates there is a market for the supernatural themed work, there is room for other types of supernatural beings, and one that is under exploited is that of demons living amongst us, in this case Succubi. This novel will explore the idea that being 'gifted' by something supernatural or out of the ordinary, above all as an emerging young adult may not be as pleasing or useful as one may expect. It is a challenge, it examines the idea of the monster within, should we fight it or embrace it? The novel leaves Janie with a choice, to embrace or deny her birthright. It does not actually show the choice she makes, leaving it up to the reader to decide - what would one do in Janie's place?
There are questions undermining notions of the mother figure; she is invested in bringing Janie into an amoral world, one humans would consider evil. Janie has a human heart and the conscious that goes with it. She cares for people, has the potential of love. Now she has matured differently, developed a different appearance, she has become the 'other'. This would be emotionally distressing for any teenage girl. There is potential for the female protagonist, Janie, to relate to her audience even more strongly as we all have very hard decisions to make, and to learn that we all have varying views on what is right and wrong. Janie is learning to be an adult, perceive the world through adult eyes - the world is a hard place to live in. Particularly for Janie who is visually different. The empowering of Janie is that she is the one who must make her own decisions, no matter how difficult or impossible seeming.
There is also a lack of the father figure that guides and protects in this novel. Janie has had to stand alone, against great odds for a very long time, she is already strong. Greater odds are thrown her way that further complicate her position. Her "heroine's" journey is not only her own physical journey, it is also reflected as an internal journey as well. The question is how long can she keep strong?





Rationale for Selected Publisher.
Chosen Publisher: Harper Teen
HarperCollins Publishers
Att. Submission Officer, HarperTeen.com
10 East 53rd Street, New York, New York
100225299
After much searching, to my dismay, I have found many publishers are not accepting manuscripts for one reason or another. Many of the publishers are specific to the Children's Book market - and this novel is for the Young Adult market, above Grade 8.
If it were ideal, I would submit this to Harper Teen Publishing, as the novel would fit right in with their other speculative fiction titles. Some compatible novels are: Wings by Aprilynne Pike, Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingstone and the Vampire Diaries by L.J Smith. Wings is about a teen girl, Laurel, who finds out she is a fairy, she has just begun school after homeschooling for ten years, and has two male friends, one is a known quantity, the human David, and a new fairy friend who is something amazing but mysterious, Tamani (She is also supported by well known Vampire writer, Stephanie Myer). Wondrous Strange is an example of an older teen girl faced with being born with a fairy heritage and pursued by dark forces. Vampire Diaries is one of half a dozen of similarly themed books.
This novel would be aimed at the young adult, particularly female market grouping. They have a great deal of work being published under the umbrella theme of the supernatural, mainly vampires. The novel would be best suited to a publishing company that knew this market well. I believe that not only does it suit this theme, it extends it in an exciting and a new way.
The protagonist, Janie, is a half blood demoness, a succubi. She is unable to change it, though it is changing her. She is an older teen, she has fitting in issues, just as her readers might, or at least be able to relate to. Holding onto one's humanity is an age old issue, and one I think that rings true to many people.
This would be a novel that would possibly not be one that would be included in school curriculum studies for the above age group, because the fantasy novels have much been passed over for the realist novels for the librarians and teachers of this grouping. But there is a large market there within the children themselves, and I pose the question - is getting the child/teen reading any work better than have them not reading at all, or being forced to read and not enjoying it? No there is a place for the fantastic, the supernatural in teenage writing, and some of it literature worthy.

Authorial Blurb.
Anathema Harris is a university student, cares for her bipolar husband and homeschools her five children. When she is not actively pursuing the above, she lends her hand to writing. She has three poems published in various literary magazines and a short story titled Notes on a Piano in an anthology of Tasmanian writers published. She has written for the online magazine, Cheers. This is debut novel for older children.

References
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Chambers, Aidan. (1990) The Reader in the book. Children's Literature: The Development of Criticism. Ed by Peter Hunt. London. Routledge pp 91-115.
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Gilead, S. (1991) Magic Abjured: Closure in Children's Fantasy Fiction. PMLA (Modern Language Assoc.), Bol. 106, No2 (March 1991) pp 277-293. http://www.jstor.org/stable/462669 Accessed: 20/09/2009
Jackson, Rosemary (1981) The Fantastic as a Mode. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London. Chapter 2 pp. 13-60.
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Small, R. C. Jnr (2005) Bold Books for Teenagers: Strange Creatures. The English Journal. Vol. 95, No. 1 (Sept. 2005) Council of Teachers of English. pp 129-132. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30047417 Accessed: 25/09/2009
Vogler, C. (1999) Book Two: Stages of the Journey. The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. 2nd Ed. Pan Books. London. pp.81-221.