The Writer's Voice

Query:

Dear Writer's Voice Coaches,

Seventeen-year-old Jenna Rose is a Majesty, one of the gifted with seriously cool powers. What isn’t seriously cool is the fact she inherited those powers from her dad. And they sent him crazy.

In an attempt to escape his psychotic rage, Jenna and her family move to Delford Valley, a place that teaches and protects people like her. In exchange for her education, all The Valley asks for is one thing: that Jenna trains to serve in the impending war. The ruling family expects unwavering loyalty, and will do anything, and sacrifice anyone, to make sure it stays that way.

The more Jenna trains with her gift though, the stranger things become; someone ransacks her room but the evidence of their search disappears, there are gaps in her memories, and her dreams are so real she nearly drowns in one of them. Then the doll’s head shows up, a marker her dad has found them again. Jenna only has two choices. Stay and train with the risk of going crazy, or face her dad and risk death.

ILLUSION OF A MAJESTY is a Young Adult fantasy, complete at 75,000 words with series potential. It will appeal to readers of Marissa Meyer's The Lunar Chronicles series, and Kiera Cass's Selection series. I am a blogger with Aussie Owned and Read.

250 words:

The box, placed so deliberately on our welcome mat, made my skin prickle the second I opened the front door.

My crazy dad had found us again. We’d made it almost a year this time. But that little box always brought trouble and it meant in a few hours, before morning, we’d be gone. Moved on to the next place, the next school, like we’d never been here at all. 

Damn it, I really liked Botany.

I stepped out onto the dark porch and reached down to pick it up. It was exactly the same shape, weight, and color as every other one before it. Inside would be exactly the same, too. A doll’s body – minus the head. He’d already sent us that.

And I’d hidden it.

I threw a quick glance down the hall to where Mom was watching TV.  If I hid this, too, she’d never know. We could stay in this laid-back beach town. I’d never have to leave my friends or the cheap, old, station wagon she’d bought me to learn to drive in.

Despite that thought, there was a name in this box. Either me, my mom, or my sister Vivien, were about to have some serious bad luck. I had to find out whose name my dad had sent us. Usually the head would be enough to figure out if it was me, because while we all had brown hair, ours eyes were different. Theirs were brown, mine were blue. 

The most recent head had its eyes poked out.