PAY IT FORWARD entry for Shelli Johannes's contest

Shelli Johannes at Market My Words is holding an AMAZING contest.

Shelli is agented by Alyssa Eisner Henkin of Trident Media Group and is offering a personal recommendation to her agent to the winner.

Hop over to her blog.

http://faeriality.blogspot.com/

Become a follower of both her blog and twitter and then enter your maximum four sentence pitch on a completed M/G or Y/A novel.


Follow the rules of the contest and you're in.


1. Post a "Pay it Forward" post on your blog or FB notes if you don't have a blog. You must pay tribute to a person who has helped you in your writing or your personal life. (This can be any day this week during the contest).

2. Put your entry in the COMMENTS (Shout Out link at bottom of her post). In your entry, you MUST provide the following information:


first, last name
email address

genre (only for MG or YA)

pitch (no more than 4 sentences)
the link to your "Pay it forward" post (either on FB or blog)

your twitter id (if you have one)
Dates Jan. 31st through February 4th, 2011.

MY PITCH :

YA urban fantasy

PITCH for THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH

Thirteen year old Victor Standish is repeatedly abandoned and picked up by his unpredictable mother. A mysterious French Quarter Jazz club owner takes him in. Victor learns the Jazz club is actually the Crossroads of Worlds, and the owner has the blood of Death in his veins. They both find love and adventure as Hurricane Katrina approaches.




SANDRA THRASHER

There are so many people who were and are beacons in my life. But one stands out like a lighthouse on a desolate, storm-tossed shore ... my best friend, Sandra Thrasher.

We all find ourselves in the dreaded Valley of the Shadow at some point in our lives.

I lived there for a short time. It only felt like an eternity.

My mother was dying in the hospital. My book store was dying, too. I had walking pneumonia. Three times someone poured sugar in my gas tank in the Mall parking lot.

Three cars gone. I was reduced to walking to my home, the hospital, and to my Mall store on foot in the worst December in Louisiana memory.

My mother died one lonely night as I sat coughing by her bedside.

I had no money to bury her. No insurance company would cover Mother in her last years with her bad heart.

Poetically, an ice storm shut down the entire city the next day. I sat in a frozen world in my dark, powerless home, shivering and coughing and crying.

I felt as alone as if I were prisoner in a frozen Hell.

There was a knock on my door. Sandra Thrasher. My best friend and fellow Mall store owner was on the porch. Think Bette Midler with pepper and salt hair. She walked in, hugged me, and whispered,

"You're not alone."

From that moment on, I wasn't.

Hurting financially herself, she still used her last untouched credit card to take care of my mother's arrangements. She dragged me to the doctor and got the medicine I could not afford. She gave me a used car.

And though it took long months, she taught me to laugh again.

She led me through the Valley of the Shadow. I shall forever be in the debt of Sandra Thrasher, my best friend, who showed me what wonders one caring heart can accomplish in the life of another person.

She was the wind beneath my bruised wings :

PAY IT FORWARD BLOGFEST

Becky Miller has a fascinating post on her blog : http://bmillerfiction.blogspot.com/

And it is in keeping with the spirit most of us try to nuture on Sunday. She has a PAY IT FORWARD blogfest from now until the end of the month. The details are on her post. Part of them is telling on our blogs or her by email of an encounter in real life where we payed it forward to someone.

My personal code dictates that I don't let my left hand know what good deed my right has done. But that is all right. I did not help another for reward. As I post this PAY IT FORWARD blogfest entry, not for reward, but just to entertain my blogger friends with laughter and smiles.

This entry comes during the middle of the third act of RITES OF PASSAGE. In the summer of 1853, Samuel McCord has followed a murder suspect onto the transatlantic steamer, DEMETER.

He discovers that the ship, among other deadly things, is a trap ... for him. It is not a matter of if he will be murdered, only when he will be murdered. At the moment, he is on the deck, awaiting the arrival of his new-found love, Meilori Shinseen.
*********************
I stared off into the blue mists of the horizon. I was adrift on a ship filled with the undead. I was a target of a half-dozen death plots. I couldn’t keep track of my old enemies on board without a chart.

The mysterious Gray Man seemed to have a personal stake in destroying me for reasons I couldn’t fathom. And some instinct told me that on top of all that, the Gray Man was a target of a separate scheme, apart from me. I shook my head. Who was so powerful that he, or she, would even try to bushwhack him, much less expect to succeed?

I sighed, reaching under my deck chair. Time to fall back on McCord Rule of Life # 2 : when you didn’t have a clue as to what to do next, do something nice for some other fellow. It wasn’t as charitable as you might think.

No skunk could abide walking by someone building a sandcastle without trying to kick it down. Now, it might not be a skunk connected with my hunt. But in my way of thinking, one less skunk made for a better smelling world.

I looked about. No maidens seemed in need of rescuing from dragons. No lions with thorns in their paws. Just clusters of apparently normal people trying to greet the morning without yawning.

An ugly red mist of anger flowed from the couple with the little boy and older girl off to my right. Mostly from the man. The woman radiated an utter sadness. I shook my head. Not my kind of trouble. I wasn’t a parson.

I pulled out the large sack of stale rolls and placed it on my lap. Opening it, I dug in and selected a big roll. Tearing it into pieces, I threw the bits on the deck.

As I hoped, it wasn’t a minute before the sharp-eyed seagulls noticed a free breakfast. They swept down from the sky and proceeded to peck and swallow. Watching them gobble up the pieces, I smiled and tore another roll into beak-size chunks.

As I threw the pieces onto the deck, the young boy came running up to me. The happy seagulls were too intent on their surprise meal to fly away. He watched me for a few seconds. His once rigid body relaxed.

His face lit up as the seagulls squawked and hopped about. He was about five or six. Maybe seven. I was bad at guessing the ages of children. I winked at him.

“Want to feed them?”

In a proper British voice, he squeaked, “Oh, could I, sir?”

I handed him the pieces of another roll I'd torn up. “Sure. They’ll probably name their next chick after you.”

He giggled, “Oh, whoever heard of a seagull named Samuel?”

I smiled big. “Samuel? Why that’s my name, too. Now whoever hung that awful name on you?”

“My Grandpapa. You must know him, sir.”

“Why must I?”

Before the boy could answer, his father stormed up to my table. He was less than happy to see me. I felt the same way about him. He had scared the seagulls away and stolen the smile from his son’s face. It was back to being pale and frightened.

The man tore the boy away. “Because he thought very highly of you before you became a murderer, McCord.”

The woman hurried to the man’s side, tearing his tight fingers from the boy’s wrist. Little Samuel rubbed it as if the man had hurt him. A low roaring filled my ears.

I fought down the urge to hit him. Striking the boy’s father in front of him would scare him -- and wouldn’t teach the man anything. His eyes were the sort that belonged to boy-men who never learned.

“Robert,” urged the woman. “You scaring Samuel.”

The young boy looked at me. “Y-You are the Texas Ranger, Grandpapa named me for?”

“Reckon so.”

“Have you ever killed any painted savages?”

“Samuel!,” hushed the mother.

I smiled at the boy. “Only when they tried to paint me.”

He giggled again. Even the mother smiled. The father tried to puff up like an outraged adult. But it only made him seem more immature. Not knowing what it was to be a man can do that to you when you fake it.

A tall, gray-haired woman, dressed all in elegant black, strolled briskly up to us. She moved with crisp, disciplined energy barely contained. It was as if she were some clockwork movement that had been over-wound. Her watery blue eyes held the sureness of the fanatic or the psychotic.

Those eyes moved over me like pale blue quicksilver, appraising me as if she were an accountant. They glittered in the dawn’s light, as they added up my worth and subtracted from it my deficiencies. The hard lines around her mouth told me that I came out in the red in her book.

It wasn’t too hard to see how her son turned out the way he had. I was tempted to show her my teeth to see if that would up my value some. But I decided a man had to have some pride. True, mine was a bit ragged, but it was all mine. At least, for a little while longer.

She took the little boy by the hand. “Come, Samuel. Bad company corrupts.”

I winked at him. “She’s right. But go with her, anyway.”

********************************
And yes, I know I have posted this video before, but it is in keeping with the defiant love Samuel has for Meilori. Besides, I just like it. As you can tell I am a sucker for Hollywood romantic classics.