Title: DON Q OATNEY: VAMPIRE HUNTER
Genre: YA paranormal fantasy
Word Count: 60,000 words.
Pitch:
The week Becca Sanchez discovers Uncle Don is a total whack-job begins with a moving van and ends in handcuffs. First, her creepy history teacher moves in next door. And then her uncle tries to stake him. That’s right, stake. As in vampire.
But when a student goes missing, Becca starts to wonder if maybe crazy Uncle Don isn’t so crazy after all. She investigates and finds a freezer full of blood bags in the teacher’s basement. She and her uncle team up to stop him before he turns the Halloween Dance into his personal high school buffet line.
Everything is going to plan … until she discovers proof her teacher isn’t a vampire after all. Because that’s ridiculous. This is real life, and vampires aren’t real. But now Becca has to save her least favorite person from a stake to the chest and her uncle from sixty to life.
First Page:
“Whoa, do you see that? Someone’s moving into the haunted house.”
Becca Sanchez pointed at the overgrown estate at the end of the lane. The other hand trapped a basketball against her hip.
Ashley, sitting on the front porch, looked up from her math worksheet. She’d worked yesterday and was catching up on her homework before school on Monday.
“You’re kidding.”
“No, really. There’s a moving van in the driveway.”
“Weird.”
Ashley’s tone was already bored. She tucked her blonde hair behind her ear and leaned back over her worksheet. A breeze rustled through the fallen maple leaves, setting the paper flapping. She slapped her hand down before her homework blew away.
“C’mon, Becca, stop putting off the shot.”
That was Drew, Ashley’s brother. Twins, though they hardly even looked like siblings. Except when playing video games, Drew always seemed half asleep, moving with the ponderousness of a giraffe. Ashley was a foot shorter, and rounder. Anyone else would have been plain chubby, but somehow on her it looked all woman, instead. The boys at school certainly noticed.
Becca eyed the hoop from halfway across the yard. It was impossibly far away. Drew always went for the long shots, and usually he missed. Not this time. She sighed and took aim. The basketball whiffed, bouncing on the cement driveway and landing in the grass in the neighbor’s yard.
“Hah!” Drew grinned. “What letter is that, now? R?”
“Says the guy at H-O-R-S.”
I like the glib tone of the Pitch. Not sure who her least favorite person is. The teacher? That could be clearer. It might be better to just say, “Becca has to save that teacher from a stake. . .” Don’t think you need some of the details in the first page: Is it important that we know Ashley worked yesterday? I’d keep the focus on the haunted house and who’s there. That would move the story forward, not back to yesterday.
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