Entry #9: PALOMA AND THE BOW WOW BAR MITZVAH

Title: Paloma and the Bow Wow Bar Mitzvah

Genre: contemporary early middle grade chapter book

Word Count: 14,500

Pitch: 

Impulsive, fur-phobic, nine-year-old Paloma Perez needs cash fast, or she’ll miss celebrating her best friend’s birthday at the most epic-i-lious concert ever.

Pet sitting a lost and most-likely dead cat isn’t working out, so Paloma literally turns herself upside down. Ka-ching! She comes up with a brilliant money maker--Paloma Perez Party Planner Extraordinaire. But she ignores her best friend’s warning, and her first event, a Doggie Bar Mitzvah, unloads a pooper-scooper full of trouble.

Paloma scrambles to pull together a furry fun-a-palooza, but amid the chaos of cat party crashers (they come for the herring) and yarmulke-eating canines, Paloma’s worried she could fail. And even worse, she could lose her best friend too.

First Page:

Summer Vacation Rule Number One: if you’re trying to save the planet, don’t use left-over Easter egg dye as hair color.

I, Paloma Perez, have a lot of hiccups. Not the regular, can’t-breathe-for-a-second kind of hiccups. The Paloma-what-have-you-done-now kind of hiccups. But those are my mom’s words. She calls my oops-I-made-a-mistake hiccups, disasters. 

Hiccups aren’t disasters unless you’re Charles Osborne. He’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for hiccuping for sixty-eight years. Can you believe he hiccuped every ten seconds, even when he was sleeping? I used a calculator. That’s over two hundred million hiccups.

I’m only nine. I bet I don’t have a thousand hiccups. Even if I add the regular kind and the mistakey kind together. But it’s only the first day of my summer vacation. 

Not even lunchtime and I’ve already created my first summer hiccup. My planet-saving hair color stinks. Like pickles. 

I told my mom this is not a disaster. Just a hiccup.

I haven’t convinced her yet. She’s banished me from the back of Lucia's Divas Hair Salon, to the front. My mom’s Lucia. She’s the owner, and we live above the salon with my grandmother.

So I’m sitting at the scratched wooden table called the reception desk, when Nina, my best friend, flies into the salon like she packed her Tori Skori backpack with jet fuel.