Today's topic is this--One of the less glamorous jobs of a writer is to be able to condense a book into a variety of synopses, blurbs, jacket copy etc and to do it fast. Faced with my young adult novel Haffling about to shoot down the production conveyer belt I must reduce 330 pages of teen angst into two hundred words or less. Here's my morning's shot at it with help from Elizabeth Fitzgerald and the editorial staff at Dreamspinner. All comments are gratefully appreciated.
All sixteen year old Alex Nevus wants is to be two years older and become his sister Alice's legal guardian. That, and he'd like his first kiss, preferably with Jerod Haynes. Sadly, wanting something and getting it, are very different. Strapped with a mentally ill mother, he fears for his own sanity--having a fairy on his shoulder that only he can see doesn't help. Jerod Haynes has a girlfriend, and his mother's schizophrenia places Alice and him in constant jeopardy of being carted back into foster care.
When Alex's mother goes missing, everything falls apart. Frantic, he tracks her to a remote corner of Manhattan and is transported to another dimension--the land of the Unsee, the realm of the Fey. There he finds his mother held captive by the power-mad Queen May, and he learns that he is half human and half fey – a Haffling.
As Alex's human world is being destroyed, so too the Unsee is being devoured by a ravenous mist. Fey is vanishing and May needs to cross into the human world. She needs something that only Alex can provide and she will stop at nothing to possess it...to possess him.
