*Thank you to everyone who helped me out with this manuscript. I'm grateful to you all. 
Sometimes reality is crazy.
Boo Hag 31 follows the meltdown of Ashley Tipton Barrineau, who checks herself in at a private psychiatric hospital six months before her 31st birthday, hoping to avoid the hag who numbered her days with this prophecy: “You’ll not see the dawn of thirty-one.”
It is adult contemporary on the surface yet pulls you beneath to wonder what paranormal fantasy percolates inside the mind of madness.
I’m willing to swap a similar ‘head-trip’ genre, or other (YA or adult): science/speculative fiction, fantasy, paranormal, horror. I can handle some straight-laced/lollipop contemporary, but keep in mind it’s not my beta-reader forte.
Sample of chapter one’s opening scene:
It went something like this:
I yanked my hand free from that hag’s sudden vicelike grip and stared at her; my palm still tingled where her knobby finger had traced a line. Her fixed gaze mirrored my study. What lurked there in her watery-grey eyes? Malevolence? Yes, definitely something toxic, but also a trace of relief mingling with sport.
“Remember what I said, girl.” The hag’s wrinkles folded in on themselves when her lips curled into an indiscernible smile. She jabbed her crooked, life-reading finger in the air between us. “You’ll not see the dawn of thirty-one.”
When I stood and stumbled backward a few steps, she cackled from across the small decrepit table. I couldn’t look away. Something changed, shifted, in her eyes. For a second, there was youth.
“Ignore her,” my friend Kayla Sinclair said to me from the door-less doorway. “Let’s go.”
A late autumn breeze blew through every missing board of that hovel, chilling me to attention.
“You’re crazy,” I whispered and turned away.
Renewed cackling followed us out. We’d not yet reached the end of the rickety porch when I heard, “But I’m right, Ashley, live every day like it’s your last.”
The warning cemented in my thoughts. I hadn’t told the hag my real name.
*
PM me if interested or have any questions.
Sometimes reality is crazy.
Boo Hag 31 follows the meltdown of Ashley Tipton Barrineau, who checks herself in at a private psychiatric hospital six months before her 31st birthday, hoping to avoid the hag who numbered her days with this prophecy: “You’ll not see the dawn of thirty-one.”
It is adult contemporary on the surface yet pulls you beneath to wonder what paranormal fantasy percolates inside the mind of madness.
I’m willing to swap a similar ‘head-trip’ genre, or other (YA or adult): science/speculative fiction, fantasy, paranormal, horror. I can handle some straight-laced/lollipop contemporary, but keep in mind it’s not my beta-reader forte.
Sample of chapter one’s opening scene:
The First Day of the Rest of My Life
It went something like this:
I yanked my hand free from that hag’s sudden vicelike grip and stared at her; my palm still tingled where her knobby finger had traced a line. Her fixed gaze mirrored my study. What lurked there in her watery-grey eyes? Malevolence? Yes, definitely something toxic, but also a trace of relief mingling with sport.
“Remember what I said, girl.” The hag’s wrinkles folded in on themselves when her lips curled into an indiscernible smile. She jabbed her crooked, life-reading finger in the air between us. “You’ll not see the dawn of thirty-one.”
When I stood and stumbled backward a few steps, she cackled from across the small decrepit table. I couldn’t look away. Something changed, shifted, in her eyes. For a second, there was youth.
“Ignore her,” my friend Kayla Sinclair said to me from the door-less doorway. “Let’s go.”
A late autumn breeze blew through every missing board of that hovel, chilling me to attention.
“You’re crazy,” I whispered and turned away.
Renewed cackling followed us out. We’d not yet reached the end of the rickety porch when I heard, “But I’m right, Ashley, live every day like it’s your last.”
The warning cemented in my thoughts. I hadn’t told the hag my real name.
“Stop referring to me as a hag.”
“Then you should’ve looked like something other than a hag.”
“Then you should’ve looked like something other than a hag.”
*
PM me if interested or have any questions.
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