It's Pitch Madness!

UPDATE - I made it through to round 2! One more round to go.

What is Pitch Madness you ask? It's a contest to match pitches with agents run by Brenda Drake and her team of slush zombies, of course. For more info, check out her blog at brenleedrake.blogspot.com.

Here's my pitch and first 250 words:

Title: BOUND IN BLUE

Genre: YA Contemporary Fantasy

Word Count: 80,000

Rhi’s color synaesthesia is actually the manifestation of a mysterious power. Which would be great, except for one problem: King Arthur is coming back. And turns out, he’s not as nice as the storybooks say.

Fear is white and thickly veined with sea-green.

I reached over the bed rail and touched Mom’s cheek, but the industrial clock on the wall ticked loudly and I jerked my hand back fast. She was cold. But she was always cool and thin and strange with her pale, pale eyes. Now they were open and staring and I couldn’t bring myself to close them the way they always do in movies.

The only thing Mom was ever afraid of was a man with silver hair. I saw him once when I was little. Mom pulled me tight against her chest and the sound of her heart was a wave crashing against rocks. That fear crept out of her chest, crawled through my ear, and made its way down to my own wildly beating heart to take up permanent residence.

Rhiannon, listen to me, we cannot be seen. Hide in the shadows and be still and silent.

And as she held me, my fear broke apart like ice on a churning ocean and all the colors of my emotions erupted out of it—but the man didn’t see us.

I once tried to tell Mom about the colors I felt, but she just smiled and looked away. I didn’t try again. It would have been nice to talk with someone about it. I’m sure my colors would be pretty interesting to some psychiatrist bored with the usual budding Unabombers.

But fear is white and cold as marble and veined in an ugly sea-green that matches the color of the hospital walls.