My Novels
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Love (and Other HR Violations)
A Contemporary Rom-Com
GIO BENEDETTI (28) manages his life as meticulously as the multi-million-dollar aerospace programs he oversees. While his button-down personality has sent his career rocketing skyward, it’s turned his love life into a series of launchpad disasters as he discovers that romance can’t be managed with spreadsheets and dashboards. When he sees Melody in a company-mandated training video and becomes smitten, he decides to think outside the box for once.
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CELIA COCHRANE (27), Gio’s best friend at work (some would say his work-wife), is reluctant to enable Gio’s latest flight of fancy. But damn his puppy-dog eyes! She agrees to help him find this latest Juliet. Maybe it’ll keep him from turning his attentions toward Daphne, their naïve coworker. Unfortunately, the studio only grants access to their talent for legitimate movie projects. Against her better judgement, Celia bangs out a movie script for Gio over a weekend to help get his foot in the door. At least she’s finally using her MFA for something other than writing user’s manuals.
ABRIL QUINONES (27) isn’t particularly surprised when the studio calls her and says someone wants to audition her for an independent film based on a training video they’d seen her in. She’s used to getting crackpot offers for all kinds of goofy projects. But—hey—an audition is an audition, right? What she wasn’t expecting was for the producer to be so handsome—and to not once mention a casting couch. Is he even for real?
Life imitates art (or vice versa) so well that it’s hard to tell who’s being real and who’s just playing a role. Does Celia’s script have a happily-ever-after in it? Or is Abril just pretending to like Gio to get the part in his ersatz movie?
Word Count: 114K
Current Status: Complete; Seeking representation
Nahotabi
A Literary Romance
MELISSA SHUMATE (23) has all but given up hope of finding her soulmate in the indigent backwater of Nahotabi, Alabama, where she was born and raised. Shumates are held in the same regard as cockroaches or mosquitos, and none of the local men would be caught dead in a ditch with a Shumate. Not a decent man, anyway. Melissa has accepted the fact that, even if a knight in shining armor were to ever appear, it would only be a sign that he was hopelessly lost, and not that he was there to rescue her.
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But one day her soulmate does indeed show up in the form of LANCE DULAC (30), who is returning to Nahotabi for a brief visit after a twenty-year absence. Cruel Cupid fires his arrow straight through their hearts, a Shumate and a Dulac – a shot every bit as outrageous as the one that nailed a Montague and a Capulet. Dulacs are the closest thing Nahotabi has to royalty, their ancestors having settled the area in the mid-1800s, while Shumates have always been so low-down sorry that they’d get someone else to breathe for them if they could. Worse still, Lance is not just any Dulac. He is the last Dulac.
Their romance detonates in the community like unexploded ordinance from a long-ago era, upsetting Nahotabi’s antiquated and provincial attitudes, and ripping the bandage off a family scandal from a quarter century before. Lance is undeterred and fights the uphill battle to convince his family to accept his and Melissa’s love for one another. Melissa, terrified that she will be responsible for getting Lance excommunicated by his family, finds herself having to push away the man she now loves, along with what may be her last chance to attain the happiness she has dreamed of her entire life.
Word Count: 107K
Current Status: Complete; Seeking representation