Desolation Ghosts is a 65,000-word adult literary fiction novel in the vein of The Human Stain. It is set in North Cascades National Park and is about a missing traumatized female veteran with alcohol and relationship addictions who changes her mind about killing herself, but then falls off a mountain and must survive in the wilderness while park rangers battle over how much effort should be spent to locate her. The story takes place during the Covid-19 pandemic and the beginning of law enforcement reforms following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. This book will appeal to readers who are interested in national parks, outdoor recreation, the Pacific Northwest, and the controversial issue of how emergency services treat people with mental health challenges. It includes exciting stories, based on real-life events, about using rock climbing and short-haul helicopter techniques to rescue a pack string mule who fell off a trail and a mountain climber who fell off a crag, a shoot-out and its impact on park rangers, a couple drownings, an aquatic body recovery and other sad outdoor tragedies, and funny and scary encounters with bears and other wildlife. If you like Jack Kerouac, Nevada Barr, Bree Loewen, Jon Krakauer, Michael Connelly, James Dickey's Deliverance, Matthew Quick's The Silver Linings Playbook or Scott Heim's Mysterious Skin, you may enjoy Desolation Ghosts.

Thursday, November 24, 2022

The Big Push

A job is looking promising. I'm trying to query all of the appropriate agencies from QueryManager before I go back to work. Organizing it took awhile, but it's going efficiently now. I queried 20 agents in the past week. Between March 8, 2021 and October 27, 2022, I queried 46 agents, and it was a trudge. 

Edits are done until an editor or agent tells me otherwise, so this will be my last big effort on Desolation Ghosts until I get an agent or nothing happens for a long time and I come back to it someday and reconsider self-publishing. 

I do plan to submit my short story Loose to One Story and Tin House when they open for submissions in January, so maybe that will get something going. It's a side story that elaborates on a couple ghosts mentioned in DG, but it wasn't appropriate for the book, and it stands on its own.
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