The Gingerbread Girl

It was after dinner that things got weird. Grace was sitting at the counter admiring the gingerbread house Mom had made earlier that week when suddenly she heard a quiet, high-pitched noise.

            She leaned in close and peered inside the little window.

            Ah!

            Grace quickly pushed the gingerbread house away, alarmed, then closed her eyes and counted to three. “When I look inside the house again, it will be empty,” she promised herself. She put her eye to the tiny window again, but sure enough, the little gingerbread girl was still inside, running around in circles.

“Help me!” she exclaimed frantically in a high-pitched voice. “I’m trapped in here!”

            This time, Grace didn’t close her eyes. “I’ll help you,” she promised the little girl, and, shaking slightly, started to lift the roof off the house.

            Grace’s little brother Jake suddenly came running into the room, and when he saw Grace with Mom’s gingerbread house, he darted over. “What are you doing?” he asked. “I’m gonna tell Mom you broke her house!”

            “No, look!” Grace said, pulling the roof the rest of the way from the house. She set it on the counter and gestured for Jake to look inside.

            But his reaction was different than what she expected . . .

            Instead of screaming when he saw the gingerbread girl, he just picked her up and bit her head off!

            The little gingerbread girl turned back into a normal cookie pretty quick.

Sorry it's been 12 years!

Hi blog world, it's been a minute . . . or two. Sorry about that!

Little update on my life:

I moved to Spain for a year and a half! (I still miss it every day)
I moved back to America!
I enrolled in an abstract algebra class at university!
I understood absolutely NOTHING in that class!
So . . . what did I do instead of trying fruitlessly to pay attention?

I WROTE A BOOK!

It's currently titled Deck the Halls, but I'm looking to change the title. Because . . . boring!

I normally just refer to it in my head slash the twelve versions of it as the "Noelle Christmas" book.

My poor sweet roommates who have to put up with me bouncing ideas off of them at the most random times think of it as my "Joseph the Jew" book.

I've been sending a nice little query letter out to agents, and I'll post that on here, too--just for fun! And who knows, maybe some literary agent will look for obscure, rarely-upated blogs and see it :)

Dear _______,

Noelle Christmas may as well have been named Gingerbread for all the mistletoe jokes she got growing up.

She’s resigned herself to her tinseled fate until her family moves to Washington and a mix-up at her new school lets her pretend her last name is Christensen instead of Christmas. Noelle is thrilled to finally distance herself from her holiday-obsessed family and immediately starts reaping the benefits of her new identity: a popular best friend, a charmingly cute boyfriend, and most importantly, no more Christmas jokes.

Everything seems to be going great until Joseph, the Jewish kid who sits next to her in history, happens to spy her family’s painfully festive Halloween tree in the window. He agrees to keep Noelle’s real last name a secret, on the condition that he gets to meet the fabled Christmas family. However, the deal starts to fall apart when Noelle’s parents decide that Joseph’s the perfect match for her. Now her family is eagerly trying to woo the wrong boy with an excessively-decorated Hanukkah tree and aggressive Christmas caroling, leaving Noelle scrambling to balance their insane attempts at matchmaking and her fragile new social life.

Shoot. Noelle’s perfect plan suddenly doesn’t seem so perfect anymore.

DECK THE HALLS is my debut young adult novel, complete at 75,000 words. Readers who love happy-ending romantic comedies will be entertained by this lighthearted holiday story.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Kindly,

___________ (my name, but you internet people can't know that of course!)

Anywho, that's where I'm at with that. Here's a random cover that I made just now on powerpoint (LOVE POWERPOINT) because I'm procrastinating (wait for it) my abstract algebra homework.

Love college.