Josh, a once enthusiastic chef, surfer and global nomad, is in a funky mood. On an otherwise ordinary day, Josh gets kidnapped by a crazy band of sinister underground fairies that prey upon male human energy.
That’s how the sequel to my first book, Catching Red Herring, begins: Josh’s girlfriend Cami, a geek with witch ancestry but little understanding of her abilities, sets out on a journey to rescue him.
This story examines the contemporary debate over the decline of perceived masculine ideals through a lens of fantasy fiction.
Funds will pay for my work as an author, copywriting, cover design and marketing. This installment of ten thousand words will be the first in a series of eight comprising a novel where Cami uses her smarts against a band of fairies that became wicked because people stopped believing in them.
The Industrial Revolution and its subsequent polluting of the planet transformed a once benevolent clan of fairies into energy vampires that kidnap men and use them as energy sources.
The fairies have underground spaces all over the globe. These fairies fought for a space with the Underground Witches (who are Cami’s ancestors as we learned in the first book), but lost because the Underground Witches were a bit more powerful than them.
While Cami is investigating her boyfriend’s disappearance, she meets another fairy – a kindhearted renegade that chose to live among humans and behave like humans instead of becoming energy vampires. These fairies try to keep the world in balance by stopping the underground fairies from kidnapping too many humans. One of the fairies starts working with Cami in order to find Josh.
Cami then has to ask for help from her witch relatives in Southern Italy, but they are upset with her since she’s lost a powerful magic rock she was trusted to keep. She joins forces with a private investigator, Marco, who helped her solve a mystery in The Red Herring. This time he helps her win back the support and trust of her powerful witch relatives, but he is unwilling to go help her find Josh, since he has a crush on her and would rather not see her boyfriend come back to the surface. Marco comes from a lineage of witch hunters; his crush on a half-witch like Cami, plus working to get her back in harmony with her witch relatives gives room to many conflicts for him and the storyline.
While the plot develops on the surface with the investigative team, we also follow Josh, who ends up reacting against his captivity and becoming one of the few kidnapped men who tries to escape from the Fairies’ Underworld. He goes to many places in that realm and communicates with Cami via his old stove, and ultimately helps her track him down. This first ten thousand word installment tells us how Cami finds out about Josh’s kidnapping, how she discovers the stove as a means of communication and her decision to defy her ancestors and try to use the bit of magic powers she’s been given.