PW #352: Young Adult Contemporary: NOT HER STORY

Manuscript Status: Finished

Mentor Name: Brenda Drake and Heather Cashman
Mentee Name: Kara McDowell
Title: NOT HER STORY
Category: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary
Word Count: 73,000

Pitch:

Cute boy, Max, doesn’t recognize Claire from her mother’s blog, so she hides her fame. When Claire poses as someone’s girlfriend for publicity, Max steps away. After uncovering her mother’s dangerous secret, Claire considers using it to end the blog and get her life and Max back–if she’s willing to take her mom down with it.

Excerpt:

There are more pictures of me on the internet than works of art in The Louvre.

Just when I thought I’d read every insane theory the message boards have to offer, DixonDummies16 claims my image is pervasive enough to fill the world’s largest museum. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever read about myself, which is saying something. Apparently, my mouth is too big for my face, my hair always looks worse on Thursdays, and there is a small but devoted faction of people who believe that my twin sister and I aren’t really related.

I shut off my phone and toss it to the foot of my bed.

Maybe it’s true (the Louvre thing, not the sister thing, obviously), but I’m not narcissistic enough to have counted. Besides, there are only so many hours in a day. But the stranger who wrote it swears it’s a conservative estimate, so maybe some people have more time than I do.

Let me be clear. I’ve never done anything interesting or important, like star in a movie or compete in the Olympics. I wake up every day in a sinfully boring town in the middle of the desert and go to school with three thousand other kids who are pretty much exactly the same as I am. The only reason people want to look at pictures of me is because I was born into the right family. Or the wrong family, depending on who you ask.