Writing is like being able to put life into a snow globe. It takes the things that are too big and scary and reduces them into a form that I can put away when I want and look at from a distance. It also takes all that’s good in life and captures it into something I can take out when I want and look at close up and keep forever. It makes the bad things into something I can hold…and the good things into something I can hold onto. Both help so much that I need that little souvenir of life.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Book Blurb Friday #49

It’s Book Blurb Friday! Lisa Ricard Claro of Writing in the Buff hosts this fun meme in which the weekly challenge is to “write a book jacket blurb (150 words or less) so enticing that potential readers would feel compelled to buy the book.” My blurb this week has 147 words at last count.

~Trials of a Salem Witch~

They had the technology, however top secret it was, to obtain proof. Pharmeceutical toxicologist Ivy Wilson was one of a team of researchers testing the theory that the events of the Salem Witch Trials occurred as a result of hallucinations brought on by ergot poisoning of rye crops. Ivy’s job was to go back to 1692 in order to collect grain samples for testing.

All she had to worry a bout was being seen.

But an error in calculations sent her back into the farmer’s home instead of his field. Not only was she seen, but a startled observer was nearly killed. So Ivy did the unthinkable: she brought him into the future to save his life.

And now what? Had she just changed the course of human history? Or was Ivy the original “witch” who had set into motion the deaths of more than nineteen innocents?

“For I have seen it and I have felt it and I know that it is love, not death, that undoes us.” ~Jennifer Donnelly in Revolution

12 comments:

  1. Tammy, this is really cool! Time travel, mystery, love and even Ivy's name. What if Ivy was the original witch? I know that I would really enjoy this book.

    Hugs,

    Kathy M.

    ReplyDelete
  2. At first I thought "ooh, too scary for old me" but you have me intrigued. I think I'd have to buy this book, Tammy. You changed me from a browser to a buyer.
    K

    ReplyDelete
  3. I hope she wasn't a time-traveling home-wrecker!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Woo-hoo! This is a juicy one! Even if you wrote it as a short story rather than a full length novel it would be hugely compelling. Great hook---I love this!

    ReplyDelete
  5. ..or did she just get a little too large a whiff of the ergot?

    ReplyDelete
  6. I was looking forward to a time travel tale after reading the first paragraph. I would have been quite happy with that, but you introduced a world of interesting possibilities.

    A wonderful blurb and I would certainly by the book.

    P.S. I loved your choice of Ivy for the toxicologist.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I am envious of your style and the ease with which you write. you are an amazing writer.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I met some witches once. Real witches, not the Halloween kind. They were giving a lecture at a Mensa party on paganism. Was actually very interesting in a cerebral sort of way. Not that I was buying into any of it. I'm an engineer and think like one. But I believe in respecting views of every sort and there's always something to learn from other people.

    Anyway, they called me off to the side to warn me. They said I had the most powerful aura that they'd ever seen and if I didn't get control of it there could be devastating consequences. I laughed and they assured me that it was true and that they could help me before I was damaged by it or my friends were.

    I didn't take them up on it. Figured that there was nothing there that could hurt me and my friends? Well.. They'd just have to take their chances.

    Of course, of late I've begun to wonder. I mean, my friends have been vanishing one by one. No accidents. No deaths that I know of. They're just there one moment and the next they're not.

    What do you think Tammy? Tammy? .. TAMMY???

    ReplyDelete
  9. Wow! I think you need to run with writing that story!

    Pat
    Critter Alley

    ReplyDelete
  10. Kathy, Kay, Lisa, Grandma and Linda, I was truly touched by your comments. Thank you!

    Val, she doesn't wreck any homes. He's a widower. A young, hot one. ;) Or else single.

    Tom, love your twist! That might be even better than taking the guy to the future with her. Hmmm....

    The witchcraft to which I was referring here was just the Salem witch hunt kind. As I've mentioned before, have had a longtime interest in world religions (plus the high school aged kids I teach are sometimes drawn to witchcraft because it sounds edgy to them) so am a little familiar with it as a religion. My understanding is that true witchcraft isn't as weird as people think it is. The thing that tends to freak them out the most, I think, is that it's based on female deities? Oh, horrors.

    That's kind of interesting about your atomic aura. I was once told my chakras needed unblocking, so a friend got me a home kit. Honestly, I did feel better, but it might have been the yoga.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Tammy - Had no idea you were interested in the comparative study of religions. It's been an interest of mine since high school. When I say I'm a "cafeteria Catholic with Buddhist leanings" I'm not really joking.

    There are actually multiple sects of individuals who are referred to as "witches." Most of them are just pagan religion variations, but there is at least one fairly common sect that comes close to what people think they are (the Church of Satan), though no human sacrifices there - and a rather nasty variation of voodoo that's practiced by some drug lords in South American that, sadly enough, actually does involve human sacrifice.

    But I wouldn't go so far to say that the pagan religions aren't as weird as some people think. The pagans that I talked with were definitely on the weird side. They were the "High Priest and Priestess of the Church of All Worlds" and they based their form of paganism on, get this, Science Fiction.

    Why Science Fiction, you say? Well, they were pantheists (most pagans are) that believe that the world is created out of a blending of everyone's ideas of what it is and that we make our own reality, quite literally. They felt that Science Fiction extends our imagination and makes more things possible, and that's a good thing.

    That was all well and good, but they lost me when the showed a film describing the world that they wanted to reach.

    It was a video of a beach. Only - the colors were all wrong. The beach was purple. The sky was green. The waves were black.

    Even I could tell that the colors clashed..

    ReplyDelete

Any return "messages" are appreciated!