Face-Lift 665

Guess the Plot

Office Magic

1. He's the head of the company's IT department. She's the new girl in the office. He'll do anything to get her fired. She accuses him of plotting against her. If these two bitter enemies are going to take their relationship beyond incessant sex it's going to take a little . . . Office Magic.

2. There is blood, gore and mayhem as the tendrils of old black magic engulf a seemingly normal office environment. The unsuspecting coworkers band together in order to rid their cubicles of the evil influence of their dreaded manager, Mephistopheles McDonald, Jr.

3. Selma Baker has kept her position as head secretary at Consolidated Megaplex Holdings, Inc. despite her unpleasant phone manner and poor typing because she's the only one who can get the office copier to work properly. But when friendly and efficient Tassie Jones fills in during Selma's bunion surgery and the copier doesn't jam once, Selma dusts off her cauldron and spellbooks in order to hang on to her job.

4. During her lunch break Tammy the receptionist uses her connection to the firm's XXiQV8 computer to bring cartoon hero Chet Urskin, aka, Captain Laserhead, to life. After a passionate frolic in the supply closet, these miscreants hijack the XXiQV8 and embark on adventures of the fourth kind.

5. Desperate college dropout Lydia Johnson begins a crummy job as the receptionist at a shoebox factory, and is thrilled when hunky shipping lackey Heath Windsor invites her out for cheeseburgers and reveals his true identity as a wizard sent by the Blue Trinity to protect her from evil secretaries, vampires, and unscrupulous dry-cleaners as she prepares for a royal destiny.

6. Unappreciated secretary Krystal Barnett buys a witchy black dress at a thrift shop and finds a tarnished old ring in the pocket. It is, of course, the fabled Ring of Vibrissa. She embarks on a program to take over the company and soon dominates the entire world of hair products. But then Uthgar the Bald, former owner of the ring, finds her.


Original Version

Office Magic is completed at a bit more than 97,000 words. Manuscript and synopsis are available upon request.

The story has elements of the Contemporary, Mystery, and Fantasy genres. The sex scenes between the main two characters are explicit, [I like a query that puts the most important stuff up front. To hell with the plot; is the sex explicit?] [We need to see five or six unabridged examples before we can advise you.] and throughout the manuscript there are excerpts of a sexual nature from a book that the leading lady is reading. That book is also written by me, but [does not necessarily recount my own sexual experiences, and is] not published. [So what you're saying is, the only scenes in this book that don't involve the main characters having sex are sex scenes from your other book?]

Alexandra-Lexi-Adams has just started working for her step-father, Robert Pedelty. On a slow day at work, she discovers an online romance novel, the heroine of which is her spitting image and carries her childhood nickname, Xandra. Intrigued, she starts reading, and becomes enamoured with the leading man, Rex. The problem is, she soon discovers the site on which the novel is posted is only accessible by her work PC. [She tries to go there from her home computer, but keeps getting the same error message: Server not found. It may no longer exist or may be experiencing heavy traffic or may be reachable only from your work PC.]

Edmund, head of the IT department, is the only person appearing less than happy with Lexi working for the company. He wastes no chance to provoke her, and has told her step-father that she doesn't belong in her current position. [Which is what? If she's not in the IT dept., what does he care? And if she is in the IT dept., why doesn't he just tell her what she's doing wrong? Lexi's stepfather isn't going to fire her; he has to live with Lexi's mother.] He suspects she's slacking off and decides to find out what she does in front of her computer screen all day.

His surprise at what takes up her time is overshadowed by the fact that the novel's leading man shares his face and the name he used years ago, before Lexi's step-father saved him from himself. [What does that mean?] Thinking Lexi is enamored [2nd use of the word enamored, and 2nd spelling as well.] with him and has written the novel, he's forced to come to terms with his feelings for her; feelings he's been denying and hiding out of respect for her stepfather. [Hiding your feelings is one thing; he's been trying to get rid of her.]

Finally giving into his attraction to Lexi, he starts baiting her, [This makes it sound like baiting someone is a good thing.] but when she is convinced he's the one who created the site, she stops reading and accuses him of plotting against her at work. In an effort to win her over, Edmund assumes his Rex persona again, but Lexi has been hurt in the past and, even though she gives into him physically, she isn't willing to share more than her body. [You've been plotting against me at work, you bastard; I refuse to have anything to do with you. Except have frequent sex.]

Edmund won’t give up his pursuit of her, while Lexi’s best friend Angi nudges her his way. Angi is a Wiccan who is too shy to perform spells in public. She may have done something in private however, that was meant to show Lexi the way to her One True Love. [Has Angi even met Edmund?]

Thank you in advance for your consideration,


Notes

How is it that Lexi notices that the novel's heroine is her spitting image but doesn't notice that its hero is Edmund's spitting image? Is the novel illustrated, or are the characters just described?

If Angi is responsible for the novel, maybe she should be in the query earlier. I'm sure she appears in the book before the last chapter. Start with Lexi's love life is in the tank when she meets Edmund, the most annoying guy in the world. But her best friend, Wiccan Angi, knows they were meant for each other, so she writes a complete novel in which they have sex all the time and live happily ever after, and puts it online where they'll both see it. Unfortunately, they never read past the part where they have sex all the time.

This is a romance, right? With some witchcraft thrown in? We're more interested in the main genre than in what genres it has elements of. If the sex is ubiquitous you can call it erotica, but there's nothing unusual about a modern romance novel having a few explicit sex scenes. It's pretty much expected. Thus there's no need to open by describing the level of intensity of your sex scenes.

"Stepfather" isn't commonly hyphenated, which you didn't realize until the fourth time you used it.