The Great Magical Brew-Off
1. Na-ni and Hespeth have a centuries-long witchy rivalry over everything from men to vacation spots to astroscopes. This year it will be tea/coffee/beer brewing and Jackson is the poor sod kidnapped off the street and forced to be judge. The real question is afterwards, for how many centuries will he be a toad?
2. When the village potion maker's apothecary burns down there goes her livelihood--unless she can win the All-Villages Brew-Off. But her main competition is her ex-boyfriend, who needs the money to study how to raise the dead. Also, they still have the hots for each other.
3. The leprechauns have gathered for the annual brew-off of Irish whiskey, but when Cillian wins, Keefe accuses him of using a bottle of Keefe's winning brew from last year, which Cillian say is blarney, and the judges can't agree on which one deserves the pot of gold. Hilarity ensues.
Original Version
Dear [Agent],
Seren Mage can brew any potion her customers desire, but she can’t figure out the right ingredients to mend her broken heart. She’s tried everything from whiskey to faerie dust. Yet the man she once loved keeps haunting her as she stumbles over his poems hidden behind jars of witches’ warts and photographs tucked into tomes. If only she could forget how happy Leo and her [she] were and cement her future as the grumpy village potioneer. When her latest efforts at banishing the memories goes awry [Matters go from bad to much worse when] Seren’s apothecary burns to the ground and, with it, her livelihood.
Leo Arcana didn’t want to study necromancy; he wanted to be a potions professor. But he’d do anything to make his father proud. His great-great-grandfather was the last Arcana powerful enough to raise the dead and if Leo’s father has his way, Leo will be the next. So he did what was expected of him, breaking up with the girl of his dreams to study blood-soaked grimoires in a musty dungeon. When he doesn’t secure the scholarship he needs to further his education, he risks being a disappointment yet again and is desperate for a solution.
Luckily, the all-villages brewing competition promises a large cash prize for the winner. When Seren and Leo enter, the last thing they expect to see is the [each] other. If they want a spot in the finale, they’ll need to confront the heartache and lingering attraction they feel. There can only be one winner and with their futures hanging in the balance, Leo and Seren face a difficult choice: the money or each other. [Are you saying if they choose each other, they can't enter the competition, and if they choose to enter the competition, they can't be together . . . even if neither of them wins it? (So far, neither has even secured a spot in the finale, so it's too early to be choosing the money.)
Apparently the only way they can't be together is if Leo wins the competition, and goes back to the dungeon till he learns to raise the dead. Though they should agree that if either of them wins the money, they'll use it to rebuild the apothecary and then use its profits to help fund Leo's education. (In that order. If they use the prize money to fund the education, Leo will dump her when he graduates, and Seren will be living under a bridge. It's a story as old as time.) They'll have each other until the apothecary is up and running, and by then, possibly Leo's father will "accidentally" have drunk a potion that turns him into a toad, and Leo won't feel obligated to finish his education.
THE GREAT MAGICAL BREW OFF is a paranormal romance, estimated at 85,000 [pages?]. It will appeal to fans of the second chance romance in The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling and the competition setting of Love and Other Disasters by Anita Kelly. Though intended as a standalone, it has the potential for expansion.
When not writing, I’m being tricked into feeding my black cat a second dinner and wishing I could own a farm of Highland cows.
Notes
No complaints from me, except to say that the difficult choice would seem more difficult if it were about what to spend the money on. Possibly with Leo saying apothecary and Seren saying education. You can say one of them wins, without giving away which one in the query.
Also, as Leo did what was expected of him by his father, presumably to avoid disappointing him, when you say he risks being a disappointment "yet" again, I wonder if he's been a disappointment with some frequency. Perhaps you just mean not wanting to study necromancy was a big disappointment to dad.
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