I’ve been done with Dead Weight, my first book, for a dumb amount of time. I’ll write about all of that in a future post. Until then, I thought I’d provide the pitch that I sent potential agents as I struggled to understood this old-school, traditional side of publishing.

Dead Weight

Can a headstrong 17-year-old boy survive and find love at the end of the world?

This is the story of Zephyr Rockwell, a wealthy, small-town teenager who wakes from a night camping in the woods and discovers his girlfriend missing, all of her clothes left behind. Confusion gives way to panic and then terror as the boy learns that her disappearance is not an anomaly, but a statistic in a widespread phenomenon that seems to have swept across his hometown.

Everybody is gone. His parents. His friends. His neighbors. The entire population of nearly 30,000 residents. The streets are littered with abandoned cars, the only remnants of their inhabitants the clothes and shoes and jewelry and even fillings they wore. Television broadcasts static channels and live newsrooms with bodiless chairs. The Internet displays yesterday’s stories and no signs of activity.

What the hell is going on?

Ill-equipped and petrified, Zephyr embarks on a journey for answers and companionship in a world where great cities lay in ruins, resources grow scarcer by the day, and every other survivor is a potential threat.

Along the way, he meets a variety of characters, including a little girl named Jordan who lost her mom, an old man named Ross with a penchant for guns and alcohol, twenty-something twins who claim to have visited Area 51, and Aurora, the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. Zephyr learns that despite the loss of so many millions, humanity remains, and all the wonder and magnificence of mankind with it. But also the brutality.

There are secrets waiting in California. Still, is the trek halfway across the country worth the risk? Zephyr and some of his new friends decide to find out, and not all of them will return.