I'll look those up, Amy. It's not so much that I want to write to the market as to whether there's a market at all.
I'm thinking adult, since the protagonist has to old enough to have freedom of action and a car. The basic idea is what happened between
Puck of Pook's Hill,
when the Fair Folk fled England, and Clifford Simak's
Goblin Reservation,
in which the trolls, goblins, banshees and the like are protected on a reservation. Our heroine inherits the job of protecting the last remaining old ones, along with a groundskeeper who may or may not be Puck. She researches odd phenomena looking for these remnants. The stories could include finding and saving them; using their powers to help others; and killing the ones who are dangerous. In the meantime, the house and grounds she inherited are full of squabbling pixies, house hobs who disagree about housekeeping, trolls who keep building bridges, and so on.
The POV character could be a kid who helps the protagonist if you wanted to aim it younger.
I'm 40,000 words into Cog now and I'm in the midst of the big middle story events. Fun.
This is my current description of the project:
Cog is the first girl to become an apprentice to ‘Mack’ the Queen’s Master Engineer. Only nobody knows Cog is actually a girl, or that she really wasn’t supposed to be an apprentice at all. Keeping herself a secret from Mack, her roommate, and everyone else in the Steel Tower is only the beginning of her troubles. When items and gizmos start to go missing, it looks like one of her best friends will take the blame. While trying to help him, she discovers a much darker plot that threatens to throw the whole kingdom into war. Fixing kingdoms might not be the same as fixing an automechanical potion mixer, but Cog has a set of precision screwdrivers and isn’t afraid to use them.
Make of this what you will, Gud, but my first thought on reading that was "Oh, 'Yentl'!"
I don't know what to make of it, I've heard of the movie, but I don't know a thing about it.
Barbra Streisand plays a girl in 19th Century (?) Europe who pretends to be a boy so she can go to a Torah school so she can continue the studies she did with her father, when, as a girl, she's forbidden to study Torah. She falls in love with a guy but has a girl fall in love with her, and I believe the relationship proceeds at least to a betrothal. I don't remember how it ends.
It proceeds to marriage. Yentl has to keep making excuses not to have sex. The girl Yentl marries finally demands sex. (The actress playing Yentl's wife went on to marry Spielberg I think. Radiantly beautiful.) Umm - I liked Yentl, though it has been a long time since I saw it. But then again, I have a Barbra Streisand fetish.
Oh and the end. Yentl reveals that she is a girl. A boy who was having feelings for Yentl is relieved to find out she is not a boy. Yentl heads off for 19th century America, where no doubt she will find a feminist paradise. I forget if the boy marries Yentl's wife or not.
Um... yeah. It's not much like that. There's much less Torah and much more mad science and trolls.
Well, my agent thought it was a little too much of a good thing and that turning CH 1 into CH 5 introduces the primary incident in that chapter a little too late in the narrative. I see her point even though it means a trip back to the drawing board. I do have a bit of a grace period, however, seeing as she's at the London Book Fair until Wednesday.
::sigh::
I really thought I'd nailed it-- adrenaline rush, I suppose.
