[Literary/Spiritual Fiction] Sample for Agent

I'm getting ready to send a query and 5-page sample off to agents, but before I do, I want to see what kind of feedback this sample might get. So:

Title: Leap of Haste (working title)

Length: of Query + Sample 2,000 words
Draft: 1st
Language: English

Summary: Liz McDonnell greets the morning of her twenty-fourth birthday with renewed commitment to her faith and her belief in God’s plan for her life. She has taken a position as live-in campus ministry intern for incoming freshmen at a Catholic college in the Northeast, and born-again Liz is ready to help them all see the joys in volunteering and the emptiness in binge-drinking. As she and the freshmen begin to teach each other lifelong lessons, though, devastating news from her soul mate in South Africa shakes Liz’s deeply-rooted faith. With everything she believes in suddenly unearthed, Liz’s neatly wrapped story of finding Christ and seeking salvation suddenly seems too indefinite to grasp. Liz must choose once for all whether she can believe, and whether believing can make any difference to her, her freshmen charges, and her destiny.

Sub Genre & Keywords: Spiritual Literary Fiction; Fait, God, College, Young Adult

Known Issues: I think it might skip all over place, but I can't seem to get enough distance from it to tell. I'm also concerned it won't hook the reader (agent) enough to request more pages.

Critique Requested/Tolerated: Give me everything you got!

Experience and Goals: A decided lack of experience coupled with lofty goals.

Method of Communication: Email or post here.

Thanks for any/all help you're willing to offer.

Dear Ms. Agent,

What do you get when you mix one-part born-again Christian, two-parts college campus, and one-part international heartbreak? You get a cocktail that has never been served at Alpha Delta Pi’s Spring Fling before, and you get a story no one has read before but everyone needs to hear.

Liz McDonnell greets the morning of her twenty-fourth birthday with renewed commitment to her faith and her belief in God’s plan for her life. She has taken a position as live-in campus ministry intern for incoming freshmen at a Catholic college in the Northeast, and born-again Liz is ready to help them all see the joys in volunteering and the emptiness in binge-drinking. As she and the freshmen begin to teach each other lifelong lessons, though, devastating news from her soul mate in South Africa shakes Liz’s deeply-rooted faith. With everything she believes in suddenly unearthed, Liz’s neatly wrapped story of finding Christ and seeking salvation suddenly seems too indefinite to grasp. Liz must choose once for all whether she can believe, and whether believing can make any difference to her, her freshmen charges, and her destiny.

LEAP OF HASTE is a cross between spiritual- and literary-fiction, echoing books like Gilead by Marilyn Robson. It examines questions of faith, interconnectedness, and the relationships between God, nature, art, and everyday reality. The story’s uniqueness lies in the honesty of its protagonist, an actual twenty-something in a typical college environment dealing with age-old questions of humanity. Any young person or college graduate can relate to Liz’s personal crises set amid a backdrop of bad dining hall food, alcohol-induced antics, and the pressures of the looming “real world.” Will faith keep her favorite freshman from a trying instance of date-rape? Can belief in a “grand plan” keep her great love alive, and in her arms?

The tale of Liz McDonnell is fiction; however, it is based nearly completely in the reality of my own Catholic college campus in the Northeast. I am an entrepreneurial script/manuscript reader and have had poetry published in the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey. This is my second novel, but my first attempt at publication.

Enclosed please find the first five pages of LEAP OF HASTE. I read on your website that you handle (young adult/spirituality/literary) fiction, and should you like to see a few sample chapters of LEAP OF HASTE, I have enclosed an SASE for your reply.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Prologue

When I paint, though it isn’t often anymore, there is an almost-transient moment between when I dip my brush into the first glop of colored oil and when I splash that oil onto a taught, riveted, blank white canvas when I can never breathe quite right. In that moment, whether I am standing out on the front lawn so I can watch you kick your soccer ball against the stoop, or hiding in the basement while you play your music through the house, in that moment I have no idea what will happen; I am terrified. On the one hand, I can put the brush back down, like any rational human being not willing to risk his whole life and being in pursuit of something intangible, invisible. Or, instead, I can thrust my hand, my whole being, toward the canvas in a horrifying leap of faith that something good will— no, must —come out of it. When you see me standing out there on the grass smiling as you kick a “goal”, I am something altogether different; I am not your father, I am not a widower, I am not an artist. I am a believer. And your mother, wherever she is in that moment, is the reason I am able, over and over again, to put the brush to the canvas, to believe.
Years ago (three years and two months ago, actually), your mother and I shared red wine and a conversation that changed our lives and yours. She told me a story then that I have endeavored time and again to recreate for you, usually through paintings, rarely through words. It was a story, much like yours and mine, of life and death and belief in the unbelievable. You know your mother continues to affect us each day in that way; long before you and I were forced to look at life the way we do, your mother chose to believe. I know that you’ve felt, say, disillusioned lately, with your mother, with me, with what you call the “charade” of our lives. Perhaps, Anne, we did perform something of a Grand Charade, but I think it is time for both of us to understand why.
You know I am not good with words; the only thing more frightening to me than a blank canvas is a blank screen. And so this is your mother’s story, not mine; I am only her disciple, retelling the stories of her works and her words, her crucifixion and her resurrection—as she told them to me that night. And when it is over, when she has said all she can say to you here, I ask no reaction from you. You see, I have chosen, as it is clear, to believe in her and everything that it entails. Whether you choose to believe too is up to you; it is between you and her and no one else. But when I watch you play, Anne, know that I am hoping that in that moment between when your foot is flying through the air and when it makes direct and premeditated contact with that ball that you are thinking of her, and that you too are believing.

ONE
Move-in day had finally come, and as she awoke to the harsh, unfamiliar light, Liz inhaled everything that day could bring. It was her twenty-fourth birthday, and the start, in every sense, of a new year. She was in a new bed, in a new city, with a new job. In a matter of hours, her life and this very room would be filled with new friends, new worries, new hopes. The only thing unchanging, she knew, was who was in that room with her.
She blinked, looking around the sparsely decorated dorm room, first to her dresser with pictures of her parents, her roommates from Philadelphia, and her college graduation photo; and then to the coffee table in the corner with the statue of Mary resting on it (stone-faced, solid); and finally to the door, with the gilded Crucifix above it. On this, her twenty-fourth birthday, she could look around a college dorm room and see that she had come a long way since she was last in a place like this. Now, she felt sure, she was here for the right reasons, for God’s reasons, and she knew He was with her on this day, the beginning of everything new.
A bullhorn blared outside and Liz sat up straight in the college-issued box bed, reluctantly shifting to the plastic tiled floor and making her way towards the shower. It was seven-thirty, and that was the sound of the student-orientation staff beginning their preparations for moving in the freshmen. Liz knew that by nine the campus would be buzzing; all she had to do today was handle introductions. That and pray that these would be some God-sent eighteen year olds, especially the ones that she’d be sharing a floor with all year. It was this uncertainty, these hours before she could even begin to form judgments about the people that would fill this year of her life that made Liz want to stay in the shower all day. Under this weakly-dripping, hot-cold-hot water, she didn’t have to plunge into this twenty-fifth year; and yet somehow, from some force inside unknown to her, her right hand lifted up, her wrist flexed downwards, and she turned off the water.
While she dressed in her uniform blue Campus Ministry t-shirt, Liz remembered her own move-in day six years earlier. In some ways, it was nothing like what today’s freshmen would be going through. She arrived at Missouri State with 4,000 other Midwestern eighteen year-olds, their parents, and the 12,000 upper-class students who had no time for wide-eyed rookies. There were people everywhere, more than she had ever seen in once place at one time before. It had been like driving off her farm, making a right, and landing in the middle of New York City. The students arriving today at St. John’s University in Rhode Island were completely different. They came from wealthy Northeastern families- children of businessmen and bankers, not dairy farmers. They had jetsetted more places than Liz had read about, and perhaps most importantly, they had chosen at eighteen to come to a Catholic college.
These students realized, probably five years before Liz ever realized it, that there was something important about being in a place like this, with people like her. In a small six thousand-person school that stressed community and Christian behavior, they would be immediately at home. She wondered if this knowledge, this maturity in faith or whatever it was, would change everything. Her college years had been full of parties, of drinking and hooking up, of one-night-stands and mornings after. But she had come so far since that time, and if her freshmen had already arrived at that kind of maturity, this was bound to be a completely different experience.
She took the job as campus ministry intern for a number of reasons. First, the University would pay for her to get her Master’s degree in counseling, which Liz had decided over the last year was what she wanted to do most in life. Second, she had spent the past eleven months volunteering with a Catholic organization, teaching inner-city children and living with other volunteers, and she wasn’t ready to give up that lifestyle, that sense of community. And finally, in typical Liz fashion, the most important reason was one she had no explanation for; it was just a feeling she had chosen to believe in, to take a chance on.
Here at St. John’s, she wouldn’t be living with five friends and volunteering from nine to five like last year, but rather living with the very people she was trying to help each day and each night of their college lives. Whereas last year the focus had been on her fellowship with her housemates, and only slightly on the volunteer work she did, now the two would cross paths somewhat confusingly. Her work would consist of late-night chats, group volunteer outings, and building relationships among the people with which she lived. Mostly, Liz just had to be available to her freshmen at all times- day and night, weekday and weekend. It was like doing college all over again, but this time she was twenty-four, and she was the role model. Ironic, she thought, that she should end up doing God’s work in exactly the same place she acted so ungodly just six years ago. But, she assured herself, that was a different time, and she was a different person. If she could only spend this time around helping, rather than hurting; if she could find that one girl that reminded her of her own eighteen-year old self and make her see it was not the way; that was why Liz was here. That was why God wanted Liz to be here.
She slipped on her flip flops and decided to head to the main campus to check the office for any last-minute updates. Stepping out of Drevin in her long white Bermuda shorts and boxy University shirt, Liz could sense the excitement growing around her. Hundreds of red-clad students— the University’s volunteer orientation staff- buzzed about, doing last minute preparations for the big arrival. Some overzealous parents had already parked the SUV’s in the main lot and were walking around campus with their kids. This was a moment, Liz thought,that she could feel, really feel; the calm before this storm was tangible, and Liz wanted at once to hold it and to run from it. Everything new was about to begin.

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