Slime Crimes and Miss DeMeanors
SLIME CRIMES AND MISS DEMEANORS is a middle-grade mystery complete at about 56K words. It’s a stand-alone novel with series potential that combines the twists, turns, and humor in Finally, Something Mysterious with the themes of friendship and hard choices in The Kate In Between. If TV’s more your thing, think Veronica Mars meets The Fosters, but for tweens.
Lizzie’s a magnet for fears. Her top three? Being un-adopted before her next birthday (the big one-three), wild coyote attacks, and everyone finding out she’s the one who sent a probably-innocent kid to juvie. After that epic detective fail, Lizzie swore off investigations for life. She’d rather eat tacos de sesos (cow brains! Ewww!) than take on another middle-school case. But when a school slime prank lands her best friend Nali in the hospital, Lizzie must accept one last mission: Find the anonymous Mastermind of Slime (MoS) and bring him down.
The MoS wasn’t done with Nali. With each girl he pranks, Lizzie grows more determined to make him pay. Through her investigations, she becomes friends with the pranked girls as she dives undercover into places she never dared go before (like detention, the janitor’s closet, and face-down in slop behind the lunchroom dumpster). Gross? Um, yeah. Dangerous? Maybe. Worth it? Totally. That is until the elusive Mastermind of Slime demands she back off – or he’ll tell everyone she’s the juvie school snitch. Now she’s got a choice: Drop the case and protect herself and her secret or stand up to the MoS and stop the next slime attack before somebody really gets hurt.
I started this novel after my spy-bag toting adopted daughter and a real-life slime smuggling ring came together to insist this story be told. It may qualify as #ownvoices because Lizzie is neurodivergent and struggles with crippling fear and anxieties.
Check out the first few paragraphs of Slime Crimes.
Finch and Me
“Finally!” thinks a wilted yellow balloon, when a lonely boy finds it tangled in the sea grass and brings it home. Soon, the boy names the balloon – Finch, after the birds that sing in the yard, and the two become fast friends.
As the boy loves and cares for the balloon, making it a home and bringing it with him everywhere, Finch grows and grows, from a shriveled, dirty has-been to a big, brilliant balloon.
FINCH AND ME is a 675-word picture book. I think of it as Sidewalk Flowers meets the opposite of The Giving Tree – a tale of friendship, magic, and the extraordinary power of loving each other exactly as we are.
Read some highlights from Finch and Me.