{"id":123,"date":"2011-01-23T23:12:17","date_gmt":"2011-01-24T04:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/?p=123"},"modified":"2014-02-27T00:40:32","modified_gmt":"2014-02-27T05:40:32","slug":"amazon-breakthrough-novel-award-2011-entering-finding-mulligan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/?p=123","title":{"rendered":"Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2011, Entering: Finding Mulligan"},"content":{"rendered":"

I decided to enter Finding Mulligan <\/em>in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition.\u00a0 It gives me a chance to win a publishing contract with Penguin.\u00a0 The international Amazon contest stops taking entrants once it hits 10,000 people.\u00a0 Each of us has to send in a pitch statement, a bio, a first chapter, and a full manuscript.<\/p>\n

The second round will involve the 10,000 entrants being cut down to 2,000 Second Round competitors based entirely on our pitch.<\/p>\n

This is my pitch statement:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What if you fell in love with someone who might not exist?<\/em><\/p>\n

Cassandra Howard leads a double life. A smart, sarcastic student by day, Cassie is a different person in her dreams\u2014literally. In dreamland, her alternate reality, Cassie becomes a happy-go-lucky, charismatic girl named Dia, and she prefers to keep her two lives separate. That changes when she falls in love.<\/p>\n

Mulligan is the perfect dream guy, and in her nighttime paradise Dia has him all to herself, but in Cassie\u2019s world Mulligan only exists as a mysterious painting.\u00a0 Feeling left out, Cassie begins to obsess over finding the waking-world version of Mulligan.\u00a0 Soon enough, Cassie tracks down two people with connections to the painting, leaving her confused as to which one of them is the man she\u2019s looking for.\u00a0 What if her two selves are in love with two different guys?<\/p>\n

Unwilling to live in the shadow of her other life forever, Cassie tries to remake her waking-world self in the image of Dia to attract the \u201creal\u201d Mulligan, but her actions blur the lines between dreamland and the waking world until neither girl is sure who she is.\u00a0 For Cassie, finding Mulligan\u2014and figuring out whether he exists\u2014might require finding herself first.<\/p>\n

Finding Mulligan <\/em>combines magical realism, identity issues, and a complicated love triangle (or is it a pentagon?), plus a dash of psychological weirdness.\u00a0 While the concept is unique enough to seem fresh, the struggle for self-definition will be comfortingly familiar to teens.\u00a0 It will resonate with young adults who appreciate self-aware, realistic characters, and will be enjoyed by those who like their romance without a side of fluff.\u00a0 Because of its gifted but fractured protagonist, early readers have compared Finding Mulligan<\/em> to stories like Life of Pi<\/em>, A Beautiful Mind<\/em>, and Fight Club.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I decided to enter Finding Mulligan in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition.\u00a0 It gives me a chance to win a publishing contract with Penguin.\u00a0 The international Amazon contest stops taking entrants once it hits 10,000 people.\u00a0 Each of us has to send in a pitch statement, a bio, a first chapter, and a full […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,44,6],"tags":[22,17],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-contests-2","category-novels","tag-abna","tag-finding-mulligan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":982,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions\/982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}