Attention, lit agents!

I’m currently querying two unpublished manuscripts: a middle-grade suburban mystery with a time travel twist entitled NORMALTOWN and a multigenerational family saga for adult readers called HEADLIGHTS ON. Read below for brief summaries of both stories. Interested in reading a partial or complete manuscript? Contact me at johnnyawilliams@gmail.com!

  • Eleven-year-old Dezzy Byrd has been missing his mom for 321 days. Ever since she departed on a mysterious work assignment, he’s been replaying their last day together on an endless, anxious loop, drowning in unanswered questions. Why won’t Dad and Nana Beam just tell him where she is? Who are the “not-so-nice” people she is investigating? Will he ever see her again?

    When Dezzy’s family abruptly moves to the cookie-cutter suburb of Normaltown, he is thrown into a parallel mystery. He and his rescue dog, Soup, collide with Molly Moscovitz, a fast-talking environmental activist from the neighboring mobile home community with a knack for journalism and getting into trouble. Together, they endeavor to locate Trace Lockhart, a local boy gone missing. Who is responsible for Trace’s disappearance? The breadcrumbs lead to Miss Bentley, the octogenarian astrophysicist with a painful past and big secrets in her basement.

    NORMALTOWN is a tensely paced neighborhood mystery with a sprinkle of sci-fi. This poignant 30,000 word debut novel is a great fit for readers of Ross Welford’s Time Traveling with a Hamster, Erin Entrada Kelly’s Hello, Universe, and When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.

  • HEADLIGHTS ON begins in 1958 with Loretta and Alan Olsen, teenage bank robbers careening down a rural Wisconsin road, outrunning the law and the ghosts of their fallen family tree. Together, the orphaned siblings navigate the American midcentury landscape with only Elvis and Brando as their slick-haired chaperones.

    Fifty years later, two young brothers, Eli and Lachlan Penner, find an antique car submerged in a pond on their family farm. After a near-death experience and a series of clairvoyant visions, the sweeping saga of their lost lineage is slowly dredged up.

    With each chapter, the Olsen-Penner family tree fills in and long-buried connections are revealed. We meet the headstrong matriarch, Pearl St. Patrick and her daydreaming daughter, Christine, surviving the hollowed homefront in 1943. We visit the boys’ two fathers, Justin and Mo, in Y2K-era New York and discover the origins of their tumultuous love.

    HEADLIGHTS ON is a multigenerational drama that captures the emotional ripples of war, art, lost love, and white lies.