Book Proposal using the Snowflake Method

And here is what expanding the summary paragraph into a proposal ended up like:

Book Proposal - Untitled as Yet

Nick Aceret is a crime novelist with a penchant for creating characters who are more than they seem on the page. During the course of writing his Diabolical Soul crime series, Nick created both Malcolm Price, his antagonist throughout the series, and Marlena Kevan, a character used as a foil for Malcolm until she was written off the page at the end of the third novel, as well as other less notable characters that existed for a few scenes here and there. While Nick was writing the fourth novel in the series, Tracy Averdue, a security agent working with the Asylum for Miscreant Characters, noticed that several of Nick’s characters were much more than he had created them to be. One particular character, Millicent Marianna Freedman, had the audacity to push the essence of the author using her at the time out of the author’s body to hang about in the library until Mr. Von Schutzel, the Asylum’s director, recruited Marlena as part of the team to deflate Millicent’s ego, allowing the author’s essence to move back into her own body and enabling the team to move Millicent back to the Asylum without incident. As Agent Averdue studied the flow of Nick’s series, he noted that Malcolm was a more devious character than Millicent had grown to be, and brought his concerns to Mr. Von Schutzel. Mr. Von Schutzel tried to gain Nick’s attention about the situation, but Nick put the voice in his head down to the natural process of letting go of a character he had spent the better part of the last ten years with.

While working on the final novel in his latest series, Nick suffers a momentary blackout as he delivers the final death blow to the series’ antagonist, Malcolm Price. During the course of the last two novels, after his small success in getting Marlena written off at the end of the third novel of the series, Malcolm had studied Nick’s creative method in order to plot how to switch realities with his creator. He’d heard about Millicent’s escapade, and figured if a one-dimensional character that had barely made it through three scenes in the fourth novel of the series could get as far as she did, surely he, being more fully evolved, could succeed where Millicent had failed. Malcolm realized he would not only have to push Nick’s essence out of his body in order to fill it with his own, but also to put Nick’s essence into the body of his character on the page in order to be able to kill Nick off and keep Nick’s reality for his own. What Malcolm didn’t count on was Nick’s heavy caffeine habit during the final writing phases of his novels having the ability to restart a newly dead heart and bring his character back to life in the novel!

When Nick comes to, he finds his essence is now in the body previously occupied by Malcolm in the novel and he has to move quickly not only to stay alive but also to figure out what happened and get back to his own reality. Though the body he now inhabited was a mass of bruises, and probably even a fractured bone or two, Nick knew he had to keep moving in order to stay ahead of the protagonist in the novel, Riley Brown, the latest agent assigned to stop Malcolm. He also knew he had to cover his tracks very well until he could figure out what the hell happened and how he was supposed to get back to his own reality. He’d created Riley to be the one to finish Malcolm off in this novel after all! Nick moved to the sewer system, where he knew only by bringing in the cadaver dogs could Riley stand a chance of finding him. He only hoped one of the denizens of the system didn’t make the dogs’ job easier by making him an actual cadaver!

Enter Marlena Kevan, a character Nick wrote off in the third novel of the series, and who is now assigned to save his life and bring Malcolm to justice. After failing to gain Nick’s attention about the situation with Malcolm, Mr. Von Schutzel and Agent Averdue confer, deciding to bring Marlena in to work the case. Agent Averdue knows Marlena was created and then discarded by Nick; however, she is the best chance they have to stop Malcolm in his tracks. What neither of them considered was Marlena’s reaction to having to face her past and how it might affect her being able to complete the mission at hand.

Marlena, who had developed a talent for changing genders to fit the circumstances, has to face her past and resolve her feelings for both Malcolm and Nick in order to accomplish her mission. Being created to go from kidnapping victim to lover and accomplice, Marlena was already well versed in changing roles by the time Nick wrote her off the page at the end of the third novel in his crime series. Marlena took that talent to the next level by becoming an androgynous character, able to be female in one scene and male in the next. This ability was quite useful in dealing with Millicent Marianna Freedman, the only other character to attempt what Malcolm was plotting. Being away from Malcolm and Nick and finding her niche as a field agent for the Asylum for Miscreant Characters, Marlena was able to ignore her past. Now she must face it and, with Agent Averdue’s help, realize that it was Malcolm, not Nick, who had tossed her aside when she became too much of an equal in the series. By facing the truth of the matter, Marlena finds the key to returning Malcolm to the page to face his fate and get Nick back to his own reality.