Synopsis

Winner of the 2015 A Woman's Write Competition for fiction!
When Alice Carroll is in grade three she narrowly escapes losing her life in a school shooting. All she remembers is the woman comforting her in the moments before the gunshot, and that one second she was there, the next she wasn't.

It's bad enough coming to terms with surviving while others, including her favourite teacher, didn't, let alone dealing with the fact that she might wink out of existence at any time.

Alice spends the next few years seeing specialists about her Post Traumatic Stress as a result of VD--Voldemort Day--but it's not until she has a nightmare about The Day That Shall Not Be Mentioned, disappears from her bed, is found by police, and taken home to meet her four-year-old self that she realizes she's been time travelling.

Alice is unsure if her getting unstuck in time should be considered an ability or a liability, until she disappears right in front of her high school at dismissal time, the busiest time of day. Worried that someone may find out about her problem before long, Alice enlists her best friend (and maybe boyfriend), Pete, to help her try to

control her shifting through time with limited success. She's just about ready to give up when the shooter is caught. Alice resolves to take control of her time travelling in order to go back to That Day, stop the shooting, and figure out the identity of the stranger who'd shielded Alice's body with her own.

Outline

The title of
I Was, Am, Will Be Alice is taken from a line in Time Traveler's Wife, "I love. I have loved. I will love." The three parts of the title also became a way to structure the novel, which is divided into three parts.
In "I Was Alice", Alice learns of her ability to time travel.

In "I Am Alice", she comes to terms with it, learns to control it, and tries to go back in time to change what happened on the day of the shooting. 

In "I Will Be Alice", we learn if she was successful in her endeavour.  

Audience

My primary audience is the young adult market. As a high school English teacher, I come into contact with a lot of young adult books. I noticed that many of the characters in these books face high-stakes, life or death problems.. I wanted to write something that would follow suit, but I also wanted to write something that would challenge young readers. 

Young adult fiction is a favourite of many older adults as well.
I Was, Am, Will Be Alice will also appeal to  adults of all ages, as it will bring them back to their own childhood experience, and prompt them to ask: what if?
In the book, Alice ages from 9 through 17. Though Alice's best-friend is Pete (a boy), the primary audience for this novel will be females from the ages of 13 through their early 20s. As the story takes place in Canada, I expect the market for this will be largely Canadian, but the issue of school shootings is, unfortunately, an international one, so I believe that people from all cultural backgrounds and countries will find relevance in the story.

Promotion

The marketing for I Was, Am, Will Be Alice has been ongoing for the better part of a year now. I have blogged about it, posted to my social media, and ran advertisements when I recently organized a cover poll to help me decide which cover to use. I approached this as a marketing poll, with the hope that the cover people found the most attractive would be the one they would be more inclined to buy. 

I regularly post to social media, and have a large network of followers when you take my websites, and the aggregate reach of my social media accounts.

I plan to run a blog tour during the week of my book's release, and approach bloggers to help with reviews. I have also been collecting a number of professional publicity and new sites and I plan to approach them for a high-profile review.

For my last novel,
The Revenant,  I put together a study guide, with the hope that it would be useful for teachers wanting to include the novel in their curriculum, or for book clubs that might use the information and suggested discussions to help fuel their meeting. I look forward to putting one together for Alice as well. 

Lastly, I will use my local connections as a Greater Toronto Area author to attend book festivals, and distribute my book to public and educational, school libraries. It is my goal to enter my novel in the White Pine book competition, thereby distributing it to school libraries, province-wide.  

Competition

Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Like Henry, Alice travels through time, but due to a different genetic anomaly. Also like Henry, Alice's episodes of time travel centre around the most traumatic event in her life - being caught in a school shooting. Unlike
Time Traveler's Wife, Alice eventually learns how to control her travelling and tries to use it to prevent the shooting from happening. The novel is not primarily a romance, but rather, a coming of age story, in which Alice learns that the curves life has thrown her do not have to define her. It is about a young girl coming to terms with her disability, and using it to empower herself.
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Names and phrases were borrowed from
Alice in Wonderland, but aside from my Alice feeling as if she's stepped into the bizzaro world of the looking glass, the story does not compare. I include Wonderland in this list with the hope that it might inspire my readers to go back and take a look at the classic work that inspired me, if not the story.
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
In
The Shining Girls, Kirby is the victim of a time traveller. She uses her traumatic event--nearly being murdered by serial killer, Harper--and her job as a reporter, to turn the event around and bring her attacker to justice. Like Alice, Kirby uses the curves life has thrown her to empower herself and overcome her past. In The Shining Girls, it is Harper who does the travelling, through a door in a magical house. Kirby is assisted by fellow reporter, Dan, in her investigation, and there are hints of a romance, much like Alice is assisted by Pete, and there are hints of a romance.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
In
The Lovely Bones, Susie is raped and murdered. She spends the book in heaven, looking down on her friends and family as her murder investigation unfolds. Susie must come to terms with her death as she hopes her murderer will be caught. As the story progresses, Susie comes of age as she accepts her fate and learns of a clue that has been uncovered that will ultimately lead to the capture of her murderer. Alice is very much alive throughout the novel. The parallel here is the trauma, and the need to come to terms with how the character's life has changed as a result of the trauma. As the character comes of age, she learns to use her trauma as a tool for empowerment, rather than defeat.
The Half-Life of Molly Pierce by Katrina Leno
Molly suffers from split-personality disorder. The book opens with a trauma--Molly witnesses a boy on a motorcycle as he is hit and killed in a car accident--and she doesn't know what to make of it. Because life around her goes on and each of Molly's personalities are only aware of half of it, she must learn to overcome her disability in order to figure out who the boy on the motorcycle was, to regain her memory, and to get better. In other words, like Alice, she must also learn to come to terms with her disability, and she eventually uses it to piece her life together, thus empowering herself so she can get well.