Bianca Marais

quince.com slash tisnotya.

Okay, Carly, handing it across to you.

Dear Carly, based on your interest in stories about motherhood, family, and ambition, I'm thrilled to share with you Nothing Close to Perfect, a 95,000-word multi-POV contemporary fiction about what happens when a long-running affair unravels the finely orchestrated lives of an ascending political family.

It's the escalating impact of family secrets and lies as Andrea Dunlop's women are the fiercest creature meets the challenges of midlife, marriage, and motherhood in Claire Lombardo's Same As It Ever Was.

Melody Sullivan has spent the past 25 years trying to build something close to a perfect life.

She's married to Billy, her college sweetheart, and a U.S.

senator planning the wedding of the year for her daughter and trying to keep her son focused on college and out of trouble.

But when a news story meant to soft launch Billy's presidential campaign instead reveals his long-term affair with Iris, a struggling diner waitress, the perfect family facade is shattered beyond repair.

As Melody and her adult children flee to the family beach house on an exclusive island, Iris deals with the fallout, trapped with Billy's newborn daughter in her D.C.

apartment.

In the months that follow, as Melody considers a future without the man she's depended on and develops complicated feelings for the handyman working next door, her daughter struggles with giving up her own ambitions for her fiancé's, while her son drops out of his elite college to work at a bar.

As Billy tries to make amends to save his floundering campaign and his family while also continuing his relationship with Iris, a second news story breaks.

The life Melody has created has been built on an unforgivable lie.

The consequences will both be devastating and ultimately freeing as Melody, her children, and Iris must decide what and who they're willing to give up for something better than a perfect life.

I work in higher education in North Carolina, where the story is set and where Senator John Edwards torpedoed his political career and his family over an affair.

While not a retelling, Nothing Close to Perfect is inspired by those events, plus the many other stories of powerful men behaving poorly and would be my debut novel.

I've enclosed the first five pages below and look forward to your feedback.

Sincerely, Alison McWilliams.

There was a postscript sharing their love for the pod and also letting me know that it was 381 words.

All right, so here we go.