Dear Query Shark,
An hour's drive from Roswell, New Mexico, is a wide spot in the road named Haley. Haley's famous for two things--Haley Hospital, the best in the state, and a dive called the Caveman Bar and Grill.
Bill Trout, big-mouthed owner of the Caveman, is enjoying running the bar, coming up with new kinds of weird beer, and settling back into a bachelor's life when Mayor Jack Stout, his best friend, decides to hide an interstellar fugitive in town. Jack's a good guy, but his common sense isn't a strong point.
Bill, who has been walking the fine line between "jerk" and "responsible adult" for many years, tries to trick the alien, Anam, into leaving, but when the aliens attack at the bar, he promises to let Anam stay if Anam will help kill them. Not that Bill intends to keep his promise.
Will Jack get off his high horse and help Bill get rid of the local alien before his pursuers find them again and kill them all? Will the local alien-conspiracy cult that runs the hospital find Anam and before he can save humanity from invasion? Will a town full of perfectly ordinary people turn crazy from the New Mexico summer heat?* It all depends on an old man built like an orangutan, a stranger with a familiar face, and Bill's latest brew, a blue beer he calls "Alien Blue."
Alien Blue is an 85,000-word contemporary science fiction novel that fits somewhere between Spider Robinson and Kurt Vonnegut. Alien Blue stands alone, but I'd like the chance to develop a sequel.
I'm a technical writer and editor for the Air Force, but my clearance isn't high enough to know anything about what happened in the New Mexico desert in 1947. Or so I tell people. I've published short-short stories (at Toasted Cheese, Verbiage, and Clever Magazine, all online), poetry (in Darkwaves and Larkwings, Vol. 1; and iMPS iN THe iNKWeLL, from a gleeful press!), murder mystery party games (the best of which are at Freeform Games, online). I volunteer for the Pikes Peak Writers as a reporter and Published Writer Liaison. I have a blog at secret-hideout.blogspot.com (shh).
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
DeAnna Knippling
[contact info]
*Probably not. It's a dry heat.
Thanks to everybody with comments from last time.
