Toni Dianne Holm

Awakenings

GENRE: Cosmic Realism; Family/Fantasy

RIGHTS AVAILABLE: 63K word novel; TV pilot script

LOGLINE: A man is visited by the image of a Guide from beyond Earth who carries a warning: Everything is going to change.

ENDORSEMENT: Helene Nash, TV Development Executive, Warner Brothers Studios, said: "I want you to know that I think your proposed series and pilot are very good; outstanding actually - obviously, you are a very talented writer. To take such a complicated concept and pull it together almost seamlessly is an art and you have, by in large, nailed it." She continued working with Helene privately on a few drafts until Helene had to take time off for her family matters, at which time the author began writing Awakenings as a novel.

SYNOPSIS: This story is loosely based on the author's unexpected death of her first husband. He died in his sleep at the tender age of thirty-four. The author wanted to write a story that didn't end with death but rather, a story revealing a bridge to the continnuation of life beyond death. What if I could travel back in time and change just one event in my life? I'd go back a year and ten days before my husband died in his sleep. I would save him this time. Because I'd know what killed him.

Also true for Catherine Cole, the protagonist. She'd risk breaking cosmic law, undoing the events that killed her husband, Robert. Catherine's the expert in the afterlife. Intuition and ESP inform Catherine's roles as wife, mother, and clinical psychologist. As a catalyst between the living and the dead, Catherine Cole sees the bridges to other dimensional worlds. To investigate the behaviors, patterns, and problems of her high-profile client cases ofentimes requires traversing other worlds, crossing timelines and dimensions to solve life threatening and/or ongoing anomalies in their private and/or professional lives.

As if on cue, each team member shows up through seemingly unrelated connections. But the relentless, magnetic pull of an unresolved past life connection between Alex, Thomas, and Owen draw them together. The opportunity to address this past life gone wrong continues to bump into their present lives until fully revealed. Snippets of this past life waft in and throughout future chapters of each book: small scenes, memories, and nightmares offer pieces of the puzzle that tie them together.

In a pediatrician's waiting room, a twelve-year-old boy mourns the recent death of his father but introduces himself to a fifteen-year-old boy sitting next to him, wincing in pain from a fractured wrist. The younger boy shows him the DVD Dr. Hadley gave him: "Journey to the Stars." The boys become immediate best friends, despite being taught not to talk to strangers.

The Guide, an upper-management, benevolent presence manages a team of Apprentice Guides who cross between the worlds of the living and the dead. The Guide rarely gets involved at a personal level, except when the dead refuse to crossover. Robert refuses to crossover. What will happen to Owen? How will Catherine cope? The Guide must now become Robert's constant companion to ensure the entire system in the Astral Plane doesn't tilt into the Causal Realm. Death, messy business.

As their paths continue to intersect—a kidnapping case cements how the team bonds. Alex asks Catherine to travel with him to Upstate New York to use her unique skills to locate his closest family

friend and business colleague and talk with his friend's daughter, Alex's goddaughter. Hugh agrees to come along in case anyone needs medical attention. When Alex's limo arrives at the farmhouse, the FBI surrounds the limo armed with guns. What none of them know is that The Guide and Robert are also searching for the missing man to ensure his survival. The Guide reveals to Robert that this man's daughter is connected to Owen and Owen's new best friend and the fate of human beings.

FBI Agent Fields suspects Alex, Hugh, and Catherine immediately upon their arrival. Torrential storms and consequential flooding have closed roads all around the area leading in and out of the farms in the area. Agent Fields asks one of his men to do a background check on each of them. Coming back with the recent death of Robert Cole, FBI Agent Fields puts all of them on an FBI watch list. Agent Fields takes a personal interest in Catherine's 'so-called' paranormal abilities, confident she's up to no good. Agent Fields lost his fiancé and secretly commiserated with psychics who ripped him off mercilessly. He's on a mission to expose fakes like Catherine as frauds. His future love/hate relationship with Catherine will send him spiraling down into his dark side with grave consequences for Catherine and her team.

Who and where are the heroes to stand up and fight these villains? What if a truly devastating act was the fault of a teenage boy, an incredibly brilliant boy, kind, devoted to his parents, with a promising future in space travel? Is he a villain? What about another young boy who chooses to save the life of the older boy, his best friend, even though he knows his best friend accidentally killed his father in a hit-and- run accident? Is he a hero? Does this random act of love show the world what is good and decent when you have some courage to notice what's good and decent in another? The younger boy's act of empathy, compassion, forgiveness, and the kind of love that glues creation together is possibly the lynchpin - to save a world.

The team is being watched. This shifts everything they have ever counted on. Humanity is being watched, but for what reason? The team agrees, humanity becomes their client. But first, a boy's life is steadily diminishing. He's important. He must be saved to save humanity. Catherine knows the two boys are key to the future discovery looming ahead on the outskirts of Earth. Their combined knowledge of astrophysics, astronomy, biogenetics, theoretical engineering, etc., and their driving force to explore the cosmos are the key to fix what we don't know but need to know - who really killed Robert Cole and why?

LOGLINE - Desperate to save his family home, a Montana rancher secretly writes successful romance novels, but when his own longing for love results in a cosmic prescription to order a bride—nobody expects an attractive, New York Times Book Reviewer to show up, expose his true identity, discredit his reputation while falling in love under a canopy of stars in Big Sky Country.

Pat Conroy's "Prince of Tides" meets Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."

 
Tula comes from southern shores, descendants of African slaves, soldiers, farmers, voodoo vagrants, hunters, a trinity of Southern women healers, warriors, sea captains, murderers, and mystics living off sand and sea and hope . . . hope that Tula masters all three miracles.

To claim the highest powers from her lineage - Great Aunt Jewel's boldness, Aunt Sarah's compassion, and her mother, Teet's sight in total darkness, Tula battles the two-leggeds (evil incarnate). Tula needs three untrained knights (Uncle Seth, Walker, and Leonard), a daughter of an African queen (Great Aunt Jewel), two sisters - her mother, Teet (a blind seer) and Aunt Sarah (a ghosted healer), a five-year-old named Saint Jeremy, and an unexpected Troll named Bode piled into a white Fleetwood Cadillac to carry them forward toward a multi- dimensional zone dividing the seduction of the dark and the divinity of the light.

If Tula succeeds, Tula heals the sins of the father and ancestral karma. 

The novel's Prologue tells the inciting event of WE —the collective voice of the narrator. "We carried our destiny as the heirs to this forced migration from our homeland on the coast of Africa. We journeyed with our prayer . . . for the ship, the Commerce, for Captain Thomas Morton, and for the souls, upwards to 203 prime slaves. We mastered the yoking of nature to the surrealism of our grief, pain, fear, and rage. The karmic cycles of our generations echoed, living through creation, preservation, and destruction until the mixing of our races birthed the child, Tula, who ratcheted our healing journey of grace into a smooth closure.

Our prayer answered.

This is our story.

In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, a young woman sets out to find her place to stand in the world as a healer and a seer. Tula is a fifth-generation descendant of African slaves. To save her world, Tula must learn the identity of the two-leggeds (evil incarnate); befriend her allies (the mystics) and reveal the truth about her mother's death and her father's suicide to transform the sins of the father.

BEENYA SOUL is a generational story of extraordinary lives, broken through wrong choices, misperceptions, loss, and bondage, but the sojourn creates characters who rise with vision, strength, and truth- telling voices. In their artistry and power of overcoming loss, family, and regret, they see themselves worthy of forgiveness and healing through intricate conflicts of the broader human drama in a Southern story, an American story, a Woman's story, and a Healing story of realized and unrealized dreams.