SHORT PITCH

Felix Howlett is cursed. And so was his father. And so was his father’s father. And so was— well, you get the idea. After a run-in with a spiteful god generations ago, all Howlett boys are forgotten on the day they turn eleven. Slate wiped clean. Sand castle washed away with the tide. Poof. Just like that, Felix Howlett will never have existed.

But Felix’s twin sister, Ivy, won’t let a little thing like The Gods keep her from remembering her brother. With their 11th birthday fast approaching, the Howlett twins are left with one option: journey to the Memorealm—an afterlife divided between the remembered and the forgotten—to beg the lord of memories, The Recollector, to break the curse he placed on their family so many Howletts ago.

The Memorealm is vast, dangerous, and filled with forgotten things that would kill to be remembered. Felix and Ivy only have three days to find and bargain with The Recollector and return home, or they risk being lost to The Memorealm forever.

PARTIAL SYNOPSIS

Under any other circumstances, FELIX HOWLETT would be labeled ‘the weird kid.’ It’s not just his penchant for making a scene or his bright outfits and ever-present frog hat. It’s the way he carefully catalogs every moment of his day, down to making his classmates reenact entire conversations. He demands constant attention. No building is safe from six-foot-tall graffiti of his name. No classroom desk escapes a school year without having “Felix was here” scratched into its surface.

These aren’t just any other circumstances, however. Anyone in Whelkshire will tell you that Felix isn’t a weird kid. He’s just a Howlett. He’s collecting evidence, like the boys in his family say they’ve done for generations. He’s building a case, trying to leave enough of himself behind to prove he’d existed, because, one day, it’ll be like he never had.

The sons of the Howlett family are cursed to be forgotten on the day they turn eleven. Just like all those who came before him, Felix’s vandalism will disappear. Howlett boys’ childhoods are sand on a shore. They can dig as deep as they like, build a castle tall as a house, find a bucket and bail out the moat. But when that tide rises, no matter how hard he tries, Felix Howlett cannot stay.

Magic can’t be reasoned with. And the uniquely Howlett trait of thinking it can is exactly what started this mess thousands of years ago, when Felix’s ancestor, ELIAS HOWLETT, tried to steal from a god.

Though the Memory Gods don’t visit humans anymore, they both used to. On the Feast of Memory, the veil between the mortal realm and The Memorealm thins just enough to connect the two worlds by way of The Great Shrine. Once a year, the stern RECOLLECTOR—god of the forgotten—and the bombastic Hierophant—god of the remembered—would cross over to walk amongst mortals.

Until one Feast of Memory, when Elias Howlett was feeling unusually bold. He was a bold child in general, but made bolder this day by two factors. The first being that the Feast that year fell on his eleventh birthday. The second was that he was impassioned, as many children are, by a Foolish Solution.

Elias’ parents died when he was a baby, leaving him to be raised by his widowed grandfather, Basil. His grandfather was a kind man who tried very hard to give Elias a good life, but as Elias got older, he began to notice Basil forgetting things. He’d leave… [editors: request the full synopsis!] [everyone else: hope an editor requests a full synopsis!]