Work in Progress: Required Materials

(Not actually my WIP, but thematically appropriate.)

Here's to works in progress! In the near-term, the literary-mystery with the working title Required Materials will be serialized via a weekly newsletter. Fan of campus novels, the strangeness of Silicon Valley, or whodunnits? There may well be something here for you. 

Katie is a thirty-year-old adjunct professor, chronically underpaid, and now half a beat from homeless after running out on her long-term computer engineer partner. She washes up in a crumbling Silicon Valley apartment she can’t afford with a full course load to teach at her community college, a cranky orange cat, and an impending interview for a tenure-track position. Without that position, she’s as good as bankrupt and on a greyhound back east. But it’s handled, or so her mentor Maggie says. Maggie has been in the English Department for decades, and she knows how to pull hidden strings. 

But then Maggie turns up dead in a parking garage, and before Katie can get too enveloped in grief, another body hits the ground—this time, the diversity representative on the hiring committee. Someone is targeting professors, and suddenly, chasing the once-in-a-lifetime tenure-track position means risking more than her rent, her career, and her ability to buy cat food. She may be lucky to get out of the interview alive.

Weaving through a tech-driven landscape of barely-functional scarcity and obscene plenty, “Required Materials” follows Katie’s quest to net a steady gig, a reasonable place to live, and whoever took out her mentor. Not necessarily in that order.