Contest

This is my entry for the Writer's Voice Contest. WARRIOR-MONKS is a 100,000 word YA Rural Fantasy.

The Query for WARRIOR-MONKS:

Fifteen-year-old Lee Ruccio is a reluctant juvenile delinquent. The last thing he expects to discover at reform school in northern Idaho is magic. But after his useless, drunk-whenever-he's-home father leaves, and his mother dies, Lee's guardians ship him off to Rocky Mountain Academy, and magic is exactly what he finds.

Despite having to earn the right to attend classes by doing months of hard labor, and being placed on restriction after getting caught alone in the woods with a girl, the school redeems itself with its mysterious curriculum. The classes have names like "The Way of Unifying With Life Energy" and "The Eight Principles of Yong." In them, Lee and his new friends (and enemies) study everything from East Asian Calligraphy and Meditation, to Aikido and Kenjutsu.

Permission to kick ass is pretty awesome when you're fifteen and convinced it's you against the world.

Through these disciplines, Lee and his fellow students learn to manipulate their Chi for things like healing, telekinesis, and imbuing their weapons with rockin' powers. And it's a good thing he mostly stayed awake during classes, because the Master of the School is sending a team of students on a mission to investigate an abandoned mine. While underground, they're attacked by Earth Elementals, golems of mud and stone, and their new-found talents are put to the ultimate test.

Actually kicking ass is pretty critical when your life's in danger and it truly is you (and your friends) against the world.

The First 250(ish) Words:

        You can call me Lee.
        It’s short for Leroy, but no one calls me that. It was my grandfather’s name, and my father’s middle name.
        One of them was a good man.

***

        Leroy always sounded like a deadhead frat boy’s name to me. I went to boarding school with some guys like that. Nice enough, but permanently stoned, and a little dim.
        Not bad guys...
        I’m not a bad guy either, but my aunt and uncle—my guardians—say I have “serious lapses in judgment.” They love to talk like that.
        I won’t deny it: I did make mistakes. Pretty big ones if I get down to the bone of the matter.
        Something about me never added up.
        But let me tell you the story of what happened after all of that.

***

        I stepped off the transport-van, rubbed my wrists where the cuffs had chafed them, and hocked a loogie into the dust. Here I was, in godforsaken northern Idaho, being dropped off at stupid-ass reform school as far as possible from anywhere I’d ever imagined being. Screwed, in other words.
        Several other kids behind me fought for position to exit the stuffy vehicle. They had to be as pissed as me, even if they hadn’t revealed a thing during the ride from the airport.
        I scanned the valley.
        Our “escort” had allowed me a glance at the map. The school sat at the foot of a mountain, marked only as “4032." There were a lot of mountains around. Most like this one—foothills—but others were real peaks whose jagged crowns stretched above the tree line. Apparently there were so many, the cartographers couldn’t be bothered to name them all. The only notation 4032 received: its elevation above sea level.