It's going to be called "The Improper Use; of a Semicolon". Isn't that brilliant? (...and confusing?)
It's going to be a love story between a librarian from Rhode Island and ... a giraffe (!). She's walking home from the grocery store carrying a large bag of mangos and a bottle of Vodka when suddenly she decides in frustration at repressed hopes and dreams that she wants to quit her job, buy a one-way ticket to Africa, and devote the rest of her life to increasing the life-span of the common Giraffa camelopardalis. The majority of the book will be spent building the conflict between this poor librarian from Rhode Island and her parents (who, of course, have wanted her to study law at Harvard or Yale since she was a little girl). After much fighting and late, late nights at the local pub, she decides to forget her family and her job at the library and leave for Africa first thing the next morning. After a twelve-hour flight to Africa with a three-hour layover in Barcelona, she finally walks off the plane, only to be greeted by the worlds leading expert in giraffes, Mr. Thomas McCoy from Ireland, whom she had written earlier to let him know she would be coming. She thinks he's very handsome, and he feels the same for her, so they both decide to get married, eventually. The only problem is, he keeps her from all of the giraffes he had promised her she would be able to study if they did marry. In fact, the first time she sees a giraffe in the first four months of being there is in a magazine at a local market stand, in a photograph with President Bush trying to pet one at the San Diego Zoo! This wakes her up to remember the real reason she came to Africa, and so she leaves early the next morning, like she did before with her parents, buys a ticket for an African safari with a bunch of weird tourists, and jumps out of the Jeep on the first sight of giraffes. It is there that this poor, deranged, little librarian-alcoholic from Rhode Island spends the rest of her life with a fourteen-foot giraffe, trying to find a way to have children with him, and trying all the while to accomodate herself to her new diet of wild berries and tree branches.
She dies four days later.
"The Improper Use; of a Semicolon." Maybe I'll add an exclamation point at the end: "The Improper Use; of a Semicolon!" I think that would sell better.
