by Andrea Homoya (@andreahomoya.bsky.social)
Adult Contemporary
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Query
Award-winning cidermaker Phoebe Skiles has ninety days to save her struggling company, and business consultant Miles Newport, a finance bro with a toddler’s palate, has the audacity to suggest her cider is the problem?
FINDING GRAVITY is an 80,000-word contemporary novel with romance crossover, perfect for readers who enjoyed the workplace setting with main character energy of Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, the complex professional insights in Back After This by Linda Holmes, and the blend of light-hearted humor and emotional depth of I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue.
Two years after her beloved magazine career and relationship imploded, Phoebe Skiles has reinvented herself as the head cidermaker at high-end cidery Appelle. But when Elise, Appelle’s CEO and Phoebe's best friend, hires a consulting firm to keep Appelle from shuttering its doors for good, Phoebe must put her professional life in the hands of Miles Newport, who calls them a Gen Z brand making a Boomer product. He’s convinced the only thing that can save Appelle is pivoting to a consumer product with mass-market commercial appeal.
Phoebe balks at the idea of watering down her recipes, but she’d rather drink spiked seltzer than disappoint Elise or have another budding career ripped from her hands before it blossoms. With no choice but to pivot from traditional methods, Phoebe vows to save Appelle—for herself and for Elise—by becoming the best modern cidermaker this side of the Mississippi. Along the way, she discovers that sometimes friendship supersedes passion, sometimes commerce enhances craft, and—if Miles Newport has anything to do with it—sometimes a broken heart can learn to beat again.
I earned my BA in Creative Writing from Eastern University and taught high school English for four years before starting my very own struggling cider company. From the blurred lines of an owner who employs her friends (do not do this!) to the intricate behind-the-scenes details of sanitizing tri-clamps and Frankentrees at the orchard, my decade of experience owning Ash & Elm Cider Co.—one of the largest cideries in the country with over 40,000 followers across platforms—lends an irreplicable authenticity to this story.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
First Five Pages
Chapter One: The People
Phoebe Skiles sat back on her heels and blew a sweaty curl out of her eye. No matter what she used—elbow grease, power washers, EPA-regulated caustic—the concrete floors never gleamed like she wanted them to.
If she could ask her seventeen-year-old self to predict where she’d be in ten years, on her knees scrubbing yeast sludge off the floors wouldn’t have cracked the top hundred. Teenaged Phoebe would have chosen something more professional: a custom power suit, a corner office overlooking downtown Seattle, a Brazilian Blowout.
Like most teenagers, Teenage Phoebe had been an idiot.
After years of striving to rise above her circumstances, she was much happier in a warehouse than she’d ever been in a cubicle. But every job has its downsides, and the weekly deep clean of the cidery floors was definitely a downside.
A drop of sweat fell from her forehead into the puddled suds between her hands.
Okay. Sometimes she missed the cubicle.
A sharp knock sounded from the back door. It had to be either a salesman with an insurance rate she “had to see to believe” or Randy, their friendly neighborhood scrap-metal collector. Phoebe propped her squeegee against a fermentation tank and crossed the warehouse.
The space was huge, way larger than it needed to be for the amount of cider they made. Three years ago, Elise, her best friend and CEO, had thrust her fancy fountain pen into the air and declared signing the lease “an act of wild optimism.” Now she considered the cavernous warehouse—fully equipped yet still so empty their voices echoed off the cinderblock walls—as a sign of her naiveté or her hubris, depending how sales had gone the night before.
Phoebe yanked open the door and came face to face with two men in expensive suits. Salesmen it was. She dropped the handle and let the automatic door closer do its thing, tacking on a “Thanks, but we’re not interested” over her shoulder.
A becufflinked brown hand shot through the opening. “We have a meeting with Elise?”
Phoebe turned back around and looked at the men on the other side of the door. It was the smaller one who had spoken, the one whose well-tailored suit and designer glasses didn’t quite conceal the impish look in his eyes.
But it was the other one, the sharp-jawed, tousle-haired dreamboat, who turned Phoebe’s heart into a stick of dynamite. He was tall, lean but athletic, with golden skin that evoked beach towels and sea spray. He could probably crush an apple in his fist. Phoebe licked her lips in a way that would be humiliating if she realized she’d done it.
“We’re a few minutes early, but she should be expecting us. Is she here?” His voice struck Phoebe like a gong, all resonant vibrations and shimmering sustains.
She panicked. What was the casual way to say affirmative again? “I—uhhh…”
The man smiled, half-polite, half-concerned, and completely devastating. “She mentioned her colleague might answer the door. You must be Phoebe.”
Instead of a reply that showed off her sparkling personality, Phoebe thumped her fist against her chest and grunted like a Neanderthal.
Fuck.
He dropped his gaze, intentional enough to be noticed but brief enough to be polite, and if Phoebe had been wearing anything other than Carhartt coveralls darkened by mop-water runoff, she would have taken it as a win.
“Well,” he smiled, “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Having a coherent thought when their eyes were locked—his were hazel, like a sun-speckled forest—took more effort than turning a rusted-out hose bibb. Phoebe almost lost her balance when his gaze drifted to something behind them.
Elise breezed through the warehouse, arms outstretched. “Miles, Amir! You guys made it! Come on in—we’ll meet in the office.”
Elise was everything Phoebe wasn’t, at least when it came to their sartorial style. Where Phoebe’s uniform was a rotation of Appelle-branded stocking caps and water-resistant performance fabric, Elise floated through the warehouse in palazzo pants paired with graphic tees, gold eyeliner bright against her dark brown skin, and a crown of locs piled high on her head. She’d fit in better on a runway than a warehouse that smelled of overripe apples and sour yeast on its good days.
“Yeah, it’s great to see you in person after all of our Zoom meetings,” the man—Miles—said, and that was the word Phoebe was looking for: yeah. So not only did he have a face like a soap opera headshot, he had an incredible vocabulary, too.
It’s possible Phoebe had been single too long.
Elise and Amir headed toward the office.
“So, Phoebe, will you be joining us at this meeting?”
The way Miles said her name filled her lungs with helium and made the blood in her veins fizz.
“Yeah.”
Well, it was nice, those three minutes of breathless attraction and unadulterated joy. Phoebe would remember them fondly.
Things went south as soon as they settled around the table she and Elise had rescued from a dumpster their sophomore year of college. The men—collectively known as Newport Khara Consulting—were there to help them “identify and plug the financial drains on their company,” as Elise put it.
That Appelle was struggling wasn’t a total surprise. Phoebe had long-since clocked the inverse relationship between Appelle’s revenue and the worry lines on Elise’s forehead, and lately, Elise looked twice her twenty-seven years.
“It can’t be that bad,” Phoebe said, chewing on the tip of her pen. “The quality of this year’s batch is top-notch. We’re selling more cider than we ever have.”
Elise dismissed Phoebe’s argument with a flick of her wrist, gold bangles jingling. “We’re not here because of a lack of passion or effort. It’s a simple matter of dollars and cents. We won’t survive if we can’t cover our expenses, and we’re almost out of money.”
The first time Elise had made those grave pronouncements—we’re running out of cash, we need more customers, I can’t figure out how to make this work—Phoebe’s stomach plummeted to the soles of her steel-toed Red Wings. But they always dug a little deeper, pushed a little harder, found a little more cider in the fermentation tank. By now, the semi-annual We’re Officially Screwed meetings were as predictable as their weekly sales recaps.
But this was altogether different, and it wasn’t the well-dressed men observing the conversation from the other side of the table. It was the resigned weariness, this grim acceptance, the way Elise’s voice broke when she said, “I’m sorry for crying, I know it’s just cider.”
Phoebe tried to breathe through the creeping tightness in her chest. It’s just cider.
Elise said that all the time. When demanding customers crowded the bar and stressed-out servers accidentally shattered glasses. When bartenders gulped icy air in the walk-in cooler to calm themselves down mid-rush and Phoebe’s juice delivery was pushed back by yet another day.
Phoebe always bristled when she heard those three words, even though they were true. Cider didn’t solve international conflicts or heal the sick. It was a beverage, an alcoholic one at that. No one needed it to survive.
But it wasn’t just cider to her. She poured everything into the ciders she made at Appelle—her sensory notes and her aching feet; her Encyclopedic knowledge of heirloom apples and super-taster palate. Making cider was a form of self-expression she discovered when her preferred method was stolen from her, something that knit the pieces of her heart back together when it was broken. She couldn’t let another chapter of her life go up in smoke.
“I’m not giving up on us, Elise. You know I can’t.”
“Neither am I, that’s why I hired NKC.” Elise pushed a stack of papers toward Phoebe and gestured at Miles and Amir.
“With what money?” Phoebe mouthed as Miles and Amir rustled through their bags for their laptops.
“With my salary,” Elise whispered.
Phoebe’s jaw dropped. She tossed a falsely bright, “Can you excuse us for just one second?” over her shoulder and tugged Elise by her elbow toward the prep kitchen.