Liberating Norma Jean & Dead Centre 🙏
Liberating Norma Jean is a heist story about a medium who predicts her own death, and then cajoles her best friend into hiring a bunch of lady criminals to enact her dying wish: busting Marylin Monroe's wronged corpse from the Westwood Brother's Memorian Park and giving her the proper burial she deserves. I'm like 10k into this and it's way less horrific than almost anything else I write on the original fiction front. Here's the blurb, which I actually have written:
Lucía works at her parents botànica and has suffered from paralyzing, inconvenient psychic visions since she was a child. Her sensitivity requires her to lead a reclusive life, and she tends to prefer the company of the dead to the living. However, when she foresees her own untimely death, she enlists her one remaining (alive) best friend to help her carry out her dying wish: busting her (dead) best friend Norma Jean, otherwise known as Marylin Monroe, from her prison of a crypt at Pierce Brothers Westwood Memorial Park, and giving her the proper burial she deserves.
💣 💔💥 The Demolitions Expert.
Pilar is good at two things: blowing shit up (both literally and figuratively) and rocking girls’ worlds before never calling them back. Armed with C4 from the construction site she works on, a crazy ex’s trust fund, and an unfaltering loyalty to her soon to be dead bestie, she sets out to add celebrity grave robbing to her already long laundry list of criminal offenses, because maybe if she gets this one thing right, all the past fuck ups won’t matter. It’s free Marylin or Bust.
Ivy Arcadia— heiress, influencer, and bona fide Marylin Monroe Super fan—has spent months hoping the butch she had a mind-blowing one night stand with will finally call her back. But when she does, it’s not to apologize for ghosting, but to speak on the behalf of a ghost. Ivy was prepared to refuse anything Pilar offered too little too late, but she can’t let Marylin’s restless spirit down, and what better cause is there for her to donate her ample funds than freeing her girl with her new girls?
Susan looks like the perfect Beverly Hills housewife with a charmed life, but behind closed doors her husband controls her finances and rules their McMansion with an iron fist. She is slowly squirreling away money to pay for a plane ticket and a lawyer by stealing neighborhood designer dogs and collecting the rewards once the missing signs go up, but when the zany twenty something from her pilates class offers her a job with a pay out she can’t refuse, she prepares to leave dog napping in the dust.
Bea has not spoken to Lucía since she fell out with Pilar as a teenager, but she thinks of her often, every time one of her sinister predictions comes to pass. Now she airbrushes hotrods for money and races them for more money, living on the edge at maximum speed, trying to escape the jaws of the past. When Pilar shows up begging one last favor, she knows there’s no point in fighting prophecy, and she does have that vintage hearse up and running.
Together, these five wronged women will realize they have more in common with each other (and with Marylin) than any of them were formerly willing to admit.