Category: 2013 Nanowrimo

Untitled by Conan Jones

Takeshi Nishimoto escaped from the demands of his family and the unbending traditions of rural Japan two years ago. Now he’s an average American with a job, a home, and a life in Southern California. He’s married to a thoroughly un-Japanese, but loving woman, he has friends, and he’s slowly learning the language. Life is good

But he has unwittingly carried something with him from Japan. A demon, carried in a household object and born out of a hundred years of memories. A Tsukumogami. It appears in his dreams, scared and angry, and starts making demands: “Take me home!”

Takeshi can handle the nightmares. But then people start dying in a series of increasingly gruesome incidents, forcing him to face the reality of the threat that the Tsukumogami poses. As myths come to life and the killings get closer to home, he races to find a way to stop the demon, refusing to admit that the only way to stop them might be to return to the place he swore he’d never go back to.

Arielle & David: We love the idea of a demon in a household object! And its foreignness adds to its intrigue. You’ve also got a nice reverse Dorothy thing going on here. Instead of wanting to go home more than anything, your protagonist will do anything not to go home. And the stakes go up as more horrible things happen and he is forced to come to terms with his aversion to his homeland.  What can be improved? First of all, what’s the household object?! Is this a genie in a bottle sort of thing? Is it an ancient teapot? A descriptor would be great. Same goes for his wife, his home, and the rural Japanese village he is from. You’ve got 75 words to spare here and we need these to really get a sense of your story. Lastly, we must have some comparable titles. We have no idea how literary or how commercial this book is. We’re not sure what writers/books your writing/book is like.

Climbing the Divide by Amy Cefoldo

“Are you ready for this?”  He whispered.  She knew what he was asking, and loved him even more for it, knowing the hard hike before them. 

“As ready as I ever will be.  You know I have to climb this trail again.  I need to see the view from the top once more.” 

What do you do when all that stands in your way is one last climb?  When Rachel moved to Colorado eight years ago, her only motive was escaping the pain and tragedy her life had become.  She never imagined experiencing life and laughter again but the night Lizzie walks into her life Rachel finds herself embarking on a journey of healing and love.

Climbing the Divide is not only a narrative about finding the physical strength to hike up a mountain; it is also about experiencing and discovering what it takes to heal a soul and repair a heart.  Journey with Rachel as she attempts to climb the divide one last time and discover the pain and tragedy coupled with the joy and love she endured to bring her to that fateful day.

Arielle & David: Any novel that deals with a pursuit that people are passionate about (like climbing), you know you’ve got a core audience you can rely on to read and help spread the word about your book. The idea of “one last climb” is a great one. And it sounds like there are really high stakes involved in this last endeavor. What can be improved? We were confused about the “he” named in the excerpt, but no mention of a man after that, just of a woman named Lizzie. Who is this guy? Who is Lizzie? There is also a host of generic phrases here: “escaping the pain and tragedy”, “experiencing life and laughter”, “embarking on a journey of healing”. These are all things we’ve heard before and they don’t give us any particular incite into your particular story. The more specificity the better. We need fewer overarching platitudes and more detail about the arc of this woman’s journey. Literally take us to the top of the cliff and then let us figure out how she’s going to get down.

BloodLust:Armani by Siren Star

When Armani Foscari, sees the beautiful human, Karlea, walk through the doors of the private Manhattan vampire club alone, he thinks she is incredibly stupid, although she seems confident and brave. Any human that comes into the club without a vampire escort is fair game, she must want to die. Maybe he should feel bad for her because these monsters will tear her apart – too late her blood has already tempted him.

Claiming his prize before any others can, Armani compels her to leave with him, but it takes more effort than it should. Armani will derive his own twisted pleasure before draining her until her heart stops beating, but he will soon discover her dark desires and her recent past as a lover to a vampire; one that left because she was somehow too much to handle, and was why she was in the club that night, alone, to find him.

Intrigued, Armani must resist the urge to kill and keep her alive, determined to get her to give in to her desires, and be completely submissive to him. Together their chemistry is on fire, even as she resists him at every turn. Can he keep her human and get her to accept, what he wants to be, her new life?

An exquisite mix of the most popular vampire fiction and erotic romance –  BloodLust: Armani will tempt you, possess you, and leave you breathless.

Arielle & David: We love the idea of a human too hot for a vampire to handle. We get the feeling from the get-go that this human is going to outwit her suitor/slayer and we’re piqued to see just how she’s going to do it. And by the time we get to the end of the pitch, we’re convinced you’ve created one sexy romance between them. What can be improved? You are writing in a VERY crowded, and what is now considered dated category of the bookstore. For this reason, it is imperative to separate yourself from the crowd—to convince and agent/editor/reader that there’s a reason to pick up yet another vampire book. To write a vampire pitch in 2013 demands a plot so intriguing, characters so compelling, and a knowledge of the bookshelf so thorough that you force someone who wants to say, “no” to say, “okay, fine, I’ll read it!!!” To say that this is an “exquisite mix of the most popular vampire fiction and erotic romance” is not enough. First of all, those two genres have been married for a couple decades now. And it’s much better to show us it’s an exquisite mix than to tell us.

Pennies by Megan Maloney

“Pennies” is a dystopian near-future noir. Overpopulation has driven the city of Chicago to accept cannibalism into the fabric of society. It is regulated by procurement codes; however, the shift creates aggressive moral hazard. The rich wall themselves off; the thin scrapings that remain of the middle class hire Trouble Boys and Girls – starving orphans and grizzled assassins – to guard their bodies and their children.

A mob doctor adopts an young ex-Catholic protégé for his Russian guard Torov to train as a Trouble Girl. The girl, Mathilda, learns to carve and kill, as much from the doctor as Torov. She guards the doctor’s daughter, Miss Cincy, who spends her days in school and her weekends in speakeasies. The scarcity of food has led to a restriction any misuse of grain resources on luxuries such as alcohol, and this Second Prohibition has led to a resurgence of moonshining, smuggling, drag racing, and a vast network parties held by the gangs and fearless of Chicago in the limestone caverns below the city.

Mathilda keeps Cincy alive for all her risk-taking, and tells their story as she sees it. She guides Cincy through the violence of the town into a legitimate medical university, while the mob doctor grooms Mathilda to take over his dark business and all the troubles that come with it.

Between consultations with her Benedictine mother and Torov’s inscrutable cheer, Mathilda’s questioning and dedication to her work keep her on a thin line between heaven and the flooding, freezing Chicago streets.

David & Arielle: We’ve heard a lot of dystopian pitches in our lives, but we can’t seem to remember one about cannibalism. That really takes the desperation here to a whole new level! Bringing back mob-ridden Chicago and prohibition mixed with this dystopian world is also original and an intriguing mix of old meets new.  We also like the idea of a “Trouble Girl”—it sounds both ominous and innocent at the same time. What can be improved? There is A LOT going on in this pitch—too much to keep track of an understand. For example, at the top of the pitch you say that Trouble Boys and Girls are orphans, but at the end you refer to Mathilda’s mother. We also lose Mathilda and Cincy’s arc because there’s a lot breaking it up. Or maybe that’s not the central story. The problem is that we can’t discern what is. Not all plot lines need to go in the pitch. Take the main story here and let us see the arc of that with some gritty detail. Otherwise, we’re left more confused than enticed.

Connor Portis: A Novel by Rase McCray

On the morning of Connor Portis’s twelfth birthday, his parents quarreled about where the picnic basket was. In the afternoon, they sniped about who had left the National Park pass in the window. At dusk, barely done with the family fishing trip Connor had asked for instead of a party, they fought about their marriage. So when he saw the UPS truck approaching in the other lane, Connor willed it to cross the median, hoping for a scare, a crash, a scar that might always remind his parents how sad they’d be if he died, how selfishly they’d overlooked him. And unexpectedly, the truck did veer, ramming the Portis’ Subaru and killing his parents instantly. Only Connor survived.

But he can’t think of that now. The truck veering proves that Connor, like Harry Potter, is a wizard. Magic exists! The novels are true! Soon, he and his two foster “siblings” run away from their new home, determined to find the wizarding world he’s sure exists—in spite of mounting evidence that their lives are merely normal and magic-less. In the spirit of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Jonathan Ames’s Wake Up, Sir!, and Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey, this tragicomic revisioning of Don Quixote follows Connor, Jacob, and Annie as they confront the consequences of believing in the extraordinary dreams of storytellers.

Rase McCray received his MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati and his MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University.

Arielle & David: Talk about twists and turns! This pitch threw in three whopping switcheroos. When an author can do this in their pitch, it makes us confident he knows how to handle plot. The specificity of the images that start the pitch also make us confident that you can write. Well. Then there are the excellent comparable titles—titles that help agents and editors understand where, exactly, your book fits on the bookshelf. What can be improved? While the comp titles are great, they’re also a confusing. You’ve got a 12-year-old protagonist, which puts this book squarely on the middle grade shelf. But the books you’re referring to are either YA or adult. That makes us concerned that you don’t quite know your audience or your category. It also wasn’t clear if the first paragraph is merely the setup for the book or whether this happens farther along. If it’s just setup, then we don’t get quite enough arc in the second paragraph. We might cut the first a little bit, so we can get more of a feel for what’s going to happen in the bulk of the book.

A Lesbian Conception:  A Journal of My Quest to Have a Baby by Yvonne Keller

“We are illegal:  Susan is not supposed to be leaning over me as I lay naked on my back, closing my eyes to hope that this time, with these tools, I will get pregnant.  We’ve promised to keep secret where we got our equipment, our information, our drugs.  The sperm has come via a FedEx delivery man who, after frequenting our door with urgent deliveries from ‘OverNite Male,’ looks at me strangely.  I push myself into our flannel sheets, feel the flickering, brown warmth of our bedroom.  ‘This time, honey,’ Susan says.  I hear her preparing the catheter.”

America uniformly imagines its moms as heterosexual.  However, honoring her powerful desire for a child, professor Yvonne Keller fights the prohibitions—cultural, legal, familial, and internal—against lesbian motherhood.  Given her severely disabled brother, she also fears for a potential baby’s health.  And then comes finding a donor, money worries, and the most difficult news:  she may be infertile.  Keller alternates between intimate, candid storyteller and public intellectual in this emotional memoir that results, three IVF cycles and a borrowing of Susan’s eggs later, in the birth of their daughter.

Keller’s book should find a place alongside parenting classics like Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, Peggy Orenstein’s Waiting for Daisy, and Dan Savage’s The Kid.  Her queer-dyke-stuck-in-the-heartland point of view, as well as her Ph.D. in feminist theory, buttress her insights into the contradictions of her position during her four-year, roller-coaster quest.

Arielle & David: This is a memoir idea we’ve heard many times, but always from a hetero perspective. So it was really refreshing to read your new take. We like to say that publishers like to do something that’s familiar but a little different and A Lesbian Conception fits right into that sweet spot. We’re also very intrigued by what exactly is illegal that you’re doing. It makes you want to open the pages of the book to see what covert operations are going on here. What can be improved? We were also confused about what was illegal. We think this needs a tiny bit more explanation while still leaving us wanting more. We also felt that the information about your brother should be reserved for the book and not the pitch. Instead use that space to give us a little more sense of your journey. Your relationship with your partner is almost entirely missing from the pitch and we’d like to get more of a sense of who you are individually and as a couple.