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Showing posts from March, 2014

What is my #Pitchmadness Pitch for The Precious Quest?

The format for the #pitchmadness pitch included starting with a 35 word logline. Trying to summarize my 90,000 high fantasy, novel manuscript into a two-page synopsis was challenging enough, but 35 words? I was a little unsure if I could do it well. According to tweets posted by the slush readers, the logline also had to fulfill the following: Make grammatical sense Make sense in terms of the plot Have the same tone as the manuscript Sound intriguing enough to encourage the reader to continue So I started. And then I revisited it over a few days. And then I put in the final logline revisions right before submission. And ended up submitting this: Laywren’s destiny is to make war and fill the goddess’ Hall with souls. But when betrayers block the return of those souls, Laywren becomes an instrument of extinction, and children become the most precious quest. The next step in submission was to pitch the first 250 words of the manuscript. Lucky for me, my manuscript excerpt

Identify the Genre of your Novel

I have been following the #Pitchmadness posts on Twitter and noticed that the slush readers have made a few comments about some of the #Pitchers not properly identifying their genres. So I've put together a flow chart writers or readers can use to identify the genre of their novel. In this post, I'm specifically going to be addressing genre for fiction novels. Genre is a category that novels can be placed in based on the content, the theme, the characters and other conventions in the story. Conventions are those consistent elements that we read about over and over. For example: a convention or common element in fantasy is magic. Easy right? Not really. Especially when a novel can belong to a sub-genre. Then it gets tricky. A way to avoid confusion is to think about the purpose or reason the author wrote the novel, and to think about how the reader would react to the novel. So let's put your novel to the test. When you write a novel you use a number of tricks (beyond t