So, today I’m posting my query and first 150 words for KISSING FOR COFFEE as part of GUTGAA’s pitch polish. I’ve been fiddling with this a little ever since I did the big revisions for ‘zee agent’ but I feel like it still needs work. Thanks to all of you for any comments, insight or feedback you can offer!
KISSING FOR COFFEE
YA ROMANTIC COMEDY
78,000 words
Query:
When the difference between maintaining her status as resident ‘Popular Party Girl’, or slinking back into the darkness of her perfect sister’s shadow resides in showing up to class with one cup of coffee, seventeen-year-old Sadie Brooks decides it’s worth kissing geeky Jake Sterling for his.
But one secret kiss becomes something much bigger when word travels through Geekland that Sadie locks lips for her morning java. She arrives at school to find her locker surrounded by a dozen candidates from the Land of Misfit Dudes- all of them holding coffee and hoping for the same payment. In order to save face, Sadie kisses Jake in front of half the student body. But she never expected her friends to follow suit.
Without warning, ‘Kissing for Coffee’ becomes the newest sign of popularity and a clear indication of desirability. The more boys vying to hand you a cup, the more pretty and popular you must be. Sadie has unintentionally lit the match on a full-out trend and it’s spreading through surrounding high school districts like wildfire. The owner of Coffee Lovers is contacting her, thanking her for the publicity. News cameras are showing up at her school. ‘Kissing for Coffee’ commercials are even running on TV!
But Sadie soon discovers that kissing for coffee doesn’t only have its ‘perks’.
She becomes the focus of controversy when the student president of the Purity Waits Club begins protesting against the act of ‘prostituting your lips out for a three-dollar beverage’. And then there’s Jake Sterling, whose deceptively talented mega mouth has Sadie craving his kisses at odd non-coffee hours. Sadie needs to find a way to put a stop to the trend she set in motion before she ends up losing her popularity, her geek, and her coffee for good.
First 150 words:
In Tokyo, high school kids don’t have to be there for attendance until 8:30 a.m. And by then, it’s daylight. And they ride in on the tram or the subway. How do I know this? Well, Canterbury’s only Japanese foreign exchange student, Nanako Ivana Saki, just told me. And yes, that is her real name.
I stifle a yawn and struggle to stay focused on the road but Nanako keeps mumbling nervously, the whites of her almond-shaped eyes visible in the car’s shadowy interior.
“It’s so dark outside,” she says, for the third time.
“Yup,” I nod. “The sun comes up a little later here in winter.”
She sinks back into the front passenger’s seat, her child-like body almost disappearing completely from my peripheral vision. “The roads are so…isolated,” she says, her delicate white fingers digging into my car’s leather interior.
My headlights create bouncing shadows down yet another winding route.
For those of you like myself, who have been in the query trenches for awhile, you know how hard it can be to break through that very first barrier. You search for an opening wherever you can, perfect your query and make the dive across hostile territory where overflowing inboxes, slush mail, hung-over interns and form rejections stare you down with their semi-automatics, just ready to shoot and explode your dreams into smithereens. (Which they do. On countless occasions)
And yet you continue to stare across that border and keep trying, hoping one day you’ll find a well-dug hole you can wiggle through or a gaping tear in the chain-link fence that separates you from the land where traditionally published dreams come true.
So, of course, when one of your comrades-in-arms makes it through to the other side, it is a HUGE cause for celebration; Not only for the author themselves, but for every one of us still here on the other side. Through their success, we know that 1- it can be done. And 2- one of the good ones has made it through. Thus our traditional dream is reaffirmed.
Today is one of those awesome occasions where our blogosphere is coming together to celebrate Writer's Ally aka SA Larson blogger Sheri Larson’s successful leap into the realm of the represented! She recently signed with agent Paula Munier of Talcott Notch Literary and is holding an incredible Bigger Than a Shopping-Mall Giveaway! Critiques, free books, swag and fun paraphernalia are all up for grabs in the form of three raffles by rafflecopter:
Giveaway #1 a Rafflecopter giveaway
Giveaway #2 a Rafflecopter giveaway
Grand Prize Giveaway (for this, you must be entered in either #1,#2, or both)
a Rafflecopter giveaway
A huge congratulations to Sheri and I can’t wait to hear more about her project as it continues to duck through revisions, editor’s desks, and acquisitions meetings all the way to the printing press!
For those already-published authors out there, what did YOU do the day you got an agent or first held your book in your hands? How did you celebrate? And for those like myself, how do you think you’ll celebrate making it over your biggest publishing hurdles? Champagne on ice? Dinner out? Online contests or festivities? All of the above?:)
I raise my cup of coffee to you on this blissful Friday Morning Follower’s Boffee. Fall is well on its way in the Paris suburbs and I’m absolutely loving the chilly mornings, Indian summer-y skies and turning leaves. Autumn has always been, without a doubt, my favorite season.
For those of you who are new to bloffee- all you have to do to participate is 1. Comment. 2. Tell us what you’re bringing to this morning’s potluck brunch. (I’m ordering some virtual pumpkin spice lattés in honor of the autumn season:) 3. Look for someone in the comments section you don’t know and check out their blog! Voila! A potential friend and follower connection has been made!
As for this week’s news: the ‘Gearing Up to Get an Agent’ blogfest (otherwise known as GUTGAA) is organizing crit partner/ beta reader connections this week. So if any of you have a draft you’d like to get some input on, here’s a great place to start!
Blogging buddy, freelance editor, and awesome author represented by Kate McKean of the Howard Morhaim Literary agency- Leigh T. Moore is releasing her debut novel THE TRUTH ABOUT FAKING through amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. It’s a contemporary romance that sounds right up my alley and I can’t wait to read it! See more here.
As for me, I’m finding that pregnancy and writing don’t always go hand in hand. My usual afternoon writing time keeps getting interrupted when I fall into a mid-day coma which may or may not consist of moderate snoring. My poor keyboard is covered in dried crumbs, drool, and sticky liquids from the constant snacking (and the ‘m’ key still won’t work right). My favorite yoga pants are getting tight in the midsection. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are no long just ‘meals’, but ‘experiences’-worthy of a thousand words or more describing just how good everything tastes and sometimes, when sitting down to write, I zone out- reliving the wonderfulness that was lunch…which inevitably leads to more snacking and not-so-much writing. *sigh*
How are all of you lovelies this morning? What, more than anything else, keeps you from your usual writing time? (social media? work? other books? scumptilicious snacks?) Any big plans for this weekend?
Well, my hiatus is officially over! And what a hiatus it has been. In the last two weeks I:
Got the kids ready to go back to school (and all that that entails).
Deep-cleaned the monstrosity that was my house.
Started a new wip and wrote nearly 8k in a seven-day span.
Critiqued 3/4th of a fellow author’s project.
Was invited to do a revise & resubmit with ‘the agent’ for a different manuscript I’d submitted a few months ago.
And continued to grow another human being.
Oh. Yes, I imagine that last one has sunk in right about now.
Creepy is again expecting a baby-child – One who will hopefully be making their fully-grown and healthy appearance in March 2013:)
I’ve missed you guys so much but, secretly, I’ve been keeping up with a lot of your news and posts through facebook. For those of you who aren’t on my friends list yet, there’s a link on my side bar.
Now on to this week’s GUTGAA Meet n’Greet:
-Where do you write? Anywhere I can sit comfortably with my laptop; the bed, the couch, the kitchen table, the jon…
-Quick. Go to your writing space, sit down and look to your left. What is the first thing you see? Toilet paper holder?… Ew. Just kidding. Kind of…Anyway- Usually when I sit down to write and look to my left, there’s one of my kid’s faces waiting right there, impatient for me to answer something for them.
-Favorite time to write? The morning/mid afternoon.
-Drink of choice while writing? Coffee coffee coffee coffee
-When writing , do you listen to music or do you need complete silence? Complete silence. But sometimes I don’t mind having the television on low.
-What was your inspiration for your latest manuscript and where did you find it? After writing my last couple novels based on ‘premise’, I got fed up while in the midst of a current wip- always trying to force a plot to meet that premise the best way I know how. With the project I’m working on now, I decided to take a different route. I’m writing what I feel like reading. I’m writing because I want to get to know these characters and this setting and really just kind of wade in it. And I’m enjoying every minute.
-What's your most valuable writing tip? Do what you have to do to keep the romance alive. If you’re serious about writing, someday it could become a job. And when it does, you’re going to have to force yourself to keep at it, even when the love is gone. Finding ways to keep the love for writing alive (like keeping a project on the side, blogging or journaling) is key, I think.
It’s great to be back! Can’t wait to catch up with old friends and meet n’greet the new! So, what does your month of September look like? Anything you’re looking forward to (book releases? bloghops? conventions? Time for wip?) ??
Those of you who’ve been following for awhile know that I don’t ‘officially’ do this very often but, alas, it must be done. After today’s Writeoncon, I will be unplugging for the next couple weeks, from now until the kids go back to school September 4th.
Having the kids and hubs around full time has made maintaining an online presence damn near impossible, but the worst is that I haven’t written more than a few lines in the three weeks since I’ve been back:( So I’m hoping to use my hiatus to spend more time in my writing cave, working on the neglected wip that’s been haunting my waking hours.
When I get back in September, I’ll be participating in GUTGAA, a month-long uber fun (and helpful) blogfest for authors ‘Gearing Up to Get an Agent’ which helps participants polish their pitches for pitch contests, presenting them to a mass of agents and small publishing houses who judge the results. Since I am in a constant state of GUTGAA, I knew this blogfest was for me! If you're interested, you can join here.
I hope you guys have a fantastic few weeks! I’ll be back debut September (hopefully with another 30k under my belt and more time to contribute to this awesome community!).
*CQG*
If you’re a parent like me, you may find yourself making resolutions based on the upcoming school year rather than the January 1st holiday. September through July is a pretty decent amount of time to set and meet goals over, after all.
This year my school year’s resolutions are:
To file for French citizenship. I thought getting my French driver’s license was hard. But that was nothing compared to the amount of money and paper work that goes into filing for citizenship. For instance, I just found out that starting January 2012, I need to take a (80 euro fee) test to prove I speak French well enough to be considered before I can file. Lovely. And all documents have to be translated (fees for that too) and issued less than three months ago. *sigh*
Find a job. My teaching contract was up in April and there’s no guarantee I’ll have a new one this October. Thankfully, I’m still covered financially by the Education Dept’s unemployment until I find something.
Finish writing and revising my current wip in time to start something new for Nanowrimo in November. That’s right. I’m going to attempt that beast again even though last year’s results were dismal.
Find an agent. Duh. :)
What are your school year’s resolutions?
Good morning Friday bloggers and welcome to our weekly Bloffee Get-Together, where we make new friends, discuss this week’s blogosphere news and make each other hungry:)
All you have to do to participate is 1. Comment 2. Tell us what you’ve brought for breakfast. (This morning I’m serving up pancakes and sausage with loads of syrup.) 3. Find someone in the comments section you don’t recognize and check out their blog. Voila! A potential friend and follower connection has been made!
This week a lot of fellow bloggers and writers are getting ready for this year’s WriteOnCon. – A free online writer’s conference. It’s a great alternative those of us that can’t make it to the biggest annual conferences around the globe and features fantastic agents, editors and authors. The open forums have already forced me to get my butt in gear and write a query letter for my current wip, not to mention renew my writerly motivation to finish this damn draft. I was feeling a definite lack of inspiration these last few weeks but those of you who posted on Wednesday’s post helped me overcome the hump! Don’t know what I’d do without you guys!
What are you guys currently working on? Anybody else joining WriteOnCon?
