New Worlds, New Voices - SFF Shooting Gallery
NWNV "Shooting Gallery" provides writers with the chance to test market their best SFF novels and hopefully score a contract. Agents and TV/Film reps will check in and review work during 2021. AAC will edit beforehand as needed. For Algonkian alums only.
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Exposition and End Game This select forum thread is dedicated exclusively to Algonkian alums who wish to post sell sheets of their completed SFF novels, or novels-in-progress, for the purpose of showcasing them to literary agents and TV/Film reps. We will inform these professionals of new high-concept projects and invite them to stop by regularly during 2021. If they wish to request something immediately, or at a future date, they will either contact you directly, make a post, or else contact us. It is also possible they might wish to video conference with you. The scenarios are various, but all is casual. There is no set schedule. This is how we want this to wo…
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Author: Andy B. Davis Title: Nightmarist (Stanchions Hollow #1) Genre: YA Fantasy/Horror Comp Titles: The Darkest Minds (A. Bracken) meets There’s Someone Inside Your House (S. Perkins), taking place within the world of The Hazel Wood (M. Albert). Hook Line: An unstable teenager, plagued by the brutal murder of his parents, must face the reality that his lucid nightmares are real creatures that must be destroyed before they consume the human world. _____________________________________________________________________________ Pitch: Sixteen-year-old Grimmond Scylent has …
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Title: Blood Animus Pitch: 97k scifi thriller V.E. Schwab’s VICOUS, Dark Phoenix, and John Wick. In a world where bloodlust is currency, humanity is loose change in a mercenary’s pocket. In 2039, ever since she was orphaned on the criminal infested, tropical island of Toppanga, twenty-three-year-old mercenary Alex Mercer searched for the answers to her past. After leaving the island, she’s presented with a high-risk contract that offers a different payment – information about her parents and her past. Alex and a group of assigned mercenaries must apprehend the elusive rogue soldier Maximillian Roivas. As the mission progresses, Alex feels somethi…
Last reply by KM1922, -
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Name: Laird Harrison Titles: Only the Millennia Will Cure Her Messing with the Multiverse Exotic Matter Genre: Upmarket Science Fiction Comparables : The Midnight Library by Matt Haig The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu Hook Line: Deprived of funding because of his awkwardness, physicist Pascal gets money from an unscrupulous time traveler who wants his help returning to the future. Short Pitch: On the verge of a pathbreaking discovery, brilliant physicist Pascal Rahali has neglected to publish. Socially awkward, he has lost his funding. So, he can’t ignore investor …
Last reply by Laird, -
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J.T. Strand Finding Lucifer Speculative (supernatural horror) COMPS: The Hunger by Alma Katsu and You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce HOOK LINE: Tormented by nightmares, a young professor must stop a shadowy figure, who achieved immortality through cannibalistic ceremonies, before he is consumed by it. Ben is a young professor who has just moved to the countryside, while his girlfriend, Jen, is on fellowship abroad. Coping with loneliness, Ben experiences episodes of sleepwalking and sees a shadowy figure in his dreams which turns all pleasant memories into wicked ones. While up nights, he befriends raccoons by leaving them scraps of food. Sleep-depriv…
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JOSH SCARALIA Book Titles: Collateral of Time; Bounty of Tarres; Dilation Effect Genre: Space Opera Comparables: A Memory Called Empire meets Red Rising Hook line: Upon completing a journey of centuries to colonize a new star system only to shockingly discover a strange human civilization has preceded them, a disillusioned and desperate young woman learns that the secret to the survival of humanity depends on joining the right side in a war fought with weapons of dark alien magic. Short Pitch: Victoria Cortez saw the four-year journey to colonize Tarres as a perfect escape from her dead-end life on Earth. How could she know that human…
Last reply by JoshScaralia, -
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Name: Gerrit Hansen Novel Title: The Power of Ancients Comparables: Throne of the Crescent Moon (Saladin Ahmed); The Poppy War (R.F. Kuang) Hook Line: Possessing power beyond far beyond his mentors, a tribal villager forsakes magic to overcome a murderous immortal by raising rival immortals long thought dead. Pitch: Maruli, a young Javan villager from the hated Jupami tribe leaves his remote jungle home to study a form of magic he hopes will help save his people from the island’s nemesis, Dahat, a member of the powerful race of Ancients that’s nearly extinct. However, the magic requires grinding up special stones that elders insist are the dead remains…
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Name: Cavis Adams Novel: Terror Undeleted Genre: Literary Fiction Comparables: "Version Control" (Dexter Palmer). "The Lathe Of Heaven" (Ursula K. Le Guin). Hook Line: Being kicked out of Tent City, New York, Nicco turns to an experimental tech-firm for the chance of a lifetime--to commit his mind to the good of science and to get paid of course. If only that were the story, and not one of undead terrorists rehashing their own bloody plot. From homeless to would-be savior of the world, Niko stands to lose more than he finally has, a place in this world. Pitch: Nicco finds himself habitually at his lowest, kicked o…
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Name: Sarah Pierce Title: Lucid Genre: YA SciFi Comparables: Inception meets Maze Runner meets Stranger Things Hook: Trapped inside a dream, a group of international students must discover the truth about their world before a fugitive nightmare gains control of their minds. Pitch: A high security dream has broken loose. Known only as the Siren, it causes 20 people to commit mass suicide in Berlin, and before anyone can react, panic erupts across the globe. Thousands of sleepers will no longer wake, and for those left aware, every night could be their last. The most dangerous nightmare of the 21st century is out of its cage, and it’s going t…
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Name: Cavis Adams Novel: The Resurrection Arc Genre: Literary Fiction Comparables: The revived spirit of Total Recall meets Inception for a journey of Memento. Hook Line: Finding the strength to wrest an immortalizing technology from the enslaving hands of a world techno-giant means to die trying. For Justin, what begins as an imaginative game along a cutting-edge of role-playing plunges deeper into the real world than he ever suspected, a world turned deadly with the struggle to save all he has ever believed in, starting with the very memory of himself. Pitch: Justin has it all on the outside: wealth, status, a beau…
Last reply by Cavis Adams, -
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Name: Travis N. Travis Novel Title: HOW TO SUCCEED AT THE PEARLY GATES JOB FAIR Genre: Adult Fantasy (81,512 words) Comparables: Good Omens, Library of the Unwritten, and The Good Place Hook: A man perfectly content not dying must navigate the hell that is finding a job in the heavens while trying to save his drunk G.U.A.R.D.I.A.N. Department representative from a pre-pubescent creation god. Pitch: Religion was formally banned in the districts of heaven when a monk, a priest, and a rabbi walked into a bar and nothing funny happened. Probably for the best. Charlie Tackle is Dea…
Last reply by TravisTravis, -
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· Name: Kayla Hardy · Title: RED WIDOW · Genre: Adult Fantasy · Comparables: (TV/Cinematic)Marvel’s Black Panther meets Netflix’s Cursed (Books) Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone meets Melissa Caruso’s The Tethered Mage. · Hook: Set during a magical apartheid known as The Partitioning, where mages are divided into rigid social classes and sold off to the highest bidder, an African warrior princess must break the law and cross into foreign magical territory to hunt down a slave trader hellbent on stealing her tribe’s magic, even if it means she’ll be stranded behind enemy lines forever. · Pitch: …
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Name: DeQuaina Washington Title: HELLGROUND Genre: Sci-Fi Comparables: Octavia E. Butler's Dawn meets Tom Piccirilli's The Cold Spot Hook: Beaten and betrayed, facing a life sentence in state prison, a seasoned bank robber makes a desperate break for freedom and escapes only to discover that the world he knew has suffered a devastating and hellish alien invasion, and the only option left to him is to try and save the one person he still loves. Pitch: When Mint Mallard, one of the most prolific bank robbers in the world, breaks out of prison to get revenge on the man who put him there, he quickly realizes that the world he left five yea…
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STRANGE HIGHWAYS, Science Fiction- Gardner Browning Word Count: +50k, still in progress Log Line: Trekking a ghostly highway across a Void Land of hostile vagrants, mercenary Luna Briggs must save the man she loves from the death dealer he has become before he claims the power of a forgotten artificial intelligence and engineers an army of killers. Comps: Strange Highways captures the hostile journey of the Road with the techno-thrill of Robopocalypse. The Road – 2006- Cormac McCarthy. About the grueling journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has dest…
Last reply by GMBrowning, -
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THE BODY ELECTRIC, Science Fiction - J. David Liss Comparables: The Strange Case of the Alchemists Daughter by Theodora Goss meets Blake Crouch’s Recursion Hook: It’s Mary Shelley vs. Thomas Edison for the fate of the world, and one scientist from the present has to decide whose side he’s on – because that side wins. Pitch: 21st Century scientist Lew Argent knows tragedy. His wife and son were electrocuted by a fallen power line. He would do anything to change what happened, but that is beyond anyone’s grasp, even a brilliant electrical engineer and physicist. Lew is drawn to his scientific hero Thomas Edison – who electrocuted dozens of anim…
Last reply by JDavidLiss, -
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Name - Shola Adedeji Title(s) - War Gods of Africa, The Hollow Glory of a Dumb Kingdom Genre - Alternate History Comps - • the “what if?” spirit of S.M. Stirling’s Black Chamber series. • the world building of Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al Rassan. • significantly influenced by the originality of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Hook Line - It is the 1300’s, an untested and naive emissary from a technologically advanced nation in Africa, inadvertently finds himself the only one capable of preventing a genocidal war set into motion by a murderous Pope and his Imperial Roman allies at Constantinople. S…
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Name: Joseph Hall Novel Title: ARKFALL (90,000 words) Genre: Adult Sci-fi Comparables: The celebrity main character of EMPRESS OF FOREVER hurled into the indifferent cyberpunk world of ALTERED CARBON. Hook: A cybernetic supermodel infiltrates the corporate underworld to exact revenge on the CEO who murdered his childhood family. Pitch: In a distant future where Earth was rendered uninhabitable, mankind now lives in helio-centric megastructures that orbit around the sun. Living on Solar Ark Terra, Vino Belissi is the solar system’s hottest cybernetic supermodel. He’s got wealth, connections, status, and his name alone is associated with…
Last reply by JAaronHall, -
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Name: Mikaela Kemsley Novel: Gods of the Fallen Genre and Comparables: Gods of the Fallen is a young adult fantasy novel that will appeal to fans of Katy Rose Pool’s There Will Come a Darkness and Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes. Hook line: After being abducted and abused by a bloodthirsty theocracy, a young woman escapes into the arctic, where she awakens a newfound, dangerous magic in a tribe of outcasts to defend herself, her best friend, and her people from a genocidal god. Pitch: Seventeen-year-old Alora has spent her life within the glass walls of a seminary, aspiring to one goal: to become a Glass Sentinel for the Church of the Fractured …
Last reply by Mikaela Kemsley,
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LGBTQ+ Psychological Fiction, Teresa A. Henderson, UNCHAINED
This is really well-written and a fascinating read, creating that sense of forbidden territory, which drives the reader to keep reading while feeling guilty for doing so. I did wonder about the age of the narrator. But more than that, what was somewhat confusing is that there are so many unnamed characters here, which is obviously a necessity since the protagonist does not know any of them but it does make things a little confusing at times. One suggestion would be to have Chris introduce by name the man who unchains the protagonist at the beginning of this, and then you can use his name.- debut
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Memoir | Adam Fout | Drug Seeking Behavior | First 500 words
As Pat said, the scene you draw here is vivid and interesting. I wonder if it wouldn't be more effective to have these characters, Fred and Jacky and Ella, converse in dialogue during the first few paragraphs so as to keep your reader "in the scene". They seem like fascinating characters, and even if some of what they say ended up being incoherent to the reader, it might be more effective at conveying what you want to reader than splitting the scene like this. They could either mention the time before, or say something that invokes the time before. And then after said dialogue, you could talk -
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New York Pre-Event Assignments - June 2021
First assignment: write your story statement. I Will Never Fall is a memoir about my 35 years of life and how I have grown and gotten through each challenge in life. Second assignment: in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, the ways they react to the world around them. Antagonist: My mom, my dad, my half-brother who molested me, the bullies I faced throughout my childhood, my disease, my spending addiction, my eating disorder. Third assignment: create a breakout title. I Will Rise. -
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Remembering Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm and Katie Roiphe in conversation at NYU, 2012. Photo courtesy of Roiphe. In one of my last email exchanges with Janet Malcolm, in one of the darkest parts of the pandemic, she wrote to me, “I can only try to imagine the hard time you and the children are having. How can you not be stalled on writing? I wish there was something I could do to help.” Her response warmed me, elevating my state of general stagnancy into something almost socially acceptable. The idea of her in my house, helping with my son’s online schooling—his teacher was reading out “rat facts” during his daily for -
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Limited Time Deals!
Right now, Amazon is running their Kindle Daily Deals but also seven whole pages of “limited time” deals. They don’t specify for how limited these are, though my guess is that these are in preparation for Prime Day. House of Earth and Blood House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas is $2.99! We did two podcast episodes with Sarah over the pandemic and honestly, those episodes were so much fun to record. Ellen wrote a fantast -
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Tough Travelling: Fairies
Welcome intrepid adventurers to Tough Travelling with the Tough Guide to Fantasyland! That’s right, we’ve dusted it down and brought back this feature (created by Nathan of Fantasy Review Barn, revived by our friends over on Fantasy Faction, then dragged kicking and screaming to the Hive). It is a monthly feature in which we rack our brains for popular (and not so popular) examples of fantasy tropes. Tough Travelling is inspired by the informative and hilarious Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. Fellow bloggers are absolutely welcome to join in – just make your own list, publi -
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Memoir | Adam Fout | Drug Seeking Behavior | First 500 words
@Adam Fout This is powerful and instantly draws you into the darkness that's all around. You have some vivid descriptions and characterizations. I have to preface this to say I don't write memoir.... but I would love to hear/see more of the protagonist's characterization in the opening scene. We see everyone around him/her but we still know nothing about the storyteller. About 3/4 the way through at "I wonder what they used to be like...." this takes us out of the scene - for three paragraphs the protagonist seems to be preaching - it's powerful statements and I love them - but maybe move it -
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The BLFUfer’s Guide To… THE WOOD BEE QUEEN by Edward Cox (BOOK REVIEW)
Apparently, there is an opposite to TL:DR (too long didn’t read) and it’s BLFU – Bottom Line First Up And so we bring you our new feature from our new reviewer Hil: to-the-point reviews for those of you in a hurry! The BLFUfer’s Guide To… THE WOOD BEE QUEEN by Edward Cox Ebbie Wren has a dead end job, in a dead end town and is in love with a girl who thinks he’s boring. At best. His only regular confidante is a homeless woman who dies and leaves him with an empty bag and a quest to do the impossible. Thus the story begins. The prose is beautiful and evocative, combining hints of -
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The Value of Friendship in Storytelling
You know how a realization about your storytelling can strike when you’re reading someone else? Of course you do. How about the kind of realization that makes you regret not having it sooner, so that you could have been taking advantage of it all along? You’re probably still nodding, right? Okay, how about one that’s so utterly obvious that you feel like an idiot for having never consciously utilized it before? How about a realization in regard to an aspect of human nature that is so elemental to each of us that we’ve all partaken in it since our earliest memories—one that is an essential par -
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10 New Books Coming Out This Week
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Laura Lippman, Dream Girl (William Morrow) “Lippman never stops twisting the plot into a deliciously intricate pretzel, right up to the jaw-dropping finale. This is both a beguiling look at the mysteries of authorship and a powerful #MeToo novel, but that’s only the tip of a devilishly jagged iceberg…” –Booklist Nicci French, What To Do If Someone Dies (William Morrow) “Crisply written, intelligently plotted and has plenty to say about the necessary selfishness of grief.” –The Guardian Joe -
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The Early, Wild, Exploited, and Sometimes Radical Days of the Comic Book Industry in America
The American comic book is inseparable from foreign policy, the great twentieth-century battles between capitalism and totalitarianism, and the political goals of the world’s preeminent military and cultural power. The history of the American comic book is a story of visual culture, commerce, race, and policy. These four fields are analogous to the four colors used to print comic books: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. They lie atop one another, smearing, blending, and bleeding to create a complete image. To separate them is to disassemble a coherent whole and to shatter a picture that in its -
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A Murder in Tiger Bay: How Nadifa Mohamed’s New Novel Revives a Decades-Old Tragedy
In 1952 a 29-year old Somalian man was hanged at Her Majesty’s Prison Cardiff in Wales by Britain’s best known public executioner Albert Pierrepoint. After a long drawn-out detention, a highly questionable police investigation, and a speedy trial at the Glamorgan Assizes in Swansea, Mahmood Mattan had been found guilty of murdering shopkeeper Lily Volpert in the then notorious Tiger Bay area of the Welsh capital. Despite arguments from his lawyers Mattan was refused leave to appeal by the Home Secretary. Forty-six years after Mattan’s execution, and 34 years after the death penalty was finall -
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Queer Crime Fiction: A Roundtable Discussion
I have discovered the secret to making a great roundtable: Alex Segura. If Alex is involved, or I get interested in a book by someone Alex has introduced me to, it’s a breeze to fill our imaginary table. This time I wanted to focus on the positives and negatives LGBTQ+ writers face. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we did the sex roundtable: if we rarely see any vanilla sex, then all of the other flavors are probably not being served either. Anyway, this came about because of PJ Vernon’s excellent new thriller, Bath Haus, and his enthusiastic participation at the aforementioned sex rou -
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Your Next Level Life Reader Review Event And Giveaway
Today, I am excited to announce the launch of a special reader review event with author Karen Arrington. Today, our readers are sharing their insights into her book Your Next Level Life: 7 Rules of Power, Confidence, and Opportunity for Black Women in America. You'll have the chance to find more about this book―which won an NAACP Image Award in 2020―and more about the author, Karen Arrington, herself. Join us as we celebrate this book and this inspiring author. First, here's more about the book: If you’re a Black woman in business and feeling stuck or trapped by other people’s expectations of -
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Eclipse by Celia Lake
Squee Eclipse by Celia Lake May 5, 2021 Historical: EuropeanRomanceScience Fiction/Fantasy I came to Eclipse via these two tweets shared on Twitter. It was the second one which really got me. I love a good magical school story, but the Harry Potter books never quite worked for me. Eclipse, which promised a view from the staff room of a magical school in the 1920s, sounded like my catnip. (Also, the author’s page has a content warning t
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