Pitches

Today, I'd like to talk about pitches, and no, I'm not talking about baseball. It seems lately on the blogs that everyone is talking about pitches and queries. Eventually, I will talk about queries and offer one up, but I haven't written one yet. Oh, I've been thinking about them and learning everything I can, but without a novel ready to go, I haven't written anything down. Yet, it seems like writers' careers hang in the balance of these two dreadful things.

Yesterday on Nathan Bransford's blog (he's just awesome and you should follow his blog if you don't already), he posted about the one sentence, one paragraph, and two paragraph pitches. It's very important to know and be able to tell people what your book is about without stumbling over your words as well as not boring them with the details. So, I'm going to try to create a one sentence, one paragraph, and two paragraph pitch for each of my written novels: Virtuoso and The Phoenix Prophetess.

I'll begin with Virtuoso:

One Sentence: After a tragic accident, Nadia picks up the pieces of her shattered life.

One Paragraph: After a tragic accident, virtuoso violinist Nadia Godunov wakes up to find that a month has passed, her left hand is broken, and her boyfriend Marcus is dead. The college freshman's life is in shambles, and all she wants to do is find a way to pick up the pieces and put her shattered life back together. But this life puzzle is more complicated than she ever could have dreamed between her new boyfriend Derek, her terrifying new ability of telekinesis, and discovering that Marcus might not be as dead as she once thought.

Two Paragraphs: Nadia Godunov is a violin virtuoso in her freshman year at Wyderly College in Ridgewood, VA. When her drummer boyfriend Marcus Giovanni and she have a terrible car accident, both will never be the same. A month after the accident, Nadia awakens, discovering her broken left hand and her dead boyfriend. Between coping with grief and therapy and regaining her position as first chair at Wyderly, she finds a difficult road ahead of her.

Yet, Nadia is persistent in putting together the jigsaw pieces of her shattered life. She finds a new boyfriend in medical student Derek Smith. Yet, something isn't right with young Nadia. Lately, she has been having terrible headaches and discovers her new telekinetic abilities. Best or worst of all, her former boyfriend isn't as dead as she once thought, and he wants to win her back. What is a girl to do when all she wants to do is pick up the pieces and move on with her life?

There you have my pitches for Virtuoso. I'm currently in rewrites/edits for this novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo 2009.

Now, on to The Phoenix Prophetess:

One Sentence: A teenage prophetess discovers her place within the kingdom and accepts her unique abilities.

One Paragraph: With a strawberry phoenix birthmark on her left breast and mind-numbing visions, Yssa knew that she was different than anyone else when she became the sixth Phoenix Prophetess in the last twenty-five hundred years. She left her family for the Temple of Apenth at the age of thirteen, and she has made this place her home. Now, at age seventeen, the prophetess finds that everything is about to change, starting with a vision of her parents' murders to the destruction of the Kingdom of Amora. Accompanied by her guard Liam and boyfriend Tym and armed with prophecy, a magical dagger, and bow and arrows, Yssa must help the Amorans stop the enemy before her next vision comes true.

Two Paragraphs: On the day of Yssa's birth, the god Apenth marked her as the Phoenix Prophetess. At thirteen, ridiculed and disbelieved by the people of Guntas, she leaves the island for the Temple of Apenth with high hopes of acceptance, but the young prophetess soons finds that temple life isn't everything she thought it would be. The people who aren't skeptical of her abilities clamor for her attention and even mob her for her prophecies.

At age seventeen, Yssa attempts to find normalcy in her abnormal life. When a vision of her parents' murders shakes her faith, the prophetess runs from her duties and escapes with the ferryman's son Liam. Yet, another vision draws her back into the Amoran kingdom. The Great Beyonders are going to attack, and Yssa is the only one that knows it. She must warn the Queen and save the kingdom before her vision comes true while finding her own place and accepting who she is along the way.

There are my pitches for The Phoenix Prophetess. Once I finish the edits/rewrites for Virtuoso, I'm going back to do the rewrites/edits for it, my first novel.

I hope these pitches aren't too bad. I plan to keep working on them. Surprisingly, I found it easiest to write the one sentence pitch than to write the two paragraph pitch.

I hope everyone has a great weekend. I'm off to work on my character interviews and edits for Once Upon a December Nightmare.