Winner(s) of Diana Fox Agent Pitch Contest!

CONGRADS everyone - here's Diana with the winners!

This was a hard decision, because there were so many great pitches in this contest! Thanks so much to Shelli for hosting it, and to everyone who entered.

Winners:

1^st place: A. Lockwood, OLYMPUS GATE

Genre: YA Historical Fantasy

Pitch: A girl from a broken future travels back to ancient Rome to stop her sister's murder, confront the gods, and prevent the coming apocalypse.

Comments: Post-apocalyptic dystopias, time travel, AND ancient Rome and the gods? I'm hooked!

2^nd place: Elizabeth Briggs, ALTERNATE

Genre: YA Sci-Fi

Pitch: A teen hacker is drawn into a war between parallel universes when she meets an alternate version of herself from another dimension.

Comments: I love the concept, it's kind of like Hackers meets Fringe.

3^rd place: S. Kyle Davis, BLACKBIRD

Genre: YA Fantasy Technothriller

Pitch: Spy chick bypasses a top-of-the line security system to steal an object before the sorcerers do in this "Mission:Impossible w/ magic" tale.

Comments: This just sounds FUN!

Winners, please email your full manuscripts to submissions@foxliterary.com and mention the pitch contest in your subject line.

Top ten honorable mentions:

Jen, BOYFRIENDS, SPIES, AND LIES

Genre: YA Contemporary

Pitch: If Carissa's oppressive parents weren't paying her boyfriend to be her bodyguard, art school would have been her perfect escape.

‪Carmen Ferreiro Esteban, THE REVENGE OF THE WOLF KING

GENRE: YA Medieval Fantasy

PITCH: Princess Ines's love for her whipping boy is put to the test when the king accuses him of the queen's murder and sentences him to death.

‪Elizabeth, FLICKER

Genre: Sci-Fi YA

Pitch: A grl w/a bad ♥ learns shes being kept alive by an alien virus that gives her the pwr 2 bend reality &save the wrld from an insidious force

‪Lori M. Lee, SOUL WITHOUT A BOY

Genre: YA urban fantasy

Pitch: In a world where souls can be ripped free and harnessed as a weapon, a 17yo boy learns the hard way that standing out can be deadly.

‪Cheree Smith, SHADOW EMBRACED

Genre: YA Urban Fantasy

Pitch: To control the creature threatening to take over her, 16-year-old Scar joins an underground fight club of witches, werewolves and vampires.

‪Lindsay Cummings, CHANGED

Genre:YA dystopian

Pitch: After an ecological disaster caused by environmentalists, a girl uses enhanced vision to find where the Disappeared go in a walled-in world.

‪Tracey Neithercott, ALIVE

Genre: YA sci-fi

Pitch: When she discovers Eli's healing ability, Alex plans to bring her sister back to life. She never expects 2 uncover lies about her childhood.

‪Emma Hollingberry, SKYBORNE

Genre: Literary YA Sci-Fi

Pitch: The emperor forces a hardcore racer onto his assassin team and then pits her against the people who deserted her as a child in an inter-galaxy war she'll refuse to fight.

‪Janet Johnson, THE PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY FRIENDSHIP

Title: The Peanut Butter and Jelly Friendship

Genre: MG Contemporary

Pitch: When selling her appendix on e-bay doesn’t work, ten-year-old Annie seeks other ways to save her best friend’s house from foreclosure.

Huntress, OF OAK AND DRAGONS

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Pitch: An unexpected inheritance, a snarky rapier with delusions of grandeur, and a tall stranger put Leah in the middle of an ancient war.

If you have an honorable mention, I would LOVE to see your query and sample pages!

Please email me at submissions@foxliterary.com and mention the pitch contest in your subject line.

Belated Bookanistas - Going to "Dark and Hollow Places"

Sorry about the late post. (ugh a day late! to be exact)

Carrie Ryan is one of my favorite writers. If I could pick a writer to write like - Carrie would be in my top 3. Why? because I LOVE how she walks the line between commercial and literary.

I love that she can write beautifully while having a pacy novel.

Oh yeah and after I met with her

(And Megan Miranda) last fall for lunch (aka Mexican fiesta!), I developed a huge writer crush on her. Not only is she so sweet, but she is hilarious - and you all know how much I love funny, sweet people.

Now, if you have not read this series because you are telling yourself "I am not a zombie person" I want you to know - "I am not a zombie person either!"

But a couple years ago, I happened to watch

Forest of Hands and Teeth trailer on Amazon and it scared the crapola out of me. yet intrigued me so much I bought the book that day. And a) i never read zombie stuff b) hate horror, and 3) hate to be scared like that. But the words on that video pulled me in.

And I've read all 3 books happily.

So after just finishing the Arc of TDAHP (which btw the sequels are really companion novels because they follow 3 different characters though they are all connected closely) - here is my shout out:

My top reasons why I love Forest of Hands and Teeth series (especially The Dark and Hollow Places)

1. The writing is gorgeous! Carrie is amazing with words.

2. The fast paces and scare factor - seriously, I was reading until late at night even when I had to get up early (damn you Carrie!:)

3. It is written with such a beautiful style that when I first started it - I'd forgotten it was a zombie book. 

4. Carrie was a lawyer but wanted to write. So after long days at the office, she would go home and write a chapter for her husband.

5. the nice romance that is not with a bad guy. But in a bad  - okay fine - crappy -situation.

6. I love the covers!

7. In an SCBWI YA masters class, Carrie's editor Krista Marino taught us about voice by dissecting Forest.

You know what? I could talk forever about how much I love this book, but I don't want to hold you up from reading it!

Check out the other Bookanista reviews:

Elana Johnson reveals the cover of The Eleventh Plague

LiLa Roecker wonders What Happened to Goodbye

Christine Fonseca wants to be Like Mandarin

Jamie Harrington falls for Falling Under

Shelli Johannes-Wells visits Dark and Hollow Places

Beth Revis discovers Lost and Found

Carolina Valdez Miller is wild about Wither

Megan Miranda swoons for Anna and the French Kiss

Bethany Wiggins commends Ketura and Lord Death

Shana Silver gushes over What Happened to Goodbye

Jen Hayley peers into Clarity

Carrie Harris is mesmerized by Memento Nora

Matt Blackstone visits The Ninth Ward

Stasia Ward Kehoe spotlights Strings Attached

Wrapping up loose ends - giveaways and contests!

Today, I have a few things to wrap up today....so here goes.

The winner of The Liar Society book from the Launch Day post is Brenda Drake.

The winner of Cheryl Klein's book from Part 2 (there was also a Part 1 you can check out) is Kate Higgins.

All of the books I have given away to date have been shipped and should have already been received. If you have won something on my blog and didn't receive it, please email me.

Now, on to the winners of the Pay It Forward Agent Query Contest.

Once again, I could not decide on only one so.... I picked one from each genre to suggest to Alyssa. To be honest, I really liked them all - it was more a matter of what I felt was more ready.

• MG - Rita Monette
• YA - Marcy Kate Connolly

Congrads! :)

Please email me offline at sjohannes@bilaninc.com for my suggestions and instructions! There are a few conditions that go along with this win.

For the other three finalists, I'm sorry :( I know how disappointing it might be. Because I want to thank you for entering - I'd like you 3 to email me offline for an ARC of your choice.

To the 5 finalists, I am still working on the query critiques (but I'm under agent deadline) and hope to have them done in the next couple of weeks. At that time, I will send the query critiques and a few notes on the manuscript pages to help you move forward.

That's it for now! :)

Part 2 - Cheryl Klein (Second Sight Giveaway)

Last week, Cheryl Klein stopped by to talk about her new book, Second Sight, An Editor’s Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults.

Part 1 aired last Thursday.

This week, in Part 2, Cheryl talks more about the editing side of her career.

Let's get started.

Cheryl, in addition what are the top 3 reasons you reject a book?

Not necessarily in order:

1. I don’t find the characters or their conflicts all that interesting.

2. The narrative voice annoys me, and therefore I don’t want to spend two years listening to it. (Most likely because of broadcasting, as above.)

3. It isn’t something that I think I can publish effectively, either because I don’t think it’s very good, or because there are a lot of books like it already in the market, or because it’s not really an Arthur A. Levine Books type of book (meaning it will do better published as something other than a literary hardcover book).

Can you give us an idea of day in the life of Cheryl Klein?

I get up between 7 and 8, do all the typical morning stuff, take the B train from my neighborhood in Brooklyn to the Broadway-Lafayette stop in Manhattan, and arrive at the office by 9:30, where I have a cup of tea and check my e-mail. I deal with any fires there, then try to turn to the first thing on my to-do list—whether it’s negotiating a contract (which can involve a lot of talking to other departments) or writing flap copy or preparing for a presentation or line-editing a manuscript or examining proofs.

The day then alternates among those tasks, attending meetings, and continuing to deal with what comes in from our production department or over the phone or e-mail—though when I’m in the middle of a novel line-edit, that tends to subsume everything else for me, because I find the work so interesting and absorbing, and because line-edits take a while.

The last thing I do every night at work is write my to-do list for the next day, so that I have my priorities set and ready to go the next morning.

There are so many books on writing out there. What is your favorite book on plot? How about voice? (besides your own of course :)

My favorite book on voice, by far (and character, too), is Orson Scott Card’s Characters and Viewpoint.

The book on plot from which I’ve learned the most is Aristotle’s Poetics, which I read for the first time in college, but I was really lucky to have a great professor teaching me the significance of all the jargony theoretical statements in the book (the edition we read, anyway).

I also like The Fiction Editor by Thomas McCormack, which is also jargony, but says some really useful things about the larger points toward which plots should work.

What is the one piece of advice you would give a writer who keeps getting so close but doesn't make it?

Figure out what (1) your two greatest writerly strengths, (2) your favorite subject to read about, and (3) your two biggest weaknesses as a writer are.

Develop (do not yet start actually writing) a book that uses (1) to portray (2) and minimize (3). For instance, if you know your strengths are awesome characters and dialogue, and your favorite subject is romance, but you’re terrible at plotting and creating tension, come up with your awesome characters, but put them in a simple story that doesn’t involve a lot of tension—a love story with a straightforward central conflict that lets the characters do their thing.

Then get help with (3) to improve it as much as you can before you dive in; then write the book and revise it.

And have fun. When writers have fun, readers do too.

In the spirit of Actor's Studio, here a few questions for you. We'll call it Editors's Studio. First, what is your favorite word?

My boyfriend will tell you the word I say the most is “Meh” or “Feh.” The word whose sound I like the most . . . I’ve always been fond of “spackle.”

Wait, is that a word? :) Okay, how about the word you hate the most?

Hmm. Soundwise, I think I must have blocked this offending word from my mind, because I can’t think of one! Meaningwise, “failure.”

What is your favorite thing to do in your personal time (you cant say reading! :)

I love cooking and baking—the absorption of putting all these ingredients together in just the right quantities, the ability to listen to music or NPR while I work, the deliciousness that results, the pleasure of serving it to others (sometimes!) and eating it.

And lastly, what profession other than yours would you like to attempt?

In the realm of reality, I think I really would enjoy being a professional baker. In fantasy, I’d love to sing and dance in a Broadway musical. Both of those professions are about being part of a community and making other people happy through your work, and those are two of my greatest satisfactions in being an editor, too.

Thanks Cheryl!

Comment and your name will be entered into a drawing for a copy of Second Sight by Cheryl Klein.