Working on yet another pitch for my Cthulhu Mythos end of the world novel:
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Children of the Deep: 2012.
When the end of the world comes, who will you love?
It's 2012, and the world is ending. The meteor Ag-Noggoth burns in the sky, heading toward Earth, and the buzz in the New Age and Pagan communities is: Change or die. Meri, a freelance writer, mocks the miracle power beads and various Xochitl Tictl herbal concoctions that everyone seems to be addicted to. Then she falls in love with a man who is like no other she's ever encountered.
When the end of the world comes, who will you be?
Drawn by her lover and his mysterious family into the cult of Becoming, with its refrain of "change or die," Meri slowly slips from reporting the phenomena to being its figurehead. All over the world, people are becoming...but what will they finally be?
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Is that enough or do I need to bring into it that there's another sentient humanoid race on earth who is going to take over?
I used this next pitch, which goes in a different direction, for a recent get-an-agent contest . I didn't win so I don't know if the pitch is crap or if they wanted something else. It had very specific rules--no more than 3 sentences/150 words which is why there's so much punctuation.
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26,000 years ago, a race of aquatic humanoids crashed on Earth; abandoned by their god Ag-Noggoth, they hid—and waited. As the dawn of a new age approaches, humanity rapidly begins to evolve. Freelance writer Meri is caught in something bigger than she can imagine, in love with a man who isn't what he seems, and as the comet called Ag-Noggoth approaches Earth, Meri holds the fate of humanity—and that of the Children of the Deep—in her newly webbed fingers.
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All comments welcome.
(Deep One plush toy from Toy Vault)
1 comment:
Honestly... there aren't enough details. You have names, but no real hook. Nothing makes the characters come alive. There's conflict, but no goal or motivation. Also, the rhetorical questions kind-of fall flat, for me, because they don't mean anything to us. I'm assuming they would by the time we finished reading the book, but we haven't read a page to us, so they don't mean anything yet.
Write down the answers to these questions:
1)Who is your hero? (Since this is sci-fi/fantasy, you'll need to figure out what snippet of world-building is important enough to include here, so we know what this world is.)
2)What is he trying to accomplish at the beginning of the book, and why?
3) Who is your heroine? (Add another snippet of world-building.)
4) What is she trying to accomplish at the beginning of the book, and why?
5) Who or what is trying to stop them from achieving those goals?
Now... THIS is what your pitch should consist of, along with a strong hint at the end of where the book is headed, ie: whether they will accomplish those goals in the end, or whether those goals will change as the book unfolds.
Hope this helps!
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