Book Country's Genre Map

Ever asked yourself which genre your WIP actually fits into? 

Ask no longer. Consult Book Country's Genre Map. 

It's a map! With genre countries! Click on any of the countries, and the map will tell you all about its genre. 

Awesome sauce!

Awesome Writerly Quote #2

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." 


- Joan Didion

On Nerds, The Pride Of

This post by Chuck Wendig moved me to tears. Okay, one tear, but still. A blog post about Star Wars, not even Star Wars itself, made me choke up. At work.

Ahem. 

Mr. Wendig should have labelled it NSFW, lest your colleagues look at you funny and you have to come up with a bogus work-related reason why you're all misty-eyed. Only fellow nerds would understand. 

Which brings me to my point. Chuck Wendig's post is an amazing testimony as to why nerds are nerds. It represents nerddom at it's finest. Whether it's Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, The Avengers, Buffy, Hunger Games, Final Fantasy or *insert chosen favorite here*, the emotions Chuck Wendig describes are the reason why we immerse ourselves into these fictional worlds so fully. It explains why we are labeled as nerds, and label ourselves as nerds with such pride:

"It [Star Wars] gave me characters I love and a simplistic, elegant view of both narrative and morality that inevitably you push back against while simultaneously reaching for it. It made me friends. It was a love my family shared then, and it’s a love my wife and my son share now. It is the universe that keeps on giving. It made me feel like I could do anything,..."

"It means friends and family. It means the power of story. It means the power of possibility."


Bull's eye, Chuck. Just... bull's eye.

Query for Nightmare City

It's finally here: Query Time. 

This is the version I'm entering the race with. Hopefully, it's compelling enough to entice an agent to ask for more. 

Deep breath.

Et voilà...

In 2042, dreams come true. So do nightmares.

Ever since a shift in reality thirty years ago, peoples' dreams and nightmares come alive, bringing with them chaos and destruction. Monsters ravage cities, bottomless chasms split roads, houses shrink, and gold rains from the sky. The possibilities are limitless, unpredictable and often deadly.

Eden Maybrey is a Los Angeles based dream hunter whose job is to eliminate these ’shades’. When longtime friend Sean tasks her with hunting down an evil doppelgänger of himself, Eden soon finds she is outmatched. She teams up with Vaughn Taylor, a hunter who goes to dangerous lengths to kill every shade he encounters.

Before they can apprehend him, the doppelgänger kidnaps Eden's sister. He threatens to kill her unless Eden publicly exposes her deepest, darkest secret: she herself is a shade. If this information comes to light, being chased by every shade hunter in the city will be the least of Eden's problems. Her 'sister', the young woman to whom Eden owes her very existence, will be sentenced to life in prison for harboring a shade.

To save her sister and keep her own secret under wraps, Eden must pit her hidden inhuman abilities against the doppelgänger. Her only ally is Vaughn Taylor - the man who won't hesitate to put a bullet in her head should he find out the truth.

NIGHTMARE CITY is a standalone urban fantasy novel with series potential, complete at 95.000 words. 

I'm a bilingually raised German whose dreams thankfully don't manifest in reality, but do occasionally come true in the more original sense: I recently had the good fortune of having two German short stories included in BACKNANG STORIES (publisher: Leseratten Verlag), an anthology with stories of my home town, Backnang (Germany), published in October 2014.

Thank you for your time and consideration. 

Sincerely,

Pia Newman

Neuköllner Strasse 8

71229 Leonberg

Germany

Phone: 0049 / (0)1578 - 77 66 818

Email: newman.pia@gmail.com