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

The Best Time to Write Your Novel

Drumroll please...



The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. – Chinese Proverb 

'Plant a tree' = write your novel

Ta-daa!




Yeah, right. Took me years to figure that out. Maybe not twenty, but enough to sometimes wonder where I could be today if I'd just been more serious about my writing sooner. But, since the second best time to write a novel is now, I'm not going to dwell on it. I'm going to write. Right now. 

You going to join me, or what?

Effective Query Letters à la Query Shark

The Query Shark is my go-to agent when it comes to composing queries. Now she's written her master-piece by distilling all the advice she's ever given on her blog into one post, Effective Query Letters.

The timing is perfect, as I plan to start sending out queries in September. I'll see then how well I followed the Sharkiest One's advice...

Awesome Writerly Quote #1

San Diego Comic Con coming to Stuttgart in 2016

Guess what I'm going to be up to on the 25th and 26th of June in 2016. Yep, that's right, attending the first ever San Diego Comic Con in Germany, which also happens to be my first ever Comic Con in general. 

Squeeeeee!! 

I might not be the biggest (or even big) comic book fan out there, but I do get my geek on for a lot of TV-series, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, anything Star Wars and Lord of the Rings... so I've always loved the thought of attending one of these cons. Trouble was, they've been so far away. Until Now. 

Now, it's not just happening in Germany. It's happening in Stuttgart, the greater area of which I live in. The Con grounds will be a mere 15 kilometers away from my house. 

Double Squeeeeee!!

There will be panels with guest stars. There will be lectures. There will be merchandise and exhibitions. There will be photo and autograph opportunities with actors, writers, directors. There will be cosplay, including a cosplay contest and parade! I probably won't be taking part in those, but I do plan on dressing up. I still need to determine as what or whom. Soooo many options...

 
Anybody else from the area planning on going?