Elevator Pitch and Outline Complete! (again)

Interesting things are afoot!

You may have noticed a new big button at the right hand side of the blog for HLandS, which is a competition for writers and their "Hook".  What I've heard some people refer to as an "Elevator Pitch". In other words, you need to pitch your story in thirty seconds (or sixty words) or less, i.e. the time it takes to ride a few floors on an elevator with that agent or editor you've just stalked for months... er, I mean, that you've run into by some miraculous coincidence!

Well, I've submitted my pitch to be critiqued over at Kat Ellis' Blog, and to be quite frank, I'm nervous as a doormouse under the couch of a crazy cat lady.  It's the first time I've let even a sniff of the actual content of my story past a very small circle of friends and family.  What if it's boring?  What if it's been done before?  What if...

Wait a damnable minute, I'm aspiring to be a writer, and I can't afford to back myself into a corner like that or I'll never get any work done!  Of course it's not boring! I'm writing it! So what if it's been done before?  I'm doing it better, with cooler, more lifelike characters!  And I'll use as many exclamation points in a single paragraph as I please!!!!

Right, got that off my chest.  I'll keep you posted on how it goes.  Oh, right, I guess I should put the pitch here too.  Keep in mind, this is a work in progress (not just the pitch, but the book too). 

Some one's killing Lenmar's most powerful noblewomen.  Flynn, a young and talented thief, is the prime suspect.  He's also the best chance Asher, the Captain of the Queen's guard, has to find the killer.  He just has to convince her. To do that, he needs to pull one last high-stakes job.

It likely needs a lot of work, but seeing as I just threw it together in about twenty minutes after seeing Kat Ellis put the call out on Twitter, it'll give me a good idea of how I'm doing in the sales department of my brain.

I've just wrapped up the Revision 2 Outline changes and finished rebuilding the Third Act.  I'm quite pleased with the results, though we'll see what holes crop up as I actually go about actually writing the book.  I'll be filling those in as I go and cleaning the whole thing up with a third Revision before I'm even remotely satisfied.  Then we'll see.


I should be able to "finish" with the Character arc I'm on now in the next few weeks, then it's on to the next Character and building out their voice.  That should be interesting, seeing as my other two viewpoint characters are women.

Once I start filling in the other Characters things will pick up for the Alpha Readers, as I'll have something a little more cohesive to pass out.

I don't have a word count update for the page at the moment, since that's words written on the book, but I've added another ~3000 words to the outline tonight.  Tomorrow I'll push that word count as much as I can, but I may head out to catch Looper earlier in the evening so it might not be as high as a full-on writing evening, which I admittedly don't get many of.

- Grimm