This is my first ever PitchWars, and I’m hyped af.
Title: More Fierce Than Fire (title comes from here)
Genre: YA Contemporary Fantasy
Comps: The Young Elites by Marie Lu, The Story of Owen by E. K. Johnston
Sixteen-year-old Abigail Hunter, the best healer in Grady Hospital’s Magical Trauma Ward, has a secret. Ten years ago, Abby wished her mother dead on the worst possible day—the day dragons awoke and brought magical powers to everyone in the world. Abby's angry wish became the powerful spell that ended her mother's life.
Abby has devoted her life to healing magic to atone for the sins of her past. Though she’s still afraid of losing control, she has become increasingly aware of the threat the dragons pose and frustrated that she is helpless to do anything about it. Hoping to develop the skills required to protect others, she joins a new United Nations-sponsored program which promises to give her the chance to work directly with the dragons and their victims. Training with some of the best young mages in the world, she prepares for the war to come.
And the war is coming. When a group of unregistered mages leads the dragons in a deadly attack on American cities, Abby must decide if she’s ready to join the fight against them, or if she’ll be stuck reliving the mistakes of her past forever.
Diversity is extremely important to me in my writing. Most of the characters in my book other than my MC are POC and/or LGBTQ. I did not feel that I had the skill or experience to write a first-person perspective for a POC/LGBTQ character, so I didn’t. However, I have been fortunate to grow up in an extremely diverse place, so I’ve included a number of POC/LGBTQ characters (loosely) based on real people. I feel that authentic, thoughtful representation is important in all forms of media and am hoping to find a mentor who feels the same.
Novel Aesthetic (Quotes & More on My Instagram)
Let’s start this the way you did back in pre-school. My name is Amy Lanchester, and I’m twenty-eight years old. My favorite color is pink (and has been since long before millennial pink became a thing #ILikedItBeforeItWasCool). More Fierce Than Fire is my first novel.
I’m “from Atlanta” in the way that most people who say they are “from Atlanta” are “from Atlanta,” in that I actually grew up about thirty minutes away and only moved to the city as an adult. I set my book here because I feel that entirely too many books are set in NYC, London, or Chicago.
I’ve been funemployed for the past year.
I started my first “real job” before I’d even finished my master’s degree, and after working there for three years, I decided I wanted to do a few things before I’m too old/settled. So I’ve traveled Europe:
and the western United States:
and I finally achieved a life goal in writing this book. I highly recommend taking a “gap year” to anyone who is able.
I live with my boyfriend and our beautiful asshole of a cat, Bret. We found him about two years ago at a local McDonald’s hanging out near the drive-thru. We went back the next day and lured him out with bits of hamburger, and he’s been our lovable jerk of a pet ever since.
- I am really, really serious about this. I’ve devoted an insane amount of time, energy, and research on this project in the past year and fully intend to see it through all the way. I love and believe in my work.
- I am crazy meticulous. I come from a STEM background, and I use the tools I learned there in my work. I’m a firm believer in spreadsheets, outlines, automation, and using technology to the fullest. I am a grammar nut who googles everything she isn’t sure about and spends hours nerding out reading style guides and grammar blogs.
- I take criticism well. I’m a fairly self-critical person who is realistic about her flaws and shortcomings. Though I love my work, I know it is far from perfect, and I am greatly looking forward to receiving a thoughtful critique. You won’t hurt my feelings. I want my work to be the best it can be, and I know that takes knowledge and experience I don’t have.
I had the idea for my MS in May 2016. It was inspired by this tumblr post which made its way to reddit (a site I love and hate and spend entirely too much time on):
I decided I could write that book, and so I did. I wrote a prologue that I cut and part of the first chapter on a train from Warsaw to Berlin in September. I made an outline when I got back home in October, and I wrote the rest of the book during NaNoWriMo 2016. I did finish my 50,000 words in November, but the book wasn’t done. I had a completed (terrible) first draft of about 55,000 words by the first week of December.
My first draft was mostly just dialogue and action. I discovered that I hate writing description as much as I hate reading it. So my next several drafts mostly involved adding description to scenes, and it took forever. I cut several scenes and characters entirely during this process and added a few more scenes and characters, bringing my final word count to 75,000 words. My current draft contains very little from the original NaNoWriMo draft, and believe me, that’s for the best.
I am definitely a planner. I would have gotten nowhere without my outline or character spreadsheet. However, most of my character’s personalities came out through writing their dialogue. I used dialogue (that I went back and cut because it was boring and redundant) to solve plot problems and work out motivations in scenes. If I ever got stuck, I just started writing a conversation between my characters, and it solved basically all of my problems.
I started writing in Scrivener, a program I’d gotten for free when I worked at the Apple Store back in 2010. It helped me a lot with organizing scenes and research. I transitioned to Google Docs after a save file got corrupted and I spent an evening panicking that I’d lost everything (I hadn’t, thank God). Google Docs sucks for long documents, but it saves to the cloud every few seconds, so I suffered through it.
I write at night almost exclusively. My best creative work comes after midnight, and usually once I’m already in bed.
I dread having to get back on a normal schedule because the night owl life is best for my writing.
Favorite Writing Resources
- Chicago Manual of Style (I’m too poor to actually own this, but I use their FAQs and this hyphenation table all the time.)
Upcoming Projects Preview
I have so many ideas. I think of new project ideas every day, and I constantly struggle not to get distracted by my newest, shiniest concept. Here are a couple of things I’ve started planning:
- Shakespeare’s plays retold in a combined setting like into the Woods or Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles. A central, overarching series plot with individual volumes devoted to some of the plots of the original plays. I’ll be combining side characters from one show with main characters from another.
- A space opera/sci-fi series centered on a girl who rescues an alien from a hostile species at war with Earth’s space empires. The aliens have superior technology and are annihilating the space colonies, but we can’t communicate with them. My MC and her android nanny devise a method for rudimentary communication and are captured by government forces who have ulterior motives.
- Harry Potter, obviously. Prisoner of Azkaban is my favorite. I spent years convincing myself I was a Gryffindor like Hermione, my hero, but I’m really a Ravenclaw.
- The Young Elites by Marie Lu
- Exit, Pursued by a Bear by E. K. Johnston
- A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin
- Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
I’m convinced that if Ray Bradbury had lived in the Golden Age of Television that we’re living through, he would never have written Fahrenheit 451.
A short list of shows I love: Futurama, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Parks and Recreation, BoJack Horseman, Game of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tale, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Jessica Jones, Broadchurch, Steven Universe, Stranger Things, You’re the Worst, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
I’ve been in (school productions of) Once on This Island, Les Miserables, Into the Woods, and Dreamgirls. Other shows I love include Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, The Last Five Years, Aida, Phantom of the Opera, Evita, The Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof, and West Side Story.
I picked up cosplay a few years back. I didn’t own a sewing machine, didn’t know how to sew, and had limited crafting experience. I taught myself using books, online tutorials, and YouTube videos. Some of my projects:
Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones
Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter
Eleven from Stranger Things
That was entirely too long, and I’m sorry.
If you read this far, you’re probably my soulmate. Please send me a message on Twitter and let me know. :)
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