Title: Lesbian Bastard Child
Genre: LGBTQ YA
Word Count: 51,000
Query:
Lesbian Bastard Child covers Nasley's life from ages four to thirty on her quiet quest to figure out how a lesbian fits into this mess of a world.
Nasley was doomed to abnormality from the moment her parents met an artist's retreat and practiced recreational procreation. Her parents then decided the most logical way to handle such a turn of events was to live across the hall from each other and raise their mistake together. With such a beginning, it's no wonder most of Nasley's life plays out like one giant mistake. She never meant to work as a brothel clothing manager, or live in a nudist colony, or become a successful playwright, and she never, ever thought she'd meet a girl as perfect as Quinn. Nasley's life might be a fluke, but she'll learn how to make it work.
My debut YA Romance novel is contracted with Puddletown Publishing Group. A date has not yet been set for its release.
First 250:
I was one of those kids who played with dolls. Nothing fancy, just the classic dolls with impossibly small waists and bosoms the size of bowling balls. You played with those kind of things at age four. Didn’t we all?
One such day during my fourth year, My father, Nathan, and I were playing with the dolls. He always played the bad girl and I always played the good girl. Today was no exception. He did this little thing of making sure the villains had their redeeming qualities. It would drive me up a wall.
And on this day, I felt particularly pleased with our latest plot development. The bad girl stole some school supplies and admitted it to my character. I scolded them for what they did and explained why it was wrong to steal, and then Nathan had to ruin it by promising to change.
“No!” I screamed. “Daddy! If there’s no conflict, there’s no story!”
In later years he told me that was the moment he knew I would become a force to be reckoned with. By the age of four, I already knew what people really cared about: drama. And it scared the shit out of him. Well, if lesbians with never-married parents are forces to be reckoned with, then perhaps he is on to something.
I think this is interesting. I guess what threw me was the difference between your query and where the book starts. I wondered for a minute it it was memoir, and then had to check the query again. As a mom, I wondered about the girls quote. Is she very precocious? It was a bit jarring to me.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, hope this goes well for you. Good luck
Ha, definitely not a memoir, but it is written in very close first person. I suppose my MC is precocious, but it's mostly the hindsight talking there.
DeleteWhat was jarring? Her thoughts?
Yes. And her word choice. It just doesn't sound like a four year old to me, although I can see what you're trying to do. Hmmm. It's a bit of a pickle.
ReplyDeleteBut she's thirty. I think she's allowed to have sophisticated thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI thought this was well done and didn't find the 4-year-olds thoughts too far off. I assumed right away that the narrator was an adult thinking back to her childhood memories (with perspective). I did find the sentence she says to her dad to be a little much, but I can see a young child saying that if they'd heard it from someone else.
ReplyDeleteThoughts are one thing. You have quotations around a very mature statement coming out of a four year-old's mouth. Not to mention the tense inconsistency in your last sentence and a pronoun agreement issue in the third paragraph. If this is going into print, you might want to fix these things. Good luck!
ReplyDelete