St. Martin’s New Adult Contest
TEMPTED by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast
Attention, writers! St. Martin’s Press is holding a contest for submissions. Yes, a contest hosted by yours truly to find books to publish. We are actively looking for great, new, cutting edge fiction with protagonists who are slightly older than YA and can appeal to an adult audience. Since twenty-somethings are devouring YA, St. Martin’s Press is seeking fiction similar to YA that can be published and marketed as adult—a sort of an “older YA” or “new adult.”
The contest begins today on Monday, November 9 and ends Friday, November 20, 2009. Submissions will be taken online and read by JJ of the St. Martin ‘s Press editorial department and Georgia McBride, Founder and Host of #YAlitchat!
There are prizes! The top three submissions—1st, 2nd, and 3rd places, if you will—will receive a copy of TEMPTED by P.C. and Kristin Cast. There may be multiple winners of this contest, but a free book will go to the three I find the most interesting/appropriate for what we are looking for.
The Rules
- One submission per author.
- Fiction applicable to older teens and twentysomethings, please. For guidelines, the protagonist should be 18 or older, but 20s are preferred.
- All works must be complete, edited, proofed and ready for submission upon request.
- Submission must include author first name, email address, 2-3 sentence hook/pitch and first paragraph of story ONLY. Any additional content will be discarded.
How It Works
Submissions are reviewed by the Editorial Department at St. Martin ‘s Press and Georgia McBride, Founder and Host of #Yalitchat. Based on the criteria defined by St. Martin’s Press; submissions are assessed and if we are interested in seeing more, authors are contacted via the email provided in the submission and a partial (first 50 pages) of your manuscript will be requested.
Your manuscript should be edited, proofed and ready for submission. If the editorial team at St. Martin ‘s Press would like to see more of your manuscript after reading your partial, they will request the remainder of your manuscript. Please make sure that your manuscript is properly formatted, spell-checked and ready to go.
Winners
Winners in this “contest” are those who submit and are asked to have their manuscript submitted for consideration by St. Martin ‘s Press. Ideally, a book deal would come of it, but we have no guarantees. The goal is to give as many #Yalitchat writers an opportunity to have their work considered.
Disclaimer: St. Martin’s Press does not guarantee to publish the material requested and cannot be held liable for a book published through St. Martin’s Press with similar content to any submission from the “New Adult” Contest sponsored by #YAlitchat.
Comment here to enter. Good luck!
The Mist: Blinded By Darkness
Pitch: Adela Jane can’t escape the feeling as a pair of eyes follow her every move, which frightens her. She has a good reason to be concerned because someone, or rather something, is watching, yearning for her innocence and beauty. A creature of darkness, only known as the Mist will stop at nothing until it owns Adela Jane because it has been lonely for so long and only she can fill its aching need for love.
Paragraph: This feeling of being watched had been with me all morning as I washed my laundry in the river bank not far from my home. I’ve tried to ignore this uncomfortable sensation because it’s ridiculous if you think of it. No harm can come to me here. It’s still daylight, not even noon yet. The only concern I should have is for when the sun sets. Then the Mist will arrive, waiting to strike at those who haven’t reached the safety of their homes in time.
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ACROSS THE BORDERLINE, EDGEWISE
Pitch: Coming of age amidst the chemical factories and decaying boardwalk towns of 1980’s New Jersey with a mother obsessed with protecting her children from chemicals and germs, eighteen-year-old RICHIE CAVELLI must decide whether to abandon his girlfriend, REGGIE, to cultivate a safer life at the manicured lawns of a suburban, Massachusetts college. As Richie’s ever-present mother propels him in one direction, the absence of Reggie’s mother (who died when she was six) pushes her the other way. Over a four year period, Richie and Reggie struggle to build a lasting, adult relationship; rationality, organized religion, and societal institutions fail them while imagination and safety pin-wearing pop stars enable them to see beyond the traditional myths forged on young people to what is buried at the edges.
First Paragraph: Although he was starving, Richie Cavelli pulled his hand back from the bowl of peanuts on the bar. He heard his mother’s voice in his head say, “Don’t touch that; there are other people’s germs all over that bowl.” Chemicals and germs were the two things Rose dreaded the most, and she compulsively warned her sons about them with the desperation of a mother whose child has been taken from her. In 1982, very few people spent much of their day obsessing over seeping threats, like pesticides; even fewer were the eldest sons of someone who did. In less than three days Richie would hear from colleges and be forced to make a decision. In a world where sons and daughters were knocked off rocks and drowned by vindictive surf while scattering their parents’ ashes underneath sparkling skies, he was going to need a lot of help.
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Pitch: Having recently turned eighteen, Alyssa would like to think she is old enough to run her own life, but her parents have a different theory. Their constant clashes push all Alyssa’s buttons causing her to rashly end up in the most terrifying situation of her life. Not many people survive coming face to face with a demon and she is beginning to think she might not either.
Paragraph:
“Then maybe it’s time I left home,” Alyssa yelled.
“And how do you think you’ll live? Food doesn’t appear on the table because you’re hungry,” her mother, Grace, snapped.
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TITLE: NO ONE LIVES TWICE
PITCH: Twenty-four year old geek extraordinaire, Lexi Carmichael’s, routine day requires hunting down computer hackers for the National Security Agency. However, her true problems lie with friends, guys (or lack thereof) and mother . . . until gun-totting thugs start popping into her life. Soon she’s embroiled in a puzzling intrigue that spans two continents and involves murder, assassins, and really, really hot guys. Relying only on her wits and friends, can the untrained and geeky girl save the day and get the guy(s)?
FIRST PARAGRAPH: When I was a little girl, everyone who knew me thought I was odd. I never wanted to play with dolls and I didn’t enroll in ballet or gymnastics. Instead, my paramount interest was numbers. For years I carried around math flashcards and liked to entertain my parent’s friends by adding, subtracting and multiplying in my head. As I grew older, I quickly moved on to more mature themes, devouring linear algebra, differential equations, quadratic reciprocity and stochastic processes. Computers were my best friends and the Internet, my playground. Today, some twenty years later, I’m still fascinated with numbers, computers and code. But this time around, I’m getting paid for it as an information security technologist with the National Security Agency, or NSA for short. Most of us working there call it the “No Such Agency” because we are so secret.
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Pitch:
When 21 year old Dimitri’s parents are killed in a car accident, he fails his college finals and ends up taking the only job he can get – writing obituaries for a newspaper in a quietly decaying New England mill town, while struggling to finish his 1,000 page novel at night. When he’s asked to cover the traditional Halloween feature story, staying at the “haunted” Aspinwall mansion with elderly channeler/hairdresser Madeline LeFevre, he thinks he’s in for the standard paranormal cliché – lots of creaking staircases and psychic babble – and he’s not wrong. But something supernatural follows him home, a beautiful and dangerous female entity that knocks him down the stairs, mocks him with whispered obscenities, carves threatening Latin phrases on the floorboards, but instead of fear, Dimitri finds a determination to catch this Succubus, prove that she exists, and in the process write the story which could launch his career, and his life.
Paragraph: There’s not a lot of opportunity to get creative with obituaries. Take Mrs. Porrier, aged 85, a school teacher at Lake View Elementary, who killed herself by locking herself in the garage of her four bedroom colonial house with the car running. She had terminal pancreatic cancer, but that’s not the point, the point is that the most interesting part of her life, the moment when she got the car keys out of the zip pocket of her husband’s leather bowling ball bag (Mr. Perrier, otherwise known as “Doc” to his bowling league), the moment she had decided, enough, opening the familiar latch of the screen door, pressing the yellowed plastic button of the electric garage door opener, then pulling the heavy door of the ancient but still functional four door Cadillac, the scent of cigarette smoke still in the carpeting although her husband had given up smoking ten years before, the moment she rolled down the windows (by hand – nothing automatic in that car), then started the engine, that moment right there, before her eyes got heavy, when she still could have, if she wanted, gotten out of the car, opened the garage door, let the October wind blow through, but didn’t, that moment, I can’t include in her obituary. Instead, I have to write the mundane, perfected life details, she taught school for forty years, is remembered by her grandchild Harris in Colorado, her daughter Stella, also a teacher, in California, her husband “Doc” who served two years in the Korean War. She enjoyed knitting, horticulture, and baking. She died of pancreatic cancer. I reduce her to a palatable bit of print, ready to be absorbed, digested, and quickly forgotten. Christ, I wish I didn’t take this shit so seriously.
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I just found out about this contest on Thursday. I think my book would fit perfectly, but it needs some editing and I don’t think it will be in ship shape and ready to go by Friday. Will you accept any unagented submissions after the deadline? Not for the contest, obviously, but just the pitch and first paragraph?
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X-It by Jane
Pitch: 1980:Nineteen year-old J.J. Buckingham,penniless,punk,and psychic,arrives in New York’s East Village from San Francisco. J.J. had hoped to ditch the charismatic Marko Voodoo and his freaky entourage by moving to New York, but they follow her. In an attempt to win the affections of X-It, a bicycle messenger and brilliant artist, J.J. succumbs to Voodoo’s dark machinations so she can become the underground art world’s Holly Golightly.
Paragraph: I lean against the nightclub wall, as loathsome as mildew. Pathetic J.J., the polite punk rocker. I should spit on the floor. Do something nasty. But I can’t. The French linoleum salesman presses me flat. Kisses me. Wanting to bite him, I kiss him back instead.
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Pitch: After losing Jasmine, Colin’s college life begins to unravel, but his friendships with with Mrs. Vesquez, an eccentric visiting professor from Spain, Chester, a lonely pothead, and Liz, an understanding co-ed, help him survive his increasingly battered emotional state. Colin gets an education in life lessons that are as important as anything he learns in the classroom. Passionate romantic encounters, wild fraternity parties, emotional quarrels, and Frisbee on the quad bring the campus scene to life.
Paragraph: She was smokin’ hot. A total 10. Jasmine stepped toward me, took my shirt off and began to kiss my chest with the softest, most sensuous kisses I had ever felt. We had just come back to my dorm room after spending the night drinking at the Campus Pub.
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Title: “Jet Black and the Ninja Code”
Jet Black is a ninja; the last living female ninja in the world, to be exact. There’s only one problem–she doesn’t know it. But everyone else does, and they want to capture her and uncover her secret, a secret she doesn’t even know she has. When her mother dies, Jet travels to Japan to protect a mysterious family treasure (Gold? A bone traced to Jesus?) in her ancestral land. Can she put aside her love for a mysterious assassin to fight him for her life? Can she break a hidden code and save a sacred mountain from destruction? Can she save herself?
Paragraph:
The smell of the forest grew stronger as Jet climbed the mountain path. She looked at the map from her mother, a hand-drawn route to an ancient village.
MASAKICHI KUROI
Kanabe Village, Towada City, Aomori, JAPAN
She heard the twig snap behind her. Was she being followed? The village was at the bottom of the valley, north of Mt. Hakkoda, still a mile away. Jet longed to stop and rest, but it was getting dark, so she pressed on. Now, definitely feeling the presence of two small creatures, she kept walking, listening. In the faint rhythms of their breath, she could tell that one was human and the other was animal. She was impressed that whoever was following her had taken advantage of the wind: When the wind blew, they walked. When the wind stopped, they stopped and held their breath so the leaves wouldn’t rustle. It was an excellent technique–”fu no kata”–moving like the wind. Jet was surprised she remembered the name.
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Pitch: The Calvanni features a truly unique fantasy world – one without swords – where all metal is magical. The book follows the adventures of Cedrin, a street-wise calvanni (knife-fighter), and Ellen, daughter of the assassinated Sarlord, as they find themselves on opposite sides in a sudden civil war. Cedrin and Ellen come face to face with deeper and more hidden threats, and eventually must face a final challenge as the most ancient secrets that bind their bloodlines are revealed.
Paragraph: Sarlord Myan Cintros lay on the dais below his overturned throne. ‘Father!’ Ellen cried as she pushed through the ranks of scythemen. She sought him across the Bridge of Minds, but there was nothing, not even the formless colors of his sleeping mind. Fear sent her heart racing and the vast chamber contracted to a roaring tunnel.
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HUNTER OF THE DEAD
Twenty-year-old Eden Rosenberg kills zombies and she’s damn good at it. But things go horribly wrong on her team’s most recent assignment in Peru. Soon Eden’s forced to confront the truth about the infection: it isn’t an accident and those responsible will do anything to ensure no one gets out of the valley alive.
Eden watched the child in her scope, her finger poised on the trigger. The young ones were the hardest for her but she couldn’t be squeamish. Besides, this thing wasn’t a child anymore and, judging from the dried blood on its hands and face, it had killed along with the others. As Eden watched, the creature that used to be a little girl turned toward her team, its mouth gaping. It would kill them all if she didn’t act now.
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HIGH MAINTENANCE LIFE
Pitch: Five students embark on three-year degree courses at Cambridge University, all with different hopes and dreams. However, the high-pressure environment affects each of them, with mixed results.
Paragraph: ‘So, how much sex are you having?’ asked the young man to her right.
Kathy nearly choked on her bread roll. ‘Sorry?’
‘Well, as I’m sure you’re aware, Freshers’ Week is when young students typically get together, embarrass themselves, then bond over the shared experience with others who have done similar.’
‘Er… none?’
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PITCH: When 25 year old Elisabeth returns to her sleepy childhood home in Northern Massachusetts, she wants nothing more than to prevent her mother from sending her developmentally disabled older sister, Kate, to an adult home. After re-uniting with an old classmate, she makes the impulsive decision to join him on a road trip to Los Angeles and take Kate with her. As the unlikely group journeys across the country together, Elisabeth struggles to come to terms with her relationship to her sister, the complexity of a new love interest, and a dark secret she’s been keeping for years.
PARAGRAPH: As I navigated Kate’s arms through each hole in the sleeve, it appeared that the dress would fit just fine. I worked my way from top to bottom with each button, then cinched the waist with a thick green sash. I fiddled around with the sash for quite some time before settling on a big bow on her right hand side. It made her look like a little girl in a party dress; Alice in Wonderland ready for a very happy un-birthday, holding polka-dotted gift-wrapped packages that stacked up to her nose. A pretty black headband tucked just behind her ears. I held on to Kate’s shoulders and took a good look at her before rotating her around to let her see herself in the mirror. We stood side by side and I felt that we had been placed on display at some kind of circus, with the way the mirrored walls reflected off of one another, every angle exposing the two of us in our strange portrait pose. She was perfectly still and quiet as she stared at herself in the mirror and I wondered exactly what she was thinking. It seemed to me that she looked perfect.
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Pitch:
Six rare abilities exist in Adamah: Strength, Empathy, Precision, Healing, Perception, and Speed. To hide one power can make one a traitor; to have all six can make another an indestructible king. When Nolan escapes the soul-stripping punishment of a traitor’s fate, he must alter everything he knows about himself to save his people from a king with a secret of inhuman proportions.
Paragraph:
After years of practice, I still found deception and lies difficult. For how can a man repress a power that comes as naturally as breathing? I had to continue, of course, even if each flawless stroke of my quill exposed me. As impossible as it seemed, I had to keep hiding my true self if I wanted to survive.
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Pitch: Armed with true stories of demons and mythical creatures who steal your safety pins, Boddhisathva, the shaman of the NYC punk community, offers his friends advice and guidance that only he has the insight to give. But lately, his mask is cracking due to two women- Angel: the Puerto Rican mohawked punk and sometime girlfriend, and Ruby Tuesday his ruby red haired protégé. Will he be able to keep up the mask he’s so comfortable with, and is there anything left of him underneath it?
Paragraph:
I don’t know where to begin. Ruby, Ruby.
“Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, who could hang a name on you⎯ when you change with every new day. Still I’m gonna miss you.”
Ruby Tuesday. Should I start with her? Maybe in the diner we met? She tagging along with Jeeka⎯ my “roommate” at the time⎯ Or maybe it was Mik?
He gestures to her “This is Ruby, She just moved here from Jersey, I
believe.” She smiles shyly and holds out her hand⎯ nearly knocking over a glass of water in her wake.
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TITLE: “MALL BATS”
Genre: Urban Fantasy/Black Comedy
Pitch: When the manager of the music store in a mega-mall is killed in a robbery attempt, he wakes up a few days later with a ringing in his ears and a strange thirst for blood. With the help of some of the other strange people who populate the mall, he has to come to grips with his new abilities and needs, track down both the robber who killed him and the strange EMT who “saved” him, and salvage the relationship he was too cowardly to pursue before he became a bloodsucking creature of the night.
Paragraph: Ever since he was a little boy, Josh dreamed of flying. At first, these dreams stayed in the nether realm of fantasy, where a young boy could imagine himself levitating off the ground and soaring through the firmament, with birds and the occasional airplane in his wake. In his dreams, Josh took to the air like a leaf caught on a passing breeze, deftly maneuvering high above the landscape to which we poor unfortunate non-flying mortals were bound.
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Heart’s Sentinel
Pitch:Twenty two year old Mackenzie came to the jaguars of River Gap pride to learn to live as something she never wanted to be – a shape-shifter. As a River Gap Sentinel, Adam is her protector and even though Mackenzie ignites desire in him, he’s decided that she’s too new to being a shape-shifter to tangle with a powerful jaguar like himself. New or not, Mackenzie is determined to build a new life for herself free of the stalker who made her, make her own choices and go head to head with Adam to make that clear.
Paragraph:
Adam didn’t know who she was when she walked through the door. He watched the way she paused before entering the school, her dark chocolate eyes scanning the room. She tensed immediately when he approached, but she squared her shoulders and faced him anyway.
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Title: Trash
Pitch: Lisa Moritz has always wondered who killed an unnamed man near her house years ago, and why there’s so much hatred between her father Terence and his former best friend Denny Jordan. When Denny’s daughter Jenny is murdered, Lisa uses her work cleaning up after dead people to try and uncover the secrets that bind together friends and enemies alike. The closer she gets, the more likely her careless last words to Jenny might come back to haunt her–How would you like it if everyone held you responsible for what your father did?
Paragraph: I push open the door into the stranger’s house. Ciara perfume lays against the walls. Couch and matching chairs all flowery. Walls crawl with those blurry peach-toned pictures of little girls in white dresses on the beach. “Well Marilyn,” I say to my mother beside me. “Another day, another dead person.”
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Pitch: Brian Hartman, a senior in high school, gets a job at an adult video/novelty store and over the course of a few months before graduation, not only receives quite an extra-curricular education, but comes to learn that not everyone in his life is who he thought they were.
Paragraph: It all starts on my birthday. I wake up for school like I do every morning, only this time right at the end of a sex dream. If you’re a guy, you know how these dreams end. If you’re a girl, well, let’s just say that I have to clean my underwear in the bathroom sink and leave it to dry in my room. That way my mom won’t see it and I’ll avoid any embarrassment. (I know; it’s kinda gross. But most things that involve sex are a little, aren’t they?)
Anyway, so begins the eighteenth year of my life.
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PS – Title of my submission is “Adult World”
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RESONANCE
Pitch: Resonance Murphy has spent the majority of her twenty-two years avoiding responsibility and caring only about herself, so when she arrives with her estranged mother in her new Maryland hometown of Tyne and discovers she must run a gantlet of reality-bending trials to earn powers that will help her save the world from a rising evil god, she’s more than a little annoyed. With a murderous dark magician, an ancient cult, a desperate fallen goddess, and the twin sister she has long believed dead each intent on thwarting her by any means, Resonance is forced to recant her nihilistic ideals and place her trust in the one person willing to accompany her on her quest to unearth her true powers, fledgling necromancer Quinn Lehrer. As the clock ticks down to the dark god’s ascension, the unlikely couple find themselves in a labyrinth of choice and consequence, where each decision reveals unpleasant truths about Resonance’s long-forgotten past, and brings the reluctant warrior closer to the moment when she will become either the savior of humanity or the catalyst for its downfall.
Paragraph: The angry clanging of pots and pans carried up through the floorboards with repetitive insistency. Resonance ground her teeth against the sound. She disentangled her legs from the snarl of covers and pushed off the mattress the movers had unceremoniously tossed in the center of the floor two weeks earlier. Without bothering to change out of her discount store wifebeater and ragged sweatpants, she made her way downstairs and into the living room, her bare feet plodding along to the rhythm of metal striking against metal in a calculated offensive. She sidestepped a jumble of furniture, kicked a bound pile of gardening magazines under the coffee table and continued through the dining room’s canyon of boxes and discarded bubble wrap. At the next threshold she stopped short, toes even with the strip of wood separating the golden boards of the dining room from the chipped yellow and white Formica kitchen tiles. The delineation of enemy lines.
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THE UNREMEMBERED DEAD: How do you find a child no one believes exists?
When young yet jaded Japanese hacker Takara meets 10-year-old Tyler online, she doubts his story of escape from a cult group’s mass murder in the New Mexico wilderness. The police find no evidence of Tyler’s existence and warn Takara it’s a hoax, or worse, a trap.
But the death of her younger brother in an earthquake years ago still haunts Takara. As Tyler’s laptop dies and he struggles to survive, Takara travels from high-tech Tokyo to the rugged Gila National Forest to save him. However, cult leader Silas also tracks the boy, determined to kill the only witness to his crime. Who will find Tyler first?
First paragraph: As his father drove them deep into the wilderness, Tyler Burroughs realized he was going to die.
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PITCH: Three friends reunite during the summer after their first year of college in their hometown of Myrtle Beach, North Carolina. In a desperate attempt to reconnect with the childhood bond they once had, Ali, Rachel and Tess compile a list of summer events they are required to complete together. Three friends learn through heartbreak, new love, and mini golf that no matter how much time has past, they’ll always have each other.
PARAGRAPH: Rae burst out of the dressing room stall and posed in the doorway. “Does this shirt make me look fat?” Tess was sitting on the dressing room floor, surrounded by shopping bags. She had patiently waited for Rach and Ali to try on everything in at least a dozen different stores. After so many hours of shopping, one shirt looked exactly the same as the next.
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THE LETTER BEA
Pitch:Bea Glasser’s mother, Cate Glasser, has written a best-selling self-help book/memoir. As the success of her mother’s book gains momentum and Cate’s star rises, Bea must deal with the fall out from the revelations contained in her mother’s book. While sifting through her mother’s fan mail one day, Bea comes across a letter from a man named Nathan who alleges that, not only is the memoir element of Cate’s book made up, but that he is Bea’s allegedly long dead father.
Paragraph: She can’t keep pace anymore. The fan mail, once dutifully opened, thoughtfully answered and sealed with a sticker bearing her unique insignia, lies in a dejected pile on the couch in her office. Envelopes have probably crept into the recesses reserved for loose change, forcing Shirley from Saskatoon to rub obscenely with the wildlife pictured tails-side rather than converse, as she intended, with my mother. She feels bad about this and has decided to hire staff to help her cope. So, despite a previously held open disdain for nepotism, I have become chief letter opener. I am a factory worker of sorts, a minion who must adhere to her assembly-line style instructions for mail responses in order to maintain the Model-T output efficiency that characterizes my mother’s self-help book franchise.
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Pitch:Combine a hapless Harvard dropout, a lovelorn lady of the street, and a drunken derelict. Throw in an old pink Lincoln full of bullet holes and a hung-over recollection of buried gold in California. The result is a character-driven road trip – an epic journey in search of buried treasure and the meaning of modern life: ME AND DESTINY.
First Paragraph:
I hate those kinds of books that start out with some boring description of the scenery or the state of the world. But, what the hell. If you really want to know: the brittle leaves had fallen from the trees in Cambridge – faded remnants of colorful dreams – and the cold weather wasn’t doing much to undermine the overpowering stench of bullshit that hangs around Harvard like a smog of smug hot air.
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ME AND DESTINY
Pitch: Combine a hapless Harvard dropout, a lovelorn lady of the street, and a drunken derelict. Throw in an old pink Lincoln full of bullet holes and a hung-over recollection of buried gold in California. The result is a character-driven road trip – an epic journey in search of buried treasure and the meaning of modern life: ME AND DESTINY.
First Paragraph: I hate those kinds of books that start out with some boring description of the scenery or the state of the world. But, what the hell. If you really want to know: the brittle leaves had fallen from the trees in Cambridge – faded remnants of colorful dreams – and the cold weather wasn’t doing much to undermine the overpowering stench of bullshit that hangs around Harvard like a smog of smug hot air.
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Title: Rending’s Time
Pitch: Imagine a female time traveling James Bond. Genevieve Rending is a spy in the United Kingdom’s Temporal Interval Management Experts, aka TIME. Going wherever and whenever she is assigned, this particular novel has Gene struggling to get back into the service after being sanctioned for a year, unraveling a plot to keep King John from signing the Magna Carta, while fighting her need for revenge against the man who scarred and almost killed her a year ago.
Paragraph: Rending sat alone in the darkened corner of the pub sipping on a pint of bitter. She knew that most people in her line of work preferred whiskey or vodka martinis, but she wasn’t most people. What she really wanted was Horlicks and Amarula. That’s what you needed on a cold windy night like this. But she couldn’t indulge herself at the moment. Besides, such an unusual drink was memorable to bartenders, and she had no intention of being memorable tonight.
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FAVORABLE IMPRESSIONS
Pitch:
Victoria Aston is a tomboyish Regency nineteen-year-old who would rather help manage her family estate in Hampshire than navigate the ballrooms of London. But when her family discovers that her sister is the victim of spousal abuse, Vicky’s parents tell her she must marry before her sister’s vicious husband can lay claim to their lands. Vicky’s parents throw her into the whirl of the social season where she has to find the strength to battle jealous suitors, the scheming of her brother-in-law, and the resentment of the young man she’s had a crush on since childhood, all while evading mysterious kidnapping and murder attempts. To triumph over those who seek to destroy everything she holds dear, Vicky must use all her wits to discover the truth and find the courage to trust someone other than herself.
First Paragraph:
–Oakbridge Estate, Hampshire, England, 1817–
Had Victoria Aston known when she awoke that in a few short hours she would be crouching behind the prickliest bramble bush in Hampshire, mud-splattered and tear-stained, she might have decided to sleep through breakfast. Unfortunately, on that particular day, Vicky had opened her eyes to the welcome sight of golden sunshine spreading over the verdant countryside and launched herself from bed, heading for the stables with all the delicacy of a prize ox. She could practically hear how her mother would have chastised her, had she been witness to Vicky’s unladylike behavior, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. The early mornings spent alone with her horse, Jilly, were blessedly devoid of society’s constraints—and more importantly, of her mother’s fretting over how Vicky was, at age nineteen, woefully unmarried and surely on the road to spinsterhood.
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Pitch:This is THE SOUL SEEKERS: the story about a girl, a town, and a ghost. Eighteen year old Emma Shay is the newbie who longs to escape time-stunted Springvail. But when she meets the young man who has roamed invisible since 1956, she begins to wonder who caused his condition . . . and what can she do bring him back to life.
Paragraph: For just a moment I hesitated behind the wheel. Then stepping out from where we’d parked by the south side of the square, reached in to extract a huge money jar from its seat belted position in the back of Grandmother Carrie’s monster Pontiac. “Ready?”
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TITLE: What She Wrote
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TITLE: What She Wrote
PITCH: When irascible twenty-six-year-old Kate is summoned to attend her dying Gran, the unconventional Celeste, she collides with her warring family – her mother and nemesis Angel; her beloved though mercurial Aunt Harmony; and Jane, Celeste’s partner. Ancient betrayals and secret pacts have fractured the Simone women and provide the backdrop for an explosive gathering as well as a mission for Celeste who is determined not to die without repairing the damage wrought by her delusions of activism. When Celeste dies before completing her task, Kate witnesses a final clash between Angel and Harmony that unveils the truth of her parentage and helps her come to terms with herself – and her mother.
PARAGRAPH: I lay with my eyes closed waiting for Matt’s breath to deepen and slow. When it did and he rolled away from me, I slid off the edge of the mattress, grabbing my glasses from the nightstand and my T-shirt from the floor. I eased the bedroom door shut behind me and slipped to the living room where I stood looking out into the city’s almost-dark. The streetlights hid the stars and painted squares of light through my apartment’s windows onto the dark wood floor. Wishing for a cigarette, I found a glass of stale water left on an end table and sipped it instead. I tried to think of nothing at all.
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Pitch: In a retro-futuristic coal-mining slave society, 19-year-old Lilah Collyer forms an unlikely friendship with a grieving middle-aged man exiled from another group of slaves for committing a crime of passion. For them the question becomes not whether they can escape the slave camp into the unknown world beyond, but whether they truly want to.
Paragraph: The big hand on Lilah’s wristwatch was almost to Tuesday, she saw, glancing down at it. She tried not to look at her watch while she was working, because when the dial was still only at mid-Friday or half-Sunday, she sometimes got a feeling of nausea when she looked up again and saw the tunnel stretching ahead of her, dark beyond the sphere of illumination provided by her headlamp. It was the same nausea she occasionally felt at the beginning of her shift, when a whole fifteen and a half hours still lay ahead of her, and it seemed like it would be forever before the mass of those hours would finally dissolve into the black sweetness of sleep, only to swim up before her again on waking. But this time when her eyes strayed to the wristwatch, she felt vindicated, and a spurt of excitement twisted in her stomach and made her heart beat faster. Only another hour or so to her sleep break, she saw, and when she woke it would be Tuesday.
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GOSSAMER
Pitch: Sophia Blithe might have been the most ordinary person in the world – or at least in all of Oregon – but when you’re the infamous “Blithe Baby”, and your mother’s in a mental facility for killing your father and nearly killing you, and your foster father is the most conservative radio host on the west coast, you’re anything but ordinary. Add on to that a jealous boyfriend, a new school, and an indigo-eyed charmer who doesn’t seem to care about your past and you’ve got the makings of a pretty messed up fairy tale.
Paragraph: “Sophia!” I sighed as my name was shouted down to me from the top gondola of the Ferris wheel. Peering up, I could see my best friend lean over the rail; her face alit with the grin of a fool, her dark hair hanging down in her face like the kelp.
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Pitch: After her mother’s suicide, Annie traverses her rock-n-roll teen existence in the 1980s while getting life lessons from Abraham Lincoln, among other Civil War ghosts. Meanwhile, in 1830s Illinois, another Annie struggles to define herself and come to terms with her love for Abe. The lives of both young women are connected by history’s filaments.
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June, 1987: Gettysburg, PA
They’re burying my mother today and Abe Lincoln thinks I should go to the funeral. I hear my stepfather Dan pull out of the driveway on his way to the cemetery and the car stops just a moment in front of the barn. It idles before turning down Emmitsburg Road. This morning I told Dan he couldn’t make me go to the funeral and he believed me. Instead, I sit in the barn, on a musty mound of damp hay, downing Stoli shots from my mother’s favorite glass.
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Pitch: When eighteen-year-old Sioneh of Rhyged, the warrior heiress of King Arthur’s largest subkingdom, saves an attractive young priest from Saxon raiders, it appears she’s found an ally against her father, who’s trying to steal her crown. But after witnessing her mother’s violent death, Sioneh’s unable to trust, and Medraut, the priest, has more than one secret to hide. Complete at 97,800 words, The Deadly Peace is a romantic fantasy with a contemporary edge.
Where were the bodies? In the two years she’d patrolled the coasts Sioneh of Rhyged saw enough raids to know there had to be bodies. She leaned on the pommel of her war horse’s saddle and scratched his withers as she scanned the rutted lane that in a bigger village might have served as a street. . There ought to be at least one figure sprawled awkwardly in the mud, his limbs splayed in a morbid parody of a run. And another half-in, half-out of one of the doorways, a futile weapon in his hand. Or a pair of shapely legs, painted with blood, beneath a skirt pulled over its wearer’s breasts and face.
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Pitch:Two worlds collide when the opposite personalities of a fame-driven hipster and an invisible working stiff take up residence in one man. For Niles
Wilson, only one can survive.After quitting his music career and drug use, he gets a job in an environment overrun by thugs and thieves––the TV industry–– where a battle for his soul ensues as he fights to discover his true identity: a hip young artist, a devoted newlywed, or a drug-fueled maniac on the verge of committing the ultimate crime.
Paragraph: Niles Wilson paced the one room apartment enough to measure a mile. He’d stop, on occasion, to track his breath lingering in the cold dank space. Attempting to keep warm, he pounded fists against the sides of his head. Above him tiny footsteps surrendered to another rapid-fire Spanish argument, which echoed through gulch-like cracks in the plaster. Then, as if stung by a bullwhip, he sprang to an old cinder-block bookshelf and yanked an unread copy of WAR AND PEACE from the top row, which jolted the makeshift structure. Behind that book sat a small Tupperware bowl containing a plastic grinder, similar to the type drugstores sell for turning pills into powder. Along with the grinder, he dug out an old spoon seared by previous flames ignited to escape his present hell. Niles plucked the bowl from its hiding spot, then, slid the book back in place. Ignoring the scurry of cockroaches, he snatched his army surplus trench coat from a laundry heap that grew like a Jersey landfill ever since he finished a string of jam sessions a few weeks earlier — culminating in a canceled record deal, and no band.
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WILD FIRE by Rashda
Pitch: Dragon shape-shifter, Lynn Alexander, is haunted by her failure to save her grandmother from a fire. When mysterious fires burning up acres of West Texas threaten her best friend, she faces her insecurities and goes on the hunt for the arsonist. The question driving her nuts: Is her main suspect a rogue dragon bent on destruction or the love of her life?
Paragraph: Lynn Hana Alexander woke choking. Hot, boiling air pressed thick and heavy against her skin, her mouth, her nostrils. Prickles of anxiety spread through her veins as if an army of attacking ants lay trapped beneath her skin. Her mouth opened and closed, trying to suck in air. Agony and nausea twisted through her. She lay feverish, petrified. Trapped in tangled sheets.
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Pitch: Lucy Silver once dreamed; then she stopped dreaming. Now she must dream again. The Earthbound are breaking loose, and only Lucy can stop them – unless they stop her first.
Daniel Winter knows something is up when the mysterious Aloysius Black accosts him in an Oxford bookshop and warns him Lucy is in danger. Strange things happen on his return to Newport, ghostly hands and girls without faces, but guarding Lucy is easier said than done.
Paragraph:Daniel hadn’t noticed the man at first. There were other things to look at, lectures to hear, questions to ask. Questions. Ask a question, his teacher had urged, make an impact, at least get a feel of the place, of how it is done. His tone had been one of regret, perhaps envy. He might have gone to Oxford but now he was old. Forty-five, Daniel guessed, unmarried, marking done by seven and down to the pub. In the mornings Mr Jenkins smelt of beer and cigarettes.
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Pitch: An ultra powerful consortium has kidnapped CIA operative, Shawna O’Malley’s, twelve-year-old daughter. To get her back, O’Malley teams with a Chinese prophet who leads her into a world of mysticism and intrigue.
Paragraph: The swamp smelled of a million years of decayed trees and animals. The morning was oddly silent given the cacophony of birds and insects that normally trilled their unique sounds. The creatures were muted by the synthetic thump of the outboard motors that pushed five boats up the river.
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Pitch: “Not everything is as it appears to be,” became the mantra of Sarah, a wildlife photographer for a major U.S. magazine. Last year’s assignment resulted in more than photographs as she battles to come to terms with her forest encounter with an extraordinary man, the other-worldly child she’s now raising alone, and the two strangers who want to either observe her son, or destroy him.
First Paragraph: As rain hammered the Rover’s aluminum body, battering it from all sides, Sarah could hear the run-off on the road grow louder. She risked a quick glance out the side window — she was in trouble. The ditches were overflowing, swamping over their banks, turning into a river as they sluiced down the mountain, carrying road debris that pummeled the Rover from behind. When fogged windows reduced visibility to nil, she reluctantly pulled over to wait out the storm. No sooner had she stopped the vehicle and put it in park, when another stab of pain lanced through her. She doubled over and moaned, holding her stomach; the sharp pain lacing with the constant, gnawing hunger. Closing her eyes, she tried to relax, tried to move past the pain… tried to figure out what was wrong with her.
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Title: Twenty-Somewhere
Pitch: Originally written for the web as “episodes,” Twenty-Somewhere tells the story of three best friends as they navigate life after college. Beautiful and confident Sophie, goody goody aspiring writer Claudia, and boy-crazy nerd MJ are ready to take on the Real World — or so they think. As relationships go sour, careers sputter, and ethical dilemmas arise, the girls turn to the one thing they can always count on: their friendship with each other. But even that will be put to the test…
First paragraph: Three young women gather at the end of summer to say their goodbyes. Long-limbed Sophie is dressed for a tennis match and has plans to meet X at the courts right after this. She likes to keep busy. MJ sips from her cappuccino, licking foam off her top lip and evaluating the guys in the room. Believe it or not, she’s the nerd of the group. Last but not least is Claudia, late as always. She breezes into the café, spewing apologies in advance.
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Title: Bite Me
Pitch: Its Animal House meets Christophe Moore when werewolf Talbot Osbourne is forced to partner with vegetarian vampire Julian St. George to catch a would-be assassin before either of them get slayed—if they don’t kill each other first, that is. Throw in a shapeshifter with ferret envy, a nymphomaniac wizard who makes people’s clothes disappear, and a banshee with laryngitis issues, and these boys are in for the summer of their lives. Or deaths.
First Paragraph: Talbot blamed his mother for the fact he’d spent most of the summer impersonating a nun. Though the financial system in the Osbourne household had something to do with it, too. That was his father’s fault—a physics professor who left his family the day he discovered his wife and children were all werewolves. Talbot blamed the bastard every time money ran tight. Which explained his current situation.
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PITCH for GLOW:
When college student Lily Emerson is drawn into a world hidden in the subway tunnels of Boston, she must come to terms with her newfound siren magic, her love for cursed faerie Ben Sullivan, and the army of crows hunting her. Separated from her allies, only one thing remains on which she can rely: her voice.
FIRST PARAGRAPH:
When I left the Boston Public Library that night, the moon was high and so full it was almost daylight. The stone steps of the library and Trinity Church across the street were much clearer than they normally would be at ten o’clock. A row of trees lined the small park in front of the church and threw awkward shadows into Copley Square. Restaurants and bars up and down the street were open, their sparkling lights giving them away, but I felt completely alone—an odd feeling to have in the middle of the city.
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Pitch: It’s been nearly two years since Jack dropped out of college, left New Jersey and moved to Boulder, Colorado. He had hoped that he’d make something of himself out west, hoped he would grow into someone who could impress his unfaithful ex-girlfriend Nancy back home, maybe become something like a writer. But after a series of low-paying jobs, and countless personal humiliations– he now finds he’s even worse off than before. Jobless, lonely, broke, evicted and losing the world’s most comfortable couch—he’s about ready to cut his losses, call it quits and head back to Jersey. But then he meets Christina, an attractive, wealthy, mysterious girl from Los Angeles who, for reasons Jack can’t quite seem to understand, has taken a liking to him. He soon thinks Christina may be the girl who can finally erase Nancy from his memory. That is until he learns that Christina’s boyfriend is driving out from Miami to come and visit. Why she has never mentioned a boyfriend or the fact that said boyfriend is six feet five, two hundred and fifty pounds and already on his way to Boulder—Christina refuses to say. But Jack begins to realize that things aren’t quite right with Christina and he suspects she’s harboring more than one secret. Whether he should stay or get out—Jack can’t seem to decide; but he knows that this is an experience that he will remember for the rest of his life.
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Pitch: It’s been nearly two years since Jack dropped out of college, left New Jersey and moved to Boulder, Colorado. He had hoped that he’d make something of himself out west, hoped he would grow into someone who could impress his unfaithful ex-girlfriend Nancy back home, maybe become something like a writer. But after a series of low-paying jobs, and countless personal humiliations– he now finds he’s even worse off than before. Jobless, lonely, broke, evicted and losing the world’s most comfortable couch—he’s about ready to cut his losses, call it quits and head back to Jersey. But then he meets Christina, an attractive, wealthy, mysterious girl from Los Angeles who, for reasons Jack can’t quite seem to understand, has taken a liking to him. He soon thinks Christina may be the girl who can finally erase Nancy from his memory. That is until he learns that Christina’s boyfriend is driving out from Miami to come and visit. Why she has never mentioned a boyfriend or the fact that said boyfriend is six feet five, two hundred and fifty pounds and already on his way to Boulder—Christina refuses to say. But Jack begins to realize that things aren’t quite right with Christina and he suspects she’s harboring more than one secret. Whether he should stay or get out—Jack can’t seem to decide; but he knows that this is an experience that he will remember for the rest of his life.
First Paragraph:
My apartment was on 30th and Valmont, across the street from the Three Diamond gas station. A quarter of a mile down the road there was a chicken processing plant. On some days, when the breeze was blowing in the right direction, the stench from the plant would come through my windows and haunt everything around me.
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Pitch: Mellie Berg possesses a unique ability to communicate with animals and finds remarkable uses for that talent as a vet school student. When she becomes the target of professional assassins, she cannot fathom why. Her beloved father owns a private animal research firm and she discovers that his lab’s unusual experiments are the reason for her troubles. A religious consortium seeks to kill her because she is a product of her father’s animal research. Her existence is a genetic bridge between animals and humans, a link to evolutionism, and a threat to creationists.
First Paragraph: Mellie positioned the sterilized tray of surgical tools beside the little dog sprawled across the operating table. Shaved in a wide swath down his back, the dachshund’s front paws were strapped forward, his back legs secured behind. A canine in prayer.
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Title: Legend of the Shaolin Blade: The Land of Drifting Ghosts
Pitch: Set in a world of flux – 7th century China – this an action/adventure story of father-son relationships set against the establishment of China’s greatest dynasty, the Tang. Fifteen years after Tanzong escaped his family’s massacre by finding shelter in a Buddhist monastery, he re-enters the secular world as a Zen master/warrior monk to search for his parents. Mutual necessity forces him to join with the emperor’s cousin, Li Wei, to face ever interweaving conflicts that involve the fate of China’s greatest dynasty and their own personal quests. This adventure story of magic, myth, and occult powers is written in the traditional Chinese-style wuxia (heroic fiction) genre.
First Paragraph:
Chapter 1
A Shaman’s Villa on Azure Fortress Mountain, Sichuan
The boy’s eyes flashed into focus seeking out the screams. The smoke, thick pine scented smoke, filled his bedroom and seared his eyes, nose, and throat. He rubbed his eyes and peered out into the dim hallway. Lodged in the floor, a fire arrow, consuming itself, marked the entrance to his room. He remembered, father is not home! He scrambled off his sleeping pallet and ran toward the doorway to save his mother and sister.
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Crouched in a corner of the old farmhouse, Maggie Young clutches Will’s rifle with shaking hands as she waits for the sound of splintering wood to drown out the song of crickets and rain. She’s been in that room before, listening for the approach of the man who’s coming to kill her and praying that Will finds her first. She knows the odds are stacked against her,and even if she does survive the delusional obsession that’s driven her would-be suitor to this extreme, a chain of events has already been set in motion and history is determined to repeat itself.
First paragraph:
Preface
January 5th
Jack is in the field with the cows today. I can’t imagine what he hopes to accomplish in this awful weather, perhaps a cold? I often wonder if he’d show more of an interest in me if I grew an udder and took to grazing.
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Words that Rhyme with Stupid
Kate Burroughs is skulking back to high school with 40k in student loan debt and a bra without enough padding for the level of air conditioning in the average classroom. School is intense; the students are wild, the teachers are wilder. When the repulsively vile Computer Tech teacher starts spreading rumors about her, Kate’s teenage problems are revisited while her adult problems are just beginning.
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My student loans are living, breathing things that do what all living, breathing things do. They reproduce. Copulate. Compound. But I can keep them at bay. I can hold them off, if only, if only, I can get an A+ in a Survey of Supervision in the American Classroom. An A+ I have no chance of earning, because Ernest Perriwinkle just yacked Gummi bears all over Mrs. Maloney’s desk. Whole Gummi bears. Did he take them like medicine? Down them with a little water or Diet Mountain Dew? It is only 7:45 A.M. Does Ernest Perriwinkle eat Gummi bears for breakfast? Are little semi-transparent Gummi demons possessing him and spewing out at inopportune moments?
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Working Title: “Believe in Magic”
Meet Alia: her boyfriend is a werewolf, her half sister is half witch, and her history teachers keep trying to kill her. And, if that wasn’t enough, there’s always her boyfriend’s psychotic ex-girlfriend to deal with. Life isn’t easy for a princess-in-hiding.
First Paragraph:
The smell of dead blood assailed his nose. The smell was so thick it hurt, and choked him momentarily. He held the baby as close to his chest as he could without smothering her. The baby’s mother, a child herself, clutched his arm desperately. She pulled herself as close to him as she could as they both pressed against the cold wall of the dank, dark, seeping stone castle. He held a finger to his lips when he thought the girl was going to say something. He took a deep breath of the air around them, trying not to choke on the blood and to find out if their hunters were anywhere nearby.
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