I’m submitting an adult sci-fi manuscript (cli-fi,
apocalyptic, if we want to get more specific) for #PitchWars this year.
The plot, in a little more than a nutshell:
Nineteen-year-old Douglas experiences inexplicable, crippling anxiety and
destructive rage, but he’s found a solution: a drug that will take away his
emotions. The military is offering it to make better soldiers. He soon becomes
such an exemplary guard that he’s assigned to protect Selena, a solar-powered
teenager created to help repopulate the planet. When he discovers that she’s
really a prisoner in her own home, suffering through painful experiments, he
can either help her escape—and slowly go insane—or lose everything that makes
him human in order to survive. It has a lot of science, a good amount of
pseudo-science, some philosophy, action, and love (in semi-romantic doses).
I submitted this manuscript to Pitch Wars three years
ago, as YA, and it wasn’t chosen. Just after submitting, I started working as
the Operations Assistant at Skyhorse Publishing. I’m now their Operations
Manager. I got married. I wrote, edited, and sent 98 queries for a completely
different novel. I came back to this novel and realized that it had much more
complex themes than I was giving it room to explore. A lot has changed in my
life. So has a lot in this manuscript.
Now that I’ve been working in publishing for three
years and gained more life experience in general, it’s affected how I look at
writing and informed a new approach to this book. I’ve added to the original
inspiration, which I talked about in my last bio, and am now submitting it as adult.
Douglas’ voice is still YA to a point, but his arc (and Selena’s) has expanded
to accommodate more of what I’ve learned about the courage of love over the
past three years. Their stories are less about discovering themselves and more
about finding out what it really means to be human—what it really means to love
someone. That’s a loaded topic. Everyone has a different opinion on it. These
characters find out a little more about what their opinion is about it, and
hopefully challenge readers to define more of their opinion about it.
I like books that make me think. One of my more
profound reading experiences over the past few years was Kiersten White’s AND I
DARKEN, which I’d read just before I got engaged. It prompted me to confront
some equally profound thoughts about love and marriage, the biggest of which
was that loving someone—really loving someone—means that you give up your
freedom. In loving someone you are bound to them, and that’s both a very
powerful and very scary thing. So this manuscript touches on that topic a
little: the power of the choice to love. The gravity behind that choice. The
joy. The different kind of freedom that results from it.
All in all, I love these kinds of questions. These
characters. The interstitial spaces in which we live our lives. I’ve also been
more around the block in the querying/writing realm than I had been three years
ago, so I’m better equipped to handle criticism, intense revision, and getting
to the truth of the story than ever before. I hope to find a mentor who’s
equally excited about exploring these themes with me (and who’s just as driven
as me to get things done). I’m ready to give this book its chance to become
fully-realized.
Some of the music I listen to when I work on this
book to give you more of its vibe:
Cough
Syrup (Young the Giant)
Difficulty
(KT Tunstall)
Feed
the Machine (Nickelback)
Technologic
(Daft Punk)
Solar-Powered
Life (The Classic Crime) - this is the song that actually inspired the short
story that became this novel
Weight
of Living, Pts. I and II (Bastille)
Complainer
(Cold War Kids)
Run
for Cover (The Killers)
99
Luftballoons (the original is great, so is the version from the Atomic Blonde
soundtrack)
Anna
Sun (Walk the Moon)
Thanks for reading! Please connect with me on Twitter:
@AlexScholls. Always looking to make new writer friends.
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