Queens: Obsidian

Brilliant dark concept. Love it.
Backed with pleasure
Abel Kane
The Alchemists' Cookbook

I like the concept. Shelved. Hope you will take a look at Royal Blood Chronicles and do the same, save the comments.

I'm nothing if not predictable!
Being Authonomy's #1 common potato and professional spam doctor, trust me, you must master the basic technique of saying “SHELVED!” as often as possible in order to grab the new members. That's how one climbs in ranking - gathering exposure though comments won’t help better your novel but it certainly helps better your novel’s position.

I’m not interested in your comments on my book when you get the chance; all I want is your shelf.

Love Sooty Max.

Like this very much. Brilliant short pitch. Short and succinct. The long tells me but not too much. Being Authonomy's #1 commentator and amateur pitch doctor, trust me, you mastered this basic sales technique to grab the casual reader. That's how you climb in ranking to gather more exposure and comments to better your novel. SHELVED!

I can use your comments on my book when you get the chance. Cheers!

JC
The Obergemau Key
Authonomy's #1 rated commentator

Good short chapters which I'm sure is vital for YA and narration which sounds just like a young person speaking. It seems unique to me, though I've never read YA apart from on here. It's terse, to the point and down-to -earth. Brilliant. Backed. Lynn

Okay, so I read through the whole thing, and thought I should leave you another comment
1. I think I would've loved it even more when I was sixteen, this is exactly the kind of novel that YA girls like
2. Your cover is not doing it justice, when I saw it for the first time I thought it was historical fiction
3. The sarcasm of the main character is super entertaining, but in action scenes and intense dialogues, it distracts and sometimes irritates. I think it would be to the book's benefit you left the bare minimum in those scenes.
4. I think more exposure of the adult witched will be necessary - I read through the entire thing and still have questions that should've already been answered.
5. Work on your pitch, make it more personal, and really juice the Red queen, White queen line - it really is a great friggin idea.

Hope that helped, and please write more, I am very interested where this will go.

Hi L.A.,

I really enjoyed reading your work, it's fresh and different. The voice you write with is attention grabbing and clear. I really believe this will do well with the audience you have targeted. Good Luck and Best Wishes.

Backed 100%

Patrick Armstead
Dark Lands

Odd one, this. I really don't think I'd buy it, and in many respects I find the narrative voice fundamentally unlikeable, but I admire your technical skill a great deal. Very polished, very professional, virtually free from grammatical or spelling errors, and I know your writing's fairly succinct, but I still got through ten chapters in one go, and part of me wants to read more. I know I'm really not your target demographic - at the same time, I do read pretty widely, and I'm happy with young adult stuff if I find the story reason enough to keep going. So I find it mildly peculiar that in some ways this seems to epitomise many of the 'like, whatever' aspects of the form I can't stand, yet I still thought it was well-written enough to draw me in regardless.

It could be the short chapters - I think anything indulgent stands a lot better chance of being moreish if it's packaged in tiny chunks. That's definitely meant as a compliment - regardless of my personal tastes I thought the pacing was really pretty well done, with just enough of a mini-cliffhanger at the end of each instalment to tip me over the edge into the next part. And the length seemed pretty well-judged, too - nice, sparing prose, quick and pacy enough the lack of any overt descriptive material didn't really seem like too much of a shortcoming.

Good characterisation as well, I felt - again, whatever I thought of these people as the reader, I did think you'd done quite a lot to give them fairly distinctive voices, which isn't an easy thing when you're writing so quickly and giving yourself so little to play with. The internal monologuing seemed very consistent, too.

But yes, the main shortcoming for me was in ten chapters I'd started to decide I didn't like any of the cast much. I don't think it's any reflection on you (and I say that because I have read and disliked things on this site because I thought people were putting their own voice into the narrative in entirely the wrong way). It could be the frequent asides - they seemed a little too curt, too perfunctory - or maybe the atmosphere of everyone hating (or at best being contemptuous of) everyone else. I get the highschool as a battleground thing, obviously, but I do wonder if having everyone at each others' throats right from the off is necessarily the best way to go about it.

At the same time, this could largely just be personal taste - again, I do understand you're not really writing for me! - and I do admire your obvious technical aptitude. I'm going to stick this on my list, and try a little more, see if I warm to it any further. Not sure if I'd want to shelve it, but I'd definitely like to give something this well crafted some small gesture of support. I hope my comments prove useful, and good luck with your writing all the same.

interesting.. i don't have any space of my shelf but I'll watchlist you (sorry if that's a wrong thing to do, I'm new here :) I really like your dialgoue and the internal monologue of the character (Alyssa) is very entertaining... very well done!

E.

ha! great prologue - I love how she drops the news to casually and now I really wanna know who the hell is Jack - all good things for a person with a short attention span like myself

You've moved up fast. I can see why. I'll back this for you and help out. Dave

53) “I belong to you (now).”

55) ...awesome that it is me (who) broke it by being cool.—this sentence could use some mechanical/grammar work.

60) It feels like I should be nearing the end of the book though it’s like it’s actually just getting started.

61) The plot is starting to get sluggish. Your prose has become short narrative sentences.

65) Be careful with the addition of tertiary characters. It weakens the story if they aren’t well-rounded or given enough attention to justify naming them.

68)Things are starting to get interesting again.

74) I think of things that are “X” rated to be sexual in nature, rather than profane. Maybe you can say they were NC-17 rated?

75) I really like the Alice in Wonderland references that are popping up. Wish there were more of them in the intro to your book. Maybe instead of “Rebel Without a Cause” she could be reading “Through the Looking Glass” for school? She references it earlier after all...

20) My heart fell out of my chest and landed in a big squishy... this paragraph is a little distracting from the smooth flow of events. Especially her thoughts about if he was or was not dating someone from the princess posse.

24) So I guess the teacher wasn’t really serious when they said the students would be stuck with the seats they picked for the rest of the year, since Jack is able to change his to sit with Lily. It’s odd that you say it takes 3 weeks for him to star talking to her again and then not mention what he says to her, at least not in the same chapter.

26) such fun details—her patchwork back hitting his butt as he runs.

27) Is he driving a convertible with the top down, yet the widows up? (She looks out the window, yet he dumps her in the seat without opening the door). If you drive a convertible, the windows should be rolled down if the top is down.

30) I’m not familiar with what “B and E” stand for. Why would Alyssum think there was a vampire at her window, or is this in reference to B and E? Seems out of the blue to me.

31) Alyssum sees he’s bleeding in 30. It seems heartless to me for her to refuse to let him in. If she hasn’t noticed he’s injured then you should remove it from her point of view. Seems odd that she doesn’t comment on it initially.

32 or 33) Please, spare me the Twilight references.

36) You should SERIOUSLY consider rewriting the book from a 3rd person point of view. That way you could switch between perspectives whenever you wanted without the awkwardness of needing to break up the chapters. If not, perhaps use one font for Jack’s thoughts and one for Alyssum’s

37) Horror? This is quickly turning into a comedy.

38) You need to put in more references of how she’s immune to the witch craft. So far I can only think of the one instance in the cafeteria with the red queen. Have there been more?

39) The story seems to be losing its directional focus. The story seems to be different than the one alluded to in the pitch. Is this really about the hierarchy in the school, or is it about freeing Jack from his subservience?

42) In the beginning of the book I thought you said she wasn’t the fighting type and she tries to discredit herself as the aggressive type. Seems like that is untrue.

Of all the books you’ve uploaded, I was most interested in reviewing this one.

2) “rapes” or rapings? The voice of the MC seems a little naïve and ignorant in regards to how she declared what “people’s” opinion of what gangs are. I would be careful as specific generalizations can be unintentionally offensive.

3) Do you really want to create bias by potentially labeling your MC as a Mormon/ Latter Day Saint with the reference to BYU? (Brigham Young University, I’m assuming.) This creates issues with things like “Aren’t Mormons not supposed to swear?” Yet Alyssa calls Lily a “bitch”.

5) I generally still think of witches as humans, or is Jack something other than another witch? I don’t think the species changes, even if some have magical powers and some don’t. I assume you’ll expand on this later.

6) Do fish really gawp? Not too fond of “It was the guy.” The subject seems a little nebulous and informal.

7) Mine and Lily’s relationship—shorten to just “our” relationship... since it’s obvious who the subject is. Can Jack read minds or why else would he be thinking what Alyssa is thinking about him and Lily being a couple? I do love how cocky Jack is. The promise for a romantic relationship between the two has me itching to keep reading more.

8) “It wasn’t the guy.” She should at least call Jack her seating partner or something less informal, even if she doesn’t know his name. Jack doesn’t refute in 7 that he’s Lily’s boyfriend, then having Alyssum think of him as “Lily’s boyfriend” in her thoughts almost makes it seem like fact. He should really just introduce himself when he sits next to her so you can refer to him by his name.

You contradict yourself “That guy beat me to it.” (implicates I think that he does hit her) then she says that “she’s not worth it”.

Her parents are paying to have her go to school here? I was not aware this was a private school. Did I miss you mentioning that earlier?

Should Mace be capitalized?

9) Shares the same text as chapter 8.

10) Why does she live so far from the school. 20 minutes on a residential road? Wow.

11) Private schools provide bus service? Engineer booted foot? Not a steel-toe construction worker’s booted foot?

13) “blood knuckles”. Blood on her knuckles or bloodied knuckles.

14) My eye started to twitch. (Remove paragraph return) “Can I help you?” I demanded.

“Can’t I eat lunch with the new girl?”—odd for her to refer to her as “the new girl” rather than “you” “Not if you don’t want to eat tabletop”. The double/triple negative here is confusing because of the “Can’t from the first sentence.”

Red hair with green eyes is a huge cliché and perhaps the most common one on this site.

16) In what way did Geneva lie to her face?

17) I wonder what this would be like in a real book and where your chapter breaks would actually start and end.

19) Another vampire. Should I be surprised, impressed? Smart of you to save this revelation for this late in your book. I think a lot of people would be turned off if you mentioned it in your pitch since the market seems to be oversaturated with them. I’m wondering now if you can’t think of some other dangerous creature he could be besides a vampire. Maybe he could be a witch’s familiar in a human form that needs/craves blood to survive?

I really like it. The pacing is seriously gorgeous. I love Alyssa because she's not the weak, afraid heroine, she'll kick your butt and not think twice about it! The characters are all really well concocted and I hope you write more. That's right, this girl read it BEGINNING TO END!! Well...not in one straight shot, but still, you get the picture, it's good, keep it coming. :]

Well what can U say, not at all what I expected, sort of Harry Potter with girlie angst! Work on your pitch! This is a book with guts telling a story with meaning, Well done, Maggie P.

LA there is a sub story that need to be told. I was most impressed with your dialogue and descriptions. Your opening strikes a mighty blow—intense. I found the plot interesting and characters compelling. There is a rhythm in the writing that adds to the already good pace--its sets the tone for the remainder of the book
Best wishes
Scott
The Esrevinu Chronicles/Secrets of the Elephant Rocks

Hi, LA -

I'm not a big reader of YA (passed out of that audience too many years ago to admit to), but I have to tell you how much I enjoyed your book.

I love the first person voice, and it works so well here. Left me feeling like I was reading the literary love child of Rowling and S. E. Hinton.

Exceptional writing, and I'm delighted to back your book.

Best of luck with it, and I would love it if you could take a look at mine.

Thanks.

-Jeff Lee
THE LADIES TEMPERANCE CLUB'S FAREWELL TOUR

This is a very modern look at highschool life: viewing it as a battlefield rather than a learning environment. And this is a war on steroids; there are real witches here doing battle. I think this will attract a wide teenge audience as they will see themselves in Alyssa and know someone who makes them think of Lily. It's a good read. Burgio (Grain of Salt).

When I read the pitch, I was nodding in agreement. School is a war ground at the best of times with different tribes almost but to throw in the supernatural is fantastic without becoming Buffy like. i can see the school and the characters, believable setting but hitting back at the buly sometimes is the worst thing to do. I liked the dialogue, smooth and flowing and the author has obviously planned where this story is going. witches and their powers in this battle when they threaten the only oasis in the storm may well blow everything apart or smash it back to normaity. Good start.

Your tag got me hooked, how it starts with a slap and ends with a war. Very compelling. You have a strong voice. My only problem with this is that you are telling more than showing. I don't want to be told what happened between these girls or how the war started. I want to experience it. Other than that, I think you really have something here.

I like this... it catches my interest from the start and makes me want to keep reading. Good luck.

You have quite the compelling read here! A real talent for pacing and truly a wonderfully vivid imagination! Well crafted so far and backed with pleasure!

Liz
The Cheech Room

Good 'voice' and I think it will appeal to the YA crowd. I've got to say that you're blurb didn't read quite right. Not sure why though.

Great read! Read as far as Chapter 4 and was captivated, but no time for more right now. Great writing 'voice' and easy dialogue. A natural. Cheers!
Carollyne