Yay! Blog Award!

So, apparently, we were nominated for the Liebster Blog award by the ever-awesome Emaginette.

The rules for the Liebster Award are:

* Each nominee must answer the 11 questions.
* Create 11 questions for the next nominees to answer.
* Link back to who nominated them.
* Choose 11 people and link them in your post.
* Go to their page and tell them.
* No tag backs!

So it goes without saying that I'm so thankful for this, and without further ado, here are my answers!

Favorite breakfast?

Bacon and Eggs, definitely.

Muffins or Cupcakes?

Chocolate cupcakes, definitely.

Dog or Cat?

Dogs, definitely. The meat is way more tender and cat whiskers keep getting caught in my teeth.

Autumn or Spring?

Spring. It’s just so full of promise, promises of backyard barbecues, and camping trips, and days at the beach. Autumn is just a reminder that soon we will be buried in another brutal Canadian winter and the mayor will be forced to send polar bears out to clean up the frozen corpses again.

PC or Apple?

I can't hear you over ALL the Apple products that are around me right now.

Beer or Wine?

Well, I’m Canadian, so the answer must be beer. If I were to say wine, people would accuse me of being FRENCH Canadian, and nobody wants that.

Your goal for 2013?

Get an R&R (Revise & Resubmit) for Little Miss Evil.

What do you like to read?

Holes by Louis Sachar, Divergent by Veronica Roth, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I love anything gritty, twisty, and unique.

What is your all time favorite character? (Be it from books, films or cartoons.)

The Joker (Heath Ledger) from Dark Knight, Chigurh (Javier Bardem) from No Country for Old Men, and Col. Hans Lada (Cristolph Waltz) from Inglorious Basterds.

What do you like to write about?

If it isn’t obvious from the above list, I like writing about bad guys. They always seem to be the most interesting person in the movie.

What makes your day brighter?

Making people laugh. Seriously, if on any given day I can make someone, somewhere in the world stop what they’re doing and chuckle, my day is officially made.

And here are my nominees: Amanda Foody, Stacy Stokes, Paul Adams, Roselle Kaes, Rachel Pudelek, Rhiann Wynn-Nolet, Sophia Chang, Gnetch, Karma Brown, Abby Cavenaugh, Lindsey Sprague

So to all subsequent nominees, here are my 11 questions:

1. What's the dream?
2. How are you going to make that dream happen?
3. What crazy awesome thing are you going to do when that dream comes true?
4. Who is your favourite hero?
5. Who is your favourite villain?
6. Which one would you rather be?
7. What turns you on?
8. What turns you off?
9. What is your favourite curse word?
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
11. What are you doing tomorrow, and more importantly, how are you planning on making it more awesome than what you're doing today?

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Twitter Pitch and Excerpt for LITTLE MISS EVIL

This is our pitch and first 250 words for Twitter #PitMad. Thank you Brenda Drake for organizing this!

Name: Kristy and Bryce

Title: LITTLE MISS EVIL
Genre: MG Thriller
Word Count: 41,000

Twitter Pitch: 

MG: Laser Torch? Check. Laptop? Check. Flamethrower? Check. When you kidnap my evil genius father, this happens. I’m coming, dad. #PitMad

 

Excerpt: 

   When your Dad’s a cackling super-villain, you get some pretty weird stuff for your birthday. Like when I was six, he gave me a butterfly knife. And when I was ten, he gave me a Universal Remote Detonator. It’s one of those universal remotes you can point at any electronic device, except instead of turning it on it blows it to smithereens. And last year, he gave me a laser torch disguised as a tube of lipstick. Only I didn’t actually know that and almost melted my face off when I tried to put it on. So I really didn’t know what to expect today.

   “Open it, Fiona!” Dad beams, stroking his pointy little goatee. He does that whenever he’s pleased with himself, and somehow that makes me even more nervous.

   Hesitantly, I pull off the lid to find…a lighter?

   I breathe a sigh of relief. No live grenade, no mutated anthrax. Just a normal, non-insane gift.

   “Thanks Dad.” I beam. “I love it.”

   “No, no, no. That’s not your gift. That’s just part one.” His grin is so wide it fills up his entire face.

   “What do you mean?” I say.

   “Oh, I could just tell you. But why tell—when I can show!” He pauses for dramatic effect, puffing up his chest before announcing, “To the weapons laboratory!”

   As I watch him scamper off cackling like a hyena, I can only think “Oh, God. No good could possibly come of this.”

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The Madness! The Madness!

 OK, so an update from #PitchMadness...

LME survived to Round 2!

That's our little girl...Sniff...

But, no rest for the weary, so Round 3's starting now. And I was biting my nails, but then I ran out of nails. And then I was biting my fingers, but then I ran out of fingers. So I started biting OTHER people's fingers and they...they don't like that.

Fortunately, they have WIFI coverage in my jail cell, so while I'm waiting here's our entry.

Name: Kristy and Bryce

Title: LITTLE MISS EVIL
Genre: MG Super-Villain Thriller
Word Count: 41,000

Pitch: When your Dad’s an evil genius, life can be weird. But when he gets abducted and the kidnappers demand a super-weapon that can vaporize the entire city, weird turns to suck really fast.

Excerpt: When your Dad’s a cackling super-villain, you get some pretty weird stuff for your birthday. Like when I was six, he gave me a butterfly knife. And when I was ten, he gave me a Universal Remote Detonator. It’s one of those universal remotes you can point at any electronic device, except instead of turning it on it blows it to smithereens. And last year, he gave me a laser torch disguised as a tube of lipstick. Only I didn’t actually know that and almost melted my face off when I tried to put it on. So I really didn’t know what to expect today.

“Open it, Fiona!” Dad beams, stroking his pointy little goatee. He does that whenever he’s pleased with himself, and somehow that makes me even more nervous.

Hesitantly, I pull off the lid to find…a lighter?

I breathe a sigh of relief. No live grenade, no mutated anthrax. Just a normal, non-insane gift.

“Thanks Dad.” I beam. “I love it.”

“No, no, no. That’s not your gift. That’s just part one.” His grin is so wide it fills up his entire face.

“What do you mean?” I say.

“Oh, I could just tell you. But why tell—when I can show!” He pauses for dramatic effect, puffing up his chest before announcing, “To the weapons laboratory!”

As I watch him scamper off cackling like a hyena, I can only think “Oh, God. No good could possibly come of this.”

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Aaaand here we go again

Oh Hello! Welcome to Heart Attack Island! I'll just take your coat and then AAAARGH!

WHY DID I EAT ALL THOSE BACON SANDWICHES!

 And by that, I mean, yeah, we entered LITTLE MISS EVIL (or LME for short) into a contest (#pitchfest). Oh, no wait! That's a lie! We entered it into TWO CONTESTS (#pitchmadness)

And you would think (as we did) that after doing this last year, we would have gotten used to all this emotional crap, and be able to go into this round as jaded, cynical veterans.

Worst. Pitch. Ever.

Nope. HELL nope. It's just as nerve-wracking. Just as panic-inducing. Just as brain-aneurysm-causing as it always was.

There's a YA Fantasy in those trees. I'm taking the shot.

I don't think we'll EVER get used to this. Sending out your story into the world, I mean. It's a little like, well, arming your kid with a bow and arrow and just shoving them out into battle where everyone wants them dead. So what I'm saying is that pretty much, the entire writing industry is basically The Hunger Games. With slightly less murder. I hope.

And we've just thrown LME into that world.

To say we're Freaking Out is to show a grave misunderstanding of what Freaking Out actually means.

But there's little we can do about it now. The writing world is cruel. Cruel and unforgiving. And it's in this environment that LME has to live and die by.

And like any parents, we hope LME makes it. But at this point, there's very little we can do. The gun's gone off, the race has begun, and we're standing in the bleachers, screaming our lungs out. That's our LME. That's our little girl. And we desperately want her to win.

So run, LME. Run like we taught you.

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New Year, New Manuscript

Phew! What a crazy couple of months this has been!

To those of you who have noticed a disturbing lack of...well...anything happening on this blog, I would like to inform you that No, this was not the result of a Captain Laziness rearing his sleepy, useless head. Quite, the opposite actually. We have been writing, non-stop, every evening, every weekend. And we are proud to finally announce that...

We have a second manuscript!

Go away, Second Manuscript! I was here first!

The first manuscript (which is still going through queries, in case you were wondering) took us a good, solid two years to create and polish to a point where we weren't embarrassed to show to another person. But the second? It took us only two months. Two months.


Why the big jump? Well, basically, when we sat down and decided to start a new project, we looked back at our history and we identified everything that went wrong with writing that first manuscript that caused it to spin for two years. And then we basically decided to do the exact opposite.

The method that we came up with is something that we like to call...Agile Writing.

Like this, but with words.

Is it useful? Does it work? We have no idea! We only made this thing up two months ago!

But if this crazy thing actually goes anywhere, you can rest assured that we'll be talking about it in agonizing detail over the many weeks and months to come. And if it doesn't, well, at least we'll always have Monorail Cat.

Monorail Cat is now leaving the station. Please ensure your hopes and dreams are locked in an upright position.

So without further ado, here's the query for our new MG Super-Villain Thriller, Little Miss Evil!

   When you ride to school in a helicopter, live in a volcano, and see your dad regularly on the nightly news with the caption “EVIL GENIUS” plastered underneath his picture, it takes a lot to rattle you.

   For thirteen year-old Fiona Ng, today is definitely one of those days.

   We have your father. Deliver the NOVA in 24 hours or we will kill him.

   Was it Ruby, that psychopathic albino girl in her class? Her family has an air force that rivals most small countries. Or was it Jai, that sadistic bully who loves torturing the other kids? His family has their own battleship, but they've never been this bold before.

   All Fiona wants is a normal life—graduate middle school, go to a new high school where nobody knows her father's a cackling super-villain, and actually have a friend. A single friend. Is that too much to ask?

   Well, that's not happening. The problems are piling so high they threaten to topple over and crush her under the weight of their suck.

   Because now she has to take over her father's Evil Empire, something she's been running from her entire life. And she has to figure out how to protect her home, as the other families smell blood and are moving in to finish her off. And that NOVA the kidnappers want? It’s an incredibly powerful nuclear bomb, capable of turning the entire city into a mushroom cloud. And oh yeah, one more thing.

   Fiona has no idea where her Dad hid it.
 

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Congrats to My Brilliant CP!

SQUEEEEEE!!! My ridiculously talented critique partner, Amanda Foody, has an agent!

The second I finished I reading her amazing YA fantasy "ACE OF SHADES", I knew she was going to make it. And make it she did. HARD.

She just signed with Molly Jaffa from the Folio Agency!

No one deserves an awesome agent like Molly more than Amanda. She actually eats, breathes and poops words (nope, that didn't sound creepy at all). If you've heard of the expression "work until you're bleeding from your eyeballs", Amanda's that times a thousand.

I'm going to buy all her books, sprinkle them like candy all over my friends, family and coworkers, and when she's famous, I can be like "I knew her when..."

So please head on over to Amanda's blog and congratulate her :)

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One Lovely Blog Award

Our shiny new friend and talented writer Rhiann Wynn-Nolet just gave us the One Lovely Blog Award!

Purdy isn't it? *stroke stroke stroke*

Okay, so for this award I'm sharing 7 horrifying interesting facts about me before passing it on.

1. I once braved a snow storm to save $2 on canned corn. Replacing my frostbitten legs cost $500. But YAY, canned corn!
2. I like having feet in my mouth. Chicken feet, that is. Also, children's feet. YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!
3. Coffee helps me sleep...yet alcohol keeps me awake. And when I mix them IT'S FUCKING AWESOME AND zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
4. Swans scare me. They smell like a wet dog, they bite like a rottweiler, and running away screaming just makes a thousand of them come out of nowhere to murder you with the force of a thousand hurricanes. I don't have a joke here. I just really really hate swans. Fucking swans.
5. I have imaginary arguments with people in my head. But that's normal, right? What? I'm crazy like a WHAT? WHY DO YOU KEEP BRINGING THAT UP? I TOLD YOU, THOSE PEOPLE WERE BEHEADED WHEN I GOT THERE!
6. I've gotten lost in my own house. So lost I've actually found myself in other people's houses. Incidentally, I'm currently lost in the court house.
7. I like punching things. Cars, trees, old people. It's all here in this police report.

Now go check out these awesome bloggers:

Amanda Foody

Jessa Russo

Wistfullylinda

Juliana Brandt

Paul Adams

Dahlia Adler

Deana Barnhart

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