Welcome to National Novel Writing Month, 2015! We’re celebrating all month long with a sale on some of our favorite novels, daily discussions with Black Lawrence Press novelists on craft and writing habits, and this–a consultation program for those of you with in-progress novels that could use an expert eye.
Today, we’d like to introduce to you one of our NaNoWriMo consultants:
Tracy DeBrincat’s novel Hollywood Buckaroo was awarded the inaugural Big Moose Prize and published by Black Lawrence Press. She has also had two short story collections published: the Elixir Prize winner Troglodyte (Elixir Press) and innovative fiction prize winner Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night (Subito Press, University of Colorado Boulder). She has published prize-winning short stories and poetry in literary journals from Another Chicago Magazine to Zyzzyva and authors the occasional blog Bigfoot Lives! (www.tracydebrincat.com). Tracy is a freelance creative advertising consultant in the entertainment business and loves living in Los Angeles, where she is currently working on a YA novel titled How to Kill Your Coyote.
Finally, we’d like to let Tracy introduce herself. If you feel that Tracy would be the right reader for your novel, you can sign up here. The price for a full read and critique is $500 and Tracy is able to take up to five manuscripts. All critiques will be completed by December 31, 2015.
Tracy DeBrincat’s Statement of Purpose
No one really wants to read your book.
Unless, of course, the first pages grab them by the throat and they can’t stop (though I don’t mind when a book grabs me by the heart, brain or guts either – as long as there’s grabbing going on).
They’re looking for the book that won’t let them stop turning pages, devouring sentences, creating movies in their heads, building new worlds or plunging more deeply into familiar ones.
The book that invites us to be more intimate with its characters than we are with our families, than we dare to be with ourselves. That inspires us to love or hate the mirrors those characters create, and reflects truths about ourselves we never knew.
The book that twists us with a surprising story, that offers up images that shimmer with subtle revelation. Dialogue layered with truth, emotion, and yearning.
The book that makes us read slower and slower to forestall the inevitable, the climax where we hold our breath, the resolution that lets us breathe again, the ending finally having its way with us so we can slam the damn thing shut, reborn as a person who’s been moved by something that never really happened.
Except that it did.
That’s the book I want to read.
It’s the book I want to help you create.