PitchWars Wishlist

Welcome, welcome to Kat and Sarah’s wishlist! We are looking for YA fantasy manuscripts for PitchWars 2020, so if that’s what you’ve got, keep reading!

There is also an accessible version of our wishlist.

If you have any questions, the fastest way to reach us is on Twitter – @KatAliceDunn and @s_e_c_underwood

Can’t wait to see all your brilliant submissions!

WHAT IS PITCHWARS?

Pitch Wars is a mentoring program where published/agented authors, editors, or industry interns choose one writer each to spend three months revising their manuscript. It ends in February with an Agent Showcase, where agents can read a pitch/first page and can request to read more.

And I’m Kat Dunn! Author of DANGEROUS REMEDY (2020), MONSTROUS DESIGN (2021) and GLORIOUS POISON (2022).

After two degrees and jobs as a bookseller, nursing assistant and translator for NHK, I settled down to a career as a writer and editor, working in YA and children’s publishing, mental health and government web content. I’ve been editing day in day out for the last 9 years at work, in my master’s programme and working on my own manuscripts with my agent and editor.

I grew up in London, and have lived in France, Japan and Australia. Back in London now, I live with too many house plants and a mission to write as many sapphic books as I can fit into my life.

My favourite books are dark and twisty and gothic, but I fall in love with anything and everything if the mood strikes me right! I’ve mentored for 2 years and what both books had in common was a plot that kept me rooted to my seat, and characters I loved (or loved to hate).Find me on twitter and instagram @KatAliceDunn.

Hi! I’m Sarah Underwood, author of sapphic YA fantasy LIES WE SING TO THE SEA. I grew up in the English countryside, and am a big fan of gardening, scones (jam first, sorry!), and long walks in impractical footwear.

As well as being a writer, I’m a recent engineering graduate from Imperial College, London, and an incoming postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge where I’ll be studying Population Health Sciences.

My favourite books are fantastical and romantic with lush, borderline-purple prose. This is my first time mentoring, but I was a Pitch Wars mentee in 2020, so I’m very well acquainted with how brilliant–but also stressful and intensive–the program is. 

You can find me on twitter and instagram at @s_e_c_underwood

Our Wishlist

• FANTASY! First and foremost, we are fantasy writers (and readers) and it’s the genre we love most. Nothing is off limits. Witches? Great. Vampires? Also great. Creepy bog creature with too many elbows? Yeah. Excellent. Especially if they’re a love interest. Mythology, particularly the lesser known lore, is also a particular favourite as is any sort of retelling. We love second world and high fantasy, but we have an extra soft spot for fantasy set in our world (both of us have written historical fantasy!) SORCERY OF THORNS, SORCERER TO THE CROWN, THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS
• Scifi. We’re going to be a bit pickier here–scifi is a hard sell right now unfortunately–but we’re still big fans. Kat’s 2019 mentee, Kate Dylan, is a scifi writer and her Pitch Wars book, MINDWALKER, is out with Hodder next summer. MINDWALKER is the perfect book for us; it’s smart, fast paced, and a little sexy, and we’re always keen on the ‘softer’ side of scifi–think GEARBREAKERS, CINDER, and CRIER’S WAR. We also adore VICIOUS and VENGEFUL and THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR.
• Historicals. Give us all your historical settings, especially those with a fantasy twist! Some favourite books across YA and adult include anything by Madeline Miller, CODENAME VERITY, FOREST OF STOLEN GIRLS, A SHADOW IN THE GLASS, and THE CITY BEAUTIFUL.

• Sapphics. As sapphics ourselves, we are big fans. Most plots are improved by the addition of a chaotic sapphic and that’s just a fact. We’d love to see explicit bisexual rep (explicitly bisexual rather than erotica-type-explicit, please!). Recently, we’ve loved SHE WHO BECAME THE SUN and THE JASMINE THRONE (both adult titles, but sufficiently excellent that we had to include them here), THE ONES WE BURN, and QUEEN OF COIN AND WHISPERS. Generally, we’re big fans of any kind of significant queer representation.
• Horror. We’re both delighted by the recent rise in YA horrors. We’d love something that’s less outright gore, more slowly creeping and psychological. Trang Thanh Tran’s SHE IS A HAUNTING is a great example of this, as are PLAIN BAD HEROINES (if it was YA), THE DEVIL MAKES THREE, and TOGETHER WE ROT.
• Gothic. We love everything gothic. EVERYTHING. Think DOWN COMES THE NIGHT, WILD AND WICKED THINGS, and MEXICAN GOTHIC.
• Dark Academia. Here, we’re looking for atmospheric and beautiful prose. We love books with some focus on relationships–from lushly romantic to dark and twisted. A few we love are THE SECRET HISTORY, NINTH HOUSE, A STUDY IN DROWNING, and A LESSON IN VENGEANCE.

Things that aren’t right for us

• Ancient Greece
• French revolution
• Austen-era
• Pure romance plots. We love a good OTP or romantic subplot in SFF, but if you’re interested in romance specifically as a genre, we’re not experienced enough in that sort of story telling to help. 
• Circuses
• Dystopia
• Pirates
• Mermaids
• Fae (of the Sarah J Maas variety)

Favourite Media

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• The Untamed
• Crimson Peak
• The Mummy
• The Company of Wolves
• The Princess Bride
• Shadow and Bone
• Lord of the Rings
• The Thick of It
• BBC Merlin
• Only lovers left alive
• Pride and Prejudice (1995)
• Killing Eve

Who we’re looking for

As above, we’re happy to adapt our mentorship style to our mentee’s needs, so there’s no need to work in a particular way. The only things we really need from our mentee are an ability to accept and respond to critique, and a willingness to put in the work needed to transform your manuscript. Pitch Wars manuscripts are meant to be imperfect–otherwise, there’s no point to it–and working with a mentor to fix them is great practise for coping with agent and editor revisions.

This may sound like a lot of work, but remember that it doesn’t need to happen within the three month Pitch Wars period–the showcase is not compulsory, and many past mentees who skipped it have gone on to receive multiple agent offers through querying, and even sell their books at auction in splashy six-figure deals. We’ll be your mentors for as long as you need us (Sarah still talks to her 2020 mentors every week; they supported her through the submission process, and they’re helping her plan her second book). 

We’re especially interested in seeing submissions from marginalised writers this year, particularly those living outside of North America. Please know that you absolutely do not need to disclose any information about your marginalisation at any stage; only tell us what you’re 100% comfortable with. Of course, we’re still definitely open to writers from North America as well.

content warnings

We are happy to receive submissions with heavier themes and explicit content, but would appreciate warnings (you can put these at the end of your query along with the metadata such as word count).

How we work

We want to spend the majority of our time looking at big picture changes. This means really digging into your characters and plot and pulling them apart to understand how they all work together. Depending on what we agree together, this could involve a complete rewrite, or major structural changes if that’s what the book needs. 

We will send you a formal edit letter outlining what we think isn’t working, and probably with some suggestions for what you could do differently. We can then talk this through over Skype, email or DMs, whatever you prefer. Suggestions will only ever be that – suggestions. We may find it easier to explain what we think isn’t working by illustrating with an example of something that we think *could* work – that doesn’t mean we are right, or that that’s what you should do! We will only ever include things like that in the hope it might spark ideas for you. 

We might also mark up your manuscript if we notice anything in particular that’s confusing, or doesn’t work for us – but in general we won’t do a major line edit with you unless this is something you’re specifically concerned about.

If you’d like to take our edit letter and vanish into the wilderness for two months, that’s totally fine! Ideally, we’d like to check in fortnightly or weekly (or however often you want!), just to make sure you’re doing okay. Pitch Wars is wonderful but it can also be a highly pressurised environment, and we want to support you wherever we can.

You can see an example of Kat’s editorial comments on the Pitch Wars blog from 2019.