Our #PitchWars Mentee Bio

Hello!

Welcome potential mentors and fellow participants! ::waves::

We are Aimee and Heather, and we are co-authors…so when we use “we” in this post, you’ll know we aren’t having some sort of episode, there really is two of us 🙂

(gotta be honest, it’s really hard to resist the temptation to make this entire post a series of Supernatural screenshots). First, a little about us. We met in Jr. High and for the past twenty-::mumbles:: years we have been geeking out together. First we geeked out over movies (Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, Waterworld, and Indiana Jones). Then, we geeked out over tv shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, Supernatural, Sherlock… okay this list could go on forever). Lastly, we started to geek out over books (If I Stay by Gayle Forman, Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, Graveling by Kristin Cashore). We have always been linked by this absolute LOVE of stories.

Then we thought, “Hey! It would probably be really fun to geek out over stories we made up ourselves!”

And then we wrote a screenplay and NA novel that shall remain under Aimee’s bed forever.

Which brings us to now. Both of us work in healthcare (one in billing, one in mental health) and spend our non-daytime job hours writing. Both of us work on individual projects, but our work shines when we collaborate. Our unique strengths balance out each others weaknesses.

We know, two people working on a book together? How does that work? Any of ya’ll seen Pacific Rim? If you have, we are basically drift compatible. 

One of us writes something, the other combs through it and adds on, then other other combs through that and adds on etc etc. until we have a finished book and have no idea who has written what.

Almost always, we are on the same page with character arch, plot points, world building, and canon of any kind. We often have identical, totally independent thoughts from one another. It’s spooky and very helpful. And more fun than words can describe.

The MS we submitted to #pitchwars is YA PN, and we love it so. Below is our pitch.

Em is hell-bent on proving her mother didn’t commit suicide. Suffering from inexplicable visions, Em defends her mom’s sanity when she isn’t even sure of her own. Paranormal VERONICA MARS meets THE SKY IS EVERYWHERE.

We wrote the first draft several years ago. We sat on it for a few years, puttered around with other projects, researched more about the publishing process, joined twitter, and read a lot. But this story kept poking at us. It wanted to be told. So we looked at it with fresh eyes, and re-wrote the whole friggin thing. It has much improved since that first initial draft 🙂

We love this process. The whole thing. Yes, editing can be repetitive, the query letters are tedious, and the synopses are soul crushing… but we love it all. Because it’s all writing. It’s all about crafting new ways of telling your story. And we love this story. We hope that you, possible mentors, love it too.

If Harry Potter Can Eat a Kidney…

Recounting one of Aimee’s random adventures sometime during 2012:

I worked the AM shift today (7:00-3:30), which to any normal person would be a normal schedule. However, I am not a normal person and hence I do not have a normal schedule- I work 3:00-11:30pm. So having to wake up at the ungodly hour of 5:00am is always an experience. I mean, it’s night time outside. There is absolutely no perceivable difference between when I leave for work at 5:30 this morning and when I come home from work at midnight.

So. I’m tired. And as things often do when I am very tired, things turned into a fun filled food oriented fiasco. When I got home from work,Rob, whose apartment is one of the many places in which I spend my time, suggested that we enlist his neighbor to make dinner. His neighbor, who is from Turkey, was delighted at the idea. He immediately drove us back they way I had just driven on my way home from work, to a Turkish grocery store. Upon arrival I was dazzled with the rows and rows of food I had never, in my life, seen before. I was fascinated. I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store. I was so utterly distracted by the bright packaging of food I didn’t recognize in a language I didn’t understand, that I didn’t notice our friendly neighbor arguing with a woman behind the counter about the absurd amount of meat she was trying to sell us (5 lbs).

Suddenly, while gazing at a jar of honey that had an actual honey comb in the jar Andrew and our friendly neighbor appeared and announced we were going to another store, for the butcher was being unreasonable. They whisked me away to another store, where the entire process started to repeat itself. Again, I wandered off.

I was entranced by the food. The fact my stomach was complaining noisily probably had something to do with this, and I quickly became acquainted with the sweets isle. There were these lovely looking cookies in many flavors (which I deduced from the pictures- the names were in Turkish).  I thought I spotted some Turkish Delight (why wouldn’t I, I was in a Turkish store) but alas, it was something I could not pronounced and said “Made in Canada” on the packaging, which saddened me greatly. I made my way back to the butcher, where the friendly neighbor was again arguing about the volume of lamb we were purchasing (3 lbs), and the butcher was quite literally waving a leg of lamb-hoof and all- aloft in the air.

Not taking this as a good sign, I wandered off again, this time to inspect the most absurd amount of feta cheese I have ever seen. Did you know there are all different kinds of feta? Domestic feta, french feta, turkish feta, greek feta… lots of feta. Literal ropes of feta.  My stomach was making more noise because of all the feta and I, hopefully for the last time, returned to the meat counter.

“….only if I were Bear Grylls”

“Bear Grylls?” I immediatly jumped in. I love Bear Grylls!

“What would you eat only if you were bear Grylls?”

Rob pointed to some shiny, very dark red and honestly quite disgusting looking things while friendly neighbor said in his thick Turkish accent, “Heart and kidney’s. They are my favorite.”

Not wanting to insult friendly neighbor, who was dragging us all over kingdom come just to make Lamb Kabob, I replied “Um. Well. I would try a bite, maybe, and only if it were cooked.”

Neighbor looked at me as if I were implying anyone ate heart or kidney’s uncooked (which is to say, he looked at me as if I was insane).

Then, in an unprecedented move, he bought some. One heart, and one kidney. Which I will be eating, later on tonight, apparently. He also bought a package of those lovely cookies I was admiring, which I was a great deal more excited about than the heart or kidney.

The only  thing I am taking solace from is the fact that Harry Potter likes kidney pie. I do not know what kidney pie is, but I assume there are kidney’s in it. And if Harry Potter can eat a kidney, so can I.

But honestly? I am not so sure about the heart.

 Pictured: Me, later.

Our First Post!!

Welcome to our blog! This is our first post! This is so exciting!!!