Pitches, Plots, and Presents...Oh my!

Today I finished the current book on my TBR pile, Your Novel Proposal: From Creation to Contract by Blythe Camenson and Marshall J. Cook. I'll just call it YNP for the sake of brevity.

Poison Study and Magic Study author Maria V. Snyder recommended YNP when she was kind enough to offer suggestions on my query letter for Lest It Come True. (One of the suggestions she made was to change the title to The Shadow Guard, but I haven't decided yet if it would be too obscure.)

After reading through YNP I can see where my pitch needed (needs?) perfecting, so I worked on that tonight. My husband gave the current pitch the thumbs up. It goes like this:

"A woman in a mystical version of London's Roman epoch achieves her goal of becoming her Sovereign's personal guard and must choose between her duty and their love."

I'm unsure about whether or not I like it. It doesn't give the flavor of Ilia's character or the fact that she is the only female Shadow Guard (magical protector) ever. Neither does it tell about her unique relationship with Tiernan (the Sovereign) whom she has known since childhood. Are these facts necessary to the pitch? Probably not. I do think they are flavorful. They can be woven into a query, but not into the pitch itself.

My fingers are itching to write the synopsis and chapter outline for Lest It Come True, but I want to finish the edits first--probably a wise idea. Then there's the other six Seven Sovereign novels and a new idea I have for a story called The Vampire Hotel which takes place in a hotel the heroine inherits in Manhattan's Washington Square Park.

All these ideas are clamoring for attention now and it's getting very noisy in my brain. Not that I'm complaining, but if only Santa would bring me two more hands and enough lottery money to be a full-time writer I would be content. Which reminds me, now that Thanksgiving is over I'd better start thinking about Christmas shopping. On second thought, maybe I'd better ask for four extra hands...