YA Contemporary Fantasy: UNTITLED (there are dragons)

Author's Name: Lyla Lawless

Category: YA

Genre: Contemporary Fantasy

Stage of Completion: Rough Draft

Preferred Critique Style: A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down (but please include LOTS of medicine.)

Cat Person or Dog Person: Dog person, but it's like 51%/49%...

Tea or Coffee: Coffee. People who can stay awake by tea alone are demigods.

Short Pitch

Ingrid prefers tinkering with cars to helping her best friend, national hero Ildri Hildadottir, tame firebreathing drekar. But she can't dodge the spotlight once the drekar, decimated by illness, start escaping their island's preserve and wreaking blazing havoc. When Ildri ditches her training program in a desperate hunt for a cure, it’s up to Ingrid to track her down and engineer a solution to protect her friend, the drekar, and her ailing country.

Writing Sample         

     Today, thanks to a forest of reporters and their giant black Q-tip microphones, my town has doubled in size.

     We have one stoplight and a half-size grocer’s market, and go to the next town over for petrol—we shouldn’t even be on the map. But we also have my best friend Ildri Hildadottir. She’s the only person who can handle Eldurland’s firebreathing drekar, and everything that happens to her is national news.

     Even university assignment day. Our last day as equals. The one public moment we share, and one of many moments when I’d rather not have an audience.

     We huddle under the grocers’ eaves, noses peeping from chunky scarves. Our friend Benji hangs at my elbow. Together we digest the laminated, oh so predictable admissions list tacked to the notice board.

     It’s stupid. The bustling news crews know she’s going to Hofuthborg, where she can train with national security. They’d never send someone like her to the ramshackle technical school on the other side of the island.

     I, on the other hand, am no special case.

     Ever the pragmatic one, I say, “We knew this was going to happen. I can’t spell for shit.”

     “It’s not fair.” Benji scuffs at the ground with his boot. “I tutored you for months.”

     “I’m okay,” I insist. “I don’t want to theorize about engines; I want to personally spread their guts all over my garage.”

     I’m not saying what we’re all thinking, but I silently admit it to myself. If this were a superhero kind of place, I’d be, at best, the sidekick.