YA Contemporary: TAKING ON THE TEACHERS

Author's Name: Raimey Gallant

Category: YA
Genre: Contemporary

Stage of Completion: Mostly Polished and Looking to Query

Preferred Critique Style: Straight to the Point, line and big picture editor

Cat Person or Dog Person: Meow

Tea or Coffee: Cold tea with lotsa sugar

Short Pitch

In my humourous YA contemporary TAKING ON THE TEACHERS, fifteen-year-old Addyn is that in-your-face environmentalist girl, whose teachers and classmates are fed up with her combative attitude. Likewise, Addyn is tired of arguing, and done with her outcast status. When given the opportunity to lead a green initiative at Bagshaw High, she jumps at the chance to reinvent herself. She’ll have to prove to her newly-recruited eco student group – including her crush – that she can quit fighting with her teachers and convert enough into allies for their project to get the green light.

Writing Sample

Before I quit synchronized swimming, my coach would push my team through marathon water-treading drills. “Up,” she’d repeat over and over, until our shoulders were high and dry.

Ten minutes of egg beating my legs felt like an eternity. As always, my calf would seize half way through. I’d hold my toes and straighten my knee to relieve the pressure. With my nose bobbing at the surface, I’d inhale as much chlorinated liquid as air.

“Do Olympians take leg-cramp breaks?” my coach would ask. “No, because judges don’t award high marks to swimmers who look like they’re drowning.”

Five days a week, this was my routine. After two years, I decided I liked air enough to breathe it full time and abandoned synchronized swimming along with my chances of going pro. Realistically, there were no medals in my future, and I wasn’t willing to spend my teenage years tucked into a swim cap that didn’t prevent my auburn hair from turning a greenish tinge anyway.

No, I was ready for a carefree adolescence, filled with the type of comic indiscretions I’d seen in movies, and a big group of friends to plan and execute said indiscretions with. 

These future friends would call me all the time. “Addyn,” they’d say, “Let’s fill the principal’s car with that vat of slosh the cook refers to as tiramisu, because we’re cool and carefree.” And I’d be like, “That’s a great idea, and who cares if we get caught, because consequences expire when we turn eighteen.”