YA Science Fiction: UNTITLED

Author's Name: Ashley Northup

Category: YA
Genre: Sci-Fi
Stage of Completion: Mostly Polished
Preferred Critique Style: A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down
Cat Person or Dog Person: I’m a cat person, but dogs are pretty cool.

Tea or Coffee: Neither, but coffee between the two.

Short Pitch

            Seventeen-year-old Carolyn Morgan is the first human inspector in the galaxy. When her first murder suspect is a human boy she goes with her gut, and the evidence, to try to prove his innocence. The longer the investigation goes the more it looks like she’s a human covering for another human - and the more everything she’s worked for is at risk.

Writing Sample

Some people are afraid of the dark. Carolyn was terrified of light. Not sunlight, but overwhelming, blinding artificial light. It reminded her of being taken. For years whenever there was a flash of light she smelled grass, heard her dog barking, felt his collar digging into her hand, and felt the grip of terror in her chest as she became completely weightless.

Years later, when the other details faded, she still felt the fear.

The first time she saw the commissioner, he was surrounded in light.

Carolyn was running through the crowded streets of a city she and Errol had landed on weeks ago. They’d planned everything out, except for the commissioner's impromptu visit. People filled the streets to see him.

“Get out of there,” Errol said in her earpiece. “This isn’t worth it.”

            But they’d worked weeks for this mark. Too long, by far, to just up and leave. They didn’t have enough food, let alone enough fuel to get them very far.

            “What’re we supposed to eat when I come back?” she asked. “We could rip up that junker, sell the metal.”

            “You don’t have to be jealous that my ship is perfect,” he said.

            “Our ship,” she said.

            “I picked her.”

            “You stole it from a trash heap,” Carolyn said. “It was going to be destroyed.”

            “Some people have no taste,” Errol said.

            “Glad you know that about yourself,” she muttered, low enough that the com device she’d jerry-rigged from several older, dead com devices, couldn’t pick it up.