QK Round 1: Zone Tripper versus History Hound
Entry Nickname: Zone TripperTitle: Zone TrippersWord count: 90,000Genre: Adult SciFi
Query:
Owen MacIntyre already lost his wife to cancer and now his daughter is missing. But he can’t just file a missing person’s report—Eve is infected with Zone Tripper’s disease, which causes people across the globe to involuntarily swap souls en masse. Eve’s body remains at home, serving as a revolving door for other zone trippers, while her soul leaps into other trippers all over the world.
In quick progression, Eve finds herself in a Chinese slave laborer, a blind French woman, then in a dying woman. Only a train stop away from home, Eve’s soul jumps once more and she hasn’t been heard from since.
Owen struggles with the strong personalities rotating through Eve’s body as he continues to search for Eve’s soul, using the website he co-creates with one of Eve’s visiting souls, Humberto.
Meanwhile, the world has segregated itself into two camps—the trippers and the statics. The survival odds for zone trippers are falling fast, with horrific conditions waiting on the other side of a bad trip.
And to further complicate their fates, a tasteless reality show, Identity Theft, debases victims on international television while zone-tripping serial murderer, called the Infinity Killer, has put other trippers in his cross hairs.
Owen must risk his own safety—and soul—before he loses his daughter for good. But how do you find a missing person when it's her soul that's left?
First 250 words:
Home is where the heart breaks, my wife had always said.
She wasn’t wrong.
The garage door opened its jaws and swallowed my car whole. Each time I pulled into the drive, it’s a fist to the gut. My daughter Eve’s Toyota sat in the third bay, seemingly miles away. A small ghost of an oil stain marks the center spot.
Walking out to the bricked mailbox in the frigid March air, I leafed through today’s bills, which included a tuition payment. I had agreed to pay for Eve’s frivolous photography degree, but only if she factored in a few business courses, achieved stellar grades, and lived at home.
Photography is a hobby. Taking pictures isn’t a career. How many times had I told Eve that?
A junk mail letter with Penelope’s name caught between the tuition statement and a flyer. I stopped rifling and swallowed hard. Shouldn’t this have stopped by now? It had been three years. Ironically, it was an ad for life insurance.
Viewing the house from the outside made it seem emptier. Penelope had stood here almost every day, gathering the mail—until she was too sick to walk outside. The house held 5,200 square feet of broken memories. Her fingerprints could still be seen on her vanity mirror but her absence echoed from every corner. Her love seat held air, her bedside table sat naked, and her painting studio was empty now except for dust. Every night I forced myself to enter this tomb for Eve’s sake.
Versus
Entry Nickname: History Hound
Word Count: 85,000
Genre: Adult, Historical Fiction
Query:
Elizabeth Tudor is born into dark and dangerous times. She disappoints her parents by being a girl and when her mother is executed for treason she becomes aware that not only her sex but her status of bastard place her in a precarious position. Growing and witnessing her father’s relationships to four further wives, and affected differently by each unfortunate woman, she is thrown into adulthood abruptly by an attempted rape when she is just fourteen.
While growing she meets a boy who will become her lifelong friend, Robert Dudley. Robert is the one constant in Elizabeth’s life; her confidant and advisor. He watches her grow into a gloriously intelligent woman and helps her to make the decisions that shape the type of ruler she will eventually become.
Always potentially a figurehead for rebellion, Elizabeth witnesses her brother Edward’s feeble reign and then endures the constant threat of death at the hands of her sister, Mary Tudor. Mary, driven mad by a false pregnancy she so desperately wanted, tries to return the realm to the old faith, thrusting the protestant-raised Elizabeth into a light she despises and fears. With the help of her friends and supporters she survives intrigue, plots, months living under the threat of death in the Tower of London and years of house arrest to finally ascend the throne of England.
First 250 words:
The screams that had for hours echoed through the halls and corridors, forcing themselves into every corner of the palace, were now still. In the birthing chamber the smell of burning candle fat mixed with blood and sweat. Ladies-in-waiting hurried back and forth between the bed and the washbasin; stumbling occasionally, unable to see in the room darkened by the heavy tapestries covering the windows. After a day and a half of labour the queen had been growing weak but the midwife had refused to summon a surgeon to cut the child from its mother’s body. Just as the queen’s chief lady was about to overrule the midwife, the screams had abruptly stopped. The room held its breath as the midwife cleaned and swaddled the newborn. She now faced the queen, the silence in the room broken by a small wail coming from the bundle in the old woman’s arms.
“Tell me! Is it a boy or a girl?!” The nervous silence that followed her question elicited from the queen, worn from childbirth and delirious from exhaustion, a shriek at those present. “I demand that you tell me! NOW! Is the child a boy?!”
The queen looked expectantly at the woman’s face. The midwife stood still, her eyes cast down. Finally she shook her head, the fear sharp in her features. The queen’s agonising wail drowned out those of her child.
Query:
Owen MacIntyre already lost his wife to cancer and now his daughter is missing. But he can’t just file a missing person’s report—Eve is infected with Zone Tripper’s disease, which causes people across the globe to involuntarily swap souls en masse. Eve’s body remains at home, serving as a revolving door for other zone trippers, while her soul leaps into other trippers all over the world.
In quick progression, Eve finds herself in a Chinese slave laborer, a blind French woman, then in a dying woman. Only a train stop away from home, Eve’s soul jumps once more and she hasn’t been heard from since.
Owen struggles with the strong personalities rotating through Eve’s body as he continues to search for Eve’s soul, using the website he co-creates with one of Eve’s visiting souls, Humberto.
Meanwhile, the world has segregated itself into two camps—the trippers and the statics. The survival odds for zone trippers are falling fast, with horrific conditions waiting on the other side of a bad trip.
And to further complicate their fates, a tasteless reality show, Identity Theft, debases victims on international television while zone-tripping serial murderer, called the Infinity Killer, has put other trippers in his cross hairs.
Owen must risk his own safety—and soul—before he loses his daughter for good. But how do you find a missing person when it's her soul that's left?
First 250 words:
Home is where the heart breaks, my wife had always said.
She wasn’t wrong.
The garage door opened its jaws and swallowed my car whole. Each time I pulled into the drive, it’s a fist to the gut. My daughter Eve’s Toyota sat in the third bay, seemingly miles away. A small ghost of an oil stain marks the center spot.
Walking out to the bricked mailbox in the frigid March air, I leafed through today’s bills, which included a tuition payment. I had agreed to pay for Eve’s frivolous photography degree, but only if she factored in a few business courses, achieved stellar grades, and lived at home.
Photography is a hobby. Taking pictures isn’t a career. How many times had I told Eve that?
A junk mail letter with Penelope’s name caught between the tuition statement and a flyer. I stopped rifling and swallowed hard. Shouldn’t this have stopped by now? It had been three years. Ironically, it was an ad for life insurance.
Viewing the house from the outside made it seem emptier. Penelope had stood here almost every day, gathering the mail—until she was too sick to walk outside. The house held 5,200 square feet of broken memories. Her fingerprints could still be seen on her vanity mirror but her absence echoed from every corner. Her love seat held air, her bedside table sat naked, and her painting studio was empty now except for dust. Every night I forced myself to enter this tomb for Eve’s sake.
Versus
Entry Nickname: History Hound
Word Count: 85,000
Genre: Adult, Historical Fiction
Query:
Elizabeth Tudor is born into dark and dangerous times. She disappoints her parents by being a girl and when her mother is executed for treason she becomes aware that not only her sex but her status of bastard place her in a precarious position. Growing and witnessing her father’s relationships to four further wives, and affected differently by each unfortunate woman, she is thrown into adulthood abruptly by an attempted rape when she is just fourteen.
While growing she meets a boy who will become her lifelong friend, Robert Dudley. Robert is the one constant in Elizabeth’s life; her confidant and advisor. He watches her grow into a gloriously intelligent woman and helps her to make the decisions that shape the type of ruler she will eventually become.
Always potentially a figurehead for rebellion, Elizabeth witnesses her brother Edward’s feeble reign and then endures the constant threat of death at the hands of her sister, Mary Tudor. Mary, driven mad by a false pregnancy she so desperately wanted, tries to return the realm to the old faith, thrusting the protestant-raised Elizabeth into a light she despises and fears. With the help of her friends and supporters she survives intrigue, plots, months living under the threat of death in the Tower of London and years of house arrest to finally ascend the throne of England.
First 250 words:
The screams that had for hours echoed through the halls and corridors, forcing themselves into every corner of the palace, were now still. In the birthing chamber the smell of burning candle fat mixed with blood and sweat. Ladies-in-waiting hurried back and forth between the bed and the washbasin; stumbling occasionally, unable to see in the room darkened by the heavy tapestries covering the windows. After a day and a half of labour the queen had been growing weak but the midwife had refused to summon a surgeon to cut the child from its mother’s body. Just as the queen’s chief lady was about to overrule the midwife, the screams had abruptly stopped. The room held its breath as the midwife cleaned and swaddled the newborn. She now faced the queen, the silence in the room broken by a small wail coming from the bundle in the old woman’s arms.
“Tell me! Is it a boy or a girl?!” The nervous silence that followed her question elicited from the queen, worn from childbirth and delirious from exhaustion, a shriek at those present. “I demand that you tell me! NOW! Is the child a boy?!”
The queen looked expectantly at the woman’s face. The midwife stood still, her eyes cast down. Finally she shook her head, the fear sharp in her features. The queen’s agonising wail drowned out those of her child.
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