Nathan Bransford - The Forums

The theft of a painting makes the thousand year kipping secrets of King Dragonogard assurgent to life. -This is rather meaningless to me. I don't have a reason to care about any secrets coming to life because I don't know what those secrets are. I think you need to start with the main character, an...

Dee Lykos is one of a small number of people who knows about the demon-infested parallel universe that nestles beneath the human world like a dark twin. Clients contract drivers like Dee to smuggle cargo through the demonverse by vanishing from the human world in one city and appearing with the goo...

Devi’s memories are stolen by the shadows and her job is to keep her journals to retain what little she has left and to never ever chase after the shadows. In the meantime Bren and Dalia search for a way to get the rest back. When she moves to a town far from her isolated house in the woods she mee...

Most people would kill for the power to shoot stone shattering rays of energy out of their hands, to melt metal just by touching it, to set fire to something without so much as a match. "stone shattering rays of energy out of their hands" is wordy. Rays are already implied to be energy. T...

Revision 3: I went for a more "back cover copy" style this time. Keep it straightforward and concise. More summary. Less shock and cleverness. Is it any better? Is it too vague? The Earth has flooded. If you're not stuck on one of the sea stations then you're ekeing out a life on the ocea...

The mission is simple: kill the hybrid, end the drought. -This is a pretty good intro, but I'd like to know a hybrid of what? That'll add distinction to the story. Seventeen-year-old Ty thinks there's no way he'll have the honor of being drafted to face the man-beast hybrid. He's a bastard, a nobod...

Thank you for the feedback -- its the most constructive I've got so far. I made some clean up, mostly fixing vagaries and clarity. Let me know if I didn't clear something up. And let me know if I haven't explained something to a satisfactory point. What I've got here only summarizes half the novel....

EDIT: Revised query below Dear agent, Gene got himself a mermaid. He didn't want it, of course. The damn thing swam up the tailpipe of his boat while he was trying to avoid the mafia he owes a debt to. It's bad enough most of the world is flooded and he has to eke out a living on the ocean with onl...

Fifteen-year-old Jade Kadeem has it worse than your average Wind-Rider: She can’t control her city-razing hurricanes, and her father was brutally murdered by those who can’t control the elements, the Masha. Those gun carrying fools. -I'm not a big fan of that last line. It sounds out of place. It s...

There’s no way fourteen year old Jonathan Stevens is going to his first day of public school in May. So cutting class to wander around a park seemed like a better idea... until a storm forces him into a bathroom stall, and he falls face-first into a giant hole caused by an earthquake. -Maybe it's j...

Don’t be careful what you wish for--let the Tenders do that! Intriguing... I might say start with the main character, but I'm interested in what follows. In the year 2018, the North is ruled by wish-granting people called Tenders. Seventeen-year-old Ibsen Goodman lives in the South, a segregated co...

Some say Lewis and his family are among the lucky ones. After all, they survived the Demon hordes of World War III with their mansion and wealth intact. Sixteen-year-old Lewis, however, doesn't consider himself to be lucky. The demon-fighting Warriors who stalk the streets of this new, frightening ...

Seventeen-year-old Ally Ashworth prefers combat boots to heels, Mozart over metal and one friend to being Miss Popular. She’s definitely not Society’s Bitch but being an outsider is about to take on a whole new meaning. I'm a big proponent of the Oxford comma, so it should be "combat boots to ...

Sixteen-year-old Clementine will die the day she turns twenty. The Extraction Test is her only shot to prove she's worth keeping alive. I like this line. Names the character right away, what she wants, and what she needs to do to get it. Don't change it. The test instructors look for intelligence, ...

London, 1882. Kidnapped as a child, Emil Aleric and his mother survived. The rest of the family didn't. So the word of a ruthless killer rampaging London frightens his mother into sending Emil to live with Officer Corwin James. -I'd start with the character's name--you want to go left to right with...