Friday, October 19, 2012

BD Round 2 Revised Logline #14

Original Post #33


TITLE: Hunted
GENRE: YA urban fantasy
Fifteen-year-old drama queen Zuza Biss is used to making mountains out of molehills. But when she suddenly develops healing abilities and a tendency to zap people, she finds out what puberty is like for superheros. Now she's being chased by bounty hunters, intent on dragging her to another dimension.  If she doesn't get the knack of controlling her powers, she'll be thrown through a portal into the hands of a criminal collector.

10 comments:

  1. I love the voice. But I'm not getting a clear picture of the stakes. Is she just trying to avoid getting collected? Or are there bigger stakes?

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  2. i love the voice as well and i guess the clearer the stakes the better. but this works great for me and i'm all in, hook line and sinker! good luck!!

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  3. So much better than the original! I like it a lot. You get character, conflict, stakes, and voice. Suja might have a point, I guess, about there being more proactive stakes. But it works for me. Good luck!

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  4. Interesting! Cute voice. I'd read this. :) For MG, I think just avoiding caputre would be high enough stakes, but since this is YA, I'm betting there's more to the stakes. Show that?

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  5. I like the middle a lot! The beginning seems disconnected, though. Zapping people doesn't seem to be a mole-hill to me, so I don't know how that line matters to the rest.

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  6. This is great! So much better than the original!

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  7. Thanks for the comments everyone! Glad you like the revisions. I will work on making the stakes clearer. She is trying to avoid getting snatched and taken to another dimension but there are other things going on too. I've been told that the plot comes across as too complicated in my query so I'm trying to keep it simple. Urgh - loglines and queries are tougher to write than the novel itself :)

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    1. I agree! Loglines and queries are the worst. That's why I really appreciate all these contests and blogs. I've learned so much from reading, critiquing, and being critiqued.

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  8. Honestly, I liked the first one better. It was very clean and I found it intriguing. The only suggestion I had before was to reveal her powers but I'm not sure it even needed that.

    This rework does reveal more of your voice and I think that is good, but it lacks the crispness of the first attempt. (My logline is a mess, I totally understand how hard this is!)

    I don't know how much this will help, but these are the important points I drew from the loglines:

    She can't control her powers (and they pose some danger to others - and herself?).
    She is being chased by bounty hunters (because of something she did accidentally?)
    If they catch her, she will be turned over to a criminal collector (that sounds fun, I hope she gets caught just to see what that's all about).

    My understanding is that when we have these complex plots, sometimes the way we struggle with our loglines reveals some of the weaker points of our novels. I know that fussing over my logline revealed over-complications in some of my plots and has me doing crazy levels of revision.

    Good luck to you!

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