Thanks to
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Finding out you’re a werewolf would be a pain in the ass for anyone trying to live a normal life in a modern American city – especially if you’re a struggling vet whose patients now smell like dinner. For a grieving young widow who can barely face her normal life’s problems, transforming into a werewolf just makes things go from bad to worse.
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We have at least one vote for working "nearly eats a kitten" in there somehow.
Whether important to the pitch or not, I have also settled (for now) on these other things:
She has just moved to Seattle and is trying to start a new life there.
She was raised on a rural family compound by one of those crazy religious families with a million kids.
The pitch sounds really fun! I did give me pause* that she comes from “one of those crazy religious families with a million kids” — so there are a whole lotta siblings and cousins out there howling at the moon?
*thanks to a friend, I can never see this phrase without thinking “paws”, which kind of works here.
In the course of the novel she will discover that her actual mother was one of the older sisters, and her father was the werewolf.
So if she’d grown up with daddy’s family, there would have been a bunch of cousins and whatnot, yes.
Whew — glad to hear there aren’t a million little werewolves. :^)
Ha! Awesome!
woot! Except I point credit towards for creating that pitch incorporating my suggestions and your “pain in the ass” explanation. I think it sounds great, though!
You’re right, edited.
Disregard my recent comments on the last post. I am too slow for the Internet. Yay for settling on a direction!
So, is your external goal driving the plot for her to successfully set up a brand-new vet practice in Seattle? I’m being irritating about this external goal point, because while your winner sounds winning as a _pitch_, I don’t know how helpful it is as a One-Sentence, since it’s not describing an actual line of action for her/you to follow towards a goal. Also there isn’t any mention of the crazy family stuff, which seems like an important part of the plot now. Maybe: To break free from her wacko religious past, a widowed vet struggles to set up a practice in a new city, only to discover she’s half-werewolf as well.
You know, my top-of-the-head response to that whole grieving widow thing is to imagine her husband as a good, loving guy. But then this religious compound angle makes me wonder… wouldn’t it be likely that she’d marry someone associated with all that? So that maybe the death, while also scary and sad, is also freeing to her. That getting out of his control is what enables her to start her new city life apart from that way of thinking. Which makes this, and not some previous event like going to school or getting married, the first clean break for her from that old life.
To raise the stakes even more, maybe she’s never practiced or gone to school as a vet before since that wouldn’t have been acceptable female behavior. Maybe her husband was a vet and she’s just helped out in his clinic.
I will stop now trying to write your novel now. Unfortunately, it is much more fun to try and plot out someone else’s novel than bang my head against my own.
Her main external goal is trying to set up a meaningful new life without her husband. The vet practice is the core of that because it’s a long-held dream.
Her husband was a great guy, not part of the religious crazy at all, but he was so much her guide to the outside world that without him she’s a bit at a loss even for ordinary life things like renting apartments and acquiring credit cards.