Okay, I haven’t posted in awhile. Everything caught up with me (see this post) and something had to give. I could only skip so much sleep, so the blog posts were next.
I think it’s time to take another stab at the elevator pitch. This time, instead of tweaking what the pitch(es) I already produced, I want to try come at it from another angle.
So, here it is…
My story follow a young archaeologist, Gretchen Blake, as she travels to Mars to decipher strange symbols found in a cave. The company that hires her, MarsVantage, battles to compete with a much larger and profitable company, Peter Konklin Interplanetary.
While on Mars, Gretchen resist being recruited as a spy, exposes Interplanetary spies, and is marked for death. The symbols lead to a mysterious message that suggests a city is buried under the sand. With her short-term contract coming to an end, she renegotiates the it to stay and explore further.
She and Frank, a MarsVantage Maintenance Engineer, discover a civilization’s knowledge concentrated in that city, and together plan to exploit it for the betterment of MarsVantage and humanity. At the same time, they also discover they’re falling for one another.
I like this version better. It’s longer and more descriptive. I have between a 60 and 90 seconds to make the pitch. I prefer to go shorter, hopefully whetting the agent’s appetite to ask questions.
What this version lacks, though, is a mention of the Knowledge Keepers, an organization that Frank belongs to, and their reason for being, which underpins the entire story.
I’ll work on weaving those factors in for the next version.
I’m an author living in northern Virginia with a wife and a cat. In the late ’80s, I worked on the International Space Station project. I recently retired from managing a group of software engineers to focus on writing science fiction and speculative fiction. Learn more.