MG MENTOR BIO:
E. Latimer is a young adult fantasy writer and literary intern for A + B Works literary agency. She was born and raised in Victoria, BC. She`s had her work published in Chicken Soup For the Soul: Reboot Your Life, and most recently, the Imagines anthology, published by Simon and Schuster.
In her spare time, she writes books, makes silly vlogs with the YA Word Nerds about writing and reads excessively. She`s also one of the hosts of the Wattpad4, a weekly twitter chat which features awesome guests like Lauren DeStefano, Leigh Bardugo and Victoria Aveyard.
Her middle grade gothic fantasy, The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray is coming out from Tundra Books/Penguin Random House in Spring of 2018.
Mentoring Style
I’m a hands-on type of mentor, I love going through for plot, structure and character development, but I’ll also be diving into line edits.
I believe “mentorship” carries over, not just to the craft of writing, but to coaching on other things, social media, the publishing industry, ect. I’m going to be preparing you for what getting an actual edit letter will be like, what working with a publisher can be like, which means deadlines. I love goofing off and sending one another gifs, laughing our faces off on GChat or skype, and creating ridiculous team names, but we’ll also be working hard.
LOVE IT OR LOATHE IT
Love it:
-Fantasy That can be categorized as any of the following: Spooky, eerie, whimsical, gothic, dark.
-Horror
-Mythology of any kind, give it to me!
-Anything that can be described as “Tim Burtonesque”
-Anything with a Roald Dahl, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe vibe.
-Girl friendships
-Female scientists (mad or otherwise)
-LGBTQ+ (send me aaaaaall the LGBT MG please!)
-Quirky families
-Anything in space
-Anything with ghosts
-Funny characters
-Any and all diversity is welcome but #ownvoices has priority. (I will note that my favorite diverse books are not issue books, but feature diversity as a fact of the characters, give me neurodiverse girls in space! Give me lesbian pirates! Give me witches, magic and mythology from outside North America! I want it all!)
-A great adventure story (Pirates! Treasure! Riddles! Games!)
-Anything with magic. Give me all the witches, wizards and warlocks!
-Favorites are: Ms. Cavendish’s Home for Boys and Girls, Lemoney Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events, The Kneebone Boy, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, everything by Diana Wynne Jones, everything by Francis Hardinger
Loath it:
-Sports themed
-Sad stories (this has exceptions but if your story is about cancer patients, alcoholic parents, abuse, or anything equally grim, it will probably not be in my wheelhouse)
-Historical Fiction
-No books where animals are the main characters please!
-Contemporary or “issues” books (w/ some exceptions, including LGBT and comedy – also exceptions for if the “issue” is not the MAIN part of the story: ie, your manuscript is about a girl pirate with general anxiety disorder)
-Romance (as a main plot)
–I’m not your best bet for chapter books, as I prefer upper middle grade. Your book should be at least 40k (50k is best).
-I’m not your best bet for faith-based stories.
Pet Peeves: The overused, the cliche, the just plain “No thank yous”.
-I see hundreds of MG submissions on bullying, which is a worthy subject, but is not the only MG experience out there! If bullying is a central theme of your manuscript it should have a VERY different/fresh spin on the narrative or I likely won’t request.
– Middle Graders are smart! Please don’t talk down to them, or me! “Dumbing down” a manuscript is an automatic pass!
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