Anyone fancy beta testing my novel?!

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Dear Admin, ff this is more appropriate for Shelf Abuse, please move it.

I wrote a book in 2019 and then completely got cold feet about having people read it, so it's remained on my laptop since then but I'm trying to get back on the horse.

Hopefully within a year I can get it into shape to start submitting it to agents.

I am wondering if I should specifically set the book in 2019, since school life was hit so badly by Covid-19. The book also heavily revolves around music, which changes so much in such a short time, and though the book mostly revolves around classic rock, the references to modern music might seem dated now.

If anyone's interested, just reply and I'll send a DM asking for your email addresses, or just shoot me a DM. Either way works.

The synopsis is below. (This would be the kind of synopsis I'd send as a package to agents).

*

"THE SEPTEMBER GURL"
Author: Calum Syers
Word count: 76,000

In an anonymous, suburban English town lives an anonymous teenage girl. Not one of the popular crowd, nor unpopular either – she is just one of the not-anything group. She has only one friend in the world - a friend as unnoticeable as she is - united by the loss and grief in their awkward home lives, and their love of old music. Their new band might just be the spark which gets them back on track in the world – but, for the adults around them, emotional repair may be a little more difficult!


EMILY KING is fifteen years old, red-headed, with acne, and a bipolar father who committed suicide three years ago – needless to say, she is having a few problems socialising. Add to this her Asperger's diagnosis, and you have one fully-fledged, self-loathing outcast. She has only one friend: the moody and acerbic ALISON, who is having problems of her own, dealing with a mother who has left her alone with her boring father, with whom she clashes daily. Emily herself doesn't seem to pass two words with her own chronically depressed mum in a single day, and the only memory she can form of her father is finding him dead on the bathroom floor.

But, these two girls have a shared love of old music, if they don't always agree on it. Emily inherited her father's tastes - The Beatles; Big Star; The Cars; The Ramones; classic rock and old-school punk/grunge - and despairs of the contemporary pop of her peers. When she is asked in her PSHE class to prepare a speech entitled "Does a Pop Song Have a Soul?" she doesn't just think about the answer, she obsesses and agonises over it, asking everyone she meets for their opinion. The profound analysis she applies to the subject of music presents a metaphor for her life generally, as she draws on it to explain her own issues. Meanwhile, the disillusioned teachers and parents around her all seem to be falling apart, in full public view.

When her headteacher offers incentives to the students to take part in the end of year school concert, almost pitying the lack of enthusiasm, Emily signs up. And - just so she won't feel too much of failure when she inevitably fails to see this through - her patronising friend Alison joins her. They need one more member, so they enlist the help of church-band drummer JAMIE, who very soon cottons on to the fact that Emily and Alison can't actually play. But, they only need to rehearse one song – and rehearse they do, as Emily the outcast determines that if she has never seen anything through before in her life, she will not let herself down this time; she needs to play at that concert, if only for her own self-worth.

Along the way, the girls face up to their demons, and learn that they do actually care about each other, after all. As Alison's relationship with her dad is stretched to make-or-break point, Emily finally discovers that the key to her own mother's happiness is Emily herself making peace with her loss. Emily also learns that even though she completely humiliated herself, at the party of none other than BILLY EVANS - the super-hot, super-nonchalant boy of her dreams... and, it went viral! - he and others perhaps have a view of her that she has never quite shared: that she is not quite the uncool outcast she thought she was. Additionally, much to her surprise, besotted Billy may not be quite the bonehead she had always thought him to be. So begins Emily's journey of reflection, self-acceptance and a long-overdue willingness to grieve – and remember – her father. But still, as the girls will learn for their concert performance, there is nothing in life which can't be explained by a song! Perhaps therein lies the answer to her PSHE teacher's question.

The September Gurl is a bittersweet, emotional comedy, narrated from Emily's first-person, present-tense viewpoint, which takes a humorous and sensitive approach to the dramas of coming-of-age, peer pressure, the importance of empathy, the diversity of all of our mental health and – in the social media age – the fickle five minutes of viral fame, usually for all the wrong reasons!

[Rev+]

How many books do you need to have read for this gig?

I've read the novelisation of Bram Stoker's Dracula that came with the VHS, and also this dream book that tells you what your dreams mean.

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How many books do you need to have read for this gig?

I've read the novelisation of Bram Stoker's Dracula that came with the VHS, and also this dream book that tells you what your dreams mean.

So long as you can read, you've got the job!

[BlodwynPig]

Looks good from the synopsis but I don't have time to read the full thing properly. I'd say get it out there.

[Pijlstaart]

A couple of immediate comments, not sure alison is a marketable name, alison connotes thin hair and that'll scare off advertisers, perhaps Luscious works better, Phull Scalp? Typo in the title, assuming you want the month it's Setembar, and no, you can't set it in 2019, that wouldn't do at all. Just take a step back and there'll be some obvious common-sense changes to apply.

Wasn't it you who pitched that Love Of Bob and Daphne screenplay a couple of months ago, I was in favour of that, very clear, timeless yet of it's time, should focus on a book tie-in for that, maybe some branded keyrings to sell at airshows? You're a promising young man but you have to play to your strengths.

[pancreas]

Echo the above. I always thought Amstrad would be a good name for a girl. Use that.

[dead-ced-dead]

So, the normal names of Phull Scalp and Amstrad to replace the weird name of Alison? Got it.

[Johnny Yesno]

Echo the above. I always thought Amstrad would be a good name for a girl. Use that.

True fact: Lord Alan named the company by reversing the name of his mother Dartsma.

[Twit 2]

Have you considered changing the protagonist to a pike fisherman called Dave? Keep the rest, though. Perhaps Dave could have been kept back in school as he put more time into pike than his studies.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Emily sounds like a musical elitist snob. I hate her already.

[Johnny Yesno]

Emily sounds like a musical elitist snob. I hate her already.

She sounds like a typical Beatles fan to me. Perhaps replace 'The Beatles; Big Star; The Cars; The Ramones; classic rock and old-school punk/grunge' with forum favourites Sutcliffe Jügend.

[flotemysost]

I can definitely see this as a YA romance/drama - "socially awkward misfit unexpectedly gets attention of class hottie" is a pretty popular plot (I'm assuming this is for a YA market given the school setting and ages of the main protagonists), but even from that synopsis it sounds like there's an interesting depth to the characters, reflecting the complexity of teenage friendships.

One thing I would say, not to uproot the whole basis of Emily's character, but I think the "despairing over her peers' contemporary music tastes" thing would need to be handled quite carefully, as lots of teenagers actually have pretty catholic tastes (thanks to streaming etc.) and are probably likely to have heard of/be into older/"classic" artists.

At the same time, I think that sort of "they don't make 'em like they used to!" attitude to music *could* be read as snobbery/elitism, and could potentially be alienating to a young, diverse, politically aware audience - I'm not suggesting you've written Emily as a 15-year-old boomer, but I think it's worth making sure you don't risk turning off readers if they can't see themselves in your main character.

One small point re: the title, I get the reference (although admittedly I don't know much about Big Star), but I'd bear in mind that spelling of "gurl" also has associations with LGBTQ+ and also Black culture (again, I'm sure you're aware of this already, but if the main characters are white cishet people then I dunno if it could potentially risk being a bit misleading to young readers? But an agent wold be far better placed to advise on that!).

Re: references to COVID and contemporary music, I don't know how specific you were planning on being (e.g. references to particular contemporary songs/artists) - would it be possible instead to be more generic or even come up with fictional artists/songs? I'm not sure how YA novelists are handling the COVID issue, I imagine many of them probably just don't refer to it at all (is there a need to state what year it's set in?) but it might be worth seeking out any examples of recent novels which do acknowledge it, just to see how they've gone about it.

Best of luck anyway, interested to hear how you get on.

[dead-ced-dead]

Thank you for the above. I'm away from the keyboard so I won't address everything you wrote but the streaming point is a very good one.

This is actually perfect, because one thing I was proud of when writing the book, is I didn't write any manufactured Mean Girls' esque rivalry and sort of made the main character's mind her own worst enemy. This way the other school kids are just normal. You have your friends and the people you ignore. So to further normalise them, I can add a few paragraph's to explain that Emily's obsession with is part defence mechanism/part crutch/partly due to her being on the spectrum.