Perfect Pitch: Nita Tyndall's Query for Who I Was With Her
It’s that time!
I’ve been anxiously awaiting Nita Tyndall’s debut for a while now, and I’m so excited it’ll be in your hands this month. Who I Was With Her is a heartbreaking and lyrical YA contemporary novel that shifts back and forth in time, digging into the story of a teen girl who loses her secret girlfriend in a tragic accident.
What happens when you’re forced to mourn alone, for a person and a relationship no one else knew existed? This book broke me into so many tiny pieces, and I was just so thrilled to work on it.
Below, you’ll find Nita’s original query for it, and I hope you’ll find it helpful. And if you do, pick up a copy of their debut! It’s in bookstores everywhere, and available in audio, September 15th via HarperTeen.
Let’s dig in!
Corinne Parker is a runner. She runs on her high school’s cross-country team; in the woods behind her house. She runs away from her flighty, alcoholic mother and clueless father. And she runs from the truth she won’t admit to herself, or to anyone—that she’s bisexual, and she’s dating the captain of the rival cross-country team, Maggie Bailey.
But then Maggie dies, and Corinne has no one to turn to. Not her parents, not the best friend she’s pushed away for a year. Not Maggie’s brother, Dylan. The only one she has is Elissa, a girl she barely knows; a stranger who’s the only one who has any idea how Corinne is hurting because she dated Maggie, too.
As Corinne begins to fall for Elissa, she realizes she didn’t know Maggie as well as she thought, and she realizes that what Maggie and everyone else wanted for her—coming out, Division I schools, a life outside of her small North Carolina town—may not be what she wants.
But the only way Corinne’s going to figure out what she wants is if she stops running.
WHO I WAS WITH HER is a contemporary f/f YA novel complete at 61,000 words. I was a fellow at the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging Writers in 2017, and am currently a blogger for Barnes & Noble Teen and a moderator of the site YAPride.
Thank you again,
Nita
And there you have it, that’s the pitch!
Nita does so many things spectacularly well in this short query letter. They get right to the plot, they dish the title, genre, category, word count. Their bio has important details about their platform in the community space (sigh, I miss the B&N Teen blog so much, where we both used to write!).
I know some readers of this letter might be wondering where the personalization is, but Nita’s a writer I knew all the way back then. I was expecting the query letter. They didn’t need to.
Hopefully Nita’s query helped you! You can thank them by ordering their debut!