PW #121: New Adult Male-Male Romance: WELL-PLAYED

Manuscript Status: Finished

Mentors Names: Layla Reyne and Victoria De La O

Mentee Name: Alexandria Bellefleur

Title: WELL-PLAYED

Category: New Adult

Genre: Male-Male Romance

Word Count: 79,000 words

Pitch:

Theatre-major Oliver doesn’t care what Google says; he can totally handle being friends with benefits with his high school crush turned enemy turned college roommate. Whether he’s a good enough actor to hide his rapidly-rekindling feelings for Jason is another story.

Excerpt:

According to a cursory Google search, the terminal velocity of falling bird shit is 26.8 meters per second, or 60 miles per hour. Fast enough to generate the force necessary to crack a windshield, or more feasibly, ruin my day.

Scrolling through the search results on my phone, I leaned against my car and tried not to breathe through my nose. Ruin might’ve been melodramatic, but a crow had decided my shoulder was the best place to drop a whopper of a deuce at the worst possible time. Talk about making my already stressful day crappier.

Google seemed to think there was a popular belief that what had happened to me was a sign of good luck. Like I was supposed to be thankful for being crapped on when my day already entailed a flat tire, a flat spare tire, and a visit to a crooked auto-mechanic. He’d tried to convince me I needed a new radiator—my Accord was a piece of junk, but that was one thing I didn’t need—and charged me a fortune for the tire. I’d meant to arrive in Eugene by lunch so I could grab the keys to my new place early. Instead, I’d screeched into town minutes before the complex’s management office closed. Then the bird situation happened.

If there were ever a moment for my supposed luck to kick in, it was now, as I stood in the parking lot Googling bird facts while avoiding the boxes weighing down my car. Scratch that. I was avoiding meeting my new roommate.