Post-apocalypse biker chick – what’s not to like? This story gets off to a good start, but a little focus on the details starts to illuminate problems.

Title: Lionheart ‘Luna Knight’
Wordcount: 124,996
Genre: Science fiction/Fantasy
Language: British English
Synopsis: Seven years after a global nuclear holocaust, eighteen-year-old Luna Knight finds a document which identifies the last known whereabouts of her biological parents. Escaping the abuse of her ‘host family’, she sets out alone into the wastelands in search of her real mother and father.

Text:

South Yorkshire

England

Having glanced behind to make sure no one had followed her,  eighteen-year-old Luna Knight put all of her weight behind the metal door and opened it.  A thick fog of bootleg cigarettes,  cheap booze and sexual depravity stained the air.  She was immediately met with a wall of silence as a swarm of gaunt white faces ogled her slender body.  She was the only female in the room and they’d noticed.  Undaunted,  she lowered her eyes and headed towards an unattended table in the corner of the room.

The lurid stares only intensified once Luna had unclipped her hazmat helmet and placed it on the table.  She ran her fingers through her long blonde hair and shook the knots out.  However,  the lustful glares soon ceased when she placed a handgun on the table next to her helmet,  almost forcing them to re-evaluate their intentions and recommence with their mutterings.

With a wry smile,  Luna took off her motorbike gloves and removed her satchel,  retrieving a couple of documents from inside.  The first was a ‘wanted poster’ for a man named Elias Hart.  The second,  a document that contained the last known whereabouts of her biological parents…  Kingsborough Castle.

“I’m guessing tha not from round here?” the bartender asked,  in a thick,  Yorkshire accent.

“No,  I’m not.”  She said,  whilst putting the documents back into her satchel.

“So, what’s thi poison?”

“I’ll have a can and tin of whatever you got spare,  please.”

“Will limeade and baked beans do?”

“I guess.”

“That’ll be a litre of oil.”

“Do I look like I’m carrying a litre of oil?”

The bartender checked her out.  He was momentarily captivated by her toned physique and tight-fitting suit.  There wasn’t enough room for her to breathe,  let alone conceal something like oil.  “I guess not,” he said.  “But tha needs something to trade with.”

Luna put her hand in her pocket and retrieved a couple of shiny stones.  “Will these do?”

The bartender inspected the two gems and nodded.  He then handed over his half of the bargain,  along with a loaned out tin opener.  “Although,” he said.  “There’s no need for that here.”

“What?”

He jabbed a stubby finger towards her helmet on the table.  “That!”

“Why?”

“Because the area’s been clean for about a year,  that’s why.”

“That’s impossible!”  Luna exclaimed,  before she retrieved a small Geiger Counter from her satchel and took a reading.  “Wait,  I can’t believe it.  There’s nothing.  Nothing at all.  It’s a miracle.”

“Or a curse.”

“Curse?  How so?”

Just then,  the cabin’s metal door slammed open,  almost taking out one of the locals in its wake.  A teenage boy burst into the room,  petrified.  “It’s here.  The beast of Kingsborough Castle’s here.”

“Speak of the devil,”  the bartender remarked,  nervously.  “And he shall appear.”

“Beast?”  Luna queried,  as a handful of locals attempted to console the poor lad.

“More like a beast-man,  to be fair.”

Luna shook her head and started to open her tin of beans.  “Oh,  come on.  You’re not being serious,  right?”

“Deadly,”  the bartender replied,  having given the nod for the locals to pick up their swords and take guard outside.  “It’s been spotted around here almost every week for the last twelve months.  It keeps its distance mostly but there’s been the odd close encounter.  One guy survived by the skin of his teeth.  He said he saw its face.  He said it had the bright blue face of a lion and the body of an enormous man.  Its eyes burned with white fire and its roar shook the earth.”

“So,  a fiery blue lion-man?  How did he escape?  Douse it in water and give it a cat biscuit?”

“Mock me all ya like,”  the bartender scoffed,  his eyes wild.  “But mock the devil at ya peril.  All I know is,  since that glowing freak turned up,  all the radiation in the area disappeared overnight.  It’s like it sucked it up like some sort of environmental vampire.”

Luna tilted her head back and shook the last of her cold beans into her open mouth and washed it down with a can of room temperature limeade.  It had the oddest of tastes but it at least had some flavour,  albeit a rather questionable one.  “So,  where’s this castle?”  she asked,  wiping her mouth with her bare hand.

“Ya don’t wanna go there.”

Luna slid her fingers over her handgun and fixed her stare.  “I can take care of myself.  Now,  please…  where’s that castle?”

“About half hour walk northeast.”

With that said,  Luna checked the compass on her wrist and put her helmet back on.  She gave the bartender another couple of gems for his assistance and left the cabin with her gloves and gun held tightly in her hands.

Chapter 2

Luna rode through the black goo left behind by the fallout.  Even after seven years,  numerous wells of an oily substance flooded the baren landscape.  ‘I still don’t get it.  How can there be no sign of radioactivity?’  She couldn’t help but wonder if there was any truth behind the bartender’s words but her intuition ultimately overruled her intrigue.  Either way,  the area was totally clear of toxins and she’d no rational explanation as to why whatsoever.  Forcing it to the back of her mind,  she pushed on and headed northeast towards the castle.

Having reached the top of the hill,  she finally saw it and braked to a stop.  Her heart plummeted.  ‘Oh God,  no!’  The castle was in ruins.  Only the cylindrical keep appeared mostly intact but that was about it.  The area itself,  however,  had been almost completely destroyed,  not incinerated like London and the other major cities but still flattened,  nonetheless.

Just then,  Luna heard a rumble behind her.  A fleet of Knights Templar United militia thundered her way on motorbikes.  ‘I guess they found the fuel then.’  Without another second to spare,  Luna fired up her bike and wheel spun away.

Editorial comment:
Lots to like here, in this post-apocalyptic quest premise. A female hero — I’d imagine rather modelled on Lara Croft, given the “tight-fitting suit” and the four-letter name — a straightforward task, plenty of obstacles in her way. For such a personal mission, whether we like the book is going to depend a lot on how empathetic the main character is. Do we care enough about Luna to want her to succeed? This passage is too short to really get a feel for that, but there are plenty of pointers to a feisty, tough heroine with a nice line in sarcastic wit, who is not bad looking, either.
I like the way we start straight into the action, Luna pushing open the door to the dingy bar, and scene and back-story is seamlessly built up in dialogue between her and the barman. There’s no fumbling around “describing the scene” or detailing the appearance of secondary characters like the barman.
In terms of agent response, I’d want to see a detailed synopsis (which this site doesn’t cater for but a real agent would ask for), before I asked to see more of the material. Only if the synopsis was a really different and novel take on the genre would I show any more interest. This is because there are a number of writing issues in the text that show a writer needing a significant amount of coaching and editing, and publishers often just don’t have the bandwidth to take on that kind of project any more. Ideally, they want a book that is pretty much ready to go, or, as I mentioned, is a radical new take on a genre that shows significant developmental promise.
So what kind of issues am I talking about?
There are some tiny details that don’t ring true. She is “undaunted” by the gazes of the other patrons after she opens the door, but she “lowers her eyes” to cross the room. That sounds quite … well … daunted, to me. The handgun on the table “almost” forces them to re-evaluate their intentions. So it doesn’t, actually, force them to re-evaluate?

Why does she take the documents out of her satchel? She takes two documents out of her bag, a wanted poster and a document about her parents’ location. She then, after a couple of lines of unrelated dialogue, puts them back in her bag. Their significance is not explained (and nor should it be that; would be exposition — to be avoided), but neither are they referred to or “used” in the scene.

She’s wearing a hazmat helmet because of suspected environmental radioactivity, but she takes it off in a bar where there is no airlock or other kind of isolating infrastructure. Why would she assume the bar to be uncontaminated?

Her later conversation with the barman is interrupted by a local lad bursting in saying the “Beast” of Kingsborough Castle is back and the locals all grab their swords and head outside, but she promptly leaves the bar, having eaten her baked beans and drunk her limeade, seemingly unimpressed, and we don’t hear about the beast again.

It feels as if there are too many introduced elements that don’t actually go anywhere — that are not followed up in any consistent world-building sense. It’s your world, obviously, but you need to ensure that it’s consistent in its treatment of elements of that world, otherwise readers will not be able to suspend their disbelief.

One other technical writing issue: there’s a failure to manage point of view (POV) when the barman pauses to ogle Luna in her tight-fitting suit with “barely enough room to breathe” let alone hide a can of oil. These couple of lines are clearly his POV, but we’re in Luna’s POV the rest of the scene (albeit a distant third person POV), so that kind of headhopping should be avoided if possible. It takes us out of Luna’s experience of the bar, and puts us, very briefly, in the barman’s experience, looking at Luna. It’s an easy fix (Luna watched his eyes travel up and down … etc.)

In terms of the bigger picture, and having that unique take on a dystopian post-apocalyptic world that you want to impress an agent with, think quite carefully about the elements you want to introduce. You want to avoid cliché, and make your world as interesting as possible. It’s a bit of a (heterosexual male) fantasy cliché to have a good-looking fit young woman with long blonde hair, dressed in a skin-tight catsuit, as the main character in a post-apocaylptic world. Luna rides a motorbike, so perhaps you could argue that this is what bikers wear. Yes, but bikers wear that gear for less wind-resistance. She’s unlikely to be going at any speed. There’s likely to be debris on the road, or large potholes, round every corner, so she would be going at a snail’s pace. And a bike is dangerously unstable at any time – on roads that have been left to ruin for seven years? Also, in a post-apocalyptic world where oil is the new currency, motorbikes are desperately inefficient means of transport. They’re no more economical on petrol than a small car, you can carry a fraction of the load, and that load, and you, are exposed to the elements (including radiation, in this world) at all times while travelling. Is her skin-tight suit radiation proof? Where does she keep her ammunition? How come her documents don’t get wet if she keeps them in a satchel on her back? In a real post-apocalyptic world you would be driving a robust diesel car, because diesel engines can, with a bit of tinkering, run on almost anything. (A plumber of my acquaintance used to run his van on filtered chip fat.) This is why (in preparation for the coming of the apocalypse) I keep a fleet of old landrovers – they will be ideal transportation when the end of civilisation comes (at least, that’s my justification, and I’m sticking to it). Would Luna really wear her hair long, in an environment where she has to wear a radiation suit at all times? Would she really invite male inspection of her body (“Do I look like I’m carrying a litre of oil?”) in a lawless world where she is travelling alone and has to have a handgun for protection? Most women will tell you that the world we inhabit is dangerous enough for women, and the last thing they ever want to do is to invite strange male physical attention. The world Luna inhabits sounds even more dangerous. For you to convince an agent that this book is a good prospect, even with the writing issues I’ve mentioned above, you need to make Luna utterly believeable as a female navigating a violent and lawless environment, compelling and, I think, very different from other female action heroes.

I’m going to reject this, because I don’t see sufficient evidence that this world is sufficiently compelling and different to other post-apocalyptic action stories with a female lead to warrant the work involved to get the writing up to scratch, with the various issues I’ve mentioned. I think you’re making progress, but this isn’t quite there yet.

Thanks for posting!

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