Between these two pitches, which sounds more interesting?
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After climate change eradicates society as we know it, civilization is much more like 1800 than the rapidly approaching 2100. Daniel Lupida never cared about politics of “rebuilding society” when he volunteered to join The Coalition and left his small village behind to go beyond the Gate. He only wanted to find his father. Instead, he found his destiny.
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When twenty three year old Cameron Winchester becomes the youngest rookie ever recruited into the Prime Guard, the elite squad that keeps the Kingdom of Kurisa safe, he should be elated. However; he feels nothing but pressure and anxiety. Will he measure up to the rest of the squad? What if they find out how he got the job? His trouble just intensifies when he makes a startling discovery while on a mission to the Neutral Zone that will lead him into a dangerous game of cat and mouse with illusive terrorist mastermind Uncle.
Go with the one you feel the most passionate about.
The way the human mind works, I’m now assuming that Daniel Lupida’s destiny was, in fact, to become the elusive terrorist mastermind Uncle…
I love the second more, just because I’m fed up with thinking about the first IRL. Pulling off the fight against this guy Uncle may be very rewarding for a reader, with high stakes and really tight mindgames\chases. If you feel like you have a well-reasoned villain to crown that, I’d go with #2.
Honestly, both sound really cliche. I feel like you described them that way on purpose, so we the readers would be able to easily get an idea of what each story will entail (which is one of the benefits of cliches), but descriptions like that mean that my brain says “oh, we’ve been there and done that A LOT”.
My brain is kind of a dick but it is right sometimes. I would be interested to see what makes these stories yours, what interesting spin you put into these cliches, before I make a choice.
However, since we are talking about them, I will say that while your second story sounds like a fantasy story, your first story sounds like it could be an intriguing SF story. “If people today were transported to a circa-1800’s society, what advances would they make 70 years later” is something that captures my interest. What would people who are accustomed to putting electricity into sand and making it show them cat pictures be able to accomplish if they were sent back to the 1800’s?
I know my previous paragraph kind of negates the paragraph before it, but humans are a cornucopia of contrast, and I am definitely a human and not a robot typing at a keyboard, hahaha
