Hello r/Outrun.
I've written a novel inspired by the music and aesthetics of Outrun, and I need beta readers.
What's it called? What's it about?
The book is called Deliverance. Here's a provisional blurb:
Deliverance is a freelance, high-speed courier company who take anything anywhere in present-day Japan, and work for anyone, legal or not, provided they follow the rules and pay up front. Just about no-one does it better.
Deliverance is about to have a pivotal role in the huge schism between Yakuza factions that's opening up in the ugly shadows behind the peaceful, modern, advanced society of Japan. Those who control everything in the underworld of Japan are about to go to war on their own kind, and no-one is safe.
Deliverance was old friends Masa, the driver and mechanic, and Neil, who is navigator, security, loadmaster and tech. But Masa is dead, in suspicious circumstances, so Neil recruits a skilled but inexperienced new driver, Suzuka Hama, and they immediately find that things are a lot more serious than they imagined.
Deliverance is now a target. Suzu must adapt to the world she's now part of, and Neil must adapt to her and deal with the death of his friend. Together they must learn to rely on one another to survive whatever is out for their blood.
Essentially, the story follows Neil and Suzu through her first few weeks on the job, and tells of their involvement in the infighting between the older, larger faction of the Yakuza and a newer breakaway faction. It's an action novel, but with literary influences and a theme of loss and how people deal with it; I experienced a serious loss myself, and another part of the inspiration of the book is the way I started to understand how nostalgia and the retro vibes of outrun and synthwave helped me through.
What's a beta reader? Why are you asking r/outrun ?
I'm looking for five people to read and critique the first draft, which I'll revise based on this feedback. They say the best beta readers are the ones closest to your target readership, and that's basically you lot! As to what it consists of, it's basically like what you did in English Lit classes at school, only with an Outrun-flavoured novel full of chases, rally cars, shotguns, and retro awesomeness, rather than Of Mice And Men or Romeo And Juliet or whatever. You read it critically and analytically, then you give me feedback about what's good and bad, what works and doesn't. Plus, unlike English Lit classes, you don't have to write an essay or anything, just let me know what you think and tell me how you think I should improve it. I'm also not expecting you to be editors or anything like that - I'll handle that stuff later.
I just need people who like to read fiction and can:
a) commit to doing this with the whole novel (by my calculation, about 450 standard novel-sized pages), and
b) feel like they can be constructive, detailed and specific in their critique.
If you fancy that, get in touch.
If beta reading is not for you, but you're interested in the book, let me know as well! I wrote it primarily because I love writing, but I'm interested to see if there's really a readership out there for this sort of thing. I'm looking to publish it as a Kindle book ASAP. I'll be keeping people updated on progress.
N.B. I posted this yesterday, not realising about 'music mondays', so if you glimpsed this yesterday, no, you aren't going insane, I'm just trying again.
Submitted February 19, 2019 at 05:26AM by SecretCatPolicy http://bit.ly/2SUFvsf
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