Unlock Your Magic

Nicole and Rebecca coach writers who struggle to craft their inner magic into words. We transform budding writers into dynamic professionals, and wild ideas into powerful books.

As speculative fiction fanatics, we know the world is hungry for stories that span universes and we want to help bring yours to life.

Is Your Quest Missing Its Gandalf?

Your idea is big. Your characters are so cool you’d go manticore hunting with them. Your tale is epic, innovative, and beginning to grow tentacles. Your story flourishes in the dreamscape, but is it suitable for the world of publishing?

That’s the hard part, isn’t it? As sci-fi and fantasy experts, we understand our genre is bigger than any one collection of pages. We also understand high-quality critique groups just don’t grow out of 4th dimension portals (as much as we wish they would).

You need pointed, encouraging, professional feedback that makes your story shine in the growing world of SFF.

Our job as coaches and editors is not only to help you define the concepts and logistics of your story, but to put that know-how in your hands. We will help you create a stronger, smarter manuscript and build foundational blocks that will continue to guide you in your career as a writer.

Let’s conquer those books.

Book Coaching Packages

Full Book Coaching

Need a TARDIS to Get You to a Finished Book?

Let us traverse time and space with you to achieve the final product. Like the companions of Doctor Who, we’ll lend you our literary compass to guide you as you evolve into a Time Lord (or, in this case, Experienced Novelist). Full Book Coaching means we join you on your journey, starting where you are, and partner with you all the way to a finished manuscript.

This option is for you if:

  • You want to move quickly and need expert help to save you time
  • You’re looking to invest in a solid foundation for your writing career
  • You don’t know how to achieve the vision inside your head

Will Full Book Coaching, we’ll take you all the way to a finished manuscript in preparation for self-publishing production or querying. Through outline creation, multiple editing phases, and career-focused support, we’ll help you manifest your biggest dream.

What we provide: 

  • Personalized coaching sessions throughout the journey
  • Practiced help building your story outline
  • Developmental editing
  • Line editing
  • Support in time management, budget building, and breaking down all the steps to a finished book
  • Exclusive resources on story-building, including videos, PDFs, and slide shows
  • Access to us via email to touch base, pick our brains, or talk things out

Developmental Edit

Is Your Interstellar Navigator on Course?

You need to know if your story has a cracked hull, cryptic malware, or embedded alien embryo pods ready to hatch and eat us all alive. If that last one is true, we’d like to thank you for making our Alien Bounty Hunter dreams come true. 

In all other cases, it’s critical to identify plot holes, structure issues, pacing hitches, and other big-picture errors plaguing your story. 

As the creator, you know all the fine-points of your fictional universe. The reader on the other side of the page, however, may not be getting the right elements in the right order. You’ve been so close to your story for so long it’s difficult to determine how your story reads to new eyes.

This option is for you if:

  • You’ve overwritten by 10k, 20k, or more
  • Your story needs clarity
  • You’re not sure if you’re doing enough to push those tropes in new directions
  • Your writing doesn’t yet feel alive on the page

A developmental edit is designed to pin-point exactly what’s distracting your reader. We’ll take a deep-dive into your completed manuscript and assess the plot, worldbuilding, characters, pacing, dialogue, and more in order to ensure the narrative is cohesive and the story’s scope is fully realized.

What we provide: 

  • A first-look personal coaching session to determine your goals and vision and learn about your story
  • A ten-page-minimum summary evaluation pointing out gaps in the story structure
  • Prolific, in-document comments citing examples and specific areas for improvement
  • Access to us via email to touch base, pick our brains, or talk things out
  • A final personal coaching session to answer questions and discuss a path forward

Line Edit

Are Your Spells Well Cast?

One thing we know for sure: a misread spell can have disastrous consequences. Nobody wants their ears transported onto a cactus. 

The lines of your manuscript are just as important. The content, style, and flow of your language have a profound effect on your reader and can make or break your ability to secure an agent or top indie charts. With your completed, revised manuscript, we’ll hone in on voice, tone, and strength. While we uncover weak points in dialogue, narrative deviation, wordiness, redundancies, and more, our top goal is to enhance your unique voice.

This option is for you if:

  • Your indie book needs a final tune-up before proofreading and self-publication
  • You want to prepare your manuscript the best you can before submitting to agents
  • Your plot, characters, and setting are in place, but the work still isn’t shining

With a line edit, we fine-tune your manuscript into a steadfast yarn. Your story will come away crisper, cleaner, and ready to come out of its invisibility cloak.

What we provide:

  • A fully annotated manuscript with in-line comments regarding word choice, consistency, and clarity
  • An eight-page-minimum summary evaluation explaining the context of our comments
  • Access to us via email to touch base, pick our brains, or talk things out
  • A personal coaching session to answer questions and discuss our evaluation

Building a Story

Looking for the Key to Your New Universe?

As fellow science fiction and fantasy authors, we understand how the complexity of your created world can run into the speed bump of… well… the real world. How are you going to shape all those fantastical details into a cohesive plot? What if the story you have so far doesn’t fit into a “saleable” format?

We can help. We’ve wrangled with unruly ideas and have successfully molded them into viable manuscripts.

This option is for you if:

  • You’re a new novelist
  • Your world has grown too large to manage
  • Your outlines have a habit of falling apart mid-story
  • Your previous manuscripts didn’t turn out the way you had hoped

We’ll teach you how to start each draft off on the right foot. As we walk you through Building a Story, we’ll help frame your world-building, anchor scenes, and character arcs to best enhance your story’s concept.

When you come out the other side of the Building a Story program, you’ll have a working outline that will serve as a map and key on your chapter-to-chapter journey.

What we provide: 

  • A first-look personal coaching session to determine your goals and vision
  • Guidance in developing an exploratory summary that we’ll help you construct into a scene-by-scene outline
  • Exclusive resources on story-building, including videos, PDFs, and slide shows
  • Access to us via email to touch base, pick our brains, or talk things out
  • A final personal coaching session to answer questions and set you on the path to a finished novel

Short Story Review

Does Your Short Story Have a Short Circuit?

Short stories give us a byte-size view into the wiring of your writerly habits. If you have a bad fuse, no amount of electrical current is going to kick the power on until you replace that fuse. You’ve spent a lot of time oiling the gears of your story, angling them just so, and it can be frustrating when things don’t pan out how you hoped.

With the Short Story Review, you’ll find out if your story is effective as a short, but you’ll also get an idea of which writing frequencies need a tune-up. It only takes a small sample of your writing for us to be able to pinpoint weaknesses you may be unaware of.

Get 5,000 words edited for $100

This option is for you if:

  • You know there are hitches in your writing but can’t pinpoint them
  • You’ve submitted repeatedly, only to be rejected repeatedly 
  • You’re not sure if your short story is structured correctly
  • You want a concrete list of your strengths and weaknesses

The Short Story Review can be used to upgrade a single short story, or it can be used against a sample of your larger work, as pricing for this package is based on word count. After our review, you’ll know precisely where to focus your kilowatt energy as you continue to write.

What we provide: 

  • A full developmental edit to evaluate story structure, pacing, and more
  • The top 3 areas you need to work on to enhance your writing skills
  • Direction on how to proceed and improve
  • Access to us via email to touch base, pick our brains, or talk things out

Use Our Expertise To Your Advantage

For years, we’ve had our noses buried in science fiction and fantasy (and two noses are better than one) constantly reading, studying themes, and hunting down contemporary news. We’ve researched, blogged, marketed, plotted, drafted, edited, and queried our way into gaining unique insight into an extraordinary field of work. Sci-fi and fantasy has utterly stolen our hearts because of its ethereal ability to bring the human experience into focus using visionary stories. 

With one eye on the influence of classics, and one eye on the genre’s evolution, we can help identify where your work fits in, what will set it apart, and how to make it shine. 

What we bring you as SF & Fantasy specialists:

  • A professional editing experience sharpened by years of working on manuscripts just like yours
  • Broad proficiency with tropes, including what to avoid and what to update
  • In-depth understanding of the publishing landscape and process
  • An unparalleled passion for stories that communicate truth through the fantastical
Nicole Van Den Eng
Book coaches
Rebecca Zornow, author

Your Story Is Waiting