Tessera

miralarkin

@miralarkin.bsky.social

Romance author Journalist, foodie, reformed waitress Querying: A MATTER OF TASTE 👇 Sign up for exclusive updates! https://miralarkin.substack.com/

33 Posts76 Follower 88 Folgt

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 6d ago

Chapter 1 of my cozy fall-inspired short story is now live on my Substack! I would love your support and if you gave it a read <3 miralarkin.substack.com/p/fall-eyes-... #fall #romance #shortstory #author

Fall Eyes on Us—Chapter 1

She wants pumpkin spice and cooler temps. He wants a quiet escape from corporate life. They never imagined picking up where they left off five years ago.

miralarkin.substack.com

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 2w ago

Some foodie fiction for you miralarkin.substack.com/p/when-eats-... #fiction #foodie #shortstory

When Eats Meets West

Explore the delicious connection between Eastern and Western food culture, from local flavors and island traditions to the surprising ways food brings us together.

miralarkin.substack.com

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 3w ago

Find out how I'm writing book #2...differently. substack.com/home/post/p-... #writing #authors #writingcommunity

What I’m doing differently for book #2

Using hard lessons from book #1 to guide me

substack.com

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 4w ago

Why I write miralarkin.substack.com/p/why-i-writ...

Why I write

Because I have no choice in the matter, as it turns out

miralarkin.substack.com

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · last mo.

I put together a roundup of all the online pitch events I know of/have participated in! Check it out, bookmark it, and feel free to add ones you know about in the comments: www.miralarkin.com/post/the-com.... #amquerying #querying #author

The complete guide to online pitch events for querying authors

This quick, scannable guide highlights all the online pitch events for querying authors.

miralarkin.com

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · last mo.

Want a cutie author sticker? Sign up for my newsletter before Tuesday, and I'll mail you one! www.miralarkin.com/newsletter

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Curious about how to build an author platform and haven't sold a book yet? Check out my learnings from 11 months at it!

How I built my author platform from scratch—before selling a book

Ah, the dreaded (for some) online-presence building of authordom. Gone are the days when writers could simply sit in their caves and write. Now, we're expected to market, be the face of our books and ...

miralarkin.com

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Help me choose my first author sticker! 🍳📚 I'm giving away the winning design soon in an upcoming giveaway! Which one would you actually put on your Kindle, water bottle, or laptop? 🍳 A – In My Fictional Hot Chef Era ❤️ B – Read More. Eat Better. Love Hard ☕ C – Fueled by Coffee & Books

@amberjollyauthor.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Jack Frost (1998) x Sweet Home Alabama YULE ALWAYS FIND ME is a holiday paranormal romance with: 🤍second chance romance 💀murd.er 🤍fake dating ❄️frosty magic 👯‍♀️sister bonds 🐶a cute pet sidekick 🎄Christmas festivities 🔼love triangle Would you read it? Art by @mknzgmbn #questpit #wip #P #R #A

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A viral feud never tasted so good 😏 After a food critic’s viral review sparks a public feud with a celebrity chef, she must partner with him in a cooking competition—and somehow not fall in love with him. 🔥 THE SLOWEST BURN x FOR BUTTER OR WORSE #Q #questpit

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 2mo ago

After her viral review sparks a public feud with a celebrity chef, a food critic must partner with him in a cooking competition—and somehow not fall in love with him. 🙈 Blindfolded taste tests 🍳 Forced partners in a cooking competition 📱 Viral public feud 🌺 Hawaiʻi setting #bluepit #r #amquerying

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Slowest Burn x For Butter or Worse After her viral review sparks a public feud with a celebrity chef, a food critic must partner with him in a cooking competition—and somehow not fall in love with him. A MATTER OF TASTE is a contemporary romance complete at 70K words. #amquerying

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Found my MMC on the dating app, UNHINGE! Meet Theo, the moody AF James Beard Chef who is looking for a girl who can call him on his shit. And he might drag her in a viral post, too. 70k chef x food critic romance #unhingedpit #r #querying

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“Sorry for throwin’ ya to the wolves so early,” he said, standing up to walk me out. I straightened my off-white jacket, pretending I was totally fine. I would be totally fine. Right? #wipsnips #amquerying

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I arrived at the office Monday morning after an anxiety-ridden Sunday un-reset spent laying low (and getting tipsy with Makenna). When I passed by Diane’s desk in the accounting department, she had my review up on her screen and quickly exited out of it when she saw me. 👀 #wipsnip

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 3mo ago

To save her dream job at a food magazine, a food critic must partner with the James Beard award-winning chef her debut review nearly destroyed—and somehow not fall in love with him. #amquerying #romanceauthor

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It worked, too. I’d stacked up some pretty serious bylines, including features in Eater, Food & Wine, Bon Appétit. And now, if I could survive the gala, I could add Island Taste to my resume and finally solidify myself as a real writer. #wipsnips

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“Already?” Neil, who just a few days ago complained about fraternizing among the commoners, whined with the annoyance of a small child at the prospect of leaving the dinner table. #WIPsnips

#BluePit - A Storytelling Hype & Pitch Event @bluepit.bsky.social · 3mo ago

A new pitch event, specifically for adult writing! June 24th is #SmutPit! A hype event for writers of spicy content! Both published and WIP! #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #SmutSky #BookSky

Zeke Caliban@zekecaliban.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Let's take a day to celebrate all expressions of love and the fact we get to create art about it! Join us for #SmutPit, a hype event, on June 24th! Find new stories! New friends! Maybe new kinks! 🤣 Published & WIPs welcome! #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #SmutSky #RomanceLandia #BookSky #Erotica

#SmutPit

A hype event to show off and promote your spicy stories and make connections with other creators!

June 24th
12 AM to 12 AM EST

Use the #SmutPit tag and #P for published (include a purchase link in the replies!) or #W for a WIP
Include whatever other #s from our genres & kink lists you are comfortable with
Limit 3 posts per pen name
Published works and WIPs welcome!
No AI

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I fixed myself a bowl of spicy hot ramen with two soft-poached eggs, letting the hot broth drop down the back of my throat. An edgy warmth blanketed my insides. #WIPSnips

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Sending vibes out there for authors who are querying: may you get multiple full requests, great feedback, multiple offers of rep, and a book deal! 🙌

Frankie | Querying & Drafting @byfrankiejoy.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Bea’s convinced she’s bad, and hides her sexuality in the pixelated boxes of TemptressB—it’s how she survived what came before. Until a suspicious subscriber, censorship-happy board member, and stupidly principled (utterly devastating) boss force her to be fully seen. #QuestPit #Q #A #WF #U #LF #R

Image: faded background of library metal bookcases. A pink filter is atop growing from the bottom left corner. A blue pen is across the right part of the screen poised beside a scribbled heart.

Text: Shamelessly Wanting. By Frankie Joy. An Agents Guide. Upmarket fiction with romantic arc (80k). Querying.

Text banner at top: messy fmc, buttoned-up mmc, late stage dual pov, open-door, book banning b-plot

Image: light pink background with a pink distortion in the corners. Scribbled blue loops separate two halves of the slide. Yellow highlighter is beneath the headers. Four book covers are on the right-hand side.

Pitch:

Beatrice Dorsey shelves books at the Meadow Park Library-and runs a spicy content site under the name Temptress. But that's none of her coworkers' business. Or her family's. Especially not Miles Noor, her steady and irritatingly attractive boss. The man who brought her burgers on the library floor and walked away from their almost-kiss with two words: "Not yet." A new subscriber surfaces, reminding her of what she's always known: "You were always bad;)" Someone from before has Found her. Within weeks, Bea's cousin has the photos, her best friend tires of her avoidance, and a board member is targeting "indecent" books. The exposure she's spent years hiding from is coming due.
Bea arms herself with humor, lipgloss, and sour gummy bears. It works. Mostly. Until she's lying on the floor wondering who she is when she stops performing.

Comps:

The Wedding People
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Funny, guarded heroine learning to let people in —and making mistakes along the way.

Idea of You
Centering of female desire.

Fleabag
Exploration of shame without moralizing.

Image: light pink background with a pink distortion in the corners. Scribbled asterisks are in the right upper corner. Yellow highlighter is beneath the headers. Gummy bears are beside Bea and jalebi beside Miles.

Bea Dorsey
Gummy bear-fueled, anxious-avoidant, narrating her life in lipgloss. If she gets too close to others they might see the parts of her she shamefully hides. You'll want her happy ending anyway.
"I hid truths from my own brain. Reality is what I say it is."

Miles Noor
Patient, principled, and permanently undone by the woman he’d sign disclosure paperwork for. He never forgets he's her boss-but the buttoned-up exterior becomes too suffocating to maintain.
"I’m just here to unbutton your buttons, Miles.”

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 5mo ago

After her viral review sparks a public feud with a celebrity chef, a food writer is forced to partner with him in a live cooking competition to save their reputations—only to fall for the man she nearly ruined. Order up: 69k romantic comedy set in luscious Hawaiʻi 🌴🌺🥥 #Questpit #Q #R

Cassie Wallin Author @cassiewallinwrites.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Apple TV’s SEVERANCE meets SILO 🚫 Emotion as system error 👾 The haunting is digital 📋Corporate ritual menace 🧪 Complicit Protagonist 🧨 Creeping dread to visceral action #QuestPit #Q #A #SF #S #SFF #U

The pitch nova feels too much much and in this future it could get her mind wiped clean

Comps: severance, silo, the dram hotel, chaingang all stars

The characters. Nova the stranger and Kade

Chantal Danieli — is querying MSU! 🕯️@chantaldanieli.bsky.social · 5mo ago

JANE EYRE x THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA 🕯️forbidden gothic romance 🕯️slow burn 🕯️yearning à la anthony bridgerton 🕯️black swan-esque awakening 🕯️2000’s setting 🕯️devouring obsession but make it consensual 🕯️secret lake meetings #questpit #W #A #NA #R

First Graphic:

An Oil Painting of a woman sprawled over a man lying on a chaise. Depiction of Romeo & Juliet.

Book Title: My Sweet Unbecoming
A Forbidden Gothic Romance
Coming to agent inboxes September 2026

Second Graphic:

An Oil Painting of a woman staring deeply into a canvas. The art on the canvas is a man in uniform standing as the muse.

Comps and Pitch
Jane Eyre
The Viscount Who Loved Me
The Phantom Of The Opera

When a scandal exiles her to Lucerne, disgraced Olivia Rooney falls for the one man she’s forbidden to love—Théodore Chair-Beaumont, the brooding aristocrat sworn to matrimony with another.
But beneath his restraint lies a wound that mirrors her own. And falling for him could not only repeat the tragedy that broke him once before. It could ruin her reputation, once and for all.

Third Graphic:

Tropes.

Forbidden Romance.
High Society Match Making.
European Setting.
Slow Burn.
Love VS Duty.
Black Swan-esque Awakening.
Masquerade Ball.
2000’s Setting.
Obsessive Yearning.
Secret Lake Meetings.

Fourth Graphic:

Snippets:

His hunger transcends anything as simple as lust. A perfect replica of my own.
Our appetite goes beyond the physical. What we starve for is not the body, but the soul.
Spirits, which I'm certain, have known each other for millennia—longing and finding one another, again and again against all odds.
Nothing can come between what is immaterial.
Even less so when it is destined
A divine homecoming.
He is the vessel of my existence. The missing half that completes me. There is no him without me. And without him, there is no me.
-
And how do I tell him I'd gladly crawl beneath his armor, inside his clothes and past his skin? Fight myself through sinews and bone, every ligament and essence that makes him him, and live on solely to keep his soul free of any pain?
Caretaker of his soul for eternity.
-
A touch, as soft as a feather.
The dull edges of fingernails.
Deliberate and as exquisitely slow as molasses.
I arch into these luxuries like a cat wanting for more.
Hum at the whispery strokes as they comb through my scalp, down my hair, in pursuit of my jaw and finally my décolleté.
I know it's him.
Scent him like a vampire would sweet blood.

EvelynHail, PhD @evelynhail.bsky.social · 5mo ago

HEARTLESS HUNTER X SLAVIC FOURTH WING 🎭 She, a humble servant posing as Duchess, is his executioner-to-be. 🐉 He, the arrogant Dragon Prince, must save a kingdom from the encroaching Ever-Dark. 🖤 Neither anticipated falling for the one destined to be their undoing. #questpit #NA #R #F #DF #Q

A gothic-style book cover titled "Root and Ruin." Centered is a glowing, cyan-blue dragon coiled into a circle, its scales etched with faint, runic symbols. Golden, gnarled roots extend downward from the dragon like branching veins against the pitch-black background. Text at the top reads "Enemies to Lovers," "Fated Mates," and "Fake Identity," with "An Agent’s Guide" in the top right. Subtitle reads "80k • NA Slavic Romantasy," and the bottom logline says, "She is sent to kill the dragon. Instead, she might become his only salvation."

A graphic titled "The Comps" in golden lettering. It displays four book covers arranged in a grid: "Heartless Hunter" by Kristen Ciccarelli, "Fourth Wing" by Rebecca Yarros, "Shadow and Bone" by Leigh Bardugo, and "The Witcher: The Last Wish" by Andrzej Sapkowski.

A self-made fantasy illustration showing a halfway transformed, dark-haired man, Prince Konstantin Veliki, with a silver crown and dragon wings. He is carrying a woman, a humble servant Iva, masquerading as a Duchess Zora, in a long, flowing cream-colored gown as they fly through the air. She is his guest but unbeknownst to him, she is plotting to poison him. In the background, a sprawling forest surrounds a magic academy, Kolegium with colorful, traditional Slavic-style onion domes—gold, silver, bronze and green. Each of the domes represents air, water, fire and earth magic respectively. Snippet text at the bottom reads: "Do you always sequester your guests and take flight with them?"

A self-made illustration set in the catacombs under the magic academy, Kolegium, featuring classical-style statues on the walls. Iva, in dark armor, rides a bright, light blue-scaled dragon; it is Prince Konstantin Veliki in his dragon form.
They face off against a monstrous, ethereal shadow dragon composed of wispy, black smoke and glowing eyes — this is Konstantin’s fallen father Tibor Veliki. A brilliant golden sphere of light, relic of the Slavic god of light, Belobog, called Spark of Creation, floats on a pedestal between them. Text at the bottom of the snippet reads: "Let us dance, little one," the Shadow Dragon hisses in a dry whisper of the fallen. "A worthy foe," Konstantin responds. We take to the air to meet the darkness. Two gargantuan winged silhouettes hover in the abyss, suspended in a precarious balance. They mirror one another; two sides of the same coin, champions of Belobog and Chernobog.

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 5mo ago

One chef. One food writer. One delicious dilemma. 🔪 ✍️ A MATTER OF TASTE features: 💞 Professional rivals 🔥 Hot Hawaiian nights 😘 Sharp-tongued banter 👩‍⚖️ Ambitious female heroine 🫣 Blindfolded taste tests 👨‍🍳 Emotionally-complicated MMC who can cook 🍳 69K rom-com set in Hawaiʻi 🌴🥥🌊🌺 #Questpit #R #Q

Marie Montague @mariemontague.bsky.social · 5mo ago

It's The Flatshare meets The Hating Game in wellies 🌱 Enemies-to-lovers 🥕 Forced proximity (Only one vegetable bed) 🔪 Grumpy Chef x Chaotic Influencer 🪴 Petty sabotage & turf wars 🍳 Accidental food stall partners 🗣️ Dual POV & biting British banter #questpit #q #r #a

miralarkin @miralarkin.bsky.social · 5mo ago

After her viral review sparks a public feud with a celebrity chef, a food writer is forced to partner with him in a live cooking competition to save their reputations—only to fall for the man she nearly ruined. 69k romantic comedy set in luscious Hawaiʻi 🌴 🌺 #Questpit #Q #R