Maeve MacLysaght

🔮 Unabashed minimalism. Ironic disinterest is over, baby! yes YES the tiger is out!

🗡️ Gay-coded villains, frivolously or as a more intentional examination of queerness and what we owe to our queer elders and the generation following

👯 Ensemble casts with charming side characters (I’m an inveterate side character lover)

🚢 Hope and kindness as a prerequisite. Come talk to me about the exquisite examination of compassion and community in the face of annihilation in The Terror season 1

🎟️ Speculative futures not set in American cities

💀 Horror you want to hide from while you keep reading, things that make you say “gross”

🕰️ More mystery in everything! I love a goal. Speculative? Give it a mystery. Contemp romance? Give it a mystery!! Mystery? Go ahead and slap another mystery in there, baby!!!

📽️ Tightly paced, high-tension character driven stories you can’t put down. Slice of life is not for me

🌈 Romantasy and speculative queer love stories. I love space ships/fantasy kingdoms but what I love more is knowing how many beds are in the ship/castle

🤌 Characters who kiss (or should) but dont👏 trust👏 each👏 other👏

2023 #MSWL! As a reminder, I represent BIPOC, queer, & marginalized creators making joy for themselves in SFF & horror for MG, YA, Adult, and Graphic Novel.
My existing MSWL is still a mortifyingly perfect encapsulation of my tastes, but this year I'm looking for even MORE:

For more MSWL details and submission guidelines, you can find me at:
📚manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/em-l…
🖊️emlysaght.com

I love characters who are:
🗨️Earnestly enthusiastic about their one weird thing
💪Locked in a cant-trust-you-cant-trust-anyone-else relationship
👨‍👩‍👦‍👦Found family
🗝️Motivated not by youthful exuberance but by an old and hard-won sense of fury and spite
🐍Evil & sexy about it

In MG in particular, I’m looking for:

🔭Adventure and puzzle stories set outside America

🧜‍♀️Diana Wynne Jones-esque grammatical magic

📏Novellas! Some of my favorites are The Monster of Elendhaven, A Dead Djinn in Cairo, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps

✨Hope as a prerequisite

🐉Monsters, ghosts, cryptids. To kiss? To kill? To make friends with? To become? All of the above.

🧛Funny fantasy, à la What We Do In the Shadows

🕴️The bizarre treated banally, like Control or Magnus Archives

In YA/Adult/Graphic Novel, I love:

🕵️A locked room mystery or a closed set thriller, like Detention (2021)

🏺Dark academia that really grapples with what it means to be a person of color in academia and the complicity it begs of you in its racist and classist structures

New year, new #MSWL!

I represent BIPOC, Queer, and marginalized creators writing commercial genre fiction across MG, YA, Adult, and Graphic Novel. My particular weaknesses are genre-blending SFF, horror, and anything with murder or making out (ideally both)

The plot of It's Raining Men is honestly a banger sci-fi concept #MSWL

This entire photoshoot is BIG #MSWL VIBES 🥮

#MSWL this entire video youtube.com/watch?v=zhOIEe…

Among Us is making me crave a novel that encapsulates the particular gnawing dread of standing with your back to an empty hallway and hoping a faceless coworker won't come up and murder you horribly while you try to do crucial tetris (#mswl or recommendations, if you got'em!)

That's a good bake, Mary! My #mswl page is live, and absolutely exposing my Very Specific Taste. Authors, please query me if you think we'd be a good fit manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/em-l…

2020 is when Persona 4 finally got released for PC, so 2020's the perfect time to remix that nostalgic, small-town Japan, crime-solving-teens feeling except w/o the homophobia and pointless sexism, right? #mswl

in my ongoing campaign to only care about villains, I desperately want to read a story where the MC has the slow, horrifying, dawning realization that THEY are the antagonist #mswl