CorynAllanRichard

This has been a fantastic conference! Having attended previous events and workshops through AAC, I've learned so much about the craft of writing, from story structure to character development, and everything in between. This helped me finish my novel and at the September NY PItch Conference, I could finally bring that knowledge to bear. With the help of my writing peers and AAC faculty, I was able to craft and deliver a confident pitch I could be proud of. Thank you to all my peers and AAC faculty for your warmth, friendship, and encouragement. I'm excited to continue and can't wait to see how far I can go, but it all starts here, in a nurturing environment that pulls no punches and pushes you to excel. Thank you!

The God of Wrath By Coryn Hayman Opening Scene - Introduces protagonist, tone, setting, and foreshadows conflict in her relationship with her sister. Chapter 1. Sniper First Dribino, Sukhodrovka Sector 17 kilometers southeast of Vitebsk, Byelorussia March 22nd, 1944 No way in hell Vera was going to let that terrified mother and child into her precious hiding place, because she was a sniper first and a nurse second. She darted her eye away from the scope as the frenetic blur of mother and child blocked her view of the second-story window across the street. There, a “cuckoo” sniper waited for Vera to poke her head up enough for him to blow it off. She backed away from her own basement window, losing whatever bead she had on her quarry. In that split second, she was vulnerable. A flush of warm air greeted her as she retreated from the curling eddies of March ice and sleet biting and blowing into her hide. Out of the cold, Vera noticed how frigid her ungloved fingers and exposed cheeks were. Back from the window, Vera looked through the scope, inching the rifle barrel forward until she could see the other window again, her right index finger resting less than the width of a stalk of wheat above the trigger. But as she settled into position, the young mother, grabbing the forearm of her screaming toddler, ran in front of the scope again. In frustration, Vera squeezed her eyes shut, the palpebral muscles aching. She blinked several times to dispel the anger surging against the fear of an unseen enemy sniper, who might just get a glimpse of her forehead because she wasn’t paying attention. A glimpse was more than enough. Vera readjusted her rifle, propping the barrel atop a pile of sandbags against the wall beneath the window. The mother stood paralyzed in the middle of the street, suddenly quiet, even the child no longer whimpering. A gust of wind blew her headscarf away like a fleeing wraith, revealing tangled ringlets of blonde and premature grey. Vera thought she took the shape of the wind, wispy and unforgiving. There was nothing left of her except that child, thought Vera. The woman still stood transfixed and silent like a dark effigy against the cold and grey. Only her eyes spoke, wide with pleading terror. The boy whimpered and his mother kneeled beside him, ducking his head into the warm folds of her faded wool coat. She yanked him by the arm, causing him to lurch forward and howl in pain at the violent strain on his shoulder. With angry purpose and determination, she pulled him toward the sandbags, back in survival mode, looking for cover. The muzzle flash from a single rifle shot flared in the reticle of Vera’s scope as she watched the window and readjusted her aim. This was her moment, but her hands shook, grated by the sudden agonized wailing of the woman, wounded by the sniper’s bullet. Vera felt prickles of sweat beneath the rim of her field cap, as she tried to shut out the screaming that gurgled into the choked and staccato rhythm of raucous wheezing. Vera’s younger twenty-two-year-old sister Anna stared down the barrel of her own rifle, covering the street and windows closer to the ground. She shifted a little, a ring of sandbags outside obscuring her view. Two hours ago, after an artillery shell blasted a crater in the street, the topmost sandbags fell into a haphazard pile, settling in a dark and dusty cloud. “If we don’t get them in here, they’ll die out there,” said Anna, her brown eyes like a fawn’s; soft, wide, and set with keen awareness. “No! They’ll give us away!” Clanking treads groaned with the ominous churning of an approaching tank. Vera quailed. It didn’t sound like a T-34, more like a Panzer. Shrinking away from the window, she kept her eye pressed to the scope. We’re going to die like rats in a sewer, thought Vera. We took the damn town. That’s what the lieutenant told us. Nothing to worry about; just small, soft pockets of resistance at most, he assured the platoon. Vera peered out the basement window to see the bulk of a lone Panzer rounding the corner of a shelled building, the heavy treads on thin steel ribs chewing the asphalt as the gargantuan beast ground to a halt across the street. The engine revved like the bellow of an enraged bull about to charge. A German Volksgrenadier flag poked through the window Vera had watched for hours, waving to alert the tank commander below. The idling engine sputtered, as though in a moment of indecision before the creaking turret swiveled its 75mm cannon toward the snipers with a grinding shriek of metal on metal, drowning out the distant peppering of machine gun fire. The turret came to a stop. Vera stared down the barrel of the cannon. The opening of the flared, bell-shaped flash suppressor stared at her like a cyclopean eye. Vera stared back, but she noticed Anna glancing toward the sandbags, the mother lying in the road just short of cover. The child sat beside her on the ground, screaming in terror at the sight of the tank. No doubt not the first one he’d seen. “Vera! We’ve got to get them now.” Anna’s words shook Vera from the mesmerizing lure of the cyclops. “No, get to the back of the room. That’s our only chance.” Vera scrambled back from the window. The building shook with the concussion of a tank shell slamming into the fortified position next door. Vera coughed as a mist of brick dust fell on her. She thought of the infantry scouts and of poor Lushko. He must be dead, she thought. They must all be dead. She wished she had enjoyed that cigarette he gave her more, probably the last she’d ever get from him. The mother’s high-pitched breathing came in short, ragged gasps among falling clumps of mud and ice. The child shrieked louder as the time between gasps grew longer. Vera watched him as he stopped wailing and climbed onto his mother, shaking her. He lay on top of her, sobbing into the folds of her coat. Her arm hung lifelessly from the shoulder by tattered sinews. If only Vera had listened to Anna. Now it was too late to save them from the mechanized horror bearing down on them. She saved her own skin at their expense, and the mother and child suffered out there still. She wanted mercy for them, if for nothing more than to prove to herself that Anna was wrong and there was no rescuing them. Imminent death enveloped and held them close, and the young mother’s shallow breathing broke into a violent stutter as the child screamed again. If they would just die quickly, like so many others, then she could get back to the job at hand and stop thinking about it all. She could stop feeling guilty that she chose not to save them. But each passing moment of wailing and wheezing was more panicked than the one before, and with each anguished fit and start, Vera knew that after another lost second, she could justify inaction to herself no longer. As there is little dialogue in the first scene, I’ve included a sample from the 2nd Chapter, which introduces protagonist’s love interest and foreshadows growing intimacy and potential conflict in their relationship. Lushko sat apart from an aimless group of soldiers, pulling his cloak tight around him as he worked on a letter, blowing on his exposed fingers from time to time to keep them warm. He looked up and waved, then buried himself back in his letter. Vera wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to him right now, and yet the prospect of such a diversion, she had to admit, seemed agreeable. “Hi Comrade Luschenko.” The young man looked up at her again. His long and pensive face, with its reddish-brown stubble, looked vexed and far away. “Greetings, Comrade Sergeant,” he said, warm but distracted. Vera winced, reminded of her demotion, but didn’t correct him. “Writing a letter home?” “I usually do, after a battle.” Vera peeked over his shoulder, noticing an entire paragraph scribbled out. “Why did you cross out that paragraph?” “I always write that at the end of my letters. I say my goodbyes, and then me and Spartak exchange letters. We promise to mail the other’s letter if one of us doesn’t make it back from the mission. When we get back, I scribble out the last paragraph. Then, I write something like ‘I’m doing fine.’ in its place.” “That’s bizarre, Lushko. Your family can still read what you scribbled out. It’s not like you erased it. They see a last letter every time, then you put an amendment that you’re fine?” “Maybe it’s good they see that it’s as bad as they imagine it, if not worse. All they get is propaganda saying how we’re an invincible wall. Maybe writing a goodbye like that tempts fate too much, though. Anyway, thanks to censors, my family may never read it. What do you think?” “I think there’s no such thing as fate,” said Vera, answering with the first thing that popped into her head. “Me too. I’m only preparing for the worst. It makes me feel better. I should prepare to die, not expect to live,” said Lushko, without missing a beat. “What if you and Spartak both die? What if you get captured?” Lushko looked pained and stared at his letter, his concentration broken. Vera had probed him too far, but despite her embarrassment, she couldn’t resist peeking over his shoulder again. “Everyone back home calls you ‘Lyonya’?” “Yes, but no one around here does. They always call me ‘Lushko’, or the ‘Reedy Youth’, or ‘Bumpkin’. “What do you want to be called?” “Lushko is fine. At least that name doesn’t make fun of the fact I grew up on a collective farm,” he replied with a slight note of bitterness. “Lots of people grew up on collective farms.” “Yeah, but they don’t get teased because of it. After I first arrived here, Lieutenant Cherenkov said I was a coward, lacking initiative. That’s how people see me, no matter how much I’ve changed. He’s dead now, so I wonder, does being alive make me right and him wrong?” He looked up and off into the distance, pulling out a pack of cigarettes, taking one for himself, and offering one to Vera. The delicious anticipation of a smoke cheered her, and she wanted to encourage him. “I saw you blow up that tank the other day. No one can call you a coward after that, but would you like it if I called you Lyonya?” Lushko looked up at her. “You’d be the first, but yes, I would.” He gave the faintest hint of a smile.

Part I: 7 Assignments The God of Wrath By Coryn Allan Richard Hayman I) Story Statement Kill the outraged Nazi colonel, obsessed with taking revenge as a hand to the God of Wrath, or die with him in a Baltic fortress. II) Antagonist Sketch Colonel Heinz Gerhardt Bruno is a 35-year-old German officer in the Heer (army) during World War II. Sexually abused by a priest at age 10, his emotionally neglectful parents ignore him until he stabs the priest in the back of the hand with a letter opener. Determined never to be a victim again, he embraces Nazism with its pastoral notions of “the Volk”, a master race destined to rule humanity arising from the blood and soil of his homeland. He exerts dominance over others through the power of his position and his cruelty allows him to sublimate the childhood trauma he suffered in God's Charnel House. His god has deserted him, but he feels empowered as a self-professed St. Michael, passing judgement on the worthiness of his enemies and riding at the head of an army that will conquer the Soviet Union, the birthright of his people. A female Soviet sniper kills his younger brother, the only person he ever loved. “Revenge a hundred years old hath still its sucking teeth,” as the German saying goes. For him, now is the time to shed the milk teeth, and grow the werewolf’s fangs of revenge. III) Title: The God of Wrath (Favoured Title) The Nurse-Sniper IV) Comparables Like The God of Wrath, my comparables feature strong female protagonists battered by the winds of war and reconciling with trauma and their shattered relationships with loved ones. 1. Barr, L. (2024). The Goddess of Warsaw. Harper Paperbacks. A famous actress from Hollywood’s Golden Age tells her story of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. Determined to fight back against the Nazis, she becomes a spy smuggling arms and information to help her fellow Jews. Both forbidden love and a threat from her past torment her. 2. Kortchik, L. (2021). Daughters of the Resistance. HQ Digital. Two women, one on a train bound for a Nazi labour camp, the other cataloguing deaths in occupied Kiev, find their lives take an unimaginable turn when Soviet partisans wreck the train. The hard choices made at war drive themes of loyalty and compassion. V) Logline with Core Wound A female Soviet sniper and poet in World War II, serving with her sister whom she failed to protect as children, kills the brother of a German colonel whose relentless pursuit of vengeance inspires her poem, “The God of Wrath”, an obsessive force that consumes them both, driving them inexorably through the fetid swamps of Byelorussia, to a showdown in a mighty Baltic fortress. VI) Two Levels of Conflict Inner Conflict Vera Ivanovna Sannikova, and her younger sister Anna, grew up in Minsk. Their father, Ivan Ilych Sannikov, was a professor at the Byelorussian State University. Of the two girls, Vera was the most like him, with her creativity and love of poetry. Anna had a religious transformation after surviving scarlet fever in 1935. She threw herself into studying the Bible, much to their father’s disapproval. As Stalin began his purges in the late 1930s, their father feared his imminent arrest and drank heavily. For Anna, his disapproval turned to rage. One night, he shattered a glass across Anna’s face, breaking her nose. A few weeks later, the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, arrested him. During the novel, Anna confesses to Vera that she reported their father to the NKVD Colonel Nikolai Andreyevich Pavlukhin after recovering from her injury. She feared for her life, certain their father would kill her if she didn’t denounce him. Largely spared their father’s violence, Vera feels guilty for not protecting Anna from him, so this news devastates her. She thinks that if she had defended Anna, she wouldn’t have resorted to such drastic action. Colonel Pavlukhin is now closely investigating them as the political officer of their military unit. Anna blames herself, but Vera thinks it’s her fault, because maybe if she’d looked out for her sister then, Pavlukhin would not be scrutinizing them now. Vera blames herself and has learned not to trust anyone. She deals with the horrors of their upbringing and the war by smoking, as their father coped by drinking. But she cannot bear the guilt and becomes angry and defensive when Anna shares her resentment of their father’s cruelty. Secondary Conflict The nature of Vera’s dysfunctional family relationships, and the paranoia that gripped the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, cause her to have difficulty forming close relationships. Her friend, the infantry scout Lyonya Mikhailovich Luschenko, known as Lushko, shares her love of cigarettes and always has an ample supply. She senses more than friendship between them, but resists it, fearing any deepening bond of trust and the thought of losing him. After Bruno kills Anna and severely wounds Vera, she languishes in hospital for months. She’s alone, vulnerable, and grieving. Vera wants to avenge Anna to atone for not protecting her when they were younger, and for not saving her from Bruno. She feels guilty because she killed his brother, ultimately leading to Anna’s death at Bruno’s vengeful hand. Lushko is the only one to visit her, and they share a kiss. Allowing herself to trust him, she asks him to find out where Bruno is. When Lushko returns, he inadvertently reveals his relationship with a girl in supplies from whom he gets his cigarettes. Vera feels bitterly betrayed and banishes him, determined to never speak to him again. In anger, she reaffirms her core belief that no one is trustworthy. Instead, she turns her mind to going back to war and finding Bruno at any cost and making him pay for killing her sister. VII) Settings The Wilderness This is a war story, so the natural environment plays a key role in the plot. The first half takes place in Byelorussia among fetid swamps in summer, iced over in winter. As a sniper, Vera must be attentive to the green of trees, unusual shrubs, and anything else that could help her judge distances or conceal an enemy. Time of day and weather are essential considerations in her vocation, and help set the scene, tone, and add sensory detail. The “sniper’s light” at dawn and twilight is when the enemy shows themselves, thinking they are still invisible. They underestimate Vera the hunter, who sees them as she hides in the waning shadows of darkness. Part of the misery of being a soldier is contending with the discomfort of the elements. Vera marks her targets in frigid cold, eating snow so her breath doesn’t condense in clouds that would give her away. The environment is part of the story, almost becoming a character itself. The church, "God’s Charnel House", rises from the wilderness at the novel’s midpoint. The suffocating cloister represents Bruno’s feeling of entrapment as a child by the abuses of ecclesiastical authority and parental neglect. It is here that he loses control, coming close to madness. Urban Environments The “Hero Bridge” is where Vera and Bruno first meet. It is a chokepoint that the Germans must prevent from destruction, so they can escape the Byelorussian city of Vitebsk before it falls to the Red Army. Tasked with defending the bridge, Bruno’s brother becomes Vera’s target. Königsberg, Bruno’s home city, is the central location of the second half of the novel. It is a city of rich, beautiful culture and history, where philosophers like Emmanual Kant made contributions to our modern understanding of reason and morality. The city is under siege by the Russians, but the cinemas and cafes are still open, while newsies hawk papers on the street. It is a fantasy. The civilian population will have to reckon with the coming war when reality breaks through denial. This affects Bruno’s relationships with his mother and sister. As the population goes about their daily lives, they do it in a still living and breathing city, but on life support. The Hospitals Severely wounded, Vera becomes a patient in a Red Army hospital. She endures the loneliness of long convalescence, pain, and emotional vulnerability. Recovery from Vera’s physical wound demands introspection and exploration of her core wound, perhaps leading to deeper insight and understanding. This will be among her greatest tests. Bruno raids a hospital in Königsberg, seizing wounded men from their beds to defend his home city. Resisted by the chief physician and Bruno’s sister, a nurse, readers share in the worries of the clinical staff. Patients with their grievous injuries reveal the horrors of war. The hospital is a place of unimaginable suffering, yet also of humanity and compassion, testing the faith of patient, doctor, and nurse. Even Bruno must question his resolve and mission. The hospital magnifies the fear and panic of people living in an encircled city under siege. The Fortress Finally, the climax occurs in a 19th century German fortress. There are twelve of them, forming a ring around Königsberg. The fortress seems inviolate, made of angry red brick, pockmarked by artillery fire, and bristling with guns. It represents the hearts of both Vera and Bruno, wounded and encased in iron. The reader discovers that their meeting, for this last time on hallowed ground, was inevitable. For it is the heart inviolate that binds them both.