A Pitch Wars Tale - This Could Happen to You!

It's Pitch Wars time, again, the contest sponsored by Brenda Drake where writers have the opportunity to find a mentor who'll help them polish their pitch, query, and manuscript for a chance in front of select agents. The competition is tough. Right now, there are over 1,200 writers waiting for September to see if they'll get that chance.

I participated for the first time last year, and although not chosen, I received great feedback and discovered new friends. As the deadline approached this year, I decided to test a different manuscript, so I'm one of the many waiting--a nerve-racking process. For that reason, I thought it might be encouraging to hear from one of last year's Mentees, my critique partner, Paula Garner. It was a contest that initially brought the two of us together, and one of the benefits of participation in contests--finding new writing friends.

Paula J. Garner
Pitch Wars Mentee 2013

Thank you, Paula, for agreeing to answer a few questions and share your experience. You steered clear of social media until I pulled you, kicking and screaming, into Pitch Wars last year, and then onto Twitter. I'm sure there may be participants this year new to both.

Before we talk about your success last year, let's talk about your first foray into social media. Any regrets?

PJG: I have found the most wonderful friends, critique partners, and mentors since joining Twitter. It opened doors I didn't even know were there. So no regrets! Not a one. 

How did it feel hearing you'd been chosen as a Mentee last year? Tell us about your experience.

PJG: I ended up being chosen by a mentor I hadn't pitched to. Lindsey Sprague emailed to ask if I'd be open to sending her a few chapters, and the rest is history. Talk about lucky for me! She read my novel, gave me great feedback, and worked on my pitch with me endlessly. And her hilarious sense of humor kept me laughing through the whole process. And I will never, ever stop singing praises for Brenda Drake, who is the most generous and good-hearted person you'll ever have the luck of knowing. She was so helpful to me through the entire process--all the way until I was signed, in fact.

You wound up with nine requests, and those requests turned into five offers of representation. I know how hard it was making that decision because you had some incredible agents to choose from. How did you decide?

PJG: Having to choose an agent was a little surreal. They were all amazing agents, and I would have been lucky to work with any of them; but in the end, I chose the one who was the best match in terms of personality/style and whose vision for the manuscript best matched mine. Molly Jaffa is brilliant and has a well-earned reputation for being a total class act, but I also love her for her warmth, her constancy, and her wicked sense of humor. Honestly, if I had the whole Pitch Wars thing to do over, I wouldn't have done one single thing differently.

As your CP, I'm familiar with your manuscript and dearly love your characters. You and Molly have been working hard over the last few months getting it ready for submission, and I can't wait to see PHANTOM LIMBS on a bookstore shelf! Could you share a bit about your YA novel?

PJG: How about my pitch from last year's contest? 

Sixteen-year-old Otis copes with grief by swimming, training to fulfill the lost Olympic dream of his tyrannical one-armed friend/self-appointed coach, Dara, but her hold on him is threatened when the only girl he's ever loved moves back to town, forcing Otis to face the tragedy that drove them apart.

Thanks, Paula, for sharing your Pitch Wars experience. Be sure and find Paula on Twitter: @paulajgarner

And a BIG Thank You to Brenda Drake and all the Mentors who volunteer their time and expertise for Pitch Wars!

UPDATE: I made the cut! FRAMED was chosen by Mentor Eden Plantz. The month of September and October will be full of hard work on edits and revisions. Agent round will be in early November. Fingers crossed it could happen to me, too!!

To Query or Not to Query…

…that is the question. How do you know if your manuscript is ready? Or for that matter, if your query is ready? This is more a question for beginners. Experienced writers tend to have a decent handle on when their work is ready. For the rest of us, it’s not so obvious. So how do you know?

The short answer? You don’t.

It takes throwing it out there to see if it’ll stick, but that also means being willing to see it fall gasping in a dead heap on the floor. It means enduring rejection and powering through. And no matter how many beta readers and critique partners you have weighing in, or contest wins and finals you have under your belt, there’s still a chance neither your query nor your manuscript is quite there yet. Once again, the only way to know is to suffer rejection and keep writing and honing your craft. You start getting requests from your queries—success! No, wait—don’t get excited. That’s just one hurdle on your way to more rejection on the partial and full manuscript. It’s a process, so get used to it and learn from it.

Move on. Keep writing. Keep learning. Write new things. And if you still believe in that first manuscript, by all means, go back and start over if necessary. That’s what I chose to do a few months back. There’s something valid in that adage of writing a million bad words. Something clicked for me in the last year, and I knew I was ready to tackle that first manuscript and do whatever it took, even if it meant gutting it and starting over. My first step was to seek the help of someone whose abilities I trust, the tough-minded and honest-to-a-fault Charissa Weaks. We examined the manuscript to determine why my full requests were not netting representation. Was the manuscript worth salvaging?

The conclusion was yes, but it would mean a total rewrite and restructuring that would upend my story and turn it inside out. I’ve now completed the newly retitled manuscript, and it is a very different story, far superior to the original. Will it experience rejection? Of course. But it stands a far better chance of acceptance now than before. And in the process, I’ve learned a great deal that will serve me well going forward.     

My participation in my first Pitch Wars is what pushed me to contemplate rejection once more. Pitch Wars is a great contest organized by Brenda Drake that I discovered via Twitter. I submitted my new query and first five pages to four mentors, and luckily, I had one request more pages. Now whether that translates into a mentor choosing me as their “mentee” or alternate is a pretty long shot—but that’s okay. I learned something valuable along with discovering new writer peeps. My new query and first pages work, and it’s time to jump back into querying.

Will I get rejected this time? Of course.

But I also might find someone who will love it and want it.  

It’s all part of the process.

UPDATE: About two hours after I posted this, I learned I didn't make the Pitch Wars cut. Later, my mentor informed me I made her short list. She shared very kind words that boosted my confidence, including it was a tough choice. Rejection and Success! And there was more good news: my critique partner was chosen as a Mentee!

Special congratulations to Paula J. Garner, who made the cut with PHANTOM LIMBS. Congrats Paula!!

To Fear of Heights and Firing Pitches

For every writer, the day comes when you must step up to the mound and pitch. For me, that day came a couple of weeks ago. I equate it to climbing scaffolding when I do decorative work on those multi-storied ceilings for my "day job." Since I have a deathly fear of heights, it’s not something I relish. The fact I'm willing to work on a ceiling over a three-story stairwell, if necessary, is a testament to how much I enjoy my work and seeing the finished product. So up I go and never look down. 

That’s what I did that day—took a deep breath and never looked down. Of course, it helped getting a personal pep talk from the great C. J. Redwine the night before. Redwine, author of Defiance, wrote one of the best books available on querying. I highly recommend Query: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started, Get Noticed, and Get Signed. She reminded me of her formula outlined in the book: A must do B to avoid or accomplish C, but D is a huge problem. Armed with that reminder, I went home and tightened my pitch to a one-minute spiel. It worked beautifully, giving the editor plenty of time to ask questions. At least I think it worked. The pitch netted two full requests. So thank you, C. J.!

To Anniversaries and Time Well Spent

October is a month of anniversaries for me. The first week of October my husband and I celebrated our wedding anniversary, and this upcoming week I will celebrate another important milestone. It’s the first anniversary of my first blog post, my first query, and my first rejection.   

After ten rejections, I decided to pull back and reassess. I had great beta reader response to the characters and story, so what might I be doing wrong at the query step? What else might I be doing wrong? I knew I needed a professional to steer me in the right direction. Just as I did when I started my decorative finishing business over a decade ago, I needed to find a great teacher to guide me. The last thing I wanted to do was waste time. If I’m going to invest this kind of time in something, then I want to do it well.

Just as in fine art and decorative arts, there’s a big difference between the professional and the amateur that the untrained eye might not perceive. As I told one of my fellow decorative artists after I began to learn more about the craft of writing, “I had lap lines all over the place.” For those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘lap line,’ it is the ‘veining’ that you sometimes see in glaze work. If the artist can finesse them, they look like veins; if they can’t, they appear as darker lines and areas that ruin the look. Either way, they are something that marks an amateur. To the untrained eye, they might be interesting; but to the trained eye, they are a major mistake that make professionals cringe.

Fortunately, I found Barbara Rogan who taught me how to avoid those ‘lap lines.’ Barbara is a former literary agent, current teacher and editor, as well as author of eight novels. With her critique of my first twenty pages came an invitation to participate in her Revising Fiction Workshop, a once a year, invitation-only boot camp she offers to a select few with completed manuscripts. Boot camp is my name for it because that’s what it felt like. It was rigorous and intense for the eight participants who completed the course. We began in mid-June and finished a couple of weeks ago. I learned more in those four months than I did in all my college writing and literature classes. I may still commit some of those ‘lap lines,’ but now I know how to recognize them and correct them. I’ve also gained a circle of friends who are amazingly talented writers willing to share their time and wonderful stories. I look forward to seeing our collective progress over the next year. We all seem to be similarly obsessed with the craft of writing.

I love writing—much to my surprise, more than I love painting. It’s a very similar process for me, the under painting equivalent to my first draft, the subsequent detail and layering of light and shadow my fleshing out of the setting and characters. The last year was time well spent doing something I love. How can that ever be a waste of time?    

Eating the Elephant

Most writers learn about the publishing industry and all that getting published entails well before they complete, or even start, a book.  Me, on the other hand, I came into the world backwards and continue my journey in a bassackwards kind of way. I didn’t even think about these things until the manuscript was complete. The day I actually sat down and started researching what my next step should be, I discovered I would be spending a lot of hours revising and rewriting. After that, I would have to tackle the dreaded query letter, then craft a concise and interesting synopsis.  And while I'm doing this, I needed to wade through hundreds of agents and find a good match who might be interested in what I'd written. Who said writing the book was the hard part?  If I ever find who said that I’m going to flog them. Writing the book was the easy part! 

I had no clue about queries, synopses, and literary agents.  I had no idea that between 80K and 120K words was the preferred size for a first manuscript.  Who knew that shelf space and paper costs played that much of a role in getting published.  For me, a 400 page novel is a quick read.  I’m one of those who skips over the thin books and goes for the nice long read; I want to live with characters for a while. Unfortunately, I write the same way I read.  Imagine my horror when I realized I had a 270K tome that had to be pared significantly, well beyond the obvious rewrite into two books. Needless to say, the day I learned these things I felt like beating my head against the wall. I went from the sheer joy of having finished a manuscript to complete and utter despair in a matter of minutes. 

Then I remembered the elephant.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time. So, that’s what I did; I focused on eating the damn elephant.  I gagged on it the first week of my new diet, then I started developing a taste for it the more I consumed. That was about three weeks ago. I trimmed all the fat from the book. If it didn’t move the story and play a significant role it got cut; if it could be rephrased more efficiently, it was. I was brutal. I rearranged, brought conflict and action to the fore; I did all the things I learned you are supposed to do. As a result, I have a much tighter book. Next, I tackled the query, where you condense the essence of the story into one or two intriguing paragraphs that will hook the reader and make them want to read more.  I never knew two paragraphs could be so difficult. That was an elephant unto itself. The synopsis may be the worst of all three efforts. Imagine squeezing a 400 page story into six, making it enticing. I wrote the synopsis yesterday, it is done, ready to send.

The elephant is nothing more than a heap of bones.  Who knows, I may decide to stew those bones for soup.  I can only hope that one of the queried agents will be interested enough to ask me to do exactly that.

I Guess It's Real Now...

...because I sent out five queries last night.  As I sit here pondering my first blog entry, I’m thinking I should probably get back into the shower.  Little did I know when I got into the shower a few days back I would hear, "Go Start a Blog…NOW."  Please, NO!  I’m the woman who said she hated blogs; I’m the woman who said she’d never do a blog.   

Of course, I’m also the woman who never dreamed she’d write a novel, either. Then, I was the woman who figured she’d never finish a novel. So there you go. With the help of messages from my showerhead, I wrote and finished the novel.  After endless rounds of editing, revising, and paring (which I keep being compelled to do), I finally let it go and put it out there.  Now, I'll armor myself for rejection and, hopefully, some interest. 

This is my story, my journey of educating myself about literary agents, publishers, query letters, synopses, etc., etc., the story of my process now that I realize I actually have two completed manuscripts.  And, I might add, a Book III in my head with these same characters. You see, I didn’t plan to be a writer so I know nada about these things; I am clueless about the process.  Oh, I’ll admit, there were occasions when the thought of writing would flit through my mind.  I’d had more than one friend along the way tell me, “you should write a book,” to which I would just roll my eyes – I am not a writer (I thought).  I never seriously considered that was a possibility for me. 

   

Thankfully, I actually enjoy research; and I don't mind educating myself about what’s next. And the showerhead told me to document the process; so here I am, sharing with you all my excitement, frustration, and - dare I ask for it? - joy along the way.  I do not kid myself that this is going to be fascinating reading or interesting to anyone; but, maybe someday, this might be helpful to some other beginning novelist/writer, illustrating what someone else experienced.  You know, misery loves company and all that…