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!!

On Liars and Fiction Writers

Yes. I am a lying liar who lies.

Twitter is a great place to stumble upon great little gems of wisdom. I found an old blog post from terribleminds the other day. Talk about ‘voice,’ Chuck Wendig has one. In this post, he gives ten reasons why one should get far, far away from writers. It is hilarious and scarily true. Just go here and read it for yourself, then consider yourself warned about me.

I knew I was a bit nuts; but I’ve always done a good job of keeping my crazy under wraps. I’m a high-functioning loon. Anyway, as I read this blog post, I had one of those epiphanic moments. That is a word, right? Whatever…I had an epiphany--I really am a writer.

When I read his reasons #2 and #3, I flashed back, right back to first grade when I wove an amazing tale for my parents’ benefit at the supper table. Wendig said, “We are lying liars who lie. We have to be. Fiction is a lie…but at least I’m not lying about, you know, real shit. That’s what I tell myself.” Reason #3 was further enlightenment for me. He said, “We make shit up all day long, and then we must write about that made-up shit with utter authority. It is our job to write with abject confidence in the subject matter. You know in high school you’d write papers that were, as you might say, ‘bullshit?’ And you could convince the teacher of it? Yeah. This is like that.”

Yeah. I’ve been creating scenes in my head forever. I simply thought I had a vivid imagination. It's always been easy to entertain myself for hours on end. It took me a couple of decades to realize I could put all these scenes I imagined down on paper.

The scene I constructed one night over dinner in 1961 landed me in the principal’s office the next morning for lying. I had a bad habit of saying, “I know,” in response to most anything my mother told me – a phrase learned from her if I recall correctly. I didn’t mean it in a ‘know-it-all’ way, more an acknowledgement like, “I understand.” Regardless, when she told us at dinner that night about the firehouse burning down in our small town, I responded with my usual, “I know.” I think it was the vision of firefighters running around in panic unable to save their own building from burning down that triggered my little flight of fancy. I could see it all as it unfolded. That movie in my head was simply too good to resist; the lines between truth and fiction instantly disappeared.

My mother asked me how I knew. So, I told her.

You see, my beloved first grade teacher, Miss Daisy, took her class on a field trip that day. We walked all the way downtown where we stood next to the railroad tracks in the cold and watched the firehouse burn down. We then trekked off to the dairy dip where she bought us all ice cream cones before we went back to our classroom at Oakmont Elementary. We had a fine time, and I remember clearly how good that ice cream tasted despite the frigid winter temperatures.

I had no clue all hell was about to break loose. My mother set the phone lines afire, chewing out the principal, who in turn castigated dear sweet Miss Daisy for undertaking such a foolhardy and dangerous expedition with close to thirty first graders in the dead of winter. The next morning found me standing before Miss Dunn, our stern-faced principal who possessed the ‘electric paddle.’ I envisioned this contraption as some sort of operating table with a huge paddle suspended overhead, ready to pound the poor kid quaking in fear beneath it. I duly apologized to Miss Dunn and Miss Daisy for my horrid lying, confident the electric paddle awaited me in some dark room. I still didn’t quite get why my brilliant tale was considered lying. Afterall, I wasn’t lying about ‘real shit.’

It was a life-altering experience. That day I learned I had a gift for making people believe made-up stuff. It just took me a while to equate that with ‘fiction writer.’ I’ve been a lot smarter about my crazy since then.

It's Been Awhile...

The last six months, I’ve been lost in a haze of addiction.

I admire people who can Twitter, Facebook, Blog, pursue their profession, and do all the necessary marketing to create their ‘platform.’ To those who can juggle it all, I congratulate you. I do not see how you do it. I had no idea when I pulled that old manuscript out of the chest of drawers what exactly I was about to get myself into. Thoughts of publishing and all that might include never entered my mind. Now, eighteen months later, I’m learning about ‘platform building’—a concept that is a bit unnerving to a very private person who has never been compelled to express her thoughts to the world.  I began to realize there is only one thing that would drive an introvert like me to put herself out there willingly—Addiction. 

Hello, my name is S. J.  I’m a wordaholic.

It started out as nothing more than an exercise, pulling that manuscript out and writing again. Before I realized it, something had clicked between my brain and my fingertips. It was the completion of a circuit that I had forgotten was there. Characters and scenes dropped into my brain and flowed so rapidly from my fingertips onto my laptop screen it was frightening—and amazingly pleasurable. It was like opening up a vein, the words flowed through me like a drug. 

I’ve read about the science of addiction, how once the pleasure center of the brain is stimulated by a particular activity it becomes impossible to control the desire to repeat the activity. In the last year, words have become my drug. Try as I might to set them aside and focus on more productive work, it is a struggle to do so. My only saving grace is that my income generating work is conducive to quiet contemplation, allowing me to lose myself in the movie playing in my head. These characters and stories demand my attention, bombarding me with their world. They make it impossible to do anything else until I give in and let it flow from my fingertips into a document. My focus narrows to such a point that I can only think of writing, the monkey on my back. 

So, here I am, building a platform…