PITCH WARS: The Adventure Begins

If you're a writer, and you're on Twitter, you'll probably be familiar with Pitch Wars.

A contest run by the amazing Brenda Drake, it's where unpublished writers get to pitch their manuscripts to mentors (from agents to editors to published writers), after which the mentors pick a mentee and they work together for a couple of months on making that manuscript shine. Then they pitch to agents. Then they get multi-million dollar book deals. Then comes the fame, fortune, and endless requests for autographs wherever they go.

Or something like that.

For the past few years I've sat and watched the (extremely well) organised chaos with interest. I've seen writers find success. Or find writing soul mates. Or both.

I've enjoyed the pitches and used the ones that worked best to help figure out what my own should be.

But it's all been somewhat lurky on my part (NOT creepy lurky, just quiet lurky). Usually just checking in on Twitter to see how it's all unfolding - in between writing short stories, new scripts, or simply trying to catch up on naps from the whole having kids and not sleeping for 5 years thing. (Admittedly other crazier parent writers blink away the tired and write through the night and that's probably why they almost always end up being successful... but whatever, I've needed the sleep because I'm getting old.)

ANYWAY.

This year I'm going to change that. I've got a manuscript that I've been told is ready to rock. I've got a little more time on my hands thanks to the whole working-from-home malarkey. And I'm in the mood to get this &!£Q£(*£Q book out there and over that final hurdle of not being quite what agents and publishers are looking for.

So here we go. They might not be all that well thought out, but I'm going to write as many posts as I can over the next few weeks to show the various stages I'm at, what I've learned, where I could do better, and how I think it's going.

If you're also new to Pitch Wars, why not sign up so you can follow my little adventure and maybe it'll encourage you to get involved at some point? Or if you're old to Pitch Wars you can watch and laugh as I flail about like an idiot who has no idea what he's doing (which is true), before resorting to burying my manuscript in the garden and going back to archaeology.

It's Day 1 (for me at least). The mentor blog hops are up and I'm about to start looking for the five I want to work with. Join me?