Oh my goodness it's been a long week/weekend! It started with Nestpitch and ended with Easter.
Easter, for us, is a fairly big family affair. All of my family (Parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) and Rock Crawling Daddy's (AKA Hubby) parents live within 30 minutes of us. It required a meal with my parents, one with the grandparents and then a third with his parents (that I actually cooked). The kids love it. They get to go on so many egg hunts it's ridiculous. My grandparents had a dinner at their house where my Uncle, Aunt and a few of their kids were there with some of their grandkids. We hid the eggs a couple of times before RC Daddy came home from rock crawling. And the candy. Oh my heavens the candy. We've got enough to store for Halloween and Christmas.
On Sunday we were able to attend church. The talks on Christ and the resurrection were wonderful, the kids watched a Mormon Messages video on Christ's resurrection and RC Daddy found a second amazing video that made me contemplate Christ. After that, I cooked a prime rib and had my mother in law over for dinner. She's sort of computer illiterate, so we showed her the videos online. She's more old school though. She'd rather read about it.
On Sunday, I found out which agents requested Summoner Battles in Nestpitch. What's Nestpitch? Nestpitch is new this year and similar to Pitchwars. You enter a pitch and the first three hundred words of your completed, polished manuscript and wait for the slush readers and the bloggers to read through them. Agents go through the picked pitches and leave little Easter themed candies on the various pitches they want to read more of. Fun, right?
Earlier this week I was stalking the nestpitch feed on twitter, when I saw a tweet from one of the bloggers. I swear, it was talking about Summoner Battles. She complained about putting a main character into a battle right at the beginning without giving a reason to care about the character. Ouch. That's my opening. Don't get me wrong, I recently got told that be the agent I slush read for. My CP's didn't say anything, so I let it go.
A few days later, I saw that the results had been posted and the 72 lucky pitches had been picked. So, I looked. I knew that I'd done something wrong and needed to fix it, and I wanted to see what the other pitches were. What genre they were, what seemed to be getting picked and there it was. My pitch had been chosen. SQUEEE! I did a happy dance, which looks ridiculous while driving a paper route car at 5 AM, but I did it anyway. I tweeted, I thanked everyone involved and then my CP's. I may have mentioned in on facebook (I couldn't keep the excitement in and RC Daddy didn't quite understand just how big this was for me.)
You see, I've entered the last four or five pitch contests and twitter pitch contests I've come across. Don't judge, I haven't had much experience with twitter and I didn't know about all of these glorious contests. I didn't even come close (I'm sure. They don't really tell you) to making it into those other pitch contests. To be honest, I wasn't ready. I needed those failures to grow and learn what I was doing wrong. Woot-Woot!
Okay, so what do you do after you get picked? You wait. Oh my heck you wait. You wait and read the other pitches that made it (there were some freaking awesome ones that I'd love to read one day, fingers crossed), you wait for the agents to leave their goodies telling you how many pages they want of your manuscript, you wait for the bloggers to approve the comments and you constantly refresh the feed in hopes of hearing what the other bloggers and entries are doing. I was obsessing the whole time!
The tweet from the blogger helped me to really realize something. This business is so subjective. The agent that I work for suggested I make changes, though she doesn't rep YA. The tweet I saw made it pretty clear that I'd gone in a wrong direction at some point, but I got picked. Someone saw potential in my writing and gave me an incredible opportunity, because guess what? I got three requests. It wasn't the most requests, it wasn't even the biggest request, which is a full request, out there, but it was good enough for me. I'm amazed that agents saw the potential that I've been hoping they would see. If anything, it has shown that I've grown in my writing, that I'm heading in the right direction and that it's going to happen. It's just going to take time.
So, today I read through the requested pages, cleaned up my synopsis, and sent out the query letters. Fingers crossed something good happens! I love the agents that requested Summoner Battles and hope that they're willing to offer feedback on how to improve. Ultimately, I'd love to get published, but I'm trying to not to get overly excited.
Okay, so enough gloating (sorry if I did. I'm totally excited that I've come this far and no one around me really understands it), and onto the new WIP. I'm not really sure when the idea came to me. I think a lot of it has to do with who I am, personally. There are a lot of aspects of my personality that I keep dormant because I'm afraid of what people might think.
I love anime.
I've always loved anime from the first time I watched Sailor Moon and Gundam Wing on Cartoon Network after school to the new anime's one of the young women at church suggested I watch. My dad used to tease me mercilessly about it too. He'd do the extra mouth movements along with his words, acting like the anime on TV. It drove me to a point where I hid it from everyone. Same thing with my love for Charmed. My parents didn't really approve of my watching witchcraft. Let me explain something. I'm LDS, meaning I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and we don't really believe in witchcraft and the like, but here's the deal. I know what I believe. I have a testimony of the gospel and attend church regularly. Watching a TV show, or reading a book, isn't going to change that. I know who I am and what I believe.
Sorry. Got off on a rant tangent there.
Anyway, new WIP. I'm going to call it Freak Show. It's going to be about a young, teenaged boy, who's being bullied at school. He sees a flyer for a midnight circus created for the outcasts and bullied and attends. The circus is sort of like going to a comi-con and he feels at home, until people start going missing.
It's in an outline stage right now, so there isn't really much that I can say, post or explain about it, but that's the just. It's what I've envisioned so far. I love this idea and I'm excited about the opportunity to tell it from a male perspective. I haven't written as a man before, so we'll see how it turns out.
Alright, well, I've rambled on long enough. Have you entered a pitch contest before? How has it worked out for you?
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