Pitch is finished, bitchez!

After an almost-overnighter working on it last night/this morning, my pitch is done and sent off for critique. WOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!! I feel like there should be confetti and celebratory cakes. And jugglers!

I feel pretty okay about what I sent. It’s solid but not brilliant. There were a couple of places that I couldn’t quite get the way I wanted, but the hours spent revising and refining certainly showed in the end product compared to my initial attempt.

I never had a flash of inspiration that sometimes comes when you need it most and makes the rest flow with ease and assurance that this, this is exactly right. But those flashes are rare any time, so that’s not too surprising. It went more the way that writing usually does, where you fight for every word and sentence and spend hours and hours wrangling structure, pacing, voice, and theme. And maybe the fact that it feels like a work in progress will make it easier when I get the critique back with a resounding “NEEDS WORK SRSLY”.

This was a really terrific experience and I’m so glad I did it. I’d been avoiding my query liek whoa, and while it was every bit as hard as I thought it would be, it’s a necessary part of the process if I want to pursue publishing. Brevity is my weakness, no doubt about it, so summarizing my story in eight to twelve sentences for the pitch portion of the query was a personal challenge. It turned out to be more room than I realized to summarize the story, but every sentence — every word! — still must do double or triple duty. I’ve done similar exercises in the past (55 Fiction is one of my favorites) and they’re a good reminder of the power of pithiness. A writing friend once described my style as “lyrical”, which made me beam for days, but I know veer too close to purple at times and that’s something I need to continually work on.

The great thing is that I now have my query essentially completed. (Well, the first draft of it, at least.) What a relief!

Now to complete my ms revisions. I obviously didn’t reach my goal of trimming 50,000 words in time for submitting my pitch, so for listing my word count, I put in the current count and in parenthesis: “finished manuscript, currently undergoing revision”. So while I wait for feedback from the agent, I need to finish up those revisions and get that word count down as much as I can. And I’m so happy to finally feel energized to do that and start querying finally.

Comments

[Anne Hawley]

Congratulations. I'm in awe.

[Writer's Cramp]

THANK YOU!! Feeling pretty chuffed, I gotta say.