PitchWars, or How I Allowed Myself to Believe

Back when I learned I’d made it into the PitchWars contest as a first alternate, I had a moment of disorientation. After all, I’d been given the original heads up about the contest from my cousin only days earlier and made my four allowed submissions motivated by the philosophy of “What’s the worst that could happen?” So when one of the mentors I applied to -- an author -- replied to me asking to see more, I thought maybe things weren’t entirely hopeless. Later that same night I had another mentor -- this time an editor -- reply with an equally complimentary message as the first, also asking for more pages. My confidence began rising. When a third person -- this time another author -- asked to see more as well, I started to think that maybe, just maybe, something was going on behind the scenes and I might actually stand a chance.

I waited anxiously for the date to arrive when the teams would be announced, and discovered during a lunch break that the list had gone live a day early. The first name on the list was the editor, and the second name on his list was mine. I indulged a moment of gratified excitement, then scrolled through the rest of the list and saw my cousin’s name listed as someone else’s first alternate, which made everything better. To the best of my knowledge we’re the only pair of blood relatives who made it into the contest, so that was a pretty cool bit of distinction to share.

Being a first alternate meant my mentor would be helping me construct a pitch and reviewing (1) the synopsis for my manuscript, (2) the query letter I was using when submitting to literary agents, and (3) a good chunk of the actual manuscript, then offer me feedback for revision. The e-mail exchanges we had over the several weeks of the contest were great; not only did he offer ideas that made significant differences when I was done revising, but the enthusiasm he showed for my writing was incredibly validating. I had always been proud of the work I’d done on “Infinity” and I’d heard many complimentary things about it from different readers, but this feedback was coming from someone in the industry, who wasn’t a friend or a relative or had any connection to me other than being impressed enough by my work that he “couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with me.” Yes, that was a quote. And yes, I saved the e-mail message it appeared in.

So now the process has nearly reached the end. Later tonight, just a few hours from now as I write this, the PitchWars agent round begins. The submissions of the mentees will go online, hosted on several different blogs, and the agents who agreed to participate will have two days to look over what we’ve all been trying to pretty up for them. If my work catches someone’s interest, they’ll be able to request more, which always has the chance of leading to bigger and better things. If what I have posted doesn’t connect with anyone, I’ll likely be disappointed about it, but I’ve survived disappointment before and I know it doesn’t signal the end of all hope. If I go back to my original approach of “What’s the worst that could happen?” Well, the worst thing would only mean that I’d be exactly back where I was before the contest started, only now with a more finely-tuned manuscript and query letter, and with a newly-tweaked level of self-assurance I can bring to my writing.

So Brent -- thanks for those. And to follow up on something you mentioned on Twitter not long ago, I’m going to accept the challenge and mark 2014 as the year I’ll be ready to admit this out loud:

I’m a damn good writer.