Ink & Penwipers

Well, that’s out of the way, then.

I entered the Pitch Wars contest this year, more or less as a practice exercise – practice deploying a query, writing a synopsis, prepping a sample, &c. And though I didn’t take much advantage of the various fora in which entrants swapped critique partners and encouragement, I did enjoy reading the tweets of folks who were preparing their manuscript to put out there – and found out a lot about industry trends, agents’ wish lists, and a whole lot of things I wouldn’t have without going on this particular venture.

Anyway, the list of this year’s chosen mentees came out last night, and as expected I am not on it; I didn’t get any responses asking for more pages or anything like that during the selection period, so it’s not much of a surprise. I’m free now to get on to the next phase of my plans for this project.

I think I’m going to stop checking out the hashtag from now, though. Because right now it’s chock full not only of congrats for the chosen and thanks to the contest runners, but also of people trying to console the other 95% who didn’t get in – assurances that there are many paths, and not to give up, and stories of those who found their agent the next day, and so on ad nauseam. I find those far more annoying than watching people be genuinely happy about their good fortune.

During this process I queried a freelance editor about tailoring my query letter to pitch a Very Long Book, and got back a frank and therefore much less annoying answer: that the chance of an agent or publisher taking on the risk of a debut novel longer than 110k words is slim to none. You could fit two of that maximum in my book. So if Becoming a Published Author were the grail I was after, my choices would be: a) rewrite the book to be something completely other than what it is, or b) put it away and write something else.

But from my point of view, being a Published Author is just a means of access to the thing I actually want: putting this particular book out there without having to undertake the project management myself. So as soon as I heard that it was all but guaranteed that querying my book would be a waste of time, I switched tracks to independent publishing with relatively little pain. I hate project management but I love control, so now that Pitch Wars is officially out of the way, I’m picking brains and making lists to try and get the best possible version of my book out by spring.

Would I have liked to see my book find its audience via traditional publication? Of course I would. Am I unhappily aware that producing it by any other means would rob it of the cachet of being a Real Book? Well, yes. Am I annoyed that the venn diagram between “books that are good” and “books that are commercially attractive” happens to leave mine in the cold after all? Tooth-grindingly so. But am I crushed? Hardly. Wanting to give up? I’ve already tried giving up on this project – might as well tell my hair to stop growing. Discouraged about my own skill and talent? Um…no more than usual, really.

So, take it all around – I’m working, and pretty much fine. But if you wanted to buy me a drink and murmur sweet writerly nothings in my ear, I wouldn’t exactly say no.