Pitch Madness, Pitchfest, & Secret Agent

It's been a very busy couple of weeks!!

Sadly, I didn't make it into the final round of Pitch Madness. I wasn't really expecting to since there were a lot of different genres that they were looking for - but still, I was a little bit sad.

And then I received an email that an agent was requesting my work. What?! Turns out, I had made the finals of WriteOnCon's Pitch-Fest and I didn't even know it! Somehow my pitch had been posted under an incorrect title. When I scanned the list of finalists, I was actually quite disappointed. But I never noticed at all how close one title was to mine - it was listed as BOUND IN BLOOD rather than BOUND IN BLUE and I must have been checking for just the word 'blue' as I was looking through the lists.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that when one door closes, another one often opens. I happily wrapped up my work and sent it off to a fabulous agent.

I also made this month's Secret Agent finals over at Miss Snark's First Victim - (I've linked directly to my entry). I got some great feedback from readers and the secret agent and the winner(s) will be announced soon.

Will any of these adventures lead to an agent and a publishing deal? I certainly hope so. But even if they don't, the great contests that I've been part of and the requests I've received from agents have helped build my confidence and skill. If this manuscript doesn't find me an agent, then I'm sure the next one will.

Or the next ;-).

It's Pitch Madness!

UPDATE - I made it through to round 2! One more round to go.

What is Pitch Madness you ask? It's a contest to match pitches with agents run by Brenda Drake and her team of slush zombies, of course. For more info, check out her blog at brenleedrake.blogspot.com.

Here's my pitch and first 250 words:

Title: BOUND IN BLUE

Genre: YA Contemporary Fantasy

Word Count: 80,000

Rhi’s color synaesthesia is actually the manifestation of a mysterious power. Which would be great, except for one problem: King Arthur is coming back. And turns out, he’s not as nice as the storybooks say.

Fear is white and thickly veined with sea-green.

I reached over the bed rail and touched Mom’s cheek, but the industrial clock on the wall ticked loudly and I jerked my hand back fast. She was cold. But she was always cool and thin and strange with her pale, pale eyes. Now they were open and staring and I couldn’t bring myself to close them the way they always do in movies.

The only thing Mom was ever afraid of was a man with silver hair. I saw him once when I was little. Mom pulled me tight against her chest and the sound of her heart was a wave crashing against rocks. That fear crept out of her chest, crawled through my ear, and made its way down to my own wildly beating heart to take up permanent residence.

Rhiannon, listen to me, we cannot be seen. Hide in the shadows and be still and silent.

And as she held me, my fear broke apart like ice on a churning ocean and all the colors of my emotions erupted out of it—but the man didn’t see us.

I once tried to tell Mom about the colors I felt, but she just smiled and looked away. I didn’t try again. It would have been nice to talk with someone about it. I’m sure my colors would be pretty interesting to some psychiatrist bored with the usual budding Unabombers.

But fear is white and cold as marble and veined in an ugly sea-green that matches the color of the hospital walls.

Writing Tip - Twitter Pitch Generator

Check out YA author Carissa Taylor's Twitter Pitch Generator over at YA Writers' Toolbox - the name says it all! Try it out and you'll be surprised how close it comes to helping you nail down a succinct Twitter or elevator pitch. I wouldn't recommend generating one and sending it out 'as is', but as a starting point, the suggested pitches are actually quite useful.

Writing Tips - Ambient Sound

I'm still waiting to hear back on fulls and partials that I have out there in agent land, so I thought I would begin posting fun writing tips or aids as I ran across them.

A lot of writers write to music. Many authors post playlists of the songs they listened to while writing their novels. I live in the country and do a lot of driving around by myself. If I have the radio on, I'm listening to that. If I have music on, I'm singing along - I can't help it, I was a singer before I was anything else. Now, there's nothing wrong with any of that, but I've found that some of my most productive 'writing' time has been when I've been driving around, deep in my thoughts, plotting my book. But it's kind of lonely doing that to complete silence, particularly at night. Celtic and New Agey stuff helps - Loreena McKennit, Clannad, etc - but I'm often tempted to sing along with them too.

Home was harder - I couldn't begin writing until everyone else was asleep because the background household noise distracts me and my music distracted everyone else (I've really got to get some stained glass up in those empty transoms!). My writing days were beginning after midnight and going on till the wee hours of the morning. I'm a night owl, but I have children that I have to get up with in the morning.

And then I discovered Simply Rain. The name says it all - rain and random peals of thunder. It puts me in the sort of 'moody' mood that I need to write and masks the sounds outside my office but it doesn't distract. I love it.

Ambient Mixer is another ambient sound generator I stumbled on recently. The cool thing about this site is the sheer variety of sounds available. You can even create your own mixes or alter the mixes you find there.

There's a lot of Mommy/Writers out there - if anyone has stumbled across other online sites that help with concentration, feel free to post in the comments!

© 2013 Heather Senter

Update On The Agent Blind Speed Dating Contest

Yoohoo! My entry received 1 full manuscript request (only 1 full was allowed per entry during the contest) and 2 partials from 3 absolutely amazing agents!

The contest at Cupid's Literary Connection is an wonderful opportunity and I want to publicly thank the anonymous Cupid for all her hard work in putting it together.