Hi all! I have returned from a somewhat hiatus, but my job as an English teacher is finally coming to a close. Oof. Let me tell you, this year cost a lot of energy - more than I had ever bargained for. See, I may look alright from the outside (or so I hope), but inside, I feel like this: Now that I can once again focus all of my attention to writing, I'm going to be able to come back and post more often. But just to really bring home the point that I've been exhausted and overwhelmed by the almost 90 students I've had under my responsibility, this is my progress for NaNoWriMo camp of April 2022: As you can see, an absolute disaster. I had no time, motivation or energy to work on my project.
But enough of that, let's move on to now! First and foremost, I am currently rereading for the 1000th time my primary WIP to verify the background world-building and character development, and also to see that there are sufficient clues and foreshadowing elements for the ending not to be too out of the blue. Secondly, another book taking place in that same ''bookverse'' is coming along nicely. To organize the chronology of the novel (as a lot happens with causes and consequences), I wrote the chapter titles on little bits of paper and arranged them manually to have an overview and make sure everything made sense. Writing books is so crazy sometimes and it's hard to remember what happens when and in what order! But then again, it's also quite entertaining to try and order things around like a detective trying to put together a puzzle. Finally, camp NaNoWriMo for July 2022 isn't just around the corner, it's started today! Agh help! This morning, still at work, I started writing for a new project, typing it on my phone whenever I had a minute to spare. I managed 500 words so I'm going to need just about the double of that to reach today's goal. I'm going to add the writing project to my WIP page on this blog, but it's been in my thoughts for quite some time now (2 years to be accurate). I'm mixing a few ideas together because they're all quite similar. In any case, I'm going to have a lot of fun with the concept that I came up with! The project is a contemporary fiction with an unreliable narrator. More infos to come soon, so stay tuned! That's it for now, and I hope I'll find my way back to the blog soon! Hope you're all having a great week and happy holidays to those who have the summer off!
0 Comments
I'm back to talk about another pitch event happening on twitter this Thursday! You can find it by searching the hashtag #sffpit. You can check out my post about pitmad which happened some time ago below. This time, the pitching is for science fiction and fantasy manuscripts. My main work in progress being a YA fantasy, I couldn't resist the urge to participate. Additionally, I'm prepping it for querying soon, so the timing is ✨ perfect ✨. To be fair, I'm pretty nervous about the final stages of drafting this novel that has been in the works for so many years now. Maybe I'm even more scared of it getting rejected. But I can't give up before even trying, so here I am. This post isn't going to be too long, but I thought it'd be good to revisit what this pitch events are and why they are the way that they are. What are pitches and why do them? A pitch is where you (try to) describe your novel in a short paragraph and make it sound as exciting as you can. This is because the goal is to win over the agents that will be looking through twitter (and have them like your tweet - basically the same thing as for pitmad). Agents are people who represent books and bring them to editors and publishers. So it'd be great to have one. It's like with acting: with an agent, the chances of actually get published are higher (even if they are still horrifyingly low). You can go to a publisher right away, but a lot of them only take in books represented by agents already. With an agent, you have a helping hand in the publishing process, someone who knows what they're doing. As authors, we don't necessarily have the training or the professional know-how to do all of it on our own. We haven't necessarily done a master's degree in publishing, obviously. Needless to say, it's better to have them at your side if you want to publish traditionally. Why pitch on twitter? Nowadays, more and more people are connected via social media and so in some ways it's easier to connect authors and agents. The twitter pitch events are also very open because we don't have to choose the agents we're querying: they're the ones that find our pitches. It's a great way to practice writing pitches and the audience engagement with tweets are definitely helpful in finding which pitches work better. See, Sffpit runs for 10 hours and each author has 10 tweets maximum. These can't be word for word the same tweet, so we're going to have to write 10 slightly different pitches! I'll post again once the pitching is over tomorrow and go over how it went! Till then, see you all and good luck if you're participating! (Btw, I'm always looking for people to exchange retweets, so don't hesitate getting in touch! Below is a link to my twitter account!). Hello everyone and happy new year! I hope this year will be the year you achieve your goals! As usual, I'm pretty much terrified of the upcoming year because I know for a fact that I'll probably not get all of my resolutions done - least of all those related to my novel. However, I still succumbed and wrote down a list of resolutions. I even decided to tweet an accountability tweet to just put it out there! Half way there so far! I'm in the midst of critiquing the novel of a new critique partner after finishing a critique for a whole novel!! Sadly, the former critique partner hasn't messaged back and had only critiqued 5 out of the 20 chapters of my book. With some luck, this one will go a bit better. I hope to have the critiquing done around March and start querying then. I've pushed it back again and again, so far even that that the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook I got is no longer valid because it was a guide for 2020! It's frustrating, but I'm glad I didn't query this time last year because I literally forgot that having critique partners was a thing - and an important one at that. The feedback from strangers was somewhat of a wake up call, but it was also incredibly helpful, and I learned to stand up for my voice in writing. I presume the feeling of one's writing being judged will only get worse when querying. But why prep my wip when I can start a new project??? In other news, I had the great idea of writing a novel by hand after seeing Little Women and tick, tick, boom. I bought an aesthetic notebook, got a fancy fountain pen and sadly had to choose between three novel ideas. I settled on the sapphic Indiana Jones in space, but that might change midway through, haha! I will let you know how it goes! At the beginning of December, I partook in the twitter event called Pitmad. I've talked about it in the last post, so I won't go into an in-depth explanation here. This is just to summarize how it went for me. Pitmad happened on the 2nd of December and was adjusted to an American time zone. As it happens, it was exactly going on during my working hours. And, as a teacher, it's not like I can post or check twitter in the middle of standing in front of a class full of students. As such, I used scheduled tweets and checked on how they were doing during breaks that day. My first post went live a few minutes after Pitmad began: Not the happiest about this pitch, as I don't feel that it reads all too well. However, that's of my own doing, as I hadn't taken the time to prepare pitches beforehand and was prepping them minutes before scheduling the tweets. I got a few retweets as you can see, some of them through retweet swaps (which I only did with those whose pitches I liked). The tweet was seen by 122 people. Next up, I tried, for the first time, doing a pitch using emojis, of which I'd seen many, particularly on twitter. I checked to see if people were using them in Pitmad, and as they were, I decided to go for it: Yikes. While I enjoyed this one more than the other one, it got much fewer engagements. Of the 46 people who saw it, not one liked or retweeted it. Then again, 46 people really isn't that much. As such, it failed both on the level of engagement and of its reach. Also, I'd rather not say how much time it took to find and choose all those emojis... Finally, the third pitch. Ironically, I really think it was the best one, but I also think it went up at the wrong time (it should have gone up sooner): Nevertheless, 180 people saw it, and it got the most retweets of all of my pitches. As you can see from the tweets above, you may have noticed that not one of them got a like - meaning not one industry professional had either seen or liked any of my pitches. However, I wasn't discouraged easily. That very weekend was Pitlight: the same thing as Pitmad, only for writers to find beta-readers and/or critique partners. The format is much looser and the atmosphere much friendlier. As such, I used my above pitch and added in the main character's mood board: 132 people saw the tweet, it got a retweet and four likes. Of course, during both of these events, I retweeted and liked (for Pitlight) all the pitches that I liked or wanted to amplify. For Pitlight, I found myself liking the tweets based on their mood boards first and foremost before checking the pitch that went along with it. To be fair, I think the mood boards are an amazing way to pitch because they introduce the pitch visually, and it's much easier and faster to decide on whether you enjoy the 'vibes' of the story. A written pitch, on the other hand, becomes difficult to read through after a while. Anyways, I'm still going to hang around on Pitlight and engage with writers there. Who knows, maybe I'll find the critique partner that I need for a last read-through before starting to query my main WIP. Until then, have a good weekend all of you, and see you next week! A big thanks to all those that have submitted in last week's post! From the look of things, you were all writing novels for Nanowrimo and were more or less on track, which is awesome! As is, a month seems to have already passed... somehow. It's already December. Meaning NaNoWriMo is over and we're faced with one question: What now? (Great question by the way). The first thing that comes to mind (mainly because it's literally tomorrow), is Pitmad. Now don't quote me on this, because I am not as well versed in Pitmad as I am in NaNoWriMo. I only participated once and didn't get very far, probably because I participated on a whim, in the moment, and hadn't planned it in advance. Not that I'm any more prepared this time lol, but whatever. For those that don't know, Pitmad, to my knowledge, is a manuscript showcase that happens on twitter. You basically pitch your novel(s) in a tiny paragraph (like, 280 words). You then add in the relevant hashtag (#pitmad) and the hashtags relevant to the genre of your novel (#YA for young adult, for example, or #SFF for sci-fi/fantasy). Agents will be on twitter, looking around and liking all those that are of interest to them. As such, a like is very much like an invitation to pitch that specific agent. That is also why the goal is for your tweet to be seen by as many people as possible. But how? Mainly by retweets. So you need to have followers, or friends, or reach out to others to swap retweets - an introvert's nightmare. That is why Pitmad, in my humble opinion, is stressful. Unlike Nanowrimo, Pitmad revolves around the fact that you're pitching your novel to the public. Everyone. And it's especially awkward when you're not on twitter any other time of the year. So in order to participate, not only does your novel need to be ready, but you've also got to be ready to share the pitch of your WIP for the world to see. Though it's not like many people will see it, if you've got as many followers as me, but still. It's out there. I'll let you know how it went in my next post, but you can also see it happen live on my twitter (@zoe7_justine) if you want to have a laugh. What about you all then? Hey all! So I'm back to talk about NaNoWriMo, an organization very dear to my heart because it's all about writing! The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 'a novel' in the span of one month (officially November, so we're in it right now!). That's probably why it's call National Novel Writing Month. Not sure about the 'national' part though, since people from all over the world participate. I started participating in 2016 with a goal to finish my now main WIP, DREAMING. Lol. And this is about how it went: Clearly, I wasn't able to maintain the about 1,600 words you need per day to arrive at a 'novel' length script at the end (50,000 words). Back then I was in my first year of Uni, and I didn't write as quickly as I do now (as I like to think). Funnily enough, during NaNoWriMo 2017, it went about exactly the same. I only made it half way. Finally, 2018 comes around. A weird year, to be sure. But yeah! I made it! For the first time, I started with a completely new project, having no idea where it would go. It was an experiment. And it worked! I think the thing to have in mind is that NaNo is there to write what you want to write about. Don't get stuck up on novel formalities - those can come later. Right now it's about enjoying the worlds you create. Easier said than done. Fast forward to 2019, and my abysmal 10,000 words total and half a month spent not writing. Then came Corona. Stuck inside all day. Hating my master's degree. Spewing out a will to escape on the page, unconsciously dreaming about returning to Scotland... and voilà. An alternate-history-victorian-revolution novel is born. And here we are, in 2021. The first year I really started exchanging with other writers online during the event. Unfortunately, my job at the moment is extremely demanding (no thanks to me needing to be a perfectionist), so I find little to no time to write during the week, and, as such, have to dump out all my words on the page during the weekend: And even though I hope to win Nano 2021, I've found that even without winning, it's always a win if you write any amount at all. One word added to the doc is more than none. Well, I guess I should probably get back to writing, seeing as I'd be below the goal line by tomorrow... My username on Nanowrimo.org is J.K.Dietz if you'd like to know more about what I write or if you'd like to buddy up! Stay tuned for the next post! |