After a week or so of living and breathing Pitch Wars, I figured it might be helpful for all the applicants–chosen as mentees/alternates or not–to check out some observations I’ve collected! Here we go.

Your Query’s Synopsis Blurb:

The most common problem I saw was lack of trajectory. I gave feedback on every entry I received, and the one comment I found myself typing over and over was a request for firming up the straightforward direction of the query. This means when evaluators look at queries, they’re generally looking for you to tell them what happens and who it happens to/who makes it happen. We want to see your character(s) defined; we want to see the problem in your story; we want to see how your character(s) might approach solving said problem; and we want to know the stakes (what will happen if they don’t succeed).

This won’t do for every query, because obviously not every story is so straightforward, and some have more than one problem. But remember, this isn’t an attempt to sum up your book in two paragraphs. This is an attempt to pull us into your story enough to start reading it. You don’t have to tell us everything. You don’t even have to tell us about every plot if your book has several. This is a document that is designed to do nothing more than get us to open your book and read page one.

A list of common issues I saw in the synopsis bits:

• Too much detail (we need broad brush, not explanations of each plot point)
• Attempts to insert storytelling into the query (we need story, but not “and her heart soared when he kissed her in the rain”)
• Presenting final stakes as a question (“Can she save her mother in time?”–yes, probably; now we don’t have to read it)
• Vague stakes (“or he will lose everything”–nah, tell us what he will lose specifically)
• Cursing (snark is okay, but I recommend against actually using swear words in the query)
• Giving too many character names (main characters and villain okay; every member of expedition team, not)
• Telling the ending (yes, you tell the ending in a “synopsis” attachment; you do not tell the ending in a pitch blurb)
• Message and themes (show us what your story illustrates, but don’t tell us it’s deep or unique or that it examines human nature)
• Too much setup (you need to bounce right into the plot, not spend a paragraph on who the character was before the plot happened)
• Lists of what happens in what order (pitches are not a stark outline of your book’s plot points)

Your Query’s Personal Section:

The most common problem I saw in the bios was irrelevant information. Most people did pretty well giving me just a little taste of their writing background and pub credits (where applicable), but I did get a fair amount that went into loads of detail about their other projects–especially when said projects were unpublished, reviewed by nobodies, or published by nobodies. Queries are for agents who want to get you a mainstream publishing deal. They care about your publication credits and writing affiliations, but they don’t need to know about them if yours aren’t impressive or indicative of a building career.

You should personalize your queries and by all means tell an agent a little something about why you think their website, blog, or Twitter presence suggests you have something reasonably professional in common. But you should not deviate into rambles about your personal life or shift focus onto other projects.

A list of common issues I saw in personal sections:

• Authors telling me who they think they write like
• Authors comparing their work to established work and giving me long-winded explanations of why it’s similar
• Authors telling me this is their first book (and I say don’t do this because this is like going into an interview saying “Hello, I’ve never done this before, but hire me!”)
• Authors claiming their self-published books or small-press books got good reviews on Amazon (please focus on THIS project, and only quote professional reviews for other projects)
• Authors telling me they’ve been rejected by others
• Authors sharing details about why they wrote the book
• Authors launching into in-depth explanations of special rules in their fantasy books and explaining their cool concepts, divorced from story
• Authors discussing their writing or publishing process (do not say how long it took to write, how many agents you’ve queried, how long you’ve been looking for representation, how many revisions you’ve done, or who you hired to edit it–notifying me that it’s been proofread as a guarantee of quality is a mistake, because we expect professional quality)

I hear that agents also often get promises from authors that the book is going to sell well and/or transform the genre and life as we know it, but I didn’t actually see any like that. If you were considering making promises about the sales and success, don’t.

Your Sample Pages

Ah, the biggie. Now everyone wants to know what I thought of their actual writing.

No secret here: The writing was usually better than the query. We’re writers, right? Not salespeople. (Unless we happen to be both.) Pitching is something we have to learn to do, and we can grumble about it, but yeah, for most of us, the strength is storytelling. I did reject some submissions that had good writing and bad queries–just because I honestly didn’t think I could handle rewriting their queries for them. But I did give a lot of preference to the pages in deciding whether I’d work with someone, and here’s some reflection on what didn’t work for me.

By far, the most common problem (and the most fatal problem) in people’s sample pages for me was unnatural backstory. If you are already launching into history and context and setting up your world while your characters stand still and it’s in the first five pages, I know you haven’t quite figured out how to tell this story. You’ve figured out your stuff, you’ve realized it needs to be in the story, and then you’ve . . . dumped it on us at the beginning. I tune out. Because I’m not invested yet. I have to care first. If you begin a novel by expecting me to sit for a lecture first, you’ve mistaken your book for a class I have to take. I don’t have to be here. I can put the book down anytime I want. Remember that and get us hooked immediately.

My chosen mentee, C.B. Whitney: Opened with a young woman covered in blood getting into a cab. Driven by a supernatural protagonist who pretty much considered this normal.

My alternate, Ryan Glover: Opened with a supernatural creature attacking a woman and child, killing the child, and responding to the woman’s hysteria with a suggestion that the child is the lucky one.

My alternate, Jessica Harvey: Opened with our protagonist getting slapped by her ex-best friend in front of an audience.

Marry those background details to character perspectives, natural revelations through story, or dialogue. And you can probably leave out more than you think. We’re pretty observant–we’ll figure it out. A great example would be one of Ryan’s well-conceived revelations: His protagonist picks up “the pills” from a windowsill and goes to his mom’s room. Immediately we know his mom’s sick and he’s the caretaker. No narration or mental explanation points out to us that his mom is dying of cancer. This comes out in a conversation when he suggests things will be better in the future and she replies, “You don’t get better from Stage Four cancer.” Up until that point we only saw Mike taking care of his mom, doing little things for her, treating her like a loving son treats a sick mom. The narration didn’t have to helpfully tell us “Oh btw cancer.”

A list of other common issues I saw in sample pages:

• Telling (narration tells me a protagonist is good, or has been a doctor for 10 years, or has three children, instead of letting me just see it come up)
• Characters have an awkward conversation about things they both/all know so I can learn about it
• Setting and situational backstory relayed through narration and divorced from character
• Spelling and grammar errors (!!!)
• Disconnected storytelling (I passively watched the character do things without understanding what they wanted or why they were doing it)
• Opening with something exciting, then backing up halfway down the page to tell me how we got here and slowing the momentum considerably
• A feeling that I would have to be patient to get to the good part (I shouldn’t feel like I’m humoring an author by reading their stuff; they need to make me want to read it!)

I was excited that I really got very few clichés, though. I didn’t see a lot of authors writing the opening that describes the sky or the weather. I didn’t see the protagonists waking up on a normal day and trying to decide what to do next. I don’t think I had anyone describe their protagonists by having them look in the mirror. Kudos!

What always got me, though, was compelling characters and authentic storytelling. Quite a few of my favorites were genres I don’t even read much of–for instance, I had a non-SF women’s fiction and a hard science fiction make my top ten. I liked them as much as I did because of the storytelling–the character connection, the ability to pull us into a situation without stopping the story to listen to explanations, the feeling that I was going to be entertained and intrigued by these characters and their futures. If I got to the end of the five-page sample and I found myself murmuring “Awww,” I knew it was way up there.

There’s more I would say on querying and character creation in general, of course, but this is just here to cover the issues I had with Pitch Wars submissions specifically while they’re still fresh in my mind. Hopefully this is helpful to some people, whether you wanted to get some direction or you just wanted to be reassured that you’re already doing what you should.

We did it! Pitch Wars picks are a done deal!

And there is a story. As there always is.

I will now tell you my side of it . . . and how I came to mentor my chosen few, with a little taste of the backstage evil which enabled me to maintain a façade leaving my top pick adrift on a sea of impending disappointment until he clicked on the blog link and saw his name.

Here’s that blog link, by the way. All the picks from all 46 mentors, and the ninja surprise.

My picks:

1. Mentee: C.B. Whitney, QUEEN OF SHARDS
2. Alternate 1: Ryan Glover, MCTAVISH
3. Alternate 2: Jessica Harvey, GYRE

So this is how it went down, y’all.

PITCH WARS opened and I posted my wish list. Made it clear that I was looking for great character-centric work, primarily of the science fiction and fantasy variety, in the Adult and New Adult categories. Little by little, potential mentees were popping by to ask questions, post on my blog, and engage in chatter with me on Twitter. One of them–the one you see up there in that shiny #1 spot–got very excited that I like the Japanese anime Eyeshield 21, and we tweeted about it back and forth. He jokingly told me I should expect a query full of Eyeshield references.

Then submission day came and my contest mailbox was flooded with submissions. I received 74 queries. And I was afraid to open them, because I had just been contacted by my publisher and had a bunch of work to do on a questionnaire for them, as well as a media interview with a British journalist. I couldn’t hit my submissions for a good three days.

Finally I began to dig through them and then there it was, second submission received:

There he is. There’s that guy. Oh my gosh, he really did make an Eyeshield reference!

So about Eyeshield 21. Let me tell you a thing. So you understand the heap of pain this fellow has just called down upon himself.

Hiruma and Sena. This picture about covers it.

Hiruma is basically a demon. Well, no, not canonically; this isn’t a science fiction or fantasy anime. It’s about American football, oddly enough, being played in a Japanese high school. Hiruma is a quarterback, but he can’t seem to get anyone to join his football team. Because they’re all afraid of him. I can’t imagine why! Such a nice guy who only wants to train hard and get his team to the Christmas Bowl, right?

Okay, not so much.

Let’s just say Hiruma’s got a passion for the game. He is not above using blackmail, threatening you with a gun, or siccing his vicious dog on you to see how fast you can run. He is literally an evil genius, and extremely scary, and very driven to win. He recruits poor Sena, who has an undiscovered and raw but amazing running talent, and forces him to play the star running back for his team, the Deimon Devil Bats. But he hides him behind a green eyeshield so people won’t know who he is and won’t distract him with demands to play on other sports teams.

Don’t ask why he has ammunition. With Hiruma, it’s always best to just . . . never, never ask.

So, people are afraid of Hiruma, but his reputation as a strategic genius and an all-around tricksy dude is also well known throughout the region, and he gets some pretty good respect. Sena frequently fears for his life around this guy, but he understands that the abuse Hiruma heaps upon him is for a good cause. It’s for the sake of his excellence. His success. His ability to realize his potential.

This was an incredibly appropriate metaphor and an extremely wise choice. As an Eyeshield fan, I knew that if I were to take this mentee literally, he would be up for any amount of evil stuff I could throw at him in order to make him better. And it doesn’t hurt that Hiruma is my favorite character. Not to mention I have my own relatively evil grin to use.

Why yes, I moonlight as an anime character. Why do you ask?

So when I saw that reference–at the end of a query I had to read twice to find anything I would change–I took a deep breath and scrolled down to the sample material.

The words that went through my head were something like Please don’t suck. Please don’t suck. I want to like you so badly.

It didn’t suck, y’all.

I won’t go into detail–that’s for my mentee and me to discuss in private–but the voice of this thing was just peaches. None of the speed bumps I’m used to seeing in first chapters where authors try so hard to tell me everything I need to know about the characters. All the focus was spent on getting me invested. And I spent five pages falling in love with our protagonist. Who am I to say no to a beefy blond lesbian Valkyrie, anyway?

(I did ask for books featuring queer characters, y’all.)

For the record, I realized there was no turning back for me when Ingrid weighed the pros and cons of being sympathetic or being aggressive to get some answers, and decided to go the loud and angry route because doing otherwise would be “some faerie godmother bullshit.”

And I was like

Meanwhile, on Twitter, it became clear to me that this fellow was monitoring his four potential mentors very carefully. He noticed everything. He kept track of everything we said that might hint for or against his being picked. And after I’d finished my first third of submissions and I still hadn’t run into one I liked better, I checked out what the other mentors were doing and was startled to see someone else had beaten me to the punch in requesting his additional chapters. Lady Lioness liked his voice too.

Rowr.

Oh well, I thought. Hey, what were the chances that he would actually remain my favorite through this WHOLE THING? I still had like 50 more submissions to read! I could pick any card I wanted! Surely someone would kick him out of spot number one, right? I wouldn’t end up mentoring the second damn submission I read, right?

And I wouldn’t let my rapport with him interfere, right?

Because man, I was really afraid of that. So I started actively fighting it. I wanted to find a reason to pick someone else, so I wouldn’t look like that jerk who picks someone because they’re my friend. After all, I have integrity. I encouraged my critique partner Jay to enter the contest but not to submit to me (because after all, he’s already had a query critique and manuscript massage from me; what would be the point?). I don’t engage in favoritism. Do I?

But he’d be such fun to work with! Ahhh!

So I had to be extra careful not to let my personal feelings get tangled up with the quality.

One by one I started recognizing manuscripts from people who were also being awesome and sweet to me on Twitter. I’d open their manuscripts and hope for amazing, and then I’d find something that sealed the deal for me–nope, I can’t take this. Sometimes it was a quality issue and sometimes it was a personal preference issue. I got a really terrible pit in my stomach every time someone I knew and considered a friend or friendly acquaintance submitted to me and I had to put them in the rejections pile. My heart sank every time I wrote an edit letter for a person I’d had a conversation with.

I blogged about my selection process and thereby showed one of my cards: Yes, I did plan to ask for more material from all of my top picks AFTER I was done reading everything. I noticed Mr. C.B. Whitney sleuthing it up on Twitter again, hiding behind his eyeshield-like pen name. He disclosed to me that the hints from the other mentors so far indicated that his might’ve been trashed since manuscripts unlike his were looking like their front-runners. I don’t know what Lioness said to that effect, but I checked with her and yes, she had read the chapters and wanted to mentor someone else. She was more than willing to surrender him to me if I wanted him. Oh hell yes.

And then, fairly early on, I came upon Gyre by Jessica. I had not talked with her and knew nothing, but her story about a young woman who discovers she can teleport captured my imagination, and after the query pulled me in, the writing really got me going. Again, I’ll give her more detail privately, but it was really the way her protagonist acted in crisis that worked for me. She acted like a person, not a character. Yes, yes.

I re-read the pages for Queen of Shards again to make sure this hadn’t beaten it, but I still loved Ingrid on a slightly different level than I loved Chelsea–just a personal thing, I guess–so I stuck it in underneath at the top of the list. Going on down the line I found I was getting mostly fantasy and science fiction, a little women’s fiction, a paranormal here and there. One women’s fiction made my top ten. Contemporary and urban fantasy kept ranking high. Then I ran into McTavish by Ryan. Oh man, the length of the query almost sunk it (and I’ll tell him more privately), but then I hit the pages and whoa. Easily one of the most polished and evocative beginnings I’ve read, with absolutely engaging and realistic characters. Sold. And truthfully, the only reason I decided against bumping him to my mentee was that I read those QoS pages again and determined that I wanted to be BFFs with Ingrid. As well-written as it was, I didn’t quite connect to Mike personally. I wanted to see what happened to him but didn’t have that weird desire to hang out with him.

And meanwhile, my secret favorite was entertaining me with tweets as I pounded out edit letter after edit letter. You see, I was determined to leave feedback for everyone, and ended up creating over 45,000 words of feedback over the course of four days. He sent me fight songs and stayed up late with me in solidarity to encourage me along. I guess this might have also been his attempt to keep the pilot light burning, but it was so much fun. I was really afraid by this point that someone else would oust him from the top, but at the same time I kind of wanted them to so I could be sure I wasn’t picking him for his own awesome factor, not the awesome factor of his manuscript.

The rest of the pitches rolled by and I found several more top-tenners right at the end, but my top three remained. I realized I had to request more pages to be sure–since some books don’t stand on their own after the first chapter and the flaws become more pronounced–and then it hit me.

A weird Hiruma-like desire to mess with my mentee’s head.

Hiruma chews sugarless gum. ‘Cause he’s already way too sweet.

At that point old C.B. was in surveillance mode, gathering information, seeming to have given up hope on the other mentors, but still graciously never pressuring me. All the compliments he sent me did not have a butt-kissing vibe whatsoever. All the teasing and silliness were just . . . the way I always act with my pals. And I realized that I could give myself the blessing to pick this guy and that we’d have a blast. But first . . . I had to send out my page requests, knowing he would be waiting for one, knowing the jig would be up that he was in my top tier if he got an e-mail from me.

So I just read the pages he’d sent to Lioness without asking for them directly. Because I am what we call in the industry a Total Jerk™.

Well, or because he SAID he wanted Hiruma to mentor him.

I maintain that this is ALL his fault. He forced my hand!

I requested pages for my other top two, plus three more I was really interested in: a historical fantasy/fairy tale (my #5), a contemporary fantasy (my #6), and a hard science fiction (my #7). My #4 was a New Adult Fantasy and I stole the pages from another mentor also.

When asked, I admitted to C.B. that I was indeed receiving pages. Subtly admitting–or so he probably thought–that I hadn’t been interested in his. He gave a gracious little speech on the PitchWars tag about how awesome this contest had been and went to take a nap or something. Soon he was back anyway. And we were bantering again. And despite the apparent snub, still playing off our rapport, knowing I hadn’t owed him anything, knowing we could still play around even if we weren’t in the contest together. After the mentors were encouraged to tweet teases about their favorites, I said I couldn’t be too specific because of all the detectives, and I pointed at C.B. with an Avatar/Korra GIF.

HEY. I got my eye on you! WATER TRIIIIIIBE!

He responded with this:

Oh my God. It’s enough to warm my cold black heart.

I read the pages, secretly declared my top picks, and waited.

So, after a day or so of believing he was out, and me vacillating between Hiruma-like cackles and feeling guilty for more or less deliberately tricking the guy into believing he didn’t have a chance in Hell, Lioness hinted that one of her picks used a pen name and I guess maybe he was thinking that was him? But then Brenda pulled a fast one and posted the mentor picks early because we all happened to be done. (We still had some stragglers last night! What happened??)

The announcement came through our e-mail and we all prepared for battle, sidling onto the Twitter hashtag and stirring up the hornets’ nests. I told the other mentors that my mentee was going to freak if he was around, because he was expecting he was out. Someone asked for specifics and I admitted to the horrible thing I had done. It was agreed that yes, my mentee was going to freak.

Yeah, he did.

I of course began speaking entirely in Hiruma GIFs after that.

I had drafted all kinds of feedback for my folks who didn’t make my top three, though it made me really sad to write them for the folks I knew and the folks who’d come really close. My e-mail broke because it thinks I’m a spammer now for all the group e-mail I sent to the other mentors, but I have the feedback for my two alternates ready for when it unbreaks, and am working on some pretty heavy stuff for my mentee (I read those chapters and yep, we do definitely have some asses to kick!), but when it all came down to it, how could you resist a hefty heroine who says things like this? [language warning]

So now my team is picked, and my two alternates found me on Twitter (and I had to quick follow them, oh my God, embarrassing, I hadn’t even followed them), and now we’re going to be BFFs of course. While I perhaps chase them with vicious dogs and bark orders while remaining incredibly charming.

Go team!

We’ll figure out Eyeshield characters for my other teammates eventually. . . .

Can’t wait for the agent round. . . .

Gulp. . . .

Better get running, Sena!

I decided to apply to be a mentor in Pitch Wars for the first time this year, and I got accepted to be part of the group! It’s a contest hosted by the illustrious Brenda Drake, designed to connect un-agented writers with mentors. Authors apply, cross their fingers to get selected, and end up getting their pitches and full manuscripts shined up for perusal by agents. Yay! I’m here as a mentor this year to guide one special author through all the hoops, as well as providing cheerleading and moral support. Sound great? That’s because it is!

About Me: Accepting Adult and New Adult Applications!

The main action is happening on my more active author blog but I will definitely share the highlights here.