Contests, pitches and queries… Oh my!

I feel like Dorthy in the wizard of Oz, things are spiraling out of control and I am going to land SOMEWHERE then know, I am not in Kansas anymore.

It all started with a novel… one I am passionate about. One I have cared for and grown for the past eight years… one that is now ready to go over the rainbow.

I sent two queries in October… was it really that long ago? Boy, I am pathetic. Ha!

Ahem, I digress… I have been messing with my query for days now… umm, months even. Then I get wind of the pitchfest and decide to totally go for it… what can happen? They choose to rep me? They laugh in my face? They pick apart my grammar?

Exactly, nothing that will break me. Which is a good lesson in quering by the way… who cares what people think about your story or query… if you are passionate about it, someone will pick it up.  Ahem… see that bunny go by? I did.

So I entered the pitchfest with this:

A prince, a spirit embodied in a journal, an amulet, a prophecy for another world… this has to be a dream, or so Emma hopes. Reality crashes in when she finds a bounty hunter tracking her, desperate to retrieve the journal. While seeking to evade capture, she discovers an ancient prophecy foretelling her trip through the Rings THE RINGS OF TIME to bring the journal safely back to Mandor. She makes a fatal mistake, which means she must travel back in time to undo the damage. Can she save not only herself, but also Mandor from destruction?

Word for word, that is what I entered… Ha ha ha… Ya, umm… do you see the error? Thankfully she didn’t point it out. But still. The pitch gave me some new fervor… gave me some new gumption… gave me a kick in the pants really.

The moment I pushed submit, I saw 1,000 things I could have done better with it. Granted it was a limited pitch, 100 words or less. So I had to try and fit this fabulously fantastical novel into 100 words… but now that I am done with this pitchfest, I see the things I could do differently, and it’s quite exciting.

Oh, the agents response was, “This feels like really derivative, traditional fantasy–too much so for it to be a good for me. Thanks though.” Which I see as a very positive thing, not negative. She just doesn’t deal with completely traditional fantasy… which means my pitch was off, because it’s not traditional. It starts urban and follows into fantastical… and back to urban and back to Mandor again! But you can’t say all that in 100 words. But it sets my query up for me.. I think. Here goes the work.

And if THAT wasn’t exciting enough (Didn’t sleep for two days!) I entered Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Awards Contest… So that means I shouldn’t sleep until February 25th when they announce the people who made it to the next round… Ha!

So what does all these mean? It means I need to keep myself busy… get to my query and start sending the stinker out! I have a goal of 20 queries sent by March… and it’s already February! How exactly did that happen?

Enough rambling… let’s start editing that query.