Another Sunday afternoon alone in the apartment.  I finished up the first draft of a new story, a short about the Wild Hunt, that I’m rather pleased with.  After spending the past five months on the same novel, it’s nice to be able to bang out a whole draft of something in a few hours.  My writing plan for the rest of the year is to focus on getting some good drafts of short fiction done, things I can polish up and start sending out to magazines after the new year.  There’s also a secret plan involving the new novel, but I don’t want to say anything for fear of jinxing it.

I’m also planning on entering a couple of year end pitch contests.  Pitches, by the way, are so not my thing.  I’ve had an inordinate amount of trouble trying to get the description of Pomegranate Seeds into something resembling pitch length.  Either it ends up sounding like a romance, which it is definitely NOT, or my antagonist comes off as a total douchebag (he’s NOT), or it sounds so generic as to be unreadable.

Back when I was still doing choir and theatre, one of my favorite teachers used to tell us that what mattered about an audition was the process, not the result.  My sixteen-year-old self thought that was the kind of bullshit teachers say to make kids feel better.  Now, after two contests, three major revisions of my query letter, and more rejections than I care to think about, I get it.

I’m viewing the pitch contests not as an end, but as a step along the way.  Here’s what I’m hoping to get out of them, in this order.  A good, solid pitch for Pomegranate seeds that I can use when people ask what my novel is about.  A few more writers to follow on Twitter and possibly connect with.  A few agents to query that I might not otherwise have considered.  And, possibly, maybe, if I’m really, really lucky, some interest in my manuscript.