Took part in #SFFpit this July. It was a lot of fun, far more engaging that I expected. Got up at 5 a.m to send out my first pitch and start retweeting. All we did was read and poke at Twitter for the next three hours.
Many kudos to Dan Koboldt (http://dankoboldt.com/sffpit/) and Michael Mammay for taking so much time out of their writing lives to organize that event. Turns out I'd heard Koboldt speak at Norwescon and hadn't realized he was the organizer of this event.
I wasn't expecting a Twitter event to be so educational. First, there was the process of trying to summarize a 143,000-word book into 260 characters. Luckily, I'm on a writing retreat, so when my writing buddies and I heard about the contest -- two! days! in advance! the fantasy writer among us and I had 24 hours to draft 10 pitches, share them with each other, and rewrite them. That helped immensely, and was probably the only reason I got any likes at all.
Pitches are HARD, y'all.
We both got two "likes," meaning people wanted pages, but they were both from tiny startup publishers, so we're researching them before we get too excited about that. The validation was AWESOME, though.
Reading other people's pitches and seeing which ones garnered agent attention was quite useful, and thought-provoking, as I'm just starting the process of querying. I sent out 13 queries yesterday, and will send another batch after a few people open at the beginning of next month.
I'm not sure this book is ever going to trigger the immediate "oh, yes, I want this!" that some of the pitches had -- it's more a "how does a young girl figure out what she's good at" for women who tried to read Game of Thrones and balked at the violence and patriarchy. It's not a "chosen one" story, and it's more a "find thyself" than a "heroine" piece, although the protag definitely does heroic shit.
The manuscript started life as a NaNo novel and an annoyed-at-Hollywood attempt to write a space opera that would fail a *reverse* Bechtel test (two named male characters who talk to each other about something other than a woman). I let go of that during the revision, of course, but there are no male leads, only supporting characters. And it introduces a complicated, multi-world universe and a "good" versus evil background story that I see carrying through at least two more books (as yet largely unwritten).
But back to #SFFpit --it was just cool to see the stories people were writing, and sad to see that several I wanted to read had no agent likes. Bah. As someone else said, the hard part of the day was wanting those pitches to be books I could buy right now!
