Pitch Wars
Ah, reality: it hits, and then it hurts.I submitted my manuscript to Pitch Wars this year. There's 1 week left in the competition. No, I haven't gotten any page requests. Not even a synopsis request from the mentor who asked for an Anastasia retelling. :-(Rejection is hard, y'all. What can I say? Did I fantasize about winning, and in a big way? Sure. I hoped that people would fall all over my manuscript. But my novel simply may not be good. Maybe it is! But probably not.And that's that. What I need now is more constructive feedback, to figure out if my story can be improved. I can't tell by myself. My mom read it, because she's the best, but she can't tell me either. And I suspect the 2 readers I sent it to will be too nice to tell me if it just flat out is bad.As far as I can tell, these are my options:
- Submit for online critique, e.g. at "Destructive readers" on reddit, on Scribophile, etc.
- Submit to my writing group, which critiques 10 pages at a time, but which I won't attend for another month because of work commitments.
- Submit to agents, once I have a decent query letter; if anyone asks for pages, I'll start getting a sense of whether it's publishable or not.
The thing is to do all of them. All of the above. I guess I'm just suffering from a serious bout of impatience. Pitch Wars would've been instant gratification. :-) That's not really how writing works. I guess I'm learning.