Bah, it's still morning

+0: General greetings to both _wunderbar_ and aaronace, stopping by my journal!

-1: Stupid Photon Cannon and allergies waking up both solarbird and me at early-effing-thirty and making both cranky in the morning. Grf. The radio claimed that there were supposed to be thundershowers this afternoon; I'll believe it when I see them. But we could use them, both to reset the temperature and to clear some of these stupid allergens out of the air. I do not get affected by this stuff nearly as badly as Dara, but I've noticed in the last few weeks that when I'm outside upon occasion I'll just get a little cough for no apparent reason, and I continue to have itchy, watery eyes and a snorky nose. Bah.

+2: How many writer types on my Friends list would be interested in having a Pitch Practice thread? I was offering to help lyonesse with practicing pitches for her werewolf book, and it occurred to me that it might be fun to get a few of us all offering feedback on each other's pitches. One of the tips that the pros at Writer's Weekend offered (aside from practicing your pitches in general) was to try to practice them at people who specifically have not read your book, and I daresay we can get a good collection of folks who have not read one another's works going if we worked at it a bit. Let me know your interest, folks.

Writer's Weekend, Day 2--Friday 6/10/05

Friday was a busy day for seimaisin and me at Writer's Weekend. We wound up going to all the panels we hit together all throughout the conference--partly just for the amusement value of hanging out, and partly for the usefulness of sharing insights with one another on the panel material. We both found that being able to discuss them with someone was almost as valuable as the panels themselves!

( Ellora's Cave & Their New Mainstream Imprint... )

( Agent Susannah Taylor, Richard Henshaw Group... )

( Agent Evan Fogelman, The Evan Fogelman Literary Agency... )

( Show, Don't Tell... )

( There is No Story Fairy: Overcoming Writing Myths... )

( Pop Culture Heroines and What We Can Learn From Them... )

( Sizzle Workshop... )

( FanFic/Slash Readings... )

The last gasp of the SAS

Some of y'all may not know that for ages, I've run a little fandom page for the character Strongbow in Elfquest--in fact, I was the person who set off a whole trend of character-dedicated EQ fandom pages! But my page has been sitting idle for many, many months now, partly due to a dearth of anyone sending me any new content to put on it, and partly (well, PARTICULARLY) due to my pursuit of my writing, which leaves me zero time to dedicate to making new content for it myself.

I've been seriously considering whether I should find someone to take over the site, or whether I should shut it down completely. This morning reminded me I should deal with this, as I got an email from someone asking about whether they should send me their Strongbow fanfic because the site has been so inactive for so long. This is a very fair question! So I decided I'd better do something about an answer to it.

So! Is there anyone out there on my Friends list who might be interested in inheriting the SAS site from me? I would prefer to hand it off to someone who has a good history of web page creation/hosting, so that I wouldn't have to walk him or her through the process of setting up/transferring a site. They should also, of course, be a big Strongbow fan. :) I would ask that a new maintainer for the site do please give me credit as the original creator somewhere on the site, and to continue to give proper credit to the people who have sent me art and fanfic in the past. If I can't find anyone interested in taking over the site, it's likely I will be shutting it down in the next few months.

So if you're interested, drop me a private email, or a comment on this post.

(And if by some remote chance Sassa of Sweden is actually reading this post, your email address bounced when I tried to answer your email. Yahoo.com claimed it had no such user as 'detretarmig'. So if you have an email address that actually works, please feel free to contact me again!)

Pitch practice thread!

Okay! Since there was a little bit of interest on my post about this from earlier today, I'm going to start a Pitch Practice thread. The purpose of this is to help any of the writers on my Friends list, whether they have been published already or not, practice giving pitches for their books. This is a skill one needs to learn when preparing a query letter to send off to an agent or editor, as it will help you get a good handle on the critical thing you have to do: interest the agent or editor enough in your book to make them ask for more of it to look at.

If you are a writer and have a book you're working on with intent to publish (or even a vague half-serious consideration of intent to publish), this thread is for you.

If you'd like to post a pitch to this thread and ask for help with it, an easy way to start would be to just try to think about how to summarize your book in a single sentence. This is what got called the "elevator pitch" at this year's Writer's Weekend--just a quick, easy answer to the question "What's your book about?" If you're media-oriented, you can also think of this as the one-sentence blurb that might get listed for your story in a program guide or on a Tivo if your story were a movie or a TV show. I will post some examples of my own in a comment. If you haven't already, you might want to look at my Day 1 writeup from this year's Writer's Weekend, where I talk about the "Query, Synopsis, Pitch" panel, or my Day 1 writeup from last year's WW, where I mention Liz Wolfe's "snowflake" method of writing a pitch.

If you are not a writer, what you can do to contribute on this thread is to look at the sample pitches offered up by the writers on the thread and tell us whether or not a pitch would make you want to buy the book. It doesn't matter if you haven't read the book already--in fact, it's actually good if you haven't read the book in question, because that is more like a real-world 'reader looking for a new book' kind of situation.

Also, in general, suggestions on how to tighten up a pitch to make it more attention-getting are good things: tweaks to word choices or grammar, anything that would add more snap to how a sentence reads, etc.

So let's see some pitches, people! :)

P.S. Pitches for short pieces as well as long ones are welcome! If you are considering trying to sell it in a professional market, go ahead and share your pitch for it!