Writing Blog

20220520 Twitter Pitch

May 20, 2022, 2:00pm

So, I participated in the Twitter #PitDark event overnight (my time). Got two nibbles - an agent who misread the pitch I tweeted and is now "considering" whether to look at the work, and a new agent who is "excited" by the pitch of a different book.

I pitched 8 books, for what it's worth, that fit the Dark themes they were looking for.

All up, I have, unpublished, 31 books (novellas and novels) I think are worth publishing, edited and cleaned. I have a further 40-odd that that I would not consider doing anything with without a major rewrite. But as I am churning out an average of 2 novels a year, and have done so for 20-plus years (before that it was two every three years... and when I was a teenager, it was one a year), that means there is always something new, so those lesser works don't matter as much when I feel I have better works all ready to go.

That sort of leads to something else. When I gave a friend a list of the works I've written over 20k words in length with brief summaries, she stopped talking to me for a while. She felt I was putting her down, as she takes around four years to complete a novel. I told her that she asked to see my list of long works, so I showed her.

You cannot compare yourself to anyone. Harper Lee wrote and published one book in her lifetime (don't @ me about the posthumous book; it was the original version of TKAM and her estate used it as a cash cow). Many authors write a book every three years. It is extremely common. On the other hand, Stephen King writes 2 novels a year or more, and Lionel Fanthorpe averaged more than 8 novels a year for more than 20 years. Don't compare - all of our writing journeys are different.

Wow, that deviated from my original intention.

Happy writing!