First things first– I’m trying to post this via email. Any wonkiness in the formatting is therefore because of that, and I’ll try and fix it later today.
I have decided, regretfully, that I don’t have time for Pitch Wars this year. Not to enter, mind you– the manuscript I was going to use is done, although having looked at it recently it does still need some work. The query letter wasn’t going to be a huge deal to write. This actually just really hit me last night as I was fiddling with the query: I don’t have time to win.
Leaving my job aside, I have no less than three books (yes, three– mwahahaha) on my plate right now. One needs to be beaten into releasable shape within a month. One is half-finished and currently languishing, and if I don’t find the time to get back to it with a quickness it’s going to die on the vine and that would be very, very bad. One is a Big Sekrit and I don’t wanna talk about it right now.
I don’t have the damn time to add a fourth. If I were to write a wonderful query letter (and mine was basically fully-formed in my head, needing only to be put onto pixels, which would have taken about an hour and which I absolutely have time to get done today) and it would win, that would mean I’d either have to put everything else aside to work on CLICK between now and the agent round, which is in… November?… or I’d have to find a way to work on four different damn book projects, plus care and feeding of the blog, plus my job, plus my wife and son.
Naaa gaaa dooo it.
So. As much as I like the idea of Pitch Wars, and as much as I’ve enjoyed poking fun at the other authors and the mentors and interacting with people about it over the last month or so… it ain’t gonna happen this year.
Dammit.
Just before going to sleep last night (and yes, we made it past midnight thanks to a three-episode binge of Orange is the New Black, which we’ve just discovered) my wife and I had a brief conversation about whether our parents/other people older than us had the weird feeling of Perpetually Living in the Future that we’ve had for the last fifteen years, except in the 1980s and 1990s. While I haven’t actually asked anyone (because that would spoil my fun) I have to imagine that the answer’s yes, but that post-2000 This Is The Future Syndrome has got to be a lot worse. With the obvious exception of 1984 aside, most speculative fiction, even from early in the 20th century, still used years beginning with a 2 as an indicator of The Future. I’m sure there are more books and stories set in the near future from the perspective of the early-to-mid twentieth century, but there’s a lot more stuff set in the 2000s and beyond.