Hiatus Over! And Stats from Brenda Drake's Pitch Party

I’m back from my hiatus. I’ll be slow catching up and getting back into the swing of things, but it’s looking like I’m going to be moving to a two-day-a-week schedule because reasons. I love blogging or I wouldn’t keep coming back, but it’s time to be realistic—and the 5h!7 is getting real as of late (more on that at a much later date).

Writing news that isn’t really news: the WIP isn’t done because I took three weeks off (bloody pirates). Yeah, I know, I need to keep moving forward and all, but I NEEDED those weeks. That being said, I think we’re a week or two from the “You’re going into the stew pot” party (that’s nerd speak for I’m almost done with the rough draft). When that’s finished I’ll probably start waxing poetic about the novel I’ll be revising. It would appear that I fall back in love pretty easily since all I can think about lately is the novel I’m about to be revising (more on that after I put the pirates in the stew).

I’ve been entering contests like a mad woman, so I’m going to take a break from those and absorb all the feedback. Even if that feedback doesn’t go into Query Bait, I’ll keep it in mind for the next run. And speaking of contests, here are the stats from Brenda Drake’s Adult Pitch Party!

Genre	Number Entered	Number of requests
Women’s Fiction	11	11
Historical Fiction	11	4
Paranormal Romance	5	3
Thriller	11	3
Urban Fantasy	17	6
Fantasy	10	1
Romance	20	31
Science Fiction	9	13
Mystery	7	9
Commercial Fiction	4	5
Total	108	95
New Adult Romance	6	7
New Adult everything else	15	7
Total	21	14

A few caveats: This contest leaned heavily towards romance, and with numbers like these, we can’t really call it statistically significant. So it looks like a really rough time to be writing fantasy, but there’s no way to tell if the ten manuscripts were actually representative, or if they were all unlucky in that they were really similar to the requesting agents’ lists. Which is to say, even though these are fun, they don’t really tell us all that much.

What I can say about contests is this: They are really good for you, and not always for the reasons you think. Yes, the feedback and friends are invaluable, but there’s more. There was an agent who requested my material, and I never would have thought she’d take a second look at Sci Fi. Nothing in her profile indicates that she does genre fiction, so for everyone out in the query trenches: QUERY WIDELY. I would have never, ever—not in a million years!—suspected that agent might have even the slightest interest in that work. I’d even passed up contests where this agent was one of the judges because I didn’t think there were enough agents in my genre to be worth my while! How crazy is that??

Okay, enough of that. Get back out there and write/query/revise/skip rocks across the gazing ponds of life.*

*The Get Back out there and fight is a direct quote from my single favorite arcade game of all time, T-Mek. If you know where there’s still a functional cabinet, let me know, I would seriously travel to play it again! (enter arena, turn left, hit the guns)