The agent round of Pitch Wars is over!!! What I’ve been left with so far are amazing mentees, zero sleep, and NaNoWrimo+Pitch Wars hair combined. For those of you who don’t know what Pitch Wars is, check it out here. In a nutshell, it’s a long, grueling process that (95% of the time) builds relationships that last lifetimes.
This year, I was fortunate enough to get two mentees: Danielle and Alex. I painstakingly scrolled through my Twitter posts until I found the ones when I was going through my submission pile and first tweeted about them, before anyone (including me) knew they’d be my choices.
Danielle: (She favorited this tweet)
Alex: (She didn’t favorite her own tweet. You’d think she would, knowing how much I talk about wanting to visit Paris!)
I’ve had the BEST time mentoring these two! Every contest I mentor someone, I get nervous we won’t connect or they won’t like the edits I suggest or they won’t measure up to my amazing first mentee Adam. But I never should’ve worried with Danielle and Alex. They handled my insanely long edit letters so well, rewrote several portions of their books, and didn’t disown me as a mentor when they got line edits back. I’ve spent the last two months gushing about both of them on my Twitter, but just like my amazing mentees from last year, these two deserve their own blog post.
Danielle-I was really hoping for a super dark, realistic contemporary with intense angst. Not only did Danielle’s book check all those boxes, it’s also one of my most favorite sibling stories I’ve ever read! I mentioned on my mentor blog hop that I wouldn’t mind seeing a YA version of Supernatural. I don’t think I could’ve asked for a better one. She fearlessly added a second POV to the story, didn’t cringe when we had to cut about 13k, and did an amazing job on her pitch that made me want to read the book all over again!
Alex-My second most-wanted category was dark fantasy, and I had a ton of amazing submissions in this category. But there was something about Alex’s that was so amazing, I couldn’t stop reading. And I’m so glad I couldn’t! Alex has been an amazing person to work with! Her writing is stunningly beautiful and she created a world in her book that I could spend all day in!
I’m so thankful to Brenda for allowing me to have both these wonderful women as my mentees this year. I can’t wait for the world to see their amazing books! I’ve had a blast working with them and I’m already looking forward to Pitch Wars 2018!