Skip to main content

Pitch Perfect

Today I’ve reached 21 years of bobbing along on this planet. I’m somewhat hung-over from my party last night (if 'somewhat' means 'very'), and I’m spending the day learning how to use an eye-tracking machine for my third year project at university. The eye-tracker is worth £30,000 and you can break it by touching its mirror...

Don’t touch the mirror.

Anyway, as it’s my birthday, I’m going to give you guys a mini present. Have you heard of a competition called ‘Pitch Wars’? Anyone who has a completed manuscript can choose 4 out of 47 writing mentors to send their pitch to. These writing geniuses will pick one novel each to help polish up before submitting it participating agents.

So basically, there’s a chance to have your novel looked at by someone who knows how to make it perfect, and then a chance to test out the polished novel. Fancy a go?

The best bit is that it’s not for another month. If you’re novel isn’t quite there, then spend the whole of November reading through and editing until it is.

Happy Pitch Everybody!

Comments

  1. Definitely going to give that a go! Thanks for pointing it out.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Happy (belated) birthday! :D

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Your Best Character: Quiz and Contest

The best characters are put through hell and yet can still carry the story forward on their broken shoulders. Your plot will fall flat if your characters are one dimensional and strong characters can make a cliché story really shine; characterisation takes work and thought. The key to character development is to ask questions. Maybe spend time thinking about the scenarios that have happened to your character which won’t make the final cut of the novel. The questions below are designed to test that (to some degree). [NOW CLOSED, REVIEWS PENDING] Answer at least 5 of these in a comment with a link to your story and I’ll give you an in-depth review. Reviews are approximately 1000 words and take me well over an hour, so if you’re looking to polish up your manuscript then don’t miss out. Also, the opening chapter with the most interesting and well-developed character will be featured on this blog! Feel free to write about anyone as long as they feature in the same story. You can ans...

Book Review: Children of Blood and Bone

CHILDREN OF BLOOD AND BONE by Tomi Adeyemi 5 Stars Verdict: So good it hurts. The night magic died, Zélie watched her mother's murder as the Maji were slaughtered. Now Zélie has a chance to bring back magic. With the help of her brother and a rogue princess, she must outrun the crown prince and battle her self-doubts to restore magic to the world. This West-African inspired fantasy is powerful and all round awesome from start to finish. The writing is emotive and imaginative, the pacing is as perfect as it gets, and the characters are real with flaws and charm. I hardly know what to say. A brilliant book like this tells the editor in me to shut up and enjoy the ride, so I'd need to read it again to offer more of a critique. If every book was as good as this one, I would never be able to stop reading. The struggles, anger, and pain are carved into this book so deeply that the desires bleed through the pages and the triumphs feel earned. The emotion in this book is ...

Psycho Bites: Metaphors and Similes

I’m a psychology undergraduate doing my final year project on figurative language. If I find something interesting or relative to writing (the whole reason I picked a psycholinguistic project) then I’ll post it on here for you to read. Do we have a deal? I'll start with the psychological difference between a metaphor and a smile. A simile compares two concepts using ‘like’ or ‘as’ to. A metaphor is very similar except it states that the concepts are the same despite the reader knowing they’re not. It turns out metaphors are more powerful because we can read them faster. This was discovered by measuring how long it took for a person to read a sentence written in a metaphorical form (‘jobs are jails’) compared to how long it took to read as a simile (‘jobs are like jails’). Metaphors were read faster! They also provide different types of imagery. Similes provide more basic links which are true for both items where as metaphors seem to open your mind up to further possibilitie...