I’m not ready to reflect on the end of Pitch Wars and what it means going forward yet, so I thought I’d talk about everything that happened to me surrounding Pitch Wars going backward. I think I’ve told most of these stories at some point, but maybe never all in the same place.

2014. I’d written a book. It was not a good book. Scholars maintain that it doesn’t actually exist. I started querying in July, and as I was cruising the internet checking out agents, I stumbled over this thing called Pitch Wars. It was accepting submissions, but closing that day. I had a query. I had a first chapter. I had a vague notion of how the internet worked. I picked 4 mentors in about 4 minutes and hit send. One of those mentors was Rebecca Yarros. Because I thought she seemed cool. I write adult SF. Rebecca was accepting neither adult nor SF. She didn’t pick me.

I joined Twitter. Brenda Drake was the first person to follow me back. True story.

My book was a 148,000 word fantasy that was derivative of Elizabeth Moon (because if you’re going to be derivative, be derivative of one of the greats.) Did I mention that it wasn’t good?

A couple of other Pitch Wars applicants, Michelle Hauck and Mary Ann Marlowe, started a forum for people to swap queries and first pages and such. I met my first critique partners, Becka Enzor, Colleen Halverson, and Red Levine–three exceptionally talented writers. It was at this point that I learned my book wasn’t good.

Dan Koboldt, a Pitch Wars mentor, subtweeted about my book being too long (which it was). I swore a life-long vendetta against him. I was probably a little over-dramatic.

I didn’t get in. I stopped querying because I knew my book wasn’t good. I rewrote it, but it still wasn’t good. I gave up on writing.

For like 45 days.

2015. I wrote a little book called PLANETSIDE and finished the first draft in February. I was revising, and was going to start querying when I was finished, but I got hurt pretty bad. Ruptured a disc in my neck, and ended up some combination of bed-ridden/drug-addled for a couple of months. Ended up finishing it up around the beginning of July. Thought about querying, but by then, Pitch Wars was coming up, so what the heck. I’ll enter again, and then start querying.

There weren’t a lot of SF mentors available that year. We were allowed 5 mentor picks in 2015, for whatever reason, and I subbed to Jason Nelson and KT Hannah, who took SF, and Kellye Garrett and Sonia Hartl, who did not. Dan Koboldt was a mentor, but we had a life long vendetta, so that was out of the question. I honestly forget who my 5th submission went to.

Since my book had been done for a month or so, I submitted the minute the window opened. Back then, mentors got the submissions immediately when they were sent and didn’t have to wait until the window was closed. I was Kellye Garrett’s first ever submission. This is, to this day, in my top ten accomplishments ever. Probably going to put it on my tombstone. Also, Kellye tweeted about my book the next day, saying that it was Spenser in a very not Spenser place. She was not going to pick me. She did pick Kristen Lepionka, who is an outstanding writer. Love her books. But I digress.

I got one request. JC Nelson asked me for my first 50 pages, and just a short time later said, “yeah, you should probably send me the rest of this.” And that was it for a couple days. Never did get another request. Then JC reached out and said that the book was good, but he wasn’t the right mentor, and maybe could he send it to Dan Koboldt. JC didn’t know about the vendetta.

So. This was a spot. Did I stick to my principles of vendettaness, even though I had no other requests, or did I cave? Well, I’ve always been a practical man. Of course I caved. I later found out that Sonia had also tried to send me to Dan.

JC Nelson has been an early reader and provided important feedback on every book I’ve written to date. There have been five of them.

I somewhat gave up on my vendetta. But not completely.

I joined the Pitch Wars 2015 facebook group where I was pretty quickly dubbed Pitch Wars Dad by some of my classmates. This was disrespectful. But not inaccurate. Some of them were younger than my son. I still talk to many of them today. I talked to two of them extensively today. This group is wonderful.

I did some revisions, but not many. I was way ahead of most of the group in that regard. So I used the extra time to read a lot of their books and provide feedback. I learned more from that than they did.

We reached the showcase. I got one agent request. It was not from an agent who I thought was a fit for me (and I was right). But Dan and I had a strategy to query, and I queried. I got a bunch of rejections. I was ready to quit again, but Dan, as is often the case, was the voice of reason and told me it hadn’t been that long. And then I got some requests, and some offers, and I signed with my agent in March. But that was actually 2016, so I’m messing this up.

2016. Once I was ready to sign with my agent, Dan Koboldt asked me if I wanted to co-mentor. And the vendetta was over. Mostly. Yeah, I know, that’s kind of anti-climactic. There weren’t even any knife fights.

I worked way too hard on our submissions to the point where I burned out, because I hadn’t learned how to set boundaries. Dan recognized this before I did.

We selected a mentee who I won’t name because she’s gone somewhat incognito on the net and I don’t want to mess with that. I thought I knew how to mentor. I thought I knew how to help someone revise. One of those things was probably true. It wasn’t the revision part.

We got to the agent showcase, and I was so worried that my mentee’s book wouldn’t get any requests that I got agents (including mine) to request it just so that I’d feel better. That may or may not have made my mentee feel better. Did I mention that I wasn’t really ready to be a mentor at that point in my career?

My Pitch Wars book sold in December to Harper Voyager, but we didn’t announce it until way into the next year, because publishing.

2017. Dan and I co-mentored again. But this time, I’d learned my lesson and we had boundaries and a better division of labor. We each read half the entries, and we ended up selecting Ryan McLeod, who is Canadian, which led to a lifelong series of jokes, and I’ll always be thankful for that.

Ryan wrote a space pirate book which I always thought was great. Still do. Alas, SF is hard, and it didn’t find a home. To this day, I feel like publishing missed on this one. I think maybe it was the 80s references. I love 80s references. I’m not sorry.

Dan and I worked on each other’s books, although it has been a long time since 2017 and I don’t really remember what books those were. But we’ve both written a few, and we’ve helped each other on all of them. I was really mean to Dan with my edits, so the vendetta is still going strong.

Pretty sure this is when Dan asked me to co-host SFFPit, but maybe that was 2018. I don’t know, a lot of it runs together. Dan and I do a lot of stuff with each other.

2018. Dan and I co-mentored again. Pitch Wars had somewhat of a crisis, and it looked like it might be the end there for a minute. I don’t really want to rehash all of that. A lot of people who had been associated with Pitch Wars for a long time, left, and things were up in the air for a bit.

Okay, being serious here for a minute. I was ready to walk away. And then Brenda announced that Kellye Garrett was going to be the director. And I was back in. That’s all it took. I knew with Kellye at the helm, we were going to be great. Some people decided, for whatever reason, that I should be on the committee, so I did that along with mentoring with Dan. We picked Chris Kerns, and his near future book that featured an evil corporation (cough Facebook cough) that created new tech that exploited the social media world.

Sure. That’s not real.

Near future SF is really hard to sell, unfortunately, and again, it didn’t work out. At some point, I signed my second and third book deals.

I met Dan and his family in person when he used his Guest-of-Honor status at Norwescon to get me invited as a panelist. His wife is lovely. I’m beginning to think the life-long vendetta thing probably isn’t going to work out.

2019. I had a full time job and a deadline for a novel that wasn’t where it needed to be, and I decided to walk away because I didn’t have the time. And I did walk away. I thought I’d miss it, and for a minute, during the exciting parts like selecting mentees, I did. But mostly I was too busy and I took the year off. Dan also walked away. It was time.

2020. I returned. I’d become a full time author and so I had more time to give. I did some work for the committee and I mentored with Alina as my co-mentor. We read 175 submissions. At some point, I realized that I had a better grasp of what books had and what they needed. I found the best submission I’d ever found in Pitch Wars (which belonged to Bethany Jacobs) and then I learned that Jake Nicholls, another mentor, was in love with that book. I let them have it, because I had a great second choice.

And then, as I started talking to the author of my second choice, it became very clear that she was not on board with what I saw that her book needed. And so we moved on from that and I found a really good fantasy book that I thought we could help. And on the night before we were to announce mentees, an agent offered representation for that book, which, on the one hand, was great, because clearly I’d picked a good book. But now we didn’t have a mentee, and we had like 24 hours and we hadn’t read any full manuscripts that hadn’t been chosen by other mentors.

So we picked something off of a partial because it had a unique voice and some great characters, and we’d figure it out. And it was good, and we did figure it out. I did what was perhaps the best edit of my life, and on top of that, I’d learned not to over-edit, but instead to steer the mentee on their own path. I credit David Pomerico with that. I’ve received some great edits from him, and at some point, a little of that wears off. And our mentee was great at that, and she got an agent offer and signed.

But that was a lot.

2021. I stepped away from mentoring. I just didn’t have the passion for it anymore, and mentees deserve people who are really invested.

They asked me to step up my role behind the scenes and become the agent liaison, replacing the inestimable Sarah Nicolas. They left me notes on how to do everything. I followed the notes. They worked.

I knew that Pitch Wars was ending before it was announced, and I didn’t blow the secret. This is my greatest legacy.

2022:

When I heard that Pitch Wars was ending — and let’s assume that I heard before you. (That’s a fair assumption for most people, I’d say. Put it this way…if you knew before me, you know who you are.) My reaction was, “Yeah. It feels like it’s time.”

Like I kind of knew it might happen. If not this year, then next. Being tight with the people who do all the work, I could see the strain it was putting on them, and it was only a matter of time.

And I have no regrets. It was the right thing to do. I’m sure there will be people who disagree with that. But you know, I don’t care. Brenda and Kellye and Sarah and Sonia and Gail and Ayana and Laura and everybody else who gave freely and graciously of themselves? They did a good thing. So have your opinion. I’m cool with that. But you won’t change mine.

I had a good journey. It reached an appropriate ending.

I’m going to go ahead and put a link to my book that comes out next week down here. That way I can pretend that I was doing promo work and not just engaging in nostalgia. If you click the link, you can consider it as fueling the illusion.

THE MISFIT SOLDIER