Pitch On workshop - Destiny

Name: Chrissi Barr

Country of residence: Australia

Title: DESTINY

Genre: Speculative Fiction

Word-count: 94,000

Pitch: Sixteen-year-old Clara Kavanagh learns that the dead still love after destiny is changed, and her family is killed by a wraith within days of returning to their Irish ancestral home. Fueled with courage from her lost family Clara crosses into the afterlife, and sets out, with ghosts of Ireland’s past, to restore mankind’s destiny only to find out that restoring destiny may result in her own death.

Pitch On workshop - Memories of Me

Name: Talynn Lynn
Country of Residence: United States
Title: Memories of Me
Genre: YA Fantasy mash-up of a fairy tale and a myth
Word-count: 70,000
Pitch: For her sixteenth birthday, River learned to erase memories of those with tormented pasts. She writes them in an animated Memory Book, but the memories come alive through her. When terrifying memories cloud her mind, River must find a way to terminate the Book before it wipes out her real identity. She learns some memories are made to live over and over again but some memories are best forgotten.

Pitch On Workshop Begins!

Today is the day folks. It's finally time to start priming to Get Your Pitch On! As I've mentioned previously, Get Your Pitch On is going to be a super chance for any YA writers that would like to be able to skip right on over the slush pile and have their pitch seen directly by an editor. The event is being put together by  YAtopia and Down Under Wonderings, and is happening October 15th.

But, before that, we wanted to give you a chance to get those pitches all sparkly-like. Thus, the Pitch-On workshop. 

Journal Idea of the Day....

Each day I will post a journal idea of the day. Some days it might be a writing prompt, some days a question, some days a photo that you can share what it reminds you of. You can write one sentence, or a paragraph...or a word. Whatever you like. Ready? Let's go. =)

 Today's journal idea is a photo journal. Where does this picture take you? What does it bring to mind for you? Do you want to create something fictional? Or real? It's all up to you....

Guilty Pleasures

Ahhhh yes. We all have them. We may not all want to admit them, but somewhere ....somewhere....lurks that thing we love to do that we may be just a teeny bit embarrassed to admit. It may be watching back to back episodes of Desperate Housewives all day long in our jammies on a lazy Saturday.  Or dancing around the living room in our bra and underwear to old 80's music pretending to be Madonna (bonus points if you tape some type of pointy contraption to said bra.) Maybe it's indulging in Ben & Jerry's while taking a bubble bath by candlelight after having sent the kids off with hubby for the evening, so you have a few hours of *gasp* quiet time.

Too often we get caught up in the pressures of work, kids, grocery shopping..you know...life---to take time for these little escapes. We shouldn't. We need to make time. Whatever your guilty pleasure, sometimes...you just need them. As for me? Yeah, I've got them too.

A Good CP (and why you want one)

Those of you writing a manuscript probably already know what a CP is, but for the non-writer friends among us, it is a Critique Partner. Well, a month ago, I had absolutely no idea what a critique partner was...any more than I knew how to make crepes suzette. (And I don't even know if I spelled that correctly, so obviously I have no idea how to make them.) But, after finally finishing my manuscript for A Summer of Hope after *mumble, mumble, cough, cough*, let's just say, a rather long hiatus, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a certain writing forum. And this writing forum led me to a certain amazing writer. And I began chatting with this writer, and was dazzled by her skill and thought she was just absolutely too fun and spunky and adorable for words.

Sign up now to Get Your Pitch On!

As I'm sure most of you have heard by now, Get Your Pitch On is a fantastic opportunity for YA writers to pitch their manuscript directly to an editor without having to worry about wading through any slush pile first. How totally cool is that?? Coordinated by YAtopia and Down Under Wonderings, it's all going down October 15th.

But to give you a chance to get your pitch picture-perfect (did ya like that?), S.M. Johnston has coordinated the Get Your Pitch On workshop. The workshop starts October 1st and is comprised of 26 different blogs that will help you to hone your pitches so that you can make them as superb as possible before you toss them into the ring. 

What does this all mean to you?
You want your pitch to be fabulous, right? Right. Since the Get Your Pitch On contest will allow you to pitch just 50-75 words, that may seem a bit daunting. 50-75 words to sell your story and convince the reader that they just can't go another day without snatching your manuscript up and taking that puppy home. And that's where this workshop comes in. You'll get feedback on your pitch from one of the workshop hosts, as well as from the other workshop participants. So how do you get involved you ask? Well, how fortuitous...I was just about to tell you.