Pitch Wars Blog Tour: Publishing While Trans by Steve Westenra

Online querying spaces look quite different now than they did in the 2010s. While social media pitch contests still exist on sites like Bluesky, a digital environment that once supported myriad opportunities to bypass the famously brutal query trenches and attract agent attention has fragmented following Elon Musk’s appropriation of Twitter. Every day, it seems, I encounter a fellow author expressing frustration at the pressure to join yet another new social media or marketing site, and when agents, editors, and other publishing professionals are themselves scattered across a spectrum of different applications, even successful pitch events have reduced visibility compared with what once was. Depending on your personal experiences with these contests, your opinion on whether or not this is a good thing will likely differ, but what is undeniable is the impact these changes have had on online community spaces for querying authors, agents, and acquiring editors.

One of the biggest and most successful of the 2010s pitch contests was Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars—a writing mentorship program and agent showcase. The end of Twitter wasn’t responsible for Pitch Wars (and its related one-day pitch event, #PitMad) shuttering in 2022, but its death has made it challenging for another program to step up and assume PW’s mantle. New contests and mentorship programs have (and do) crop up—I myself am an alumnus of the QueeryFest mentorship program, which focused on giving editorial support for queer authors, though without the accompanying agent showcase component. None of PW’s successors, though, has been quite so longlived, beloved, and, yes, fractious as the thing itself.

I’ve said it elsewhere, but it’s difficult to express the level of excitement that Pitch Wars generated in the online querying community. Every year from 2012 to 2022, hopeful authors would scour the websites and introduction posts of that year’s mentors, debating with one another over whom to submit to, or who might be a good fit based on the mentors’ genre wishlists. Community groups and fora offering the opportunity for companionship, peer critique of submission materials, and support while querying cropped up every August, while mentors teased their reactions to anonymized submission packets or remained stoically silent in the face of nail-biting authors await the mentee announcement (which almost always came a day earlier than expected). There were panels and interviews of mentors hosted on YouTube, donated material critiques from past alumni, and live Q&As with agents, mentors, and editors.

My own personal Pitch Wars experiences, which predate my selection as a mentee in Fall 2017, are a little hazy. I do remember that I entered at least three times before I was selected, and then again (unsuccessfully) the year of what would turn out to be the last showcase. I’m unsurprised I wasn’t selected on my first try. The MS I submitted, The Wings of Ashtaroth, was then 250k words (it’s now much longer), and given the length of the program, editing a book of its size would have been challenging for both the mentee and the mentor. I cut the book down, cut it in half at one point—fiddled with it in all sorts of ways—but with no takers I finally sat down to write something new. That MS, which had a working title of Lesbian Vikings (before going on to be retitled Skaldsdottir’s Saga; then Ash, Oak, and Thorn, then So Sing the Barrows), was the novel that got me into Pitch Wars (though even then it took two tries).

The first year I submitted it, I had a couple requests and a close call with an author whose own work I’ve come to respect and enjoy—the wonderful Carrie Callaghan. In SStB’s second year as an entry I was very lucky to have Carrie request again, alongside mentor duo Victoria Lee/R. F. Kuang, and, most importantly, fantasy author K. A. Doore (Kai). I’m not sure I’ve experienced jitters on the level that I did during the long month (or two?) that the mentors were reading. The fact that Carrie had requested a second time made me somewhat optimistic, yet on the other hand, would she be tired of something she’d seen before? Should I have written a new book? Had I made the right choice of which mentors to submit to? I’d had zero requests the first year I entered, then maybe one in my second (out of kindness, I suspect, on the part of the mentor, who by that point was used to seeing me on the contest circuit). This was a very different experience and it was exciting and nerve-wracking. When Kai started teasing her mentee using the nodding viking man .gif, I think I short-circuited.

There was no way that could be another book, right? So many of us knew each other’s pitches off by heart at that point, and I couldn’t think of another Norse-themed MS. Once mentees were announced, I felt like Charlie Bucket with his golden ticket. It was a wonderful experience. It felt like confirmation that, while I might not be good enough yet for publication, I was good enough for PW, and due in no small part to the hype around the contest, (somewhat paradoxically) that felt even better. I was so excited to meet my fellow mentees. I was so excited to get to join our mentee Facebook group.

I was absolutely terrified—and excited—to meet my mentor.

Kai was lovely.

She also very much, I think, picked up on the fact that I was nervous (and more than a little starstruck) right away. It’s a rare skill to be able to put others at ease, to be both very natural and calming while simultaneously choosing to do so with intention and purpose. That first chat felt like talking with an old friend. It was also exciting to hear someone I wasn’t related to sharing their enthusiasm for my characters and writing for the first time.

In Pitch Wars, mentees couldn’t be sure what the editing process would look like. While some authors ended up with comparatively light edits, others might be tasked with rewriting the whole MS, switching tense or person, and even age category or genre. Of course, most edits fell somewhere in the middle. In addition, Save the Cat and Save the Cat Writes a Novel were fairly ubiquitous as introductory craft books that a mentee might be given to help them along in the process, but not all mentors assigned that kind of homework.

As someone with less than stellar personal feelings toward Save the Cat and its cousins, I was thrilled that Kai didn’t have any such plans for me. I don’t fully remember, but I think I may even have mentioned in my entry form or in correspondence with Kai prior to selection that I had a pretty critical view of a lot of beat-oriented approaches. I was also lucky in that my edits were relatively minor or, at least, straightforward. Kai had very generously done up a reverse outline for me and together we worked through that to locate where changes would need to be made. The majority of changes were about enhancing what was there: making one of my three POVs feel more integral to the book, fixing a saggy middle, and adding two chapters to the beginning of the novel to contextualize the story better.

Apart from how much Kai helped improve my editing, however, she was also a fantastic mentor in the sense that, as a fellow queer person, she had a deep understanding of what I was trying to do and why I was trying to do it. She got my story at all levels and never tried to make my work or characters conform in order to sell better to a presumed-straight market. In an industry where even well-meaning allies can accidentally push approaches that dampen or nullify the radical queerness of the stories they shepherd, it was invaluable to have someone working with me on my book who had no interest in heteronormifying my work. While I have no doubt that courting a mainstream, straight audience would have improved my chances in both the showcase and the query trenches, it was (and is) more important to me to authentically express a queer perspective.

When it came to the showcase, I think I had around 9-10 requests for the full or partial MS, which wasn’t fantastic compared with some of the other mentees, but was about par for the course for an adult fantasy in the contest (the heavy hitters were almost always YA, which could command 40 or more requests).

I didn’t land an agent through the showcase. I didn’t land an agent post-Pitch Wars at all.

There’s very much a part of me that I think is still mentally in that space of not feeling good enough, or of being “almost there,” just outside the glass. For a while, I was part of a small cohort of mentees who called ourselves “The Monsters,” and there was a period during which I was the only one of our friends group without an agent. That was challenging, and I second-guessed myself a lot. I felt my work was good, that it could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with my friends’ stories, even if I often also fretted that I might be delusional or an imposter. What was “wrong” with my work was a nebulous thing I couldn’t pinpoint. I received rejections fairly regularly that suggested my work was ready and would soon find a home with another agent or press, but neither transpired despite some close calls. When I got similar rejections on The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle, the common denominator seemed to be me—my queerness, my transness, something ineffable, perhaps, about myself that meant I was never “quite right” despite being “so close,” or even “there.” To be “there” and yet somehow always outside, is a uniquely confusing and isolating feeling.

We’re told, of course, not to personalize these things. A rejection of one’s MS isn’t a rejection of the author as a person. I do believe that’s wise advice and, I think, largely (hopefully), true. Yet the increasing prevalence and visibility of transphobia and racism in particular, has made me less certain that it’s equally true for all of us. Certainly, though anecdotally, I’ve chatted with many fellow marginalized authors who’ve experienced rejections or not been extended the same opportunities as their cis, White, abled, or straight peers. Often, it’s not even a matter of what one is saying, so much as who you are when you say it—an unspoken expectation that authors of particular backgrounds ought to write certain kinds of books, while authors of majority groups are afforded the ability to write what and how they like (or are more often given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to flaws in a MS). There’s a privilege, it seems, to being read without suspicion.

Retrospectively, my post-Pitch Wars querying experiences often made me wonder whether I’d have made it into the contest if I hadn’t had a mentor in Kai. This is not because Pitch Wars or any of its wonderful volunteers were transphobic or homophobic. Rather, when we talk about “relatability” in the context of mentor, agent, or editor slushpiles, the ability to relate to someone without the friction of learning through them first is something we typically experience when we already share a common background or positionality with the author. When the publishing industry is largely composed of people from a majority White, cis, and straight demographic, “relatability” risks becoming an unintended cudgel—or, perhaps, a thickened pane of glass—that limits who is “there” in the parking lot, and who’s “there” inside the party.

I’ve shared essentially this same sentiment elsewhere, so I don’t want to belabour it, but going indie (and, specifically, self-publishing) was a way of becoming my own advocate. Acquiring an agent or landing a publishing deal is, it’s often said, as torturous or worse than dating. You have to find exactly the right person for that yes. Being told, repeatedly, that your work is “about to be snapped up,” without anyone actually snapping, is disheartening in a very particular way, and can feel like a reinforcement of the idea that the industry is open to everyone while simultaneously keeping it closed. There came a point in my querying, particularly given a systemic shift toward censorship and bigotry, that started to worry that my only chance to see my work in print was to do it myself. It’s bleak to have to stare that in the face, but it’s also, I think, realistic. As censorship of marginalized voices intensifies, and as bigots grow bolder in voicing their biases aloud, I can’t help but feel that choosing to say yes to myself and go indie was correct. I had the tools Kai (along with my Queeryfest mentor Mary Ann Marlowe) had given me.

When you’re “there” yet perpetually outside, you have to learn to pick locks.