A Week in Writing #224

This week I tried #PitMad on Thursday. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a Twitter event, short for Pitch Madness, in which you tweet a 240 or less synopsis of your book in hopes that a participating agent will like your tweet and request pages, etc. You can tweet up to three times during the event which runs from 8AM to 8PM EST and it is recommended that you change up your tweet up, in case one version catches interest. I decided to try Broken People, the novel I had just completed rewriting.

I had three written different tweets but since the event conveniently overlaps with my work hours, I only sent out two tweets during #PitMad. Well, maybe third time would have been the charm since I received zero likes. As with most of my interactions with social media, the results have been less than stellar. And, of course, I'm not too discouraged so this isn't the last post on this blog.

Speaking of Broken People, I'm still making touchups. It's hard to stop polishing. The truth is, that no matter how polished you might think it is when you submit, you will more than likely have to make further edits as part of your road to getting an agent and getting published; or so I've been told.

I'm still thinking about the next project. At this point, I'm leaning toward Runaway, a novel I had started but for reasons I can't remember, stopped writing. Before re-editing Broken People, I had made some edits on Runaway, so that seems like the logical next project. The plot gets a little convoluted and as I'm a pantser (meaning I write without a plan) so I may have lost my way the first time around.

Sort of a light week when it comes to Trophy Unlocked. I'm still working on a review for Song of the South, a film we watched a week or so ago. But other things have gotten in the way of getting further along with the review. We have the four reviews we need for Christmas this season, so there isn't a lot of pressure to come up with one for the rest of the year. Speaking of which, we did publish a review of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, the 1966 TV Special, on which the recent feature film is partially based.

In other Trophy Unlocked news, we went to an advance screening of Bumblebee this past Saturday night. The sixth installment in the live-action Transformers series is really very good. Trevor, our resident Transformers expert, wrote and published his review. He is by far the best choice to do that.

This week in Powers Squared, the week started with thumbnails for the last four pages of Issue #9 from our artist, Rachel Wells. She sends us two versions and Paul and I picked the ones we liked. I don't think we picked one page over another but rather these panels from one version, the layout from one version but the panels from another.

We also received several cover ideas from her as well and chose one in particular for her to work on. The cover, as you can imagine, is very important. Trevor also finished lettering the first eight pages of Issue #9, so he's caught up for now.

On the subject of social media, Paul and I are still trying to find a following for our weekly vlog on YouTube, A Week in Powers Squared. Even though we have three followers, we can always use more, we're only getting a couple of views, which I wouldn't be surprised are us looking at it.

We're finding it hard to get much traction in social media. Not only do we have few views on YouTube, but we still have no followers on Tumblr, not that we don't publish something there every week. We're similarly unknown on Pinterest, which I just started pinning on, if that's the right term. I have one follower there but I think that's more because I know my follower from another place. If you want to be a hero, follow Powers Squared on one or all three. It won't cost anything and it would be greatly appreciated. Consider it a free gift for the holidays. Always better to give than receive.