I’m secretly doing another pitch-per-day for September.

Well.

It’s not so secret now.

But I have been secretly doing another pitch-per-day wherein, I think you can work this out but still, I pitch to someone or some thing every day in the month. What you might not twig is that I do mean every day, weekends and all. What I might not be clear about is the word pitch: it does include sitting in front of someone talking up an idea, but it’s also an email approach to a producer, a script submitted, a lead followed, a competition entered and so on. The secondary purpose is to keep working at getting my material out; the primary purpose is to keep getting material so that I have something to pitch.

This aspect is working well.

But September is proving to be much, much harder than anticipated. For instance, I’ve only the vaguest idea who I’ll approach today, no idea at all for tomorrow. And looking at the list so far I can see I’ve earned three leads out of 16 pitches and no rejections at all so far.

Only, I haven’t entered any competitions whatsoever. Haven’t found any. When I did this for the first time back in March I had entered four by this stage. I’d also approached five agents. (I have a literary agent but not a script one.)

Know any good competitions?

But I truly recommend trying this month-long kind of thing. Just probably not in September.

Yet when the clock’s ticking toward midnight and you haven’t pitched yet, you do get amazingly creative and find people to email that you might not have done in other situations. I’ve often heard that you should annoy people by pitching a lot, but I’m terribly British so there are many people I’ve assumed I’ve burnt my bridges with. One fella I rate highly never replies but I passed him once in Television Centre when he was drunk and saying I couldn’t be as squeaky-clean as I appeared, so there. I pitched an email to him last night.

But what about today? I need – hang on, it’s the 17th; one, two, I need 14 more places/contests/people to hit. Any ideas?

William