T’is the last day of September, in a mo it’s going to be t’is the last hour of September, and I’ve just emailed my last pitch of September.

Thanks for your help. After my struggle finding things to pitch and people to pitch to earlier, the end of the month went smoothly thanks to your suggestions.

Last time I did this pitch-a-day I told you at the end how it had gone but that’s harder now: September was a quieter month for fast reactions. So the majority of the pitches still have “waiting” listed next to them, but a fair few have “lead” and two have “rejection”. They were depressing rejections, but there you go.

The trick now is to have enough of these things out there and pending through October – because there were due to be three Very Big Things in October, three things that I’ve worked for and am Pinning All Hopes On(TM). I don’t mean my hopes are spread equally among the three, I mean each one has the entirety of my hopes and hope-capability exclusively focused on it. We’re writers, we can cope with contradictions.

But of course what you do, what you have to do when you’ve pinned hopes anywhere is to find out when the result will come and make absolutely damn certain that by then you have found something else. Pitching is touch, but when all your pitches fail simultaneously and you have nothing out there at all, it’s even harder to pick yourself up and pitch. It’s like trying to write when you’re unemployed, the pressure for this script to be the one that turns your life around is unbearable. There’s a thirtysomething episode about exactly this, Michael Writes a Story (by Joseph Doughtery, 1989) and while, like all episodes of that show, it’s really about so many different things, I find it unbearable. But since I strive to write unbearable things, I’m conflicted. More4 occasionally shows thirtysomething so you may catch it if you haven’t already. And Dougherty writes about it in “thirtysomething Stories” (which always sounds to me like a very tall building), the published collection of scripts. (It was published in 1991, I just looked and Amazon has five copies in its marketplace.)

So will my outstanding September pitches suffice or do you think I need to find some things that are even more outstandng?

If it helps, the three things I was pinning all my hopes on in October did include a sneaky one that decided to go belly up a week early just to throw me. And it was crushing, but hey, I’ve got these two things in October that I’m pinning all my hopes on.

Who’d be a writer, eh? Why do we do this?

Thanks again for your help,
William