{"id":260,"date":"2007-09-17T09:43:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-17T09:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theblankscreen.co.uk\/selfdistract\/2007\/09\/17\/september-is-the-hardest-month\/"},"modified":"2007-09-17T09:43:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-17T09:43:00","slug":"september-is-the-hardest-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2007\/09\/17\/september-is-the-hardest-month\/","title":{"rendered":"September is the hardest month"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m secretly doing another pitch-per-day for September.<\/p>\n<p>Well.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not so secret now.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>This aspect is working well.<\/p>\n<p>But September is proving to be much, much harder than anticipated. For instance, I&#8217;ve only the vaguest idea who I&#8217;ll approach today, no idea at all for tomorrow. And looking at the list so far I can see I&#8217;ve earned three leads out of 16 pitches and no rejections at all so far.<\/p>\n<p>Only, I haven&#8217;t entered any competitions whatsoever. Haven&#8217;t found any. When I did this for the first time back in March I had entered four by this stage. I&#8217;d also approached five agents. (I have a literary agent but not a script one.)<\/p>\n<p>Know any good competitions?<\/p>\n<p>But I truly recommend trying this month-long kind of thing. Just probably not in September.<\/p>\n<p>Yet when the clock&#8217;s ticking toward midnight and you haven&#8217;t pitched yet, you do get amazingly creative and find people to email that you might not have done in other situations. I&#8217;ve often heard that you should annoy people by pitching a lot, but I&#8217;m terribly British so there are many people I&#8217;ve assumed I&#8217;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&#8217;t be as squeaky-clean as I appeared, so there. I pitched an email to him last night.<\/p>\n<p>But what about today? I need &#8211; hang on, it&#8217;s the 17th; one, two, I need 14 more places\/contests\/people to hit. Any ideas?<\/p>\n<p>William<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m secretly doing another pitch-per-day for September. Well. It&#8217;s not so secret now. But I have been secretly doing another &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2007\/09\/17\/september-is-the-hardest-month\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-4c","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}