Attention #PitchSlam Recruits - It's Nearly Time...

Establishing secure connection. H.E.L.M. communications online. Security protocols engaged. Initiating transmission. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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Greetings potential recruits. There are only days left before we launch the H.E.L.M. Initiative. For those needing a refresher, here are the dates and times for entry into each phase of the program:

10/4/2014 — RECRUITMENT: From 12:00 am until 11:59 pm Eastern Time all recruits will send in a 35 word pitch for their completed and POLISHED manuscript. One manuscript per entrant. All genres are welcomed in age categories Middle Grade and up.

10/6/2014 — BASIC TRAINING: From 12:00 am until 11:59 pm eastern, send in the first 250 words of the SAME completed and polished manuscript. In order to participate in Basic Training you have to have entered Recruitment.

10/9/2014 — COMBAT DRILLS: From 12:00 am until 11:59 pm eastern, send in the revised 35 word pitch AND first 250 words from the SAME completed and polished manuscript from the previous rounds. You will need to have entered both previous rounds to take part in this round. Captains will make selections from entries received during Combat Drills.

10/13/2014 — Suit Up!: The Squad Captains will post their chosen recruits on their blogs for the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, who will have two days to make their requests. Agent requests will be moderated and will NOT be visible until after 5:00 pm easter time 10/14/2014.

TO SUBMIT DURING ALL ROUNDS, EMAIL ENTRIES TO:

PitchSlamContest (at) gmail (dot) com

Please type Pitch Slam: TITLE  into the subject line for each round.

***Any entries received before or after the submission times will be deleted unread.***

Official H.E.L.M. regulations dictate in relation to the first 250 words of the manuscript: do not stop in the middle of a sentence. Continue to 255 words if necessary. There is no extension for pitches.

Entries must be single spaced with one line between paragraphs and NO indentations. To avoid format complications, we recommend entrants do NOT copy and paste directly from the document into the email message. Instead, paste it into a new document, clear all of the formatting, then apply the mentioned requirements.

Example:

Name: Real name (Writing as such-and-such if you are utilizing a secret identity)

Genre: This includes both age category and genre. Fiction is not a genre. YA/MG etc on its own is not a genre. Please pick ONE genre and possibly a sub-genre. Adult Paranormal Romance is a proper genre. YA Sci-Fi Horror is a proper genre. MG Magical Realism Paranormal Romance Horror is not a genre. An easy way to do this is ask yourself, if my book was in a store, what would the sign on the shelf say?

Title: Your story

Word Count: xx,000. Round to the nearest thousandth.

Hero: The hero or heroine your protagonist best relates to and why.

Pitch and/or 250: During Recruitment it will be pitch only. During Basic Training it will be the first 250 only. During Combat Drill it will be both together with pitch followed by 250.

Failure to comply with H.E.L.M. regulations will result in–

Signal disruption detected.

Switching to secure server connection.

Connection failed.

Security countermeasures engaged.

Signal holding.

Signal.

Sig.

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H.E.L.M. signal successfully intercepted Sir, per your request.

Transmission holding strong. 

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Countermeasures. Puh, I’ll counter your countermeasures…

Thank you, Jarvis.

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A pleasure, Sir.

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All right, now that I’ve saved you from the hum-drummery, let’s skip the paperwork and get down to the good stuff because a: I’m bored to tears on your behalf, and b: The More You Know.

So you got the gist of it, when to enter, where to send it, what to send, good. While I love throwing monkey wrenches into Fury’s espionage clockworks, I figured it would be more fun–and hilariously inappropriate–if I manage to corrupt, er, convince his rookies to do it for me. Instead of going in and plucking the information from the S.H.I.E.L.D. mainframe, I invite you to join me in cyber anarchy by posting tidbits of your classified entries for all to see. On Twitter! Because, why the hell not.

That being said, there is a method to my madness, and my type of anarchy does have some order. Here it is:

• Monday 10/6 – #Superpower: Does your hero or heroine have a super ability? Like an mechanized suit of asskicking-awesome. If so, what. If not, if they could choose an ability, what would it be?
• Tuesday 10/7 – #Weakness: Kinda like the superpower thing, but the opposite. And there is no “if not,” everyone has a weakness. It could be kryptonite, it could be Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

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Speaking from experience, Sir?

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Shut up…

• Wednesday 10/8 – #PlayingFavorites: Who’s your main character’s favorite hero? *cough*IronMan*cough*. Or who’s their favorite villain. And why. You can throw your personal favorites in as well.
• Thursday 10/9 – #WeaponOfChoice: How does our main character bring the pain? Swords, wands, light sabers, switchblades, their bare hands, their rapier wit, lengthy monologues that bore their enemies to death, whatever they use to do their heroing. You can post for the villains too.
• Friday 10/10 – #WhichIsCooler: War Machine or Iron Patriot. Because I told him so.
• The weekend will be some kind of crazy free-for-all. What? I did say anarchy.

That should be plenty to keep us all duly entertained, and Fury on his toes trying to bottleneck the flow of information. If I come up with anything else we can do to be a pain in Nick’s neck, I’ll pass it along.

Take it away, Jarvis.

||

Very good, Sir. Releasing H.E.L.M. communications transmission in 3…

2…

1…

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Transmission terminated.

Pitch Slam Submission Details!

T-minus four days and counting until Auditions open for Pitch Slam. Who else is excited! I seriously cannot wait to get this party started, but we need to share a few more details beforehand so everything can run as smoothly as possible.

This contest is for COMPLETED and POLISHED manuscripts, not novellas, not poetry, not screenplays, not short story collections, not collections of any of the aforementioned nots. Pitch Slam is open to all Adult, New Adult, Young Adult, and Middle Grade stories of all genres.

You’ll need a 35 word pitch and the first 250 words of your manuscript to enter. The 35 word pitch is a hard number, meaning 35 is the number of the words thou shalt pitch. Any previous number is acceptable. 36 is right out. Pleeeeease don’t make us give you the X over something like that.

For the first 250, don’t stop in the middle of a sentence, but here’s the thing about that. If you have 247, 248, 249 words and the sentence stops, end it there. Don’t go to 250 and then up to 260 or something cause the first word was the 250th.

A couple of reminders about the rounds:

Auditions open 4/20 at 12:00 am EST and will stay open for a full 24 hours. During this time you submit your 35 word pitch ONLY. Feedback* will be given.

Call Backs open 4/23 at 12:00 am EST and will stay open for 24 hours as well. During this time you submit your first 250 words ONLY. Feedback* will be give.

VEGAS! opens 4/26 at 12:00 am EST and, yup, will stay open for 24 hours. During this time, submit your revised pitch and first 250 TOGETHER. This is the pool managers will pull from.

Managers will make their picks and those will go up 4/29 for the Execs to make requests. For a more in depth look at the rounds, go here.

Okay guys, pay attention to this part. Just as agents have submission guidelines, so do we at R&R Management. Again, please don’t give us a silly reason to discount your entries, cause we wanna read all of the awesomeness!

The format for each round is the same. Every time you submit, the entry needs to be single spaced with one line between paragraphs and NO indentations. This goes for pitches and first 250.

I understand sometimes email clients screw stuff up, but a way to avoid this is DON’T copy and paste directly from your document into the email message. Instead, paste it into a new document and clear all of the formatting, then apply the contest requirements. It’ll seriously take two minutes, if that long, and save everyone–yourself included–a lot of headache in the long run.

This is what your entry should look like:

Name: Real name (Writing as such-and-such if you’re using a pen name)

Genre: This includes both age category and genre. Fiction is not a genre. YA/MG etc on its own is not a genre. Please pick ONE genre and possibly a sub-genre. Adult Paranormal Romance is a proper genre. YA Sci-Fi Horror is a proper genre. MG Magical Realism Paranormal Romance Horror is not a genre. An easy way to do this is ask yourself, if my book was in a store, what would the sign on the shelf say?

Title: Your story

Word Count: xx,000. Round to the nearest thousandth.

Song: This isn’t gonna influence anything. It’s more for fun, so don’t stress about it. Tell us what song best exemplifies your story!

Pitch and/or 250: For the first round it’ll be pitch only, second round first 250 only, third round both together with pitch followed by 250.

Please type Pitch Slam: TITLE into the subject line for each round.

And that’s it! Simple right? Oh, you probably need the email address you’ll be submitting to, that’s kinda important. ALL entries are to be sent, during the appropriate submission window, to pitchslamcontest (at) gmail (dot) com. For anyone who may have skipped everything else to get to the email address, please read the entire post for info on how to avoid the boot.

NOW that’s it. Any questions, concerns, hit us up in the comments. I hope you guys are pumped, cause I’m pumped! And I can’t wait to hang out on the #PitchSlam hashtag with you all during the week. We have lots of fun events planned for Twitter, check out the rounds postfor details on those shenanigans. Now, I have just one more question to ask…

Dooooooom is reeeeaaadyyyyyyy!

***Feedback provided will be general but still helpful. In other words, no line-edits.

READ THIS! – Anything sent before or after the entry windows of the second and third rounds will be discarded. Any entrant who fails to supply their work for said subsequent rounds will be disqualified from the contest as a whole, and no submissions will be accepted for ANY round unless the entrant participated in the previous ones. What this means is, in order to make it to VEGAS, an entrant needs to have participated in both the Audition and Call Backs rounds. No trying to squeeze an entry in at the last minute. Also, no switching up manuscripts in the middle of the game. You pick a story, that’s the one you carry through with.