If you were a casual observer of Pitching the World – and you could well be: I had someone on here a couple of days ago who had searched for “what are exotic meals?” and up popped this shit – you might be forgiven for thinking that within these pages there would be valuable information to read about the process and business of writing. For a start, it’s fundamentally a blog about pitching magazines with ideas for features. It also has some arresting, yet helpful-sounding titles: “Rewrites” and “Deadlines” and “Money” among them. You might read a post or two and feel as if there’s the possibility of learning something. You would look at my Rewrites post and think: ah, good, he’s going to be charting his progress up until now with some easy-to-follow pie charts. He’ll be doing this next week, because he said he would. The more you looked however, the more disappointed you would become. He’s not going to do those pie charts (and this is you), because he either is incapable of doing them, or his progress so far has been so tragic that he can’t bring himself to let us all know what he’s really been up to these last three months. This man is a soak and a fraud. Let’s kill him.
But don’t kill me just yet. I have a pretty much inescapable deadline that will see this project wrapped up. At the end of January, Pitching the World will be no more. The British Journalism Review – which, because it’s quarterly, I assume is prestigious – have commissioned an article from me about my experiences of pitching every magazine in the Writers’ & Artists’ Shitbook and I’m going to fire off something to each one in there, even if it means staying awake throughout January.
So yes, you’ll have me around for another six weeks ago and then, like Keyser Soze, I’ll be gone. Just like that. Imagine that, my award-winning blog: Gone.
Except it probably won’t be gone. And it’s not really an it, it’s just a me spouting a lot of nonsense and I’ll refuse to stop spouting nonsense, I’ll simply come up with another skeleton upon which I can piss out my half-baked thoughts and pretend it’s all very special.
One last thing: does anyone have any football boots? Size 9? My trial with Colchester United is on Friday.
Pitching the World 