The Pitch Wars 2020 Team PITA Mentor Wish List!

Welcome!

Welcome to Pitch Wars 2020!! This year, Remy Lai and I are mentoring Middle Grade.

What exactly is Pitch Wars? It’s a mentoring program for unagented writers. You can read more about it here.

We’ll get to our wish list in a moment, but first, a little about us, your potential mentors.

Who are we, and why are we here?

Rajani LaRocca writes middle grade and picture books. She practices medicine and lives in the Boston area with her family and impossibly cute dog. Her middle grade debut, MIDSUMMER’S MAYHEM, an Indian-American mashup of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and competitive baking, was published with Yellow Jacket/Little Bee Books in June 2019. Her next middle grade, RED, WHITE, AND WHOLE, a novel in verse set in 1983 about the daughter of Indian immigrants caught between the worlds of her family and her school, will publish with Quill Tree Books/Harper Collins in February 2021. Her third middle grade, MUCH ADO ABOUT BASEBALL, is coming in June 2021. Her debut picture book, SEVEN GOLDEN RINGS, will be published by Lee & Low Books in October 2020. She is represented by Brent Taylor of TriadaUS.

Remy Lai writes and draws stories for kids. She lives in Australia, where she can often be found exploring the woods with her two dogs. She is the creator of PIE IN THE SKY and the newly published FLY ON THE WALL, both of which are graphic novel/ prose hybrids. Her middle grade graphic novel debut PAWCASSO is forthcoming in May 2021. She is represented by Jim McCarthy of Dystel, Goderich, & Bourret.

We are both Pitch Wars 2017 mentees who benefited immensely from our mentors and the Pitch Wars community, and we are SO EXCITED to be paying it forward again as mentors this year! As mentees, we learned a ton, revised our butts off, laughed and cried and commiserated and celebrated together even though we’re literally on opposite sides of the world. Our mentee will get our best advice, our stalwart support, emails, and twitter posts and gifs for good measure. We will help you and root for you during the revision process, through the agent round, and beyond. We hope to forge a lifelong relationship with our mentee, just like the ones that our wonderful mentors share with us.

What’s it like to work with us?

We are #TeamPITA—the concept, not the bread.

We will be Pains In The A** in the best possible way. We will go through a thorough developmental edit with you, encompassing plot, character, and theme. We will give you our best, maybe even painful, suggestions for edits, but who will never tell you what to do. Because your book is your book!

We will listen patiently to your complaints during the revision process, but who will tell you that we know you can do it, so get to it. We will guide you and hold your hand during the agent showcase, querying, and beyond.

But don’t just take our word for it. Listen to what our previous Pitch Wars mentees have to say.

Here’s Kathryn Powers, our 2018 mentee:

“I STILL can’t believe that Rajani and Remy picked me to be their Pitch Wars 2018 mentee. They helped me take my manuscript from a complete mess to a polished novel I was proud of, always pushing me to dig deeper and find the heart of my story. We had a lot of fun together, from brainstorming via group calls to sending each other late-night goofy gifs. But it wasn’t all fun and games, so be warned. Rajani and Remy will make you work HARD—probably harder than you have on any project in your life. But if you keep an open mind and your nose to the grindstone, you’ll be amazed what you can accomplish with Team PITA at your side. I’m forever grateful to call Rajani and Remy my mentors and friends.”

And here’s Maria Linn, our 2019 mentee:

“Team PITA is a dream mentor team! Rajani and Remy are both amazing writers and gifted editors. They’re super generous with their time and feedback and knowledgeable about the publishing industry. Never prescriptive, their editorial style focused on asking me tough questions about my story and then helping me think through various possible solutions when I got stuck. With their support and guidance, I ended up pretty much rewriting my whole manuscript, leaving me with a much better book at the end. They were wonderful advisors and cheerleaders during the showcase and were there to help me navigate the querying process every step of the way. If you have a MG manuscript, I highly recommend subbing it to Remy and Rajani!”

So…what are we looking for?

First, we are VERY interested in working with creators from groups who are traditionally underrepresented in publishing. We’d love to see more diversity in the stories kids get to read.

In general, we are looking for middle grade stories with humor AND heart. We find that the best middle grade has both. Make us laugh and cry, like STAND UP, YUMI CHUNG! by Jessica Kim and SOMETHING TO SAY by Lisa Ramée. Give us smart kids, like SAL AND GABI BREAK THE UNIVERSE by Carlos Hernandez and THE WESTING GAME by Ellen Raskin. Give us emotionally rich stories, like EFRÉN DIVDED by Ernesto Cisneros and A WISH IN THE DARK by Christina Soontornvat.

There is more to our wish list! To see more of what we want, check out Remy’s blog here.

Still have questions? I’ll be part of the MG #AskMentor Twitter Chat on Thursday, September 17 at 8 PM ET and the MG Mentor video chat on Saturday, September 19 at 2 PM ET. Feel free to tune in and ask away!