I’m officially an Author Mentor Match Round 9 Mentee!!!!!
I still can’t believe it, I am truly, genuinely shocked to my core. I didn’t post much before AMM submissions because after I announced on Instagram that I was going to be submitting to AMM, I immediately got cold feet.
Let me explain.
2021 kind of sucked for me in the writing department.
I spent the better half of the year banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what was MISSING, what I could do to make my story better. I started second-guessing whether or not I could write this book and if I should just put it aside for a while
So, with the year coming to an end, I was feeling pretty down and lost and frustrated until I heard the advice from someone that I admire. They said that I shouldn’t get caught up in all the things I didn’t accomplish in 2021, and instead, I should focus on finishing something before the year ended.
That advice really inspired me to go hard on my book for the end of the year, so I ended up writing more in the last three months of 2021 than I had all year. I kept at it, hoping to get through one last revision before the year ended so I could have something to be proud of, and….that didn’t happen.
But I got close!
So, being the deadline-oriented person that I am, I decided I would have a draft finished for AMM No. Matter. What. I kept telling myself, it didn’t have to be perfect, I didn’t have to make ALL the changes I set out to make, it just needed to be readable and it needed to showcase my writing voice so the mentors could get the essence of who I am a writer.
I ended up editing up until the last minute literally and sent in my submission an hour before the window closed. And I was STILL tweaking my manuscript up until the very moment I got my first request.
And this is where I’d like to explain a little bit about the difference between Pitch Wars and Author Mentor Match.
They are both mentorship programs aimed towards unagented authors and the mentors are a mix of seasoned and newly published authors. With both programs, I had to send a partial manuscript, a synopsis, and a query letter to 3-4 authors of my choice. However, I would say Author Mentor Match was 1000% more stressful because you are COMPLETELY IN THE DARK.
When I submitted to Pitch Wars in 2020, I knew exactly who had requested me because they were communicating with me directly. With Author Mentor Match, the AMM team is doing all of the communicating so they would send me vague messages like “Mentors are interested in your book, reply with your full manuscript attached.”
They wouldn’t say who was interested or how many. Still to this day I don’t know how many mentors read my full manuscript. And even though I promised myself I wouldn’t, I kept my eyes glued on #AMMteasers hoping to catch any hint from the mentors that they had read my full or were leaning any type of way (Of course, it wasn’t helpful).
After that initial full manuscript request from the AMM team, they reached out again to vaguely say that one of the mentors had enjoyed my book and had some questions for me.
There were three questions, the first two were:
- What do you believe is the heart of this story?
- What about this book would you be unwilling to change?
The third question was more of an edit suggestion. The mentor explained that they had some ideas for a revision but it was a MAJOR revision. I can’t explain the details right now, because, well I decided to go forward with them. (And yes, the mentor who sent the questions ended up being my current mentor, Meredith Tate!) But it was a scary decision. I was thrilled and frightened by the idea of saying yes to this revision. I was thrilled because the revision fixed the number one thing I’d been struggling with for months: the stakes.
However, I was afraid because this meant I would have to change nearly everything. I’m talking entirely new outline level changes. It was daunting. It still is. But, I had a good feeling about it. I knew in my gut it would bring my story to the next level, just like the mentor believed it would.
I sent my answers off and then began the worst waiting period of my entire life. It was probably only 10 days but it felt like an eternity. Then on vacation in Florida with my former college roommates, in the middle of lunch I get an email notification:
Dear Danielle,
We are pleased to let you know that you have been chosen as a mentee. You’ll be working with Meredith Tate. They’ll be in touch shortly if they haven’t been already.
Welcome to the AMM family!
I nearly fell out of my chair at that moment.
Everything kind of felt like a blur after that. The full list of mentees went live on the site, my Twitter notifications started blowing up, and I was sent the “Welcome to AMM R9” email that I had seen Meredith post a teaser of on Twitter just days before.
Even though I submitted to three other mentors, Meredith was my top pick from the start. She had experience mentoring other rounds of AMM along with Pitch Wars, her mentoring style was exactly what I felt like I needed but even more so, I felt like we would click. A lot of her favorite books and tropes were my favorite as well and she was someone I could picture being friends with outside of AMM. I feel so lucky that I now have a mentor who gets my characters and appreciates their quirks, who understands what I’m trying to say, and has so many wonderful ideas to enhance the plot. And most importantly, she loves my story as much as I do.
So basically, I wanted to write all of this out to tell you to go for it. Take the leap. Do the thing, whatever that thing maybe. I would have regretted it for the rest of eternity if I hadn’t submitted this year. I also wanted to write this to remind myself on those days when I’m not feeling as confident in my writing and in myself to (in the wise words of our queen Rhianna herself) “pretend” and take those risks anyway.
In the days leading up to AMM submissions, I considered not submitting at all because my manuscript was still really messy and unworthy in my eyes. But really, my manuscript wasn’t messy or unworthy at all, it was completely fine, it was me who felt that way about myself. What a shame that would have been if I had listened to that voice.
It’s hard to explain how happy I feel being a mentee after 2 years of working on this manuscript, getting rejected by Pitch Wars, and being stuck in the seemingly endless drafting-revising-deleting hamster wheel.
There’s still a long way to go in my writing journey.
Because AMM doesn’t have an agent showcase like Pitch Wars, there’s no guarantee that I’ll get a book deal or even an agent from this. But I have hope, a newfound confidence in my abilities, and a reignited determination to do whatever it takes to achieve my dreams, and isn’t that all I need?
I loved reading this! I can really hear your voice throughout the article💕 I’m so proud of your new path! You’re moving in a good direction towards your dreams! Keep it going!