Pitching Party! (Patreon)

I have been pitching my ass off! Mostly writing. I pitched an essay about bi-phobia to The Establishment and they asked to see the essay (now rewritten and sent. Rewire picked up an essay about being a GTA and I'm sending them a finished draft today. I pitched an essay about adult friendships to Ravishly but haven't heard back from them. 

A friend gave me an e-introduction to the TV editor at Paste and I pitched him, like, 5 ideas and a list of tv shows I'd like to do recaps of. He shot down a couple ideas and said he didn't need more people to do recaps. Some of them he said he'd be interested in when they're more timely. And said he might be interested in a more fleshed out essay on American Horror Story, since it's premiering soon. It took most of the day and watching a lot of trailer recaps but I came up with this!

"I want to write an essay about how American Horror Story is exactly the show we need to work out our Donald Trump anxieties. AHS’ practice of throwing way too many things into a show, a season, an episode, mirrors our current news cycle. While an episode of American Horror Story can seem like three episodes, a single week of Trump-era news can feel like a month’s worth of headlines. And, like Trump policy, AHS often features the fears of queer people, poor people, black people, disabled people, and women in an overwhelming cavalcade of nightmares. 

Ryan Murphy has promised that this season will be about the election (as well as cults, clowns, bees, and, I assume, a host of other bizarrely disparate things) and I’m convinced that he’s the best person to take on the job. Especially because of Ryan Murphy’s penchant for giving his seasons a happy ending. Most characters don’t survive to the end of a season of AHS, but those who do always live happily ever after, which is probably the most optimistic thing a piece of art could say about the Trump era right now. Maybe a glimpse of that happily ever after will give his viewers the hope they need to continue the fight ahead."

It's taken me a long time to get ok with pitching but I think I was overthinking the process before. After I've written an essay, it's hard to walk back to the one paragraph version of that idea. So pitching an idea before I've written the whole essay is actually easier, not to mention less time consuming.

Like the rest of my jobs, I don't think this will become a full time living, but it seems like it could be an income stream that really works for me.