Pitch Wars Diary Day 2: Tweet Tweet

The Annapurna Circuit. Gorgeous, enlivening, intimidating.

Right now, I am en route to Michigan to meet up with my sherpa in order to proceed down the Pitch Wars Circuit and stick our pickaxes in the ice. We envision ourselves doing a whole lot of this:

Kicking ass, taking names.

But we'll probably wind up doing more of this:

OMG THAT TWEET SOUNDS A TINY TINY BIT LIKE MY QUERY

After acquiring the snacks, the gear, and the motivation, the next step on the journey is research. In order to complete your trek up Mount Pitchwars, or any other mountain, you need to be aware of your surroundings. You need to be acclimatized to the conditions that forge a successful writer-champion. Or, to put it in another way, you need to be acclimatized to Twitter.

I used to tweet a lot (say, four years ago or so). They were pretty stupid and unproductive, as most teenaged tweets manage to be. I offered the same thoughts about hockey that everybody else had, expected a reply from celebrities that never came, and generally became consumed by everything. After I moved to Taiwan, my tweeting died down almost completely. You can see monthlong gaps between my tweets, followed by short bursts, whenever I saw a movie and just had to share all of my hot takes. It wasn't that I fell out of love with Twitter. I just felt as if I ran out of things to say. I was teaching every day, and really, constant streams of "Well, I taught English today" aren't particularly interesting to the average user. I was barking nonsense into the void. There wasn't really much if any community for me to capitalize on.

Something like this.

And then Pitch Wars rolled around, and absolutely everything changed. I started tweeting more because it felt like the thing everyone was doing. I finally had a manuscript that I felt confident enough in to try and make the leap from amateur to professional. So I decided to post a few tweets here and there, poking my toes back into the cool lake of Twitter. And then I ripped off all of my clothes and did a cannonball. I basically spend every waking second on Tweetdeck, with one eye on the #PitchWars hashtag, another on my notifications, bouncing around every feed to try and find every drop of new information. Through it all, I'm tweeting way more than I did even during my tweeting heyday. I need to draw inspiration from Aragog; if I had oodles of eyes and oodles of legs, I'd be the Twitter champion.

Everyone says every day how awesome the Pitch Wars community is, but I feel the need to reiterate it, if only for my own records. The Pitch Wars community is absolutely amazing because there's not a bad seed in the bunch. Sports Twitter is a riotous place, but very very flammable. If you get involved in a dispute, you're going to be ensnared for hours defending yourself and everything you stand for, because there's always a chance that you'll get pile-driven. It made me more hesitant to tweet; you never know when something you say will be taken the wrong way. Pitch Wars, however, is such a beacon of positivity. I don't really see it as a competition anymore. I see it as a group of people who all want the same thing, and believe that we all can get it without stepping on each other. I've found myself so passionate about books that I've never read, simply because they share the Pitch Wars hashtag.

We're a big wacky family.

That's the beauty of Twitter. It brings a bunch of people together and lets us make each other better. And that's why I've fallen full force into it: once again, Twitter has become a place where I feel at home. I finally have something to say again, and the fact that there are people who seem eager to hear it makes it all the much better.