Sam and Carly's Pitch Wars Wishlist!

Hello Pitch Wars Hopefuls!

Carly: We are so freaking happy to be mentoring for Pitch Wars 2020! Sam and I actually met when we entered Pitch Wars way back in… Sam, when did we enter Pitch Wars for the first time?

Sam: I don’t know the year but it was the dark ages before I had any writer friends and I spent 100% of my time with toddlers. Whatever the year, i made a bunch of friends (Thank God!) and we tied as runner up.

Carly: We were asked to mentor because another team had to drop out. Like, we’re still tying for second place, Sam!

Sam: Did you know that winning a silver medal takes five years off a person’s life? It’s because you come SO close and nothing will be good enough ever again, including your late eighties. I heard that on a podcast recently.

Luckily, there is no second place in Pitch Wars anymore. It’s all or nothing! Just kidding, it’s mostly about building a writing community. That’s what I got out of it.

Here’s McKayla Maroney winning 2nd! She was featured heavily in that podcast, The Happiness Lab. I totally recommend it, btw. The happiness insight might cancel out all the years lost from rejection.

This is us in real life, or maybe Amy Adams playing us. They consolidated our characters for the sake of simplifying the narrative.

Carly: Even though we “lost” in Pitch Wars (meaning we didn’t get chosen for the spotlight by a mentor) we both went on to sign publishing contracts for our Pitch Wars manuscripts. The best advice is cheesy, but it’s true…

Sam: Carly and I might not live our full lifespans anymore, but we didn’t give up, and we met each other. Cheers to friends, books, and Pitch Wars!

A Little About Us

Carly Bloom began her writing career as a family humor columnist and blogger, a pursuit she abandoned when her children grew old enough to literally die from embarrassment. To save their delicate lives, Carly turned to penning steamy, contemporary romance. The kind with bare chests on the covers. She and her husband raise their mortified brood of offspring on a cattle ranch in South Texas.

Carly’s debut novel, BIG BAD COWBOY, received a starred review and was named a Best Book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, which praised it for “overt and subtle takedowns of toxic masculinity.” The second book in the series, COWBOY COME HOME, released in March of 2020, and the third, MUST LOVE COWBOYS, releases in April of 2021. Booklist says Bloom is taking heroes into the twenty-first century. This is true, and the heroes are kicking and screaming while she does it.

carly-blooom — Carly, pictured in front of approximately ten head of cattle, her golden hair illuminated by the setting sun.

Sam Tschida writes rom-coms and mysteries. Her debut rom-com, SIRI WHO AM I?, is coming out with Quirk Books in January and a lot of people have said good things about it. Kirkus called it “a strong debut that’s fun and funny, perfect for lovers of modern romantic comedies and light mysteries.” PW said it’s cute (which Sam is taking as a compliment) and a couple fantabulous bookstagramers said it rocked their world. Goodreads . . . don’t ask. She started SMUT University, www.smutuniversity.com, in 2018 when she realized that there are hoards of genre writers in need of a fun, supportive space to build craft and tell dirty jokes. Sam looks remarkably put together in this photograph. Things aren’t always that way. Her gang of children (not an afterthought in real life) have something to do with that.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for a good story with an absolutely fantastic voice. It’s kind of like porn in that we’ll know it when we see it.

The genres we want in our inbox are:

Contemporary Romance
Paranormal Romance
Western Romance
Rom-Com
Chick Lit
Cozy Mysteries
Women’s Fiction

What Turns us On

Henry Golding (Sam just watched A Simple Favor!). But more broadly humor and quirk, and we’re totally here for steam and kink (although we’re not looking for specific heat levels). The more awkward your characters, the more charming we’ll find them. We love LGBTQ stories (send them!) and we want to amplify any and all #ownvoices.

What Can You Expect from Us?

We both have experience with editing manuscripts and teaching craft. And please believe us when we say we’d rather be working on your book than ours. (Remember when you were a kid and it was fun to clean your friend’s room? It’s like that.) We’ll help you polish your manuscript and get it ready for agents and editors. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Sam and Carly’s Pitch Wars Wishlist!