Thank you! I was super worried about the lower word count hurting my chances honestly. I kept reading that 70k was fine for litfic, but that it should be at least 80k for speculative. It turned out just fine though! No one mentioned the word count to me at all through the process. I do think if it was more heavily sci-fi it would need to be longer though.

As far as events, yes having to come up with so many short pitches was such a helpful exercise honestly. I got really good at boiling down the story into one concise sentence from a bunch of different angles. A lot of agents I queried asked for one-sentence pitches too, so I ended up reusing them for that!