Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarterfinalist

I feel like the father on A Christmas Story: “I’ve won a major award!” If you’re the sort of folk who reads my blog, you are probably well acquainted with the ABNA contest. For 2009, Amazon accepted up to 10,000 entries of finished novels in February. They narrowed the entries down to 2,000  on the [...]

An Open Market: Back on the Chain Gang

So someone needs to start off the next round for the blog chain gang. So all of us on this blog chain gang have worked feverishly on what needs to be done before a novel gets published. Some of us are quite close to publication, including the next link in our chain, Jessica Verday whose [...]

QueryTracker.net Link Lottery Contest!

Over at the QueryTracker.net blog, we are delighted to announce the QueryTracker.net Link Lottery! Very easy to enter and a great prize!

First Page Contest: Off the Hook

Many big kudos to both Authoress on the Miss Snark’s First Victim blog, and to the amazing Secret Agent Holly Root at the Waxman Agency. This was a rocking contest in so many ways. Ms. Root invested a lot of time to give thoughtful feedback on each entry to the Are You Hooked? contest. All [...]

After a fashion…

Editing is weird. I’ve been doing a lot of it lately. I’ve heavily revised the language and descriptions through the first 17 chapters now (almost halfway through the book). You write something and, at the time, it seems pretty good. You go back later and it’s like looking at your prom photo. “Really? I thought [...]

I R Editing… a smidge, anyway.

So, I’ve been searching the internet for a good definition of women’s fiction. The category seems to be a bit vague, really, other than that it should appeal to women. So, with that nebulous information, I’ve decided to enter a contest in the category of “Women’s Fiction with Romantic Elements”. At the very least, someone [...]