Let the Fingernail Knawing Begin

The planets are converging or whatever it is that planets do! Entrants in the Amazon/Penguin novel contest are waiting to hear from Amazon today as to whether they qualified! Then the narrowing and winnowing begins. From what I gleaned from the chat group posts, some submissions will be very good and some very bad. The very bad will be very bad because some entrants submitted first drafts or raced to finish a draft or keyed a hand-written submission into the computer, or don't understand that memoir is not fiction--the usual kind of mistakes that call for the clue gun! Miss Snark where are you when we need you?

The contest accepted all kinds of genres except porn, and again, the message boards have provided some amusement. No kids, the F word does not constitue porn, nor does a sex scene or two, depending of course on the scene and the level of gratuity.

A fantastic amount of fantasy and a mega-blast of sci-fi were submitted, or maybe those folks are just more loquatious than the rest of us. What can one really tell from a message board? Some crime fiction found its way into the contest, of course. What I didn't see too much was plain old mainstream fiction or literary fiction. Maybe no one is writing it. Few mentions of chic lit either, but maybe those writers aren't the posting kind. My analytical mind never stops.

The Gather contest deadline was yesterday. Gather/Border/CourtTV contest was strictly Crime Fiction. Post the first chapter. Now I have to do a major suck up and ask friends to join Gather and vote for me. Same with Amazon should I qualify enough to get into the last 500 or 1000 or whatever BIGNUM it is. Hope I have some favors to call in. It is always so humiliating to ask for things like good reviews and 'vote for me.' I remember my shock in 5th grade to find out a girl had actually voted for herself in the class officer election.

Don't worry. I won't ask my blog readers to vote for me. Some things are sacred. BTW, Sarah Weinman talked about Blogging at the writing conference this weekend. She writes THE crime fiction blog with plenty of good links. Just Google Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. Cripes, hope I spelled it write. Suck It Up doesn't tax anyone's spelling ability.

More anon,

Grapeshot