Friday, January 23, 2009

Sending it out for proofing

After I finish this short post, I am going to ship my novel off to a good friend who copy edits so that she can proof the manuscript. Whenever I reread large material I have sent out, I almost always spot errors or which I had worded something differently. I don't self-edit very well.

The novel isn't quite where I wanted it to be at this point but my friend, who has a small child, only had time to read it over the weekend. So I will just have to take my chances. She is tremendous at proofing, however.

I haven't worked much on my pitch letter for the Amazon contest and I will need to finalize that in the next 10 days. It is a combination of query letter and book summary in under 300 words. They are critical words, of course, because moving to stage two of the contest is based solely on the pitch letter. None of the judges read any of the novel in the first stage, and the 3,000- to 5,000-word excerpt isn't posted on Amazon until the second or third stage, which doesn't come until in March. At the beginning, everything rides on the pitch. But then, isn't that always the case?

Thanks for reading and don't give up?

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