ABNA

I was online on Sunday night for a couple of hours as the minutes ticked away toward midnight. And I found a large community of writers also online waiting, waiting, waiting until the open submission period started for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest (ABNA).

In thread after thread on ABNA's community forums, writers were asking questions, offering answers, helpful advice, worrying and just sweating bullets until the contest began. One thread called "I've entered" started soon after midnight. The first post was at about six minutes after the hour and quickly filled within minutes with authors who had already entered.

The contest runs for one week, or until there are 10,000 entries, which ever comes first. While I didn't want to tarry, I didn't want to drive myself crazy just to get my entry in quickly. So, I waited until yesterday afternoon to finish one final edit of a portion of the novel, which is now called,"A Murderous Dispatch," then a final rewrite of the pitch and book description. For me that made sense. I didn't stress too much.

In the contest, judges will look at the pitches, rate them and cut the entries down to 2,000. Then they will read the excerpts of those 2,000 to determine some 500 quarterfinalists. Those who make the quarterfinals won't be notified until about March 16. Until them, none of us will hear a thing.

The guidelines for the pitch, which was limited to 300 words, were vague and in threads throughout the day today there were many writers -- some entered, some not -- still discussing its requirements. But with the entire contest, my feeling has always been that I do the best I can and don't sweat the rest. Advancing in the contest could jumpstart a career but we aren't brain surgeons. We are writers. None of this is life or death.

So now I wait. But as I wait, it's backto querying agents and writing "The Death of Art." Reagrdless of the outcome of the contest, life goes on. And so does work.

Thanks for reading and keep writing.