A new friend . . . and ABNA

I have a new friend. She is an author, I think on the West Coast, and we have communicated several times in the last day and a half. I won't mention her name here because I haven't asked her about it yet. But she has been quite helpful with my pitch for ABNA.

Being insecure about my pitch, I sent it to her and she offered a couple of very useful suggestions which I used. They greatly improved my pitch and made it shsorter at the same time. it was great.

Today there has been a lot of discussion on the merits of taking part in ABNA. When I last looked more than an hour ago, there were nearly 120 comments today on Nathan Bransford's blog on ABNA. Nathan opened up the discussion but said he wouldn't comment directly in the contest.

Any comments he'd have would be suspect because he, as an agent, has a vested interest in contests such as ABNAs failing. The winner gets a publishing contract without input from an agent, and some of the quarter- semi- and top-10 finalists could decide to self-publish using CreateSpace (an ABNA sponsor) or some other platform, again cutting out agents.

But what amazes me -- and my new friend, by the way -- is all the non-sensical arguments some writers used to justify their reasons for not entering. Who cares? Enter or not. You don't need to justify.

Plus there is little down side to entering. The requirements for entering are things you have to do to query an agent. You have slightly better odds with ABNA but not much. It's all still a subjective crap shoot.

Anyway, as I told my new author friend, I am in the contest and happy with my decision. I may or may not get much out of it but regardless of the result I don't lose anything. I'm still an aspiring author without an agent or a publishing contract. The contest just give me another path to success.

Finally, I did some outlining and writing for "The Death of Art." I think it will be my best work to date. And if I work hard and write a lot, I could have the first draft finished by my birthday. That's ambigious but it's doable. I at least want to have more than half of it completed by the time I have my appointment with the acquisition editor next month. That way I can show her I have a completed novel and considerable progress on a sequel. I hope that will give me a leg up.

Thanks for reading and don't ever give up on writing.