Well, I am now one in a crowd of a thousand who made it to the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.  Actually, technically, I’m one of two thousand — there’s me and 999 other hopefuls in the Young Adult section and then another thousand in General Fiction.  This first round was based on nothing more than a 300-word pitch of our novel, so it’s great news in the sense that I now feel like I have a functional query letter (which has been absolutely the hardest thing to write, harder even than the 67,000 word novel!)   But now the hard stuff begins — they actually start to read our novels!  The next round is based on the first 5,000 words of the novel, and the pool of a thousand gets narrowed to 250.  And so the waiting begins… March 23rd can’t come soon enough!