Amy’s Thoughts

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!

You know, I truly thought that entering the Amazon contest would mark the end of my obsession, at least for a while.  I’ve been in edit mode for entirely too many months, and it’s frankly time to be done with this novel and to move on to its sequel.  Unfortunately, I didn’t read the fine print closely enough.

I want to know who thought it would be a good idea to make the submission window for the contest last TWO WEEKS and then allow those who have already MADE their submissions to edit, change, and otherwise revise/perfect those same submissions right up until the moment the submission period is closed.  Don’t they understand that this means I get to obsess over EVERY SINGLE WORD of my submission for a full TWO WEEKS?  Just accept my submission and be done with it!  Don’t put me through this crazed insanity of “maybe I should have said this instead” or “maybe I should re-read the entire 218 page novel again, just to make sure there aren’t any typos or glitches or obvious flaws in the plot” or even better “maybe I should re-write the first 70 pages of the novel because it’s just not as exciting as the last 150… after all, who cares about character development?”

ARGH!  I truly believe this contest was designed to send hopeful would-be authors into early retirement.  It’s clearly a ploy to weed out the crazies who would otherwise be bombarding overworked literary agents with the “greatest thing they ever wrote”.   Now these agents have a few months of freedom while the crazies bombard the contest instead.  Of course, even better for the agents is when the process of submit, obsess, edit, obsess, edit, obsess, wait, obsess, wait, wait, wait, obsess, wait, obsess, obsess, obsess, wait … drives those same hopeful crazies into a downward spiral of drunken foolishness, and their literary (pseudo-) genius is lost forever.  One less query letter to read, one less manuscript to file in the recycling bin.

Save me from my (blue arrow like) swirling thoughts of craziness!