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The window for submitting to the Amazon Breakthrough novel contest has closed.  Did you enter?  Did you even know about it?

With a $50,000 first prize, it does cause quite a stir.

When I first found out about it months ago, I brushed it off because my current WIP, Fire in the Woods was complete, but hovering at a pitiful 42,000 words and didn’t make the minimum word count.  Then a few weeks ago people started talking about it again as the submission window opened, and guess what?  I was now ABOVE THE REQUIRED WORD COUNT.

So, did I enter?  You bet your left butt cheek I did!

Do I have high hopes?  Well, 1 in 10,000 is really not all that bad in odds, if you consider that 50% of the entries will probably be junk.  I’m a realist though…

Round one is based on your pitch.  Pitching is not my strong point.  I like my pitch, but I have no idea if it is good enough to be selected as a top choice.  When I looked at the pitches of past winners, I had to scratch my head.  If I saw some of those, I would have passed them over… so who knows what they are REALLY looking for (or were all the others really that bad?) Ha!

So, I have no idea how I will do… but what this did force me to do is speed up my editing process, and completely re-write my beginning.  My manuscript is a lot sharper now than it was a few weeks ago, so if anything, that’s a plus for me.

Do I have a chance of winning?  Well, I kind of look at it like this… I looked at past winners, and I felt the same way as I do about the Oscars.  Movies that win an Oscar are the ones that I would rather get a root canal than have to sit through.  To me, Oscar=boring.  That’s the way I feel about a lot of the past Breakthrough Novel winners as well.  I am sure they were well written, but not “my cup of tea”.

So, no…. Fire in the Woods is not the “Artsy” type that usually wins this type of thing.  But I entered.  At least I tried — and I did a lot of polishing to get it there.

Who knows?  This year might be the year of the manic chase/explosion novel!

Good luck to everyone who entered!

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