ManicDDaily

Pearl Does Not Believe in Contests

My apologies for a somewhat desultory blog of late!

I have been working on entering a novel contest. It is one of those sort-of-hopeless endeavors that one tells one’s self is nonetheless worth doing.

In this case, it’s the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest (called ABNA Contest.)  I have been busy (among other things) revising an old novel that was written during another sort of contest–Nanowrimo, or National Novel Writing Month.   This was not the novel I wrote this past November (which needs more than revision), but an older one, which I have been working on sporadically for some time.

The odd thing here is that over the last year or so I spent a great deal of time cutting the novel to streamline it.  I had gotten it down from 52,000 words to less than 42,000.

Then I realized that ABNA contest rules require a novel of over 50,000 words.

When you cut things, you really can’t just add them back in.  It’s a bit like hair.  You can grow new, but you can’t somehow just paste the old back on.  Even in the age of computers.  It doesn’t somehow work that way.  You made the cuts because you thought the stuff should be cut.

So now… so now….I had to figure out what was missing.

Yes, I could just have kept the novel short and not entered the contest, but things were, in fact, missing from the novel.

At any rate, I have more or less finished it now, at least gotten the book to the necessary word count.

I’m not sure I can yet call it polished, but the entry got in on time.

Silly!  (Probably.)    Unlikely to be a commercially successful endeavor.  (Who knows?)  But doing this type of thing offers a deadline, a standard,  a goal.  It gets one moving, forces one to push through obstacles, burn the midnight oil.  Right now, for example, it is past 1:30 AM on a work night.

What?!!!!

(P.S. – if you are interested in writing, check out “Going on Somewhere” by Karin Gustafson, Diana Barco and Jason Martin on Amazon!)