As one door closes another opens, isn’t that how it’s meant to go?

Heard yesterday I didn’t make the Quarter Finals/Third Round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Judging by the two Vine reviewer reports, one in particular just didn’t ‘get’ my book and was not a fan of science fiction. Anyway, at least the pitch was judged by Amazon editors who thought it was good enough and it’s always been the pitches I think I’m bad at so it’s ironic that the book fell on the opening extract.

I won’t go into those reviews further, but from what’s said on the ABNA forum, I think it would have gone through with a more targeted readership. I didn’t expect to win, but it would have been nice to have had the extract and blurb etc posted on Amazon for people to download for free and hopefully give feedback on.  That would have been a valuable experience in its own right, so it’s sad not to have had that.

So I got straight on with one of my ROW80 goals after that and polished the story for Mslexia and sent it in for their competition last night.  So now the remaining goals for ROW80 are:

1. Get my characters to the ‘Rocks and Water’ scene.  This really needs attention now as this goal has been almost totally neglected for weeks.
2. Get a package together to the publisher who wants a one page synopsis.  That’s had me stumped so I need to look at what the book doctor did on the first paragraph of another novel’s synopsis for an idea of the sort of thing that might be slashed.  Looks like whole subplots and characters have to go, so it won’t give a very faithful impression of the book.  I always feel that people will turn round and say how can you have written something 150,000 words long based on this synopsis – I think that once happened, simply because of having to cut so much to meet an arbitrary synopsis length.  A long book like this should be allowed a couple of double spaced pages, but you can’t argue if that is their rule.

Anyway, here’s the rest of the ROW80 blogs for this round: