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Since finishing the ‘big push’ under CampNaNoWriMo things have languished a little, with some work done on chapter 29 that I’m still not satisfied with.  This week I did  some writing – but not on the edit.  Instead, I polished (again) three old short stories to submit to a couple of competitions.  Three, because I finished one then realised the rules for the comp where I’d intended to submit it would rule it out as published although it appeared many years ago in a writers’ group pamphlet with a tiny circulation.  So I ended up editing a different one to submit to that competition.

I used to enter short story competitions fairly regularly and enjoyed some success, with a couple of first and second prizes, and quite a few runners up/highly commended ratings.  Since embarking on the mammoth edit of the first novel I want to self publish, I have tended to neglect that side of things, but as two prestigious competitions both close on 31 May, decided I should make an effort.  If anyone is interested, these are the well known Bridport competition, and the perhaps not so well known Yeovil Literary Prize.  They have categories for novels, too, and I have in the past submitted to those, but not this time around.  (Oh and they have poetry categories, and the Yeovil prize has a ‘Writing without Restriction’ category where you can enter essays, emails, mini sagas, biographies or just about anything.)

So my goals for ROW80 and progress in red:

1. Complete the novel edit by end May – still on chapter 29, another 7 to go
2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those – more to follow up on that.  The main methods appear to use Calibre or Scrivener.  Some people appear to just upload a Word file or PDF, whereas others handcrank the HTML which lies behind the Kindle format doing all sorts of code substitutions, which I think can be done in Calibre at least.  Not sure yet what the best approach is and will have to do some test runs to work through it, once I have something a lot nearer the final MS.
3. Once the final edit is complete, approach the various editors previously identified as possible pro editors  to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.

Anyway, here are the updates from those nice people at ROW80: