Friday, September 4, 2009

Finalist again!

Loyal readers, if there were any, would recall that back in May I took a short break from the current MS to begin the next in time to enter it in a contest. And the call came September 1st - I'm in the finalist round!

This will make the chapter conference even more fun than it was already going to be. And it gives me one more credit to drop into query letters.

Polishing on the main MS continues. Here's a development almost too mortifying to admit: I found out my word count was way off. I'd been using the old "one page equals 250 words" method rather than relying on Word's figure, only I didn't realize that method was from the days of nonproportional fonts. When I reformatted everything from Times New Roman into Courier, it ballooned and I learned my MS was too long by nearly 50%!

So I've had to cut, which feels a little like trying to do intricate carving with a chainsaw. Had to re-shape the arc, had to lose a lot of stuff I'd really loved. But I'm getting close. Now I just need to figure out in what order I want to send out my requested fulls, requested partials, and queries. And how I want to coordinate that, timing-wise, with the pitching appointments I'll have at the conference next month.

Enough! Back to work!

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