It's truly funny how, as the newbie writer on the block, you are truly clueless when it comes to how you stack up against your competition. At least you are until you enter your very first "professional" writing contest.
Now, it is hard enough getting up the nerve to let one person (my one person is my dear friend and personal editor, Linda) read your manuscript for the first time. But when you submit your manuscript and synopsis for review by your colleagues, those wonderful people you spend one day of the month with at a Georgia Chapter meeting, those people you know will be judging YOUR brainchild with their knowledge and experience, now, that's hard!
I did just that! I sucked it up, wrote the first few thousand words of novel number two along with a synopsis that I really pulled out of thin air (I am THAT person who doesn't know how it is going to end until I write it) and sent it in. Yesterday I got wind that the finalists were posted. It didn't bode well that I had nary received an e-mail from someone telling me I had made the cut, so I reluctantly signed on to review the list.
You'll never believe it, but I wasn't there. My totally awesome work-in-progress had been passed over by the judges for more excellent works. What do you think that did to my ego? Let me tell you...for about two seconds I thought how unfair it was, out of seventy some odd people trying to accomplish the same thing, that I could be passed over. Then, I looked a little closer at the list. On it were some new friends that I have made since joining the Georgia Chapter of Romance Writers. People I've come to adore and admire. It didn't matter how hard I stared at my computer screen or how hard I wished my name would just magically appear there, I just didn't make it.
After my two-second pity party, I moved on to all the positive things this meant for me and what I learned:
1) Now I don't have to write a full 70,000 words!!! Whoo-hoo!
2) The novel has changed considerably since I wrote the synopsis (for the better)!
3) Losing doesn't mean I can't still sell it.
4) I can submit it to other contests with the new and improved synopsis and manuscript.
5) I have something new to blog about. Yea!
So you see, after a little more thought, and still a lot of hope, I decided there were five good reasons to keep plugging away at my little book project. I still have personal goals and deadlines to meet by October 1st. For those of you who don't know my writing career intimately, that is the day I will pitch novel number two to an editor (or agent) at Georgia's Moonlight and Magnolias conference. I have a lot to do between now and then like finish the initial draft, do my edits, (hopefully have editor/friend Linda look it over), and perfect my pitch. It's a lot, but I can do it and will.
Now, all this is to say, if you have a dream to finish what you started, go the distance, just do it...then I say DO! Get out there, accept the critique, find the positive, and keep going. Because really, in the end who are you doing it for anyway?
Until next time, I remain...Unstoppable
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