I'm an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Quarterfinalist!

Yes, I remember entering this contest...vaguely. Very vaguely. Oh well.

Received notification this morning that I am one of 500 quarterfinalists (out of a maximum 10,000 entries, that's not bad).

You can see my novel excerpt at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UG3B4U. Please download it, review it, pass it on to your friends. (If you're not in the US, you can view the excerpt on my site here.)

It's a pretty big deal contest: Grand Prize is a publishing contract with Penguin and a $25k royalty advance.

If I make it to the final round, I'll be stumping for votes. I hate that system, because it means the best campaigner wins, not necessarily the best novel, but you have to work with what you've got, I suppose.

Let's keep our fingers crossed, shall we?

Comments

Did Somebody Offer a Challenge?

Bruce Sterling over at Wired.com posted eighteen of them for Contemporary Literature. It's a skeletal overview: a list of statements without background or exploration of any. I'd like to offer a few brief thoughts on the list, just for my own brainstorming sake. Who knows; there may be eighteen papers in here somewhere. 1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot. "Contemporary society" is a pretty big blanket, there, Bruce. I think you might mean "contemporary digitally literate culture" - after all, it's only in the Westernized world that we are beginning to share our language and culture through global media such as Facebook and mobile phones. This also assumes a very strict definition of literature: that which is published in print form, presumably a book. 2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed tex...

My Take on Specifications Grading (or, How I Learned to Not Spend My Weekends Marking)

I’ve been proselytizing this method for a while now, and have used it in a range of creative writing and publishing modules. It’s been wildly successful for me (though of course I’ll continue tweaking it), and enough people have asked about it that I thought I’d put it together into an overview/summary resource. It should probably be an actual paper one of these days, but that would require time and research and motivation. Natch. My teaching model is based on Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading (she’s also got a great intro article on Inside Higher Ed ), just so the original genius can get plenty of credit. My motivations are these: I came a hair’s breadth from burning out entirely. I went from teaching creative writing classes with 7-10 students on them to massive creative writing modules with 80+ students on them. Marking loads were insane, despite the fact that I have a pretty streamlined process with rubrics and QuickMarks and commonly used comments that I can cut and ...

In which the Apathy Monster is curtailed

Me, lately I spent my PhD years going to many, many conferences. When you're in a small department in an isolated part of the world, they're kind of a necessity. You go to meet anyone - anyone - who is doing similar stuff, and who won't stare at you blankly when you describe your research. You go to try out your ideas, to make sure the academic community you'll be pitching them to don't think you're an absolute waste of space ( imposter syndrome is for real). Also, you go just to go somewhere (though I think I went to Leicester far too often). In the last few years, as I've gained contacts and confidence, I've gone to fewer and fewer conferences. I know the ones that best suit me now, and where I'll get to meet and/or catch up with my peeps. I also know the ones, of course, where I've never made any headway at all. I was pleasantly surprised this week to be wrong about that last one. MIX Digital - Bath Spa University Let me back thi...

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