Free Contests Abound

So if you've hit the internet lately you know that free contests are happening everywhere. From Miss Snark's First Victim's Secret Agent contest. (currently closed for submission but she has them every other or every month. To Chase the Dream Contest which is once a year and still open by the way, first 1000 words once a week until March. To contests if you were asleep that day you missed it from certain agents. Fortunately, I'm well networked and tend to get a heads up when something is going down. But I also like to spread the news when I find it.

So today was supposed to be about getting two beginnings ready for two different things. The first is Catch a Star for The Marlene Contest. First pages and up to a 4 page synopsis, not to exceed 35 pages. I spent all morning cutting and tweaking and this afternoon cut and tweaked some more. The Marlene is an RWA chapter contest and cost $30 to enter for nonmembers of that chapter. The main reason I wanted to enter was for the final judge, Patience Smith, an editor for Silhouette. The feedback is usually nice if I don't final too.

The second thing I was supposed to do was clean up the new beginning of Fallen and send it to the Firebrand Literary Agency Query Holiday. I decided today not to do this one. Reasons being, the critiques that came back show that it still needs a lot of work, the whole novel needs to be spit shined, and I don't even know if the agent reps Paranormal Romance. They might and when I have a clean copy of Fallen and everything in it is exactly how I envision it or at least close enough that I'm not going to play with it anymore I'll submit it via query letter. I don't mind entering contests when things aren't 100% perfect, but for an agent I want polish. I needed to face the fact that Fallen isn't polished to where it needs to be because of my reluctance to revise.

Both the contest and the query holiday end today. I'm going to sit back and relax. Finish reading my book on revision and then take out the sandpaper. I'll start going through my sci fi writing book as well and if any ideas fall into my lap for shorts I might pursue those, but no serious novel writing until Fallen and Catch a Star are revised. So there.