Wednesday, January 16, 2008

I suck.

Got this in the email last night:

Thank you for participating in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. We received thousands of submissions and were impressed by the incredible talent and creativity, but as a result, were forced to make very difficult decisions. We regret to inform you that you have not been selected as a semi-finalist.
You will be receiving a follow up email from CreateSpace within one to two weeks regarding prizes and next steps. Your novel will be automatically set up in an account on CreateSpace and will be ready to publish.
The email will include instructions for redeeming your free proof copy prize, publishing your novel, and information about discounted publishing services such as cover design and editing from BookSurge.

That was a contest I entered with the chance to get my novel published and win $25,000. I never expected to win, but it would have been cool to make it past the second round.

Like some of you out there, I've written something that I think could be published. It's juvenile fiction, and I think it's pretty good, but I'm too lazy to keep working on it or to keep sending it to agents and publishers, so I thought a contest would be a way to get me excited about the prospect of getting in print. I'm not the kind of person who can toil away at a pointless endeavor for hours without some recognition (um, blog much, idiot?).

I would have been cool to get recognized for being a slightly better writer than someone else who can't get published through normal channels. Then at some point, I would have asked you guys to read my story excerpt and comment on it, and if I'd made it far enough, to vote on my story. But I lost.

Wait. Not me. It was that other guy who lost, the one whose name is on my driver's license and on all my mail. That guy over there, living that life. But I'm the.effing.librarian. On this page, I rock. It's that other guy who sucks. Woo-hoo! Ok, you're right; I suck here, too. You guys notice everything.