Bryce's Ramblings

Due to some confusion, allow me to clarify what you need to do to "vote" in the Amazon ABNA contest. Perhaps "vote" was a poor choice of word. "Rate My Entry" would have been better. Follow this link (same as last time), download my entry and then rate it after you've read it, just like with any other Amazon item: 1 to 5 stars. These ratings will be taken into consideration as the contest progresses. Thank you for your support!

Just wanted to post here to let you all know that I made the first cut in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. For those of you who don't know, back in October or so of last year, Amazon opened this contest to the first 5,000 people who submitted their novel. I heard about it through a newsgroup I'm part of, and I figured why not. I submitted Vodnik. They've now narrowed it down to at most the top 1,000--though it sounds like maybe it was more like the top 850 or so. An excerpt of Vodnik is now on Amazon, and there should soon be a Publisher's Weekly Review of the whole book. Customers can read the excerpt and rate it. We were limited to submitting just the first 5,000 words. I'm not overjoyed with where it cuts off, but such is life. From here, it's going to be narrowed down to the top 100, and then Penguin editors will narrow it to the top 10, after which customers will vote to pick the winner, who will get a book contract with Penguin. Anyway, faithful readers--go and vote! Here's a link for you all (I'm on a Mac, and I'm having trouble putting in an actual link, so I'll just cut and paste the link):

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00122GTYG

Tune in later to see what PW had to say about the book. Anyone else out there enter? Please tell.