Accolades for Shatter

Post edit: I describe winning a contest in this post. The manuscript that won is about to be published! Details here.

In September, while Mike was bearing horrific witness of BYU’s 10-54 loss to their rival, I was in Logan being awarded First Place in the Young Adult Manuscript category of the League of Utah Writer’s annual writing contest for the manuscript I’m working on now, called Shatter. I was so excited! Rather than blog about it right away, I waited for the league to mail me my submission so I could quote all of the judges who loved it. After all my waiting I got one quote.

“I wish I could read the whole thing.”

Well, good. I’m glad. I’d like to read the whole thing, too, but the novel’s only halfway finished.

Other writing updates:
I started the website you’re reading for the purpose of enticing all those agents who would be looking over my first novel. Very soon after, I decided I wouldn’t be sending the novel out for publication this year. How efficient of me. Two things persuaded me to hold off. 1) Getting a good agent is key in the publishing business and it can be hard to switch from a lesser-known agent to a better-connected one. Thus, the general strategy is to send agents the best work that you have. 2) The novel I’m working now can beat up my first one with its eyes closed. I think it wants to, being about gangs and murder and all.

So we will all have to wait a little longer to see if I can ever win the publication lottery.

In other writing news, I’m announcing my first-draft completion-date goal. I’m hesitant to even have one (Lina, when she’s seventeen-year’s old: “You were never there for me! You think up names and outfits for imaginary people and my clothes haven’t matched since the Bush administration!”). A major subplot of Shatter, however, is a mock trial in the main character’s high school, centered around possible conspiracies in JFK’s assassination. I realized just last month as I was researching that the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death will be November, 2013. It takes publishing houses a year to push a book to print and I’ll need time before that to make my own revisions, so I’m hoping to finish by April of 2012, just six months from now. I track my word count on an Excel spreadsheet which gives me little graphs and charts and extrapolates my finish date based on my daily averages. It says I will finish by April. We’ll see, I guess.

Please remind Lina when she’s seventeen that her clothes wouldn’t have matched under my supervision even if I hadn’t been writing. Will that help?