I May Have Problems

But The Pitch isn't one of them.

CLOSER TO NORMAL makes it past the first hurdle in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest.

The odds are still woefully against me.

But are they?

ABNA accepted 10,000 entries in 5 genres: General Fiction, Young Adult, Romance, Mystery/Thriller, and Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Horror. Of these, 2000 make it through the Pitch Round, 400 in each genre (~1:5 odds). Of each 400, 100 will make it past the Quarter Finals (1:4) and into the Finals. Of the 100, there will be 5 winners (1:20).

Breaking down the odds into steps feels so much more palatable than the 1:Gazillion odds of getting read after throwing your story over the cyber transom. It's nice to have hope. Peace...

Pain and How to "Kill" It

One of our nation's dirty little secrets is that drugs are destroying a chunk of Appalachia. Not heroin, not coke or crank or inhalants, but prescription pain-killers. OxyContin has the baddest rap, but Vicodin and methadone are heavy-hitters. Ironically, methadone is used to treat heroin addiction, but when a rash of fatal Oxy overdoses flared five years ago, the law clamped down on OxyContin prescribing and methadone became the favored opioid.

You can reduce the supply of a substance, but if you don't dwindle demand, addicts will always find another close substitute. One reason for the rise in OxyContin abuse was the reduction in opium supply when we waged war on terrorism in poppyland - Afghanistan.

Prescription drug abuse is not just a problem in Appalachia - statistics released by the National Institute on Drug Abuse Monitoring the Future survey found 9.2% of 12th graders used prescription painkillers in the past year.

My suggestion? Let's get down to the REAL causes of prescription drug abuse - a societal inability to accept, confront, and work through our collective pain. And, damn, isn't treatment a dirty word? Right up there with prevention...


On the writing front... Karl Iagnemma, one of my favorite scientist/writers released his first, critically-acclaimed novel The Expeditions, published by the Dial Press. I just ordered it from Amazon.

And speaking of Amazon... yesterday also was the separating of the wheat from the chaff in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Guess I was the chaff, as my submission failed to make it to the semi-finalist round. Not that I thought it would - my manuscript is far better now then it was three months ago. It's been fun peeking in on the mayhem over there - check out the forums, then check out the submissions and review your favorites. I can't decide what's more entertaining - ABNA or American Idol.

My personal pain continued with a decidely dead laptop. The intensity of my discomfort increased when the mailbox yielded an agent rejection - my first. As such letters go, it was a 'great' rejection - three paragraphs, personalized, even a few notes about the writing and 'well-developed' voices. But a rejection nonetheless...

But as I skulked into the dark to self-medicate with a hefty dram of Glenlivet, at last... an acceptance. Three micro-flashes accepted into print. Yahoo!

Back to revising, back to writing, slow and steady - cuz you can't rush art.

Believe. Peace, Linda