Monday, January 24, 2011

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award - Submitted!

When the submission window opened at 11 p.m. last night (Jan 23rd), I submitted my 300 word pitch, a 5,000 word excerpt, and the full manuscript (~143,000 words) for my first novel, THE COMING!  Now, I have to wait until February 24th to see if my pitch makes the cut for the second round...

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2011

After starting this book (THE COMING) back in 2001, finishing it in 2003, receiving approximately 90 rejections, and editing it approximately 2,397,402 times, I'm finally going to enter it into a writing competition!  The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award opens their submission window on 24 Jan 11...looks like I'll be up at midnight on 23 Jan 11 to make sure it gets in before they reach their 5,000 submissions limit!  Here's my pitch (this is what the judges will use to cut the 5,000 entries down to 1,000 for the second round):

THE COMING
General Fiction Category

Mike Brannick stared past the gun barrel into the vacant eyes of his killer, knowing his journey couldn’t end like this.  His pregnant wife and young son lie just inches away, but forever out of reach, their joyful laughter and fierce love of life reduced to bloody smears on a cold marble floor by the man squeezing a trigger one final time.  A gunshot ended Mike Brannick’s agony…and heightened that of mankind, for at that cruelest of moments, the world began to unravel.  The Chosen lie slaughtered.  The Evil One stood unchecked.

     Years later, Sean McMurry, a young man shaken by the abrupt return of the nocturnal terror that once stalked his childhood, and Kayla Landon, a teenage girl resolved to survive the daily carnage of a broken home, are drawn together by a force neither can comprehend, and neither can resist.  Each glimpse fleeting moments of lives clearly not their own, vivid snapshots of another time and place…and of a family murdered.  Caught in a sudden storm of violence and deceit, Sean and Kayla are torn from one another, separated by distance yet joined by a mysterious, overpowering need to fulfill a purpose yet unknown.  Guided towards the truth by dreamlike voices and tantalizingly familiar visions, they struggle to find each other…a union evil cannot allow.  Placed in their path lurks a killer who’d murdered an entire family years before.  He’d killed the Chosen once…now, he must kill them again.

THE COMING is a story of a world teetering on the brink, its future resting solely on the shoulders of two young people struggling to decipher mysterious events swirling around them, racing against time to fulfill a promise once lost, and prevent the onset of an encroaching, interminable darkness—the End of Days.

Wish me luck!