Yes, I made the entry deadline! (Yes, on the left is my totally [tos]-geeky photo ripoff with the envelope just before I took it to the post office.)

It has been a crazed month working on the manuscript to get it ready. Right after I wrote the post about wanting to submit, I formatted the manuscript properly for submission and was devastated to discover I was about 120 pages over the maximum page count. After a day recovering from that, I dug in and started editing. Whole characters and subplots were vaporized, scenes vanished, and a couple rounds of tightening occurred. The manuscript that went into the mail today is 223 pages (one page under the max) and approximately 56,000 words.

It’s amazing the mind games you play on yourself while editing, especially day after day. Some days I could zip along with no problem. Other days the voices in my head would nag, nag, nag about the choices I was making. This morning was the worst. I skimmed through the story one more time and found it quite emotional… a mix of “wow, i really finished this!” and “you’re not really about to send that to Random House, are you?”

The good news is that the people who read the story said they liked it and gave good feedback about things to fix and tidy up. So there are at least three other people out there now who think this book is okay. I think it’s a good story too. As much as some of the editing was painful (I hate that I cut two Christmas scenes), the novel is much better for it. It’s also not lost on me that the 56,000 words is so very close to the 53,000 words this story was at the end of NaNoWriMo 2006. What I submitted today is tremendously better than that, although there are several scenes from that first draft that made the final cut. (I actually looked back at that draft briefly this morning and was stunned at how bad that draft really was.)

Icing on the cake this morning: As I left the post office, snow flurries were falling!

By the end of April, the judges will issue their decision. So now it’s about waiting and watching the mailbox for that SASE to come back.

The past few months have been about editing, tightening, polishing and making sure that everything that’s in the manuscript has a purpose. I’m working as much as possible now on Neutral Zone because I want to submit it to the Random House’s Twenty-Sixth Annual Delacorte Press Contest for a First Young Adult Novel. It’s a lofty goal. It’s going to take a sizable amount of work to have the manuscript ready to go within the next month (it has to be postmarked on or before December 31). The Delacorte prize has high standards too: there’s been no prize awarded the past two years.

To borrow and modify a line from [title of show]: “Hartinger, Sanchez and Moore have done it before you and better than you.” Who you might ask? Brent Hartinger, Alex Sanchez and Perry Moore are responsible for some of my favorite YA books. Each of them are an inspiration for what I’m trying to do in Neutral Zone. I hope I can stand with that trio, and it’s a bit daunting trying to get there.

In the past two week’s I’ve started giving Neutral Zone to some people to read, and that, even more than the idea of submitting to competition, has the vampires raging in my head. (Vampires, for you non [title of show] folks, are things that fill you with thoughts of self consciousness, feelings of worthlessness and make you second guess everything you’re doing.) While it’s exciting to have the manuscript read by someone other than me, it’s really scary to await the reaction. I know the people reading it intend to provide constructive feedback. Still, it does get the butterflies stirring.

Five people have it: Will, of course, is a valued reader. My frequent writing partner and First Line co-creator David has already given some feedback on the first half. I tapped Roman to read the hockey parts to make sure I captured the game right… his girlfriend Kendall also picked it up, so I get a female point of view as well. Will down in North Carolina is also reading. I’ve read some of his stuff recently and he offered to give me some feedback on this.

Can it all come together in the next 30 days? I’m saying yes. If I fail at getting it into the mail, it will only be because I decide it isn’t ready yet and not from a lack of commitment or the stupid vampires talking me out of it.

The short story is for Nerdvana, an anthology that hits stores in Fall 2009. The collection focuses on nerds and geeks. To quote part of the call for submissions: “I want to hear about the social misfits, brainiacs, and comic book/superhero obsessed geeks… I want fiction that shows brains can be sexy.” I came up with a couple ideas pretty quickly and settled on one to flesh out. I wrote it last week and worked on polishing it this week. Tomorrow it’s off to the editor. Hopefully it will be a success.

Meanwhile, I’ve been back on Neutral Zone the past week or so. Work on it came to a grinding halt for nearly two months as the day job took center stage to get the Monopoly game ready. I’ve enjoyed getting back to the editing/polishing and working with the characters again. My goal is to spend at least an hour a day (and more if possible) on the edit work until I’m sure the novel is as good as I can make it.

Just a few minutes ago, I wrote “The End” at the bottom of the third draft. It clocks in at 200 single spaced pages and just over 107,000 words. My new goal is to give this draft a good polish before we go on vacation next month so that I can give it to a couple trusted readers for some feedback.

Is the novel any good? Not sure…time will tell. Right now I’m happy I got the story I wanted to tell down on paper in its entirety.

Completing a novel… not a bad way to start a Friday.

Last year I succeeded and created the first draft of Neutral Zone, a story about two high school hockey players who fall in love. I’m still working my way through the second draft of that novel (it was a bumpy summer for writing because work was stressing me so much, it seemed to zap my creativity). Neutral Zone gets set aside for November though as I focus on a new story. (If you care to revisit the past, you can read the blog entries from last year’s NaNoWriMo.)

For this year’s challenge, I’m shifting genres into fantasy. I wrote a short story earlier this year and I’m going to take that premise and expand it into something more.

Meanwhile, as you may have read earlier, Will has his ideas about NaNoWriMo also. The fun for us both starts in just 8 days!

What I do know is that I’ve enjoyed the writing enough, and enjoy the story enough, that once November is done with the craziness of cranking out words, that I am going to go back and edit the story and see if there is any marketability in it.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I’m quite happy that I have managed to stay on pace so far, even though I had another day this past weekend where I didn’t make the word count (Sunday I only wrote about 500 words).

So far the hockey players in love have snagged a scholarship to play at Michigan; one of them got pretty severely hurt in the middle of a game and they’re on the verge of being discovered by their teammates (I actually thought I’d get that done within the first 25,000 words, but I think it will happen before I cross 30,000).

I have posted a brief excerpt from the novel on the NaNoWriMo website. It’s part of my profile and you can read it by clicking on the part of the page to read the excerpt. Remember, it’s very much a first draft, so you’ll have to excuse any editing problems.

I still don’t have an ending yet… or really have a clue what the end game will be. But I’ve got 15 more days (including a week’s worth of vacation) to figure that part out!

So why does this show up in the hockey blog? I decided the novel focuses on two high school hockey players who end up falling for each other. Where will all this go? I’m not sure yet since I’m writing this on the fly, but they will, of course, end up coming out to their team and to the school and probably have family conflict too… who knows they may even break up by the end (or not, I’m a sucker for a happy ending). I’m typically only thinking a day or two ahead on the plot just to make sure that I’ve got stuff to write so I can actually make the word count. So far, so good… it’s day 4 and I’m on track with the word count.

I’ll update how this is going at about the half way point… wish me luck!