The Next Battle

Wow. Phew. WHAT an exciting couple of weeks it has been!

Contests. So many friggin' contests.

We've talked about An Agent's Inbox. We've talked about GUTGAA. What we haven't talked about is the rest of them.

QueryCon
Secret Agent
Pitch Madness
CAGI

That's six contests. And, so far, in every one of the contests we've entered, we've gotten requests. And sometimes, it's not even official judges that requested. Some of them were ninja agents that noticed it even though they weren't officially involved.

Wow. Just wow. If you've been wondering why we haven't been posting stuff to this blog lately, it's because there are no words. The words that are needed to describe what's happened to us simply haven't been invented yet. There are no words.

But, then again, we ARE writers, so we'll give it a shot.

We are totally grateful, and TOTALLY humbled by the response from the publishing community to our story. We are grateful, humbled, and scared out of our goddamned minds. If Webster's dictionary had an entry for "In Over Your Head", our picture would be right there.

You know that episode of the Simpsons where Homer has to climb that mountain? And every time he gets over a peak he thinks he's done but then he just realizes that there's a much, much, MUCH bigger mountain waiting behind it? This is like that.

To para-phase Gandalf, "The Battle of the Query is over. But the Battle of the Manuscript is about to begin..."

Rock that beard, you Magnificent Bastard.

And when I say Battle, I mean it. A few of those requests have come back, and there are problems with the MS. Problems we didn't see. Problems we didn't anticipate.

Have you ever picked up a book from the book store, read the first five pages and gone "Ugh"? We've done it. You've done it. Everyone's done it.

We don't do that anymore.

Because we now know that the process of publishing a book is akin to running a marathon. Through downtown Iraq. With a big "Shoot me" sign on your back. While on fucking fire. We've come to learn that getting published is one of the most difficult things on the face of this planet to pull off. If anyone, ANYONE, manages to make it through that goddamned gauntlet, they automatically have our undying respect, forever and ever, Amen.

You know, a year ago, we had just finished our first draft, and eagerly, naively started querying. And we got our asses handed to us. If someone had told us back then that in a year from now, we'd be sitting on a whole bunch of contest wins, and even more requests, we would have called them goddamned liars and slammed the door in their faces. A lot can happen in a year. A lot HAS happened in a year.

So now, here we go. Up that mountain, into that Battle. We go willingly, with no delusions, knowing full well what we're getting into. We're going to get bruised, we're going to get bloodied, we're going to get beaten up. And we're going to love every. Goddamned. Minute of it.

Because we're writers. This is what we do.