Some interesting news in the gmail tonight -- on a whim I submitted my baseball novel to the Amazon Breathrough Novel Award a few days before Mitch was born (thanks to Alex W for the tip!) and then I promptly forgot all about it, until today.

Looks like The World's All Nations is a semi-finalist! Of course, out of 5,000 entries, I'm competing with 835 other semifinalists, so no champagne yet...

Now here's what people can do, if they're interested -- go to the All Nations' download page and read/download/email yourself the opening chapter.

After you read it, write a review, if you wanna. According to the rules, "The three customers who provide the most high quality reviews will be qualified to win one of three customer prizes, including an Amazon kindle reader, $2000 in Amazon gift card value, and an HP photo printer." So there ya go. If I have time, I plan on checking out the competition myself. Plus it's always fun, reading opening chapters to a variety of novels, to see how other writers do it. Of course, it looks like the last four paragraphs of the chapter got cut OFF, so I'm including them here (I also included them in the discussion area for the book):

All of my players turned to me. I spat my tobacco onto the ground, gagging from its suddenly foul taste, and dropped my rumpled letters. As I walked toward the players gathered around Worrell, I couldn't even feel my spikes digging into the ground.

I was going to warn him, but I didn't. I could have prevented this.

At last, I reached Worrell's unmoving, prone body, and I knew that the man was not getting up; I knew this as surely as if Mack had predicted it. The All Nations head coach was dead.

His spirit would begin haunting me later that very night.

In other novel news, I also updated my blog for the Wannoshay novel, so you can read about the upcoming Wannoshay Day!

No big news about the Doorways/16 Miles novel, but I did make some great progress on the New Novel, Maps and Legends -- I finished up chapter one. And chapter two as well! Not bad. I think I'm about 10% of the way through the draft now (I'm shooting for 75,000 words initially). Whew.

And I think that's everything... Later!