Breakthrough Novel Award

Every year Amazon has a contest. The mother of all contests, in my opinion. At least, for writers anyway. I first found out about this contest at the end of last year, and I felt inspired to come up with something to enter! Enter a little story I like to call Ontario. The idea just popped into my head and I ran with it. I wrote 35,000 words of it in about two weeks. I was on a role! I only had about another week to have the 50,000 required words for the manuscript. At some point I realized that my writing was suffering because I was trying to so hard to get it done, and so I stopped aiming for the stars, at least for that year's competition.

Ontario ended up getting put on hold and I didn't finish it until the first weekend in August, but as the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contests for 2013 looms in the near future, and have a little bit more time. While I was finishing Ontario I had another idea pop into my head. It was a random day in July when I found myself bolting to my computer and furiously typing out the opening scene to another story. Another one? GREAT! At the end of August I found myself with 33,202 words worth of a new story, which for now I am calling Lorn. Ever since I started working on it I could tell that this one had some huge potential, if only I could tell the story in the right way. This is the story I will be using to enter the Breakthrough Novel contest for 2013.

Sadly, the momentum I had in August died off and my sights changed to the up and coming NaNoWriMo. Now that I've finished that and yet another book I am ready to jump back into working on Lorn. I am so excited for the future and what it holds for this story. I should definitely be working on that manuscript and not blogging about it on here, but I wanted to give you an update! Here's to hitting another 50K mark by the end of December!

33,202 words,

- Heidi Nicole Bird