Randomly

I got my new Seventeen magazine today. Yes, I still get Seventeen mostly because I haven't had the balls to get something older (like Cosmopolitan) and they are still in my age range, actually. Their stuff is still relevant to me.

Anyway, there was this sidebar ad that caught my attention about the second page in. It was for this site called inkpop. inkpop is slated for rising stars in teen literature - a community for up and coming writers.

In my quest for getting published, if not the novel then at least something that I've written, I thought what the hell, let's give it a shot. So, I have created an account (under the name of thewanderinsagittarius) and, probably after I tool around for a bit and check the place out, I'll look at what it takes to submit things.

Probably the only reason that I'm sniffing around here with some sort of hope at all is because of this sentence on their home page: inkpop members play a critical role in deciding who will land a publishing contract with HarperCollins.

Now you realize why I have an account.

My main issue is that the editorial board that probably controls all of this, only looks at the most popular ones. And you only get to be most popular when people read and vote. Which, honestly, reminds me a lot of my high school elections.

Namely, it's a glorified popularity contest.

That I'm still going to enter anyway.

It's not that I don't have confidence in my writing. It's just that, well, things are different there.

They have a step-by-step process for adding a new "project." They ask you first to have an original title for your project. We'll start this interesting thing with The Sunset Girl and see how that works. Reading further, there comes a slight snag in my plan so far. Something along the lines of heads up, book authors: books must be at least 10,000 words. We're not going to classify my CoF story as book, because it's really a short story (to me, then again, I'm the moron who works with about 700 pages of manuscript and is on composition book 11). And I don't really want to have the hassle of doing the other thing and splitting it up into chapters, as in kind of mandatory if you're in the "book" category.

Okay, next step is to have a short pitch - like the back blurb of a hardcover book. Wait, my bad. Short pitch is a sentence (25 words), in which case I'm going to pick a sentence that I think is powerful from the story and go with that.

My next issue is the 200 word full pitch. I've never been good with synopsis and things like that. Never. I have issues with short pieces - probably why the novel is around 290,000 words. Okay, but we can do this. This can be figured out.

I thought that went quite well. Now they would like me to choose a cover. They have some for you to choose from. I found one that works quite well, I think. Everything else has gone swimmingly. As usual, it's formatting that is killing me.

Well, she's out there now. Lord have mercy on my soul.

Maybe this won't be so bad.