And not disappointed. My novel, and writing, was exposed to a much wider number of readers than it would have otherwise reached. And #48 out of a top number of 60 qualifiers for the final round is pretty respectable. I just wish that I’d had the opportunity to have Island in the Clouds read and judged by the final panel, but I do know it still needs another good hard rewrite, so maybe this was a blessing in disguise that will finally force me to sit down and get at that editing! Plus I still have the other two novels in the trilogy to rewrite and polish, and the fourth novel that I wrote for NaNoWriMo that has sat fallow for long enough and is about ready to be reconsidered now. At least I can still bask in the glory of recently having won first place in a non-fiction story contest. There are still more contests to enter as well. If I could only get some time in this new life of mine to write… must seriously look at reorganizing myself - or plan to sleep less.

Today is the last day to rank the books in the top 60 of the www.bookhabit.com competition. When I checked earlier today, Island in the Clouds was at #11 - woohoo!! That’s after being as low as #53/60 this past week, with the novel bouncing up and down the ratings list like a yo-yo for the past two weeks in this round of the competition. So, for those of you who haven’t yet ranked my novel by literally dragging it up the ranking list (to #1?), please do so as soon as possible today. You don’t have a lot of hours left in the day left to do this for me! You do have to sign on, but that is free. At this stage, the only thing that counts is the ranking of novels - not downloading of chapters or comments - so please make sure you actually drag the novel up the list of titles. And please ask your friends to do the same. Island in the Clouds needs that extra push right now to get into the top ten so it qualifies for the next round of live judging.

Please go to http://www.bookhabit.com/competition/ and help my novel make it into the next, and final, round of the competition. Thanks so much for all your help and support!

The first 10 weeks of the Bookhabit competition are over and my novel, Island In The Clouds is one of 60 entries to have made it to the next round of rating and comments. It’s currently rated at #34! The first two chapters are now available for free downloading and rating for the next two weeks. Click here to link to my novel’s page; scroll down to the new announcement on the page; download, read, rate and comment. At the end of the two weeks, the ten top-rated novels will then be read and judged by a panel. The overall winner will receive $5000! Please visit the site and participate. Thanks for your help!!!

And, great news! Overnight, thanks to readers’ help, Islands has shot up to #30 on the ratings list!!

And a new season of books begins… I’ve just returned from a week in Toronto, and before that a week in Vancouver, where we met with the various publishers represented by the Kate Walker & Co. agency, and were informed of all the new publications being released for the Fall season. Quite exciting! And it’s great to be back in the saddle again, meeting with old friends in the business, making new friends, and representing a few different publishers from the last time I was a sales rep. Now comes the time when I must sequester myself away, sift through all the information, catalogues, samples, selling materials, and make up the presentations I’ll need for selling the list to bookstores, libraries, and other customers. Lots of work ahead, but many, many great books to sell. I’ll post a few of the titles as I work my way through all of this. But, believe me, a LOT of great books!!

Or “labour” as we write it here in Canada…

This week’s question on Booking Through Thursday:

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

I’ve studied several editing courses, as well as taken some writing programmes, over the past few years and the best books recommended to me by instructors and fellow students were The Forest For the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. I highly advise anyone learning to write creatively that they read and reread both books. As well, Reading Like A Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose is a book that every aspiring writer should read. I was speaking with an editor/publisher recently about the authors who had submitted work to her company and she suggested that the most important thing most of them had missed in preparing themselves for the writing life was being well-read - not only in not reading good work in the genre they wished to be published themselves, but also just not reading a lot of good books in general. She told me that many authors say they’re so busy writing that they don’t have time to read… WRONG ANSWER!!! Read, read, read, and then read some more. But make sure you’re reading good books and following their example - not copying them, but trying to understand what makes the books so good in the first place.

As for grammar books, dictionaries, thesauruses (or is that thesauri?) and writing-instruction books, I have some, and most are the standards, but, really and ultimately, that’s what an editor is for and why publishers hire copy editors… It’s important to prove to an editor that you can write a good sentence and know how to spell - for the most part - but what is more important in writing is to prove that you can tell a good story, know how to describe characters and situations, and have the ability to keep a reader engaged from the first sentence to the last words of whatever you write. An editor’s job, in fact, is to fix those words, to tweak them and make them work that much better, but they can only do that, and are only interested in doing that, if you have a great story to tell in the first place.