OPEN SUBMISSIONS

I have released my baby into the big bad world... well, the first 50 pages of it.

Someone kindly told me that Tinder Press, which publishes some of the people that I like to read, is holding an Open Submission period for the first two weeks of March. As long as your book is complete and you're not agented, you can send them the first fifty pages with a synopsis and a short biography. So I did....

Sounds easy doesn't it? Write an email, attach documents, click send. We do it every day of our lives. But it's not easy. It's scary and nerve-wracking and fantastically time-consuming. I could spend forever tinkering with my manuscript, altering, editing, seeing errors that I've missed. I doubt what I've done. I wonder why I'm bothering. I hope I won't hear them laughing from here. But ultimately I just have to let it go.

Then there's the synopsis. Have I made the story sound interesting? Will it catch the imagination, make them read my words? Everyone says writing a good synopsis is very tricky but they don't tell you how to do it. I did my best.

Even the biography was hard! I'm a housewife with no track record and almost no understanding of the industry. Please read my stuff!

The chances of anything coming of it are incredibly small. I can't imagine how many thousands of submissions they will get. But I have to start somewhere and apart from making my heart race and my palms clammy, how wrong can it go?

Watch this space.