Bitten Lit

The blog-o-sphere is a mystical and lovely place... It feels kind of awesome reading about authors and agents, anticipating a good book before it's even out (Kiersten White's Paranormalcy makes me very happy. Eleven days...). And the contests! Seems like as soon as I start stressing about querying, there are a whole bunch of query and submission contests going around.

Karen Gowen is hosting this one: http://karenjonesgowen.blogspot.com/2010/08/lettuce-write-and-get-your-chapters.html Send in the first three chapters of your manuscript. While three winners get to send in a full for editor Allie Maldonando to review for them, every entry will recieve some feedback on the three chapters.

Another hosted by Adventures in Children's Publishing for MG/YA pitches: http://childrenspublishing.blogspot.com/2010/08/new-contest-yamg-pitch-to-query-letter.html At noon tomorrow they'll be open for fifty pitches, but the contest progresses in steps. The prize is a three-chapter critique from agent Sarah LaPolla (who was on my list of agents-to-query before I found out that she's on an indefinite vampire break. Twitter saves my butt, yay) who is also judging the contest. But they're encouraging a lot of critique between contestants, and there's a panel of "mentor authors" that'll comment on the entries, so at any rate it's a good way to get feedback.

Sara B. Larson is also holding a pitch contest: http://sarablarson.blogspot.com/2010/08/my-path-to-getting-agent-pt-6.html The winning pitch gets a query critique.

This is one of the coolest: http://motherwrite.blogspot.com/ Come up with a good title for Krista V.'s WIP (currently called Bob), and four wonderful prizes will be divided between the three winners, including 1st pg and query reviews by agents.

I hope I get around to entering all of them. <3