Luck of the draw...

Howdy doody =)

First of all, thanks to the four people who left comments last week. You'll all be getting a little something from Alexis and I to say thanks!

Now I want to talk about luck and being in the right place at the right time. As some of you already know, I've been cyber stalking Anna Campbell to get a copy of her latest release, Captive of Sin. Finally it paid off and I won a copy from Nalini Singh's blog. I really like Anna and the stalking wasn't a burden for me at all but it got me thinking about luck. You enter a story into a competition like the Harlequin iHearts presents. 544 odd entries and my little one seems so insignificant. I feel like I'm swimming in the ocean with sharks circling around a ring of dolphins. The dolphins are on my side but as soon as I flail or show weakness, I'm toast and the sharks will rip me apart. Okay, I'm feeling a little morbid today. While I'm frantically trying to finish my women's fiction, I'm thinking about entering into the Australian Emerald at the end of the month, I'm also thinking more and more about the right book, at the right time, for the right person.

That's what it's all about. It's not that my writing is crap or that I'm not ready to sub or that the judges comments scare the living shit out of me. Everything in this game is completely subjective. You might be having a bad day and be more judgemental. You might have had an ex-boyfriend with the same name as my hero or the dog that bit you when you were four with the same colour eyes. I understand all of this but I also think it's a little unfair in competitions. I know. This started out as a blog and now I'm having a rant. If my story is regency noir and the hero walks into the room, takes the stranger into his arms and kisses her senseless, puts a bullet into her fiancee and then rides into the night on his trusty steed, believe me when I say, this is what happened! It's my story. Go with it for a minute. In one of my regencies, the heroine avenges her father in a duel and shoots the cretin in the thigh (she missed, she was aiming for his...). When her guardian tells her it isn't appropriate behavior for a young lady of good breeding, don't mark me down because you agree. If she has a hissy fit over being treated unfairly, don't tell me that gently bred misses don't have hissy fits! The feisty ones do!!

If you don't understand or read the genre, don't judge it! Sometimes when things happen in an era we didn't see, you have to abandon your own preconceptions and just read. You can't tell me that in the early eighteen hundreds there wasn't an heiress anywhere that didn't have a mind of her own or a tongue in her mouth that she wasn't afraid to use (that didn't come out right). You just want me to believe that all men were either scandalous rogues or fat, balding, sweaty boring gits. My hero and heroine are who they are because I made them that way. If they aren't believable, tell me that. If you don't like them, let me know. But don't tell it wouldn't or shouldn't happen because it can and it did.

Now back to my women's fiction. I decided to have a shot at something different when I couldn't find an entry into the dark regency world I'm fast falling in love with. I've had a couple of my awesome critters read it and they all though it was well written and hilarious but will you? If I enter it alongside single title suspense, regency, medieval, will it have a chance? I'm not sure but what I do know is, if I'm not in it, I can't win it!

Damn, I didn't win the lotto... But I didn't buy a ticket. Same concept. If I want my name and my work out there, I've got to put my fear of sharks to the side and trust that my work is good enough to stand on it's own two feet and that I have just as much right to be there as anyone else. If I don't win, I'll take the critism and chalk it all up to experience. Maybe I'll learn something new. Maybe I'll crack the shits and go postal (I would never do that) but at least I can say tha I tried.

Without trying there is no failure and I won't learn from my own mistakes without someone to point them out (delicately please)

Anyway, that's it from me this week. I want to say thanks again to Alexis for being my crash test dummy last week. While I didn't get the number of responses I was after, I tried =)

Have a great week!