.

Amazon announced the top 500 manuscripts in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards last night. It was a tense day. Many of the writers spent the whole day glued to their monitors – on the Amazon message boards, on CreateSpace, and for many Facebook became a good place to congregate.

As 5:00pm approached on the west coast, excitement was high and nerves were frayed. It was assumed that Amazon would make the announcement before close of business in the west. As 6:00pm approached, patience was reaching its breaking point. The humorous threads of “I got an email...” and the like, were loosing their mirth. There began to be panic stricken pleas of despair, angry words of impatience, and grim acceptance of fate.

I joined in early, I was home sick from work. The message board at Amazon reminded me of so many MMO boards right before Beta invites go out or while waiting for the servers to come up on opening day of a new game. Everyone handles the wait differently. I have been there so many times – waiting – that I was amused by it all, though no less stressed and angst ridden than the rest. For most of us, this was our chance at that big break. Our future as writers hung in the balance. This was not some online game.

One of the threads put up was a stay-in-touch type thread. Many of the writers were on Facebook, others posted their email or website addresses. I'm new to Facebook, and my friend list grew tenfold last night. I also found there was an ABNA Contestants group there as well.

During the day several of the Vine reviewers, who had reviewed our excerpts, came by the message board to offer encouragement. They couldn't give any specifics on what they had read, but they did say the quality level was generally very high. They also squashed some rumors about certain genres or styles being dismissed out-of-hand. That eased a lot of minds. It seemed, from what they told us, we had all received a fair and very thoughtful review of our work.

By 8:00pm on the west coast, 11pm my time, people were losing hope. It did say in the official rules “on or about March 16”, and some began to speculate it would be morning before the announcement came. Many, like myself, were on the east coast and it was getting late. I took a shower around 9:30pm local time, then scanned the message board, checked my email and my CreateSpace account, and hung out on Facebook until 11pm. Then I said goodnight and good luck to everyone.

I checked my email this morning and the notice had come. I made the top 2000, so my excerpt was reviewed, but I did not make the top 500. The contest is over for me. At least that tells me my Pitch was good, and the reviews from the Vine reviewers will help me polish my manuscript a little more.

I will stay around until the end – reporting on the contest and supporting my new friends as they move forward. I plan to read as many of the 500 excerpts as I can and review them. I may even post links to some of my favorites here. Then, of course, there will be the voting once Penguin picks the top three.

Congratulations and good luck the this year's ABNA Top 500. I can't wait to read your excerpts and learn from the best. You guys rock :)

max