ABNA: over the first hurdle

My entry's been accepted by ABNA. Woot!

This morning I received the email from the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, telling me my entry (Trav Zander) was eligible.

This has nothing to do with its quality, it just means I followed the rules and my files got to them uncorrupted. So you may well ask, what's the big deal?

The problem was that it was not possible to check or change what you'd uploaded; the rules were not as clear as they might have been, and there was little help or advice from ABNA admin. So the anxiety on the ABNA forum last night reached fever pitch. We'd been told we'd hear on the 12th, but emails weren't sent out till the evening American time.

In the event, they don't seem to have been as nitpicky as people feared. Wrong spacing and margins haven't meant exclusion; just corrupted files, or the extract not being from the start of the novel.

If you go to the link above, you will see a countdown clock to the date voting begins.

And if I make the Chosen One Thousand, you all know what I want you to do when the clock hits zero...