Well, now that the Wannoshay novel is out the door and in the wild, I feel like I can focus on other novels. But before I can work on my new novel, which is due at the end of the summer(!), I wanted to make one last entry about my baseball novel, which as I mentioned earlier is a semi-finalist in the Amazon novel contest.

One of the cool things about the contest, other than the fact that it had no entry fee, is that they got some reviewers from Publishers Weekly to review each semi-finalist entry, along with an “Amazon Top Reviewer.” The drawback is that these reviewers had to quickly read a lot of novels (or was it just the opening chapter? I dunno).

For example, here’s a snippet of my PW review: “The writing is strong; one can only wonder what lengths this story could have achieved had the author decided to write about a topic that appealed to a broader range of people.”

Hmmm… I guess most people don’t like history or baseball. Ah well.

And my Top Reviewer seemed to have issues with the first paragraph: “The bizarre opening lines have the reader thinking, ‘hey, this makes no sense’, but it certainly catches your interest, so the author in question has done a good job as far as that part of it goes.” And that was half of his review! Doh!

So… if you’re bored and looking for something to read, may I point you to the World’s All Nations page (page is gone now, alas), where you can read the opening chapter online? And then you can write a better review than the PW or Top Reader did. That would make me happy… 😉

And now I promise to stop asking favors — first Wannoshay Day blog entries, now this. Sheesh. Later!