Merry Eight Days Til Christmas!

Uh, oh. 

Did you know that Christmas is only eight days away? And, okay, seven shopping days, because our family starts the party on the 24th. Gah! I finally went shopping yesterday, though. Go me. Got--sort of-- done. Granted, I did some shopping online and there will be gift cards. 

Anyway. I spent last week cleaning up my NaNo manuscript. I participated in this Entangled Smackdown thing through the Savvy Authors website. The group I was in, Dead Sexy, won--which means that our imprint (Dead Sexy is the romantic suspense line) scored the most points for showing up and suiting up--and the authors who participated earned the opportunity to compete for the chance to be published by Entangled. 

We got an email last Monday from editor Nina Bruhns that said something along the lines of Hey! Send what you've got, with your beat sheet and a query letter, and one of you will get published.

To which I said to myself, You've got to be freaking kidding me.  Not only is this not finished, the story changes directions sixteen times in the 68,000 words I have written. 

Not to mention how many "that's" and "her eyes looked" and "her fingers felt" there are in there.

But hey...what do I have to lose? Okay, maybe I could get my email automatically added to the Dead Sexy spam list, but otherwise, what do I have to lose? 

I enlisted the help of my friend Laura, who graciously looked for as many overused and misspelled words as she could find (why don't I notice the spellcheck suggestions myself?).  I managed to edit SOME of the manuscript. I put together a beat sheet that explains the story I'll be telling once I've rewritten the thing. Wrote a real live query letter and sent the whole mess off. 

And now I have renewed motivation to get back to work and finish this book! I think I'll be buying a few more gift cards to finish out the Christmas shopping, and see if I can hire an elf to do some wrapping so, I can "wrap" things up on my book. HA HA HA. I crack myself up.

Merry Almost Christmas and Happy Belated Hanukkah, and Joyous Whatever Else You Might Be Celebrating!