Remember how I insanely finished my novel to enter the TAG Hungerford contest? I knew that a last-minute finish was a bad thing for that novel, but the value for me of actually getting something finished to enter the contest far outweighed the inevitability of not getting anywhere with the contest. But now that the award procedure is almost over (there are three shortlisted novels now, although the winner won’t be announced until February 2009), I’ve got even more value out of the process.
I recently received a “thanks but no …