About six weeks ago I proudly finished the edit and rewrite of my first novel draft and submitted it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. They have quite a convoluted procedure for getting from (up to) 10,000 entries down to the final winner, but the exciting news is that I’ve passed through the first two stages.

I heard today that my novel Kanako’s Foreigner is officially a quarter finalist for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award – that means that from the initial 10,000 entries (well, nobody knows if they got that many – but that is the maximum number) I was successful in reaching the best 2,000 cut, simply on the strength of my short pitch; and now I’ve made it into the top 500 on the basis of the first 5,000 words of my novel.

In the next round, Publishers Weekly people will read the entire manuscripts (quickly, I presume, since there are 500 of them) and on April 15 they’ll announce 100 semi-finalists. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

In the meantime, it looks like (some of) you can read the excerpt of my novel that made it this far as a free, downloadable “Amazon Short”. I say “some of you” because I can’t, and it sounds like other people outside the United States have the same problem – if I try to download my excerpt I get a message saying I’m in the wrong country to do this. American readers, do have a go – go to Kanako’s Foreigner at Amazon and click on “Download for free” on the right – and do please let me know if it works! Presumably they’ll fix it for non-US people soon and I’ll let you know when that happens.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited to have made it this far. I even feel a bit like the man on the right in this picture. That picture’s there for two reasons – one, it’s an accurate image of how I feel, and two, because a scene very similar to this is actually in the novel. As the man was saying at the moment I took that photo – it’s on top of Mount Fuji – “Banzai!” (Hooray!)