As you know, I was pretty excited earlier this week when I was notified that my first novel has made the quarter finals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. What I hadn’t expected was that the parts of the day I save for fiction writing business were about to get completely taken over by ABNA, but they have, and it’s been a real learning curve of a week. And a very interesting one!

Amazon’s glitches are my gain

If you’ve gone to the Kanako’s Foreigner page – my novel’s spot on Amazon – and tried to download the excerpt they have there (first couple of chapters), you’ll have been disappointed unless you live in the United States – all “foreign” internet users are unable to download the excerpts, myself included. Since the 500 quarter finalists are keen to read and review other excerpts and get other people to do the same (as customer reviews may have a small influence on next round selection, though it’s nowhere near the major criterion) , I thought at first this was a highly disadvantageous situation.

Now I’ve changed my mind and am thanking Amazon for its thoughtlessness! Via the ABNA forums online, writers from both inside and outside the US have been sharing their excerpts via email for all of those people who can’t download them, and that means I’ve been in touch with a bunch of writers who I otherwise would never have “met”. How inspiring for me to “virtually meet” a whole lot of people who are in a very similar position to me – with at least a first novel written, and trying to get published while still polishing their writing skills. It really is helpful to make these contacts and there are already a couple of writers who I’m sure I’ll remain in contact with in the future. On that note, let me point out my favourite ABNA quarter finalist so far – Kristan Hoffman’s The Good Daughters, which is not only quite obviously the kind of book I’d read (there are family relationships, cross-cultural influences, all my faves) but also very well written.

Learning from reviews of my novel

Throughout the life of my first novel, I haven’t had that much feedback on it – mainly because I’m too shy to ask for it. One good friend (who’s also a clever reader) gave me some excellent, detailed feedback on an earlier draft (Claire, you might not recognise its current incarnation – lots has changed!) and I’ve had a few useful comments from a couple of contests I’ve entered.

But now I’m getting so-called customer reviews from other writers (and some random readers as well), and that’s giving me plenty of food for thought. Having heard a rumour that these customer reviews might be deleted in future rounds of the contest, I thought I’d record the highlights here – both positive and negative – so I can both congratulate myself and figure out what I could still improve when I revisit this novel sometime.

On the positive side, it seems that my writing is considered technically good:

Clean, fresh–trimmed of all fat. The writer has command of her craft; her sentences are crisp, well written, details emerge smoothly.

As another reviewer has already noted, this is well-written, the pace is leisurely and the plot meanders in ways that provide a window into the Japanese culture.

For me this work reads visually, like a movie, which I always like. The characters are interesting, sketched with relevant details but not overdone. All in all, the signs of a skilled writer.

On the downside, I think the story might be starting to slowly, or there might not be enough plot to drive readers further into the novel (remember they’re only reading the first 5,000 words):

There is no big hook here–but we quickly become engrossed with the protagonist and her search for cornflakes, milk, and then her toothache becomes the major dramatic event.

It is well written, but I found that I was wondering where the story was leading to. Was it a romance, was she running away from something that was going to catch up to her?

This is a refreshing work, well-written and interesting, though it doesn’t hurry into conflict, tension, or action.

And one more point I want to remember is that many of the positive comments came from people who had some link to Japan (the setting of the novel) already. I’d like to know if readers who have no particular knowledge of Japan or a special interest in the country would also be drawn in by the story.

If you’re curious and want to read the beginning to my novel, but you’re outside the US and can’t download it, drop me an email via the contact form and I can get you a PDF. It’s scary, but it seems I finally have to start letting more people read my work. You’d think that’d be the whole point of writing stuff, but it’s really something I struggle to deal with!