Well, it's the last contest of the year, and I'm excited about this one. I'm busy writing my NaNoWriMo project so I'll just get to the details.

On December 8th post the first 250 words of your finished, or not quite finished, manuscript (any genre) to your blogs. This contest is about voice--whether or not your character's voice matches his or her's age. So if you mention the age or school grade in the first 250 words, please edit it out or block it out for this contest. Don't list the genre or title on your posts. 

From December 8th-9th hop around each others' blogs and try to guess the age of the character, give critiques, or praise. Revise your entries, if you want, and email them to me by midnight (EST) December 10th. If you want, you may skip the blogfest/critique portion of this contest and just enter the contest.  I will have a post on December 8th on how to format your entries and the new email address to send to.

A panel of judges will choose the top twenty entries for the semi-finalist round, which will be posted to my blog site, so if you don't want your entry posted, don't enter the contest. The winners will be chosen from the semi-finalists by our fantabulous guest judge.

Gabriela Lessa Website 
Follow her on Twitter here!  

Gabriela Lessa is an editor, literary agent assistant, writer, blogger, journalist, Brazilian, insomniac and word nerd. In addition to being an Associate Editor at Turquoise Morning Press and an assistant at a major New York-based literary agency, she works independently to offer editing and consulting for authors. Her work is to make manuscripts shine! Check out her reasonable editorial and consultant rates here. She's simply great! Now, I wish I could enter *pouts*.

And, of course, we have prizes ... 

1st place - Edit of first 30 pages + 25% off any services they want to hire

2nd place - Edit of first 20 pages + 20% off any services 
3rd place - Edit of first 10 pages + 15% off 

So what are you waiting for? Sign up now!

 

I was struggling with my daily goals, but now have caught up. The NaNoWriMo site says I need to write 1666 words a day to finish on time, which totally freaked me out because of the story I'm writing. I'm sort of fearing my story. Is it bad to have hot priests in my story like the guy above? Or the possessed priest I posted in an earlier post?

The Catholic guilt is getting to me. I know this story will be great, but I feel uncomfortable. It's nothing I've ever written before. It's darker. I've brought together good and evil, and questioned the foggy line between the two. 

Do you feel vulnerable in your writing? Do you touch on subjects that could have mixed reviews? Do you write from your heart instead of your head?